Back in November, I was doubting the success of our vegie garden, the plants seemed to be growing, but no food was to be seen – we had plenty of healthy plants with no food.
The cabbage was attacked by the White Cabbage Butterfly, and the caterpillars ate several of them too far back such that they did not recover.
One lone soldier remained, and put out a lot of growth, but this continued to be eaten through inadequate action on controlling the problem – the cabbage still has new growth, but still eaten by caterpillars.
The tomato vines have tomatoes growing on them, a lot, as I expected. However, the tomatoes have thus far been eaten by something, we’ve lost 2 I think, that went red, and had been eaten.
There’s still a heap of fruit out there, but if there’s no action taken on whatever is eating them, there will undoubtedly be more eaten tomatoes. The problem is we don’t even know what is eating them.
Then we have the Zucchini plant – there was 5 or so to start with, but they got crowded by one very dominant plant – and that’s the one that remains – we’ve had several Zucchini’s from it and it’s a realisation of just how big those can become. Picture a store brought pineapple, it’s got roughly the same diameter as one. It’s huge.
The cucumber plants have got 4 cucumbers on them, and they seem to be behaving. Our lettuce plants is also showing new growth and they look a lot better.
The carrots are showing orange tops, but they don’t seem to have grown long, the problem seems to be they were not thinned out, as should be done, when they are seeded close together this causes them to twist, and that prevents ‘normal’ size carrots. Baby carrots, but none the less carrots – and a lesson learnt, thin them out next time around. We have two watermelons popping up – but that’s the crop I could care less about.
The fruit trees have some fruit on them at their very early age, and the lemon tree, whilst has no fruit is shooting up more growth.
We’ve also had our first strawberry, but the crops are thin because it’s got ‘runners’ from it, which form new plants, this allows for more strawberry plants, and next time around we’ll cut off the runners to allow the plants to fruit better – we now have 7 strawberry plants after only buying just two.
The fix to the problems was to do with pH, the soil was always testing at 7.5, one night I was cruising through a book we borrowed from the library and noted most of the fruiting plants had pH levels in the 5 to 6 range – so we went and got some ‘sulfur’. which reduces pH.
We haven’t yet tested the pH again yet – will do so today after we remove the carrots and get some more Zucchini’s, fix up the cabbage so the caterpillars can’t eat them, and give the tomato vines a bit more support by adding another stake.