Category: Vege patch | Post by: Andrea Wong
I'm cultivating my green thumb. For a long time, my efforts at growing veges have been rather pathetic with putting a few cherry tomato plants in pots. And yes, they have done ok, giving us a good crop of delicious little tomatoes. But I've always felt that it wasn't really enough of an effort.
So in the spirit of the new year beginning, I dug up a wee patch in the corner of the garden and took the plunge - I started a real vege garden. The space that I have to work with is about 1.5m x 2m plus another little strip of about 1m x 30cm. It's hardly what you would call a big garden but I think that it is typical of how much space a lot of us have. I think that this wee space can produce enough to provide vegetables for about half of our meals.
My aim is to grow the majority of our household's vegetables. In a ideal world, this would include our fruit too, but there simply isn't the space.
I want to reduce our vege bill by at least half. There you go, I've thrown down the gauntlet. I'll give it a year. Let's see what I can achieve.
Late summer crops
It's now about two and a half months since I started the vege patch. I think that I've done well so far. We've had about 6-8 meals of beet, 2 of spinach, 2 of cos lettuce. We've also managed to have about a dozen snow peas, but only at a rate of around 3-4 snow peas per meal.
The tomatoes, which were planted very late (late December), have a few fruit and I'm hoping like mad that the warm weather hangs around long enough so that they ripen.
I love cos lettuce, so I've popped a punnet of cos into the garden as well. It seems to be a great plant, growing happily and its given us a few delicious, crunchy salads already.
All in all, a good modest start.