Guerilla gardening
It’s always hard to find the space to grow every possible summer crop we want to. Our four formal veggie beds always suddenly seem almost miniature come spring so we like to find places to sneak in a few extra veggies wherever we can. It may not be true guerrila gardening but I’m sure traditional champions of the six bed rotation system will be horrified. Read on at your own peril…
Our seed raising efforts have been pretty darn good this year. In particular we had a six pack of zucchini literally bursting out of their growing cells. I knew it was time to plant when I noticed the first flowers budding at the base of each this morning.
I’d seen a nifty little planting tip on Gardening Australia which suggested mixing up compost and manure to really get your pumpkin seeds off to a good start. I went one better and threw in a heap of dynamic lifter too.
Knowing that the soil at the outer edges of the peach and apricot tree planters was not ideal, I dug quite a lot of the existing mulch mixture out and added quite a bit of my super grow mixture back in.
I put two yellow zucchini under the apricot and two green under the peach. Hopefully we’ll be facing a glut of zucchini by Christmas!
Every year I end up with heaps of volunteer pumpkins around the garden from the compost. Every year I let a good few grow. And every year I’m disappointed with the taste of the resulting pumpkins.
Not this year!
Although we missed the seed growing pumpkin window, I picked up these from the local green hardware store because they were butternut and I loves me a butternut!
I’ve only planted two seedlings but they look pretty spindly so I’ve kept the other two in the greenhouse in case these fail.
These ones have gone between our very poorly performing feijoas. (The feijoas got a LOT of tlc this winter in terms of soil improvement so they are on final warning to do some impressive growing or else!)
Lastly everything was watered in with some mid-strength powerfeed and a healthy drink of tap water.
All looking good so far so… fingers crossed!!
