Saturday, I decided this year, I was going to have a proper summer fruit/vegetable garden. Previous years I have also had this urge but this year is different, I swear!
This year, I pledge to water my baby plants every day, keep on top of pests and diseases, fertilize and feed my babies and most of all - eat what my garden produces!
With this in mind I popped over to my nearest garden center (across the road) and picked up a tomato plant (Roma), two basil plants (companion planting with the tomato... to increase the flavour of the tomatoes), a rockmelon plant, perpetual spinach, cucumber (long green), four Pajaro strawberries and a passion fruit plant. This along with two punnets of Marigolds (more companion planting).
Companion planting is this (not so) fancy schmancy idea of planting certain plants with other certain plants to increase flavour/as a pest repellent/increase allies such as bees! Check out
this website for more information.
So here's my vege patch, all ready for the planting of my seedlings. To get to this stage, I've mixed in one and a half bags of compost to the soil with a spade and left it to settle for half a day or so.
The tomato, basil and marigolds going in. My tomato isn't staked, that's purely because I forgot to buy stakes. Staking tomatoes are a MUST otherwise you're just going to end up with mutilated tomato plants and this will hinder your plants fruit producing ability and also makes harvesting harder.
The strawberries are planted in mounds so that when they fruit, the fruit isn't sitting on the wet ground. These will be mulched as the plants mature. I tried to choose strawberries that were NOT in flower but the ones that had a couple of buds/flowers, I picked them off. This encourages the plant to work on becoming bigger and tougher which, in the long run, means more/better strawberries for you!
I got lucky with my Rock melon - two plants in one punnet. So I've planted them together and we'll see which one is the strongest one. I know this isn't the norm, you're supposed to separate them as to reduce competition which will encourage stronger growth in BOTH. But, poo to you, it's my garden. Rock melon need about a metre of space and I'm worried mine may not have enough room to grow but we'll deal with that as we come to it! Rock melon's are best grown on ground which is covered in black plastic to keep it warm as this makes the melon's sweeter and yummier. Once my plants are a bit more established a layer of plastic will be going down.
I chucked the spinach down the end of the garden and now that little patch is full. I've still got the cucumber and passion fruit left to plant but these are going to have to go in a different place in the garden.
So wish we luck in growing healthy, scrummy vegetables and fruit in my own garden! Let us pray that this year I turn over a new gardening leaf.
P.S. Don't forget to water you plants in once you've finished planting!! And don't forget to continue watering over summer!!
