Ooooh….the spring gardens a-growing

We will have food again! Not that we haven’t been eating but the preserved stuff has dwindled and I have had to buy things I really hoped not to. All my frozen tomatoes and sauces and stuff finished about a month ago, also the pickled onions and beetroot. I have been buying potatoes for over 2 months and carrots, onions etc. All my dried fruit ran out months ago! We hoped to learn from last summer and we did – we did not preserve enough. I think we have about 6 jars of preserved fruit left, 4 jars of chutney…a little bit of preserved vegetables. We have 2 pumpkins left!

We are back to eating fresh from the garden though, the glasshouse has been providing salad greens, baby carrots, baby spinach and there are radish, silverbeet (chard), mustard, asparagus, broccoli and lots of herbs ready in the garden. Beetroot (beet) and broad beans (edame I think?) are not far away. Tons of onion, red onion, lettuce, carrot, beet, beans and leeks have been sown.

10 kg of seed potatoes have been planted.

The raspberries are thriving! in the background are blackberries doing well but later in fruiting.

Onions and garlic in the foreground which are just wee, raspberries and the grapes around the house have wee bunches forming…these are only 3 year old plants and last year we only got tiny inedible fruit.

Blackcurrants are flowering 🙂

Boysenberries flowering! Our first.

And ta-da! We have apricots! We have planted numerous self seeded fruit trees around the place and this has taken a bit longer than the others…we had no idea what it was – peach, nectarine, apricot? We both hoped for an apricot and just found these, 2 apricot. Enough for a taste but next year it will be good!

And tomatoes and zucchini planted under an erected shade-cloth shelter because we need these as soon as possible. We have 3 flowering plants in the glasshouse.

And this is a fig tree cutting, just starting to bud. These are done from prunings just put in the ground under the mother tree, There are 10 of these, Roger wanted to try this and they have grown easily this way…but we have no use (certainly no room!) for 10 fig trees. We do have friends however, maybe they will be given fig trees for Xmas 🙂

This year our pumpkins are going to be grown across the only piece of lawn left in the back yard, close to the house so an area has been dug up and lots of organic matter been thrown on ready for them shortly. I am now going to have to vie with pumpkins for a sunbathing place. Our quarter acre section will be full and Roger still told me last night, as he does every year “I have run out of room”. The only way from here is up!