Bits and pieces

Nothing in particular to report this time. Last week was very quiet, I felt so exhausted all week that I didn't even try to be productive. Today we baby-sat my brother's dog, which was nice. Here she is looking very decorative in front of the vegie bed.

I did come up with a new plan over the weekend though - Woeful Wednesday. I had a nice chat with Cindy from 2paw the other day, and she mentioned how nice my garden was looking. It made me realise that the blog presents a bit of a skewed picture of the garden, because generally I only put up photos of the nice bits! So from now on, Wednesday posts will be woeful posts - somewhere to show the bits that still need heaps of work. I'm hoping this will also be good motivation to actually get something done about the problem areas :)

Here's a little woeful preview, anyway - the blinkin' inchworms are still making a meal out of our vegies!

My plan of waiting for predatory birds to show up and eat them doesn't seem to be working, so I'm considering digging out the Dipel. I've used Dipel once before when we had a hairy-mary plague in the herbs, I presume it will also do the trick with inch worms.

We've learnt a few other things lately - on the weekend we caught up with some friends and admired their lovely vegie beds. I mentioned how our tomato plants have turned into triffids and I knew you were supposed to "prune out the laterals" but I had no idea what that meant. So Mr Bon and I got a lesson in laterals :) We went out to suss out the laterals on our tomato plants, but gave it up as a lost cause - they're just too big and bushy. So we'll chalk that up as a lesson for next time. I'll also be more pro-active with staking next time - we have three different varieties out there, and only one (Tiny Tim) looks like it doesn't require staking.

I've also stuck some toilet rolls around the base of some of the leeks, but next time we plant leeks I'll try a different trick - just plant them deeper. This goes against my ingrained fear of collar rot, but I'm told it's fine to do with leek :)

One other interesting fact from today - one of my unidentified citrus trees dropped a fruit (finally! the fruit had been hanging there for donkey's years), so I brought it in & cut it in half to have a look. It's an orange! Not sure what variety, I actually thought it had quite a limey taste. Lots of baby fruit on this tree so we'll see how the rest turn out. It's badly in need of a prune though, it's got some atrocious water shoots.

And lastly - a photo to commemorate our first ever bean harvest - so bountiful! :D