It is well into winter now and the garden is starting to come along. I'm growing: lettuce, kale, brocolli, cabbage (red and drum), radishes, turnips, rhubarb, spinach and a few other things in these beds.
As you can see from the pics, organic gardening involves a lot of work when dealing with pests. You can't just spray and kill everything like large scale production does. Therefore there is always going to be some leaves munched on overnight.
This is after and before photos. Above is about 5 weeks after below. Doesn't get sun all day unfortunately. You can see the watering system I put in if you look closely. It runs from the house underground using black irrigation hose to the boxes and then I have small spray nozzles on spikes that eminate from the centre pipe that water each part of the garden. It's all connected to a digital timer tap that give them 10 minutes every morning. Saves me heaps of hassle - especially when I need to get to work early in the morning!
I always seek out the caterpillars and squash them when I see them. The ones that eat the red cabbage seem to turn a purplish tinge like the leaves.
I built these raised garden beds using old railway sleepers from a sugar cane train. Took a lot of work - especially cementing in the posts, but the result was good and works really well for access to the plants. Also stops weeds from spreading into the beds and allows you to focus on building quality soil without it leeching out to the rest of the garden.
Being really old hardwood railway sleepers (60+ years) they don't have an CCA treatment in them. This can be a problem with hardwood available today - much of it is CCA treated - Chromated Copper Arsenate - chromium, copper and arsenic. You can usually tell by the green tinge in the wood. Studies have shown that CCA can leech into your vegetables - kind of makes the whole organic thing seem like a waste of time if you are eating arsenic..! If you really have to use CCA treated then it is recommended that you use plastic sheeting to shield the edges of the beds from the containing wood. Of course I recommend that you avoid it altogether.
The centre box of the three has pumpkin vine which is developing heaps of female minuture pumpkins, but doesn't seem to get seeded from the male flowers - out of season for pumpkins I think. Might reclaim it for some more plantings soon. I also have some ginger and galangal growing here.
I decided to dig up my Yacon - Peruvian Ground Apple. The tops had almost died back which is apparently the right time to harvest. This South American plant isn't widely grown or known, although another local home gardener showed me her crop recently which suprised me.
Here you can see the two types of roots you get when digging this plant up. It is quite a prolific producer. On the left you can see the edible tubers. The tubers taste sweet like an apple and can be eaten raw in salad if you wish - although I think it has a slight gingery aftertaste. Apparently the sugars contained within yacon are ones that taste sweet but contain oligofructans which cannot be easily used by the body - so may be good for diabetics etc.
On the right is the rhizome which can be broken up and replanted to create more tubers. I am going to let this dry out a bit, give some of this to friends and plant some back in the soil in early spring for another prolific crop.
This massive garden worm was living around the yacon. Maybe he had been eating the sugar because he is the biggest specimen I have found of his type.
Here you can see the complete crop obtained from just one plant. An enormous amount of rhizome too.
I'm going to test out some organic BFA approved fungus and bacteria compost tea in the next update. Sound strange? Stay tuned for the testing and results.