Spring!

So, I've been a little lax in updating here, although my excuses involve an overseas trip and a feline bereavement, so give me a break :)

It's well and truly Spring here in Melbourne, and despite the cosmos doing its very best, we did manage to get some planting done. I'll make some retrospective posts with some photos of the early process later if I remember. But we planted three weekends ago, and here's the most exciting parts of our progress, as of this morning (11th November).

Flowers and two fruit on the miniature chocolate capsicum

I had to have a stern conversation with the snow peas this morning, and explain to them that none of them were going to grow if they just twined themselves around each other. This one was long enough to reach the fence, but it looks like I'm going to have to keep an eye on them for a couple of days until the rest are long enough to train up the fence.

I put my strawberry plants in the ground this weekend, to get them a bit more sun and a bit more space than they were getting in the pots. They're loving it. Here's the two newest flowers, this plant has around ten flowers, and even the other runty one was two or three.

The first roma tomato - we planted six of these before we went away in late September, and they're loaded with flowers. There's around ten or twelve tiny little baby roma tomatoes on them today.

My Tiny Tim cherry tomato is absolutely loaded with green cherries. I've put a stake in it today, as it was starting to bend under the weight of around twenty or so developing tomatoes.

Here's the Tiny Tim after staking.

We inadvertently ended up with two punnets of corn seedlings, so we're busily growing our own horror film set. I've been telling Michael I'm going to buy him a scarecrow for Christmas to complete the look. It's hard to see from the picture, but they're a little taller than ankle high.

Second only to the corn, is the pumpkin patch. We'd bought a butternut seedling, and Michael's parents bought a pack of four different varieties for us for his birthday. So we've got five pumpkin plants in at the moment. Seperate from everything else, obviously.

And to finish with, some general state of the nation type shots:

The tomato bed - six Roma, five Grosse Lisse, a Lemon Drop, a Black Russian, a Mortgage Lifter (rumoured to be able to produce tomatoes up to 1.8kg - can't wait to see that one!!), a Green Zebra and one other variety I can't remember right now - will have to check when I get home.

Hanging baskets, or at least some of them - basil, curly parsley and pennywort.

Pots, some of which are out in the sun - Tiny Tim tomato, garlic, chilli, mint, a selection of cat grass/ cat mint/ catnip which the felines ignore, and the marigold, zinnia and nasturtium seeds I'm growing for bug control.

And out in the patch - only a partial shot, the others weren't so good... cos lettuce, carrots, bok choy, mini capsicum, eggplant, celery, corn.

So, the current contents of my garden is:

• Mint
• Sweet basil
• Curly parsley
• Two flavours of lemons
• Limes
• Kumquats
• Tiny Tim cherry tomatoes
• Chillis
• Garlic
• Onions
• Roma tomatoes
• Grosse Lisse tomatoes
• Lemon Drop yellow cherry tomatoes
• Black Russian tomatoes
• Green Zebra tomatoes
• Mortgage Lifter tomatoes
• The other tomatoes - maybe Tigerella, will check
• Snow peas
• Cos lettuce
• Roly-poly carrots
• Bok choy
• Mini chocolate capsicums
• Eggplants
• Corn
• Celery
• Jap pumpkins
• Butternut pumpkins
• Queensland blue pumpkins
• ? another pumpkin - gold something?
• Strawberries