Salad from my garden girl

My just turned 5 year old has been out in the garden with me today. She pottered around with me and then, with no prompting at all, started collecting ingredients for a salad.

Here is the salad that she made, with only ingredients from the garden, with only a little supervision from me. Yum yum!

Rain, glorious rain

The weather is a little wet and dreary here. The sky is dark and it seems like even when it is not raining, there is a fine mist in the air. I don't think I'll be spending much time out gardening this weekend. The green house is a lovely place to sit, if it is not too cold. I get a lovely view of the garden outside and the seedling sprouting inside. Sitting in there even reminds me to water the plants in there, which is good, because when the weather is wet, I don't think so much about needing to water. So the garden is being watered by the rain, and the collected tank water has watered the plants in the green house. All is good, and in my opinion, it is looking amazing. Enjoy at wet weekend of gardening. Or stay dry and warm and plan for what gardening you'll do next weekend.

Gardening to the giggles of my littlies

With the temperature down for a few days and the clouds threatening rain, but very little to show for it, I am out in the garden.

Mostly I'm tidying, weeding and tossing on a dose of Seasol, which I have been neglectful about recently. I have noticed a few plants have self seeded from last year, so calendula and borage plants are being moved around to fill out empty patches, and I'm also putting in some seedlings of lettuce and mustard spinach from the greenhouse.

The littlies are making mud puddles and getting dirty, playing games finding homes for worms and laughing as they play. What a wonderful sound, it makes gardening even more enjoyable!

An egg that is head and shoulders above the rest

A new record. 130g.

Purple is my favourite colour

I think that most people who know me could guess that purple is my favourite colour. I have brought my love of purple into the garden with the many types of vegetables that come in purple varieties.

Here is my purple sprouting broccoli.

Rocket envy

Here is to a year without rocket envy. Last year I grew rocket, as I have done for several years. With its peppery flavour a few leaves was all that was needed to spice up a salad.

A year or so ago we were dining at a friend's house and were served a delicious rocket salad. My husband was quite impressed. He loved it. In fact, he commented a number of times how good that rocket salad was.

Well, I started to feel a little jealous of his comments about how my friend's rocket was better than mine! So, swallowing my pride, I asked her for a couple of sprouting plants or a handful of seeds.

And this year, I can have a Summer of salads without rocket envy, for now I am also growing the lovely subtly flavoured variety of wild rocket.

There are several different varieties of rocket, the very peppery standard rocket and the more subtle wild rocket, named for its wild growth habit. If you are looking at growing rocket for salads, I'd definitely recommend finding the wild rocket, and avoiding your own rocket envy.

Sowing for successive crops

Wow, Saturday already. My weekend gardening is going to be focussed on enjoying the green, the warmth and the produce.

There is a little trick when it comes to planting successive crops and that is, if you are harvesting, it is already too late to be planting out the next crop. This is, if you are wanting to avoid having a gap in harvesting.

So with this in mind, it is seed sowing time again. I currently have some great little plants in the green house ready for planting out. It is easy to see the potential growth of those plants and not think about the need to sow more seeds. I find that for each lot of plants such as lettuce, carrots and onions that I sow, they can be relied on for a month or so of harvesting in the warmer months. That means, of course, that a new lot of seeds needs to be planted every month!

What's on my hot list to sow this week:
Coriander
Parsley
Spring onions
Carrots
Lettuce
Beetroot
Radish