Today, we spent much of the afternoon fixing up the odds that occur in the gardens.
First up was the front, the flowers we placed there last year are still going strong, but the weeds have found paths through the thick layer of mulch we placed there to suppress the weeds and grass.
Next, we cleaned out the shed – it’s not as bad as the storeroom out the back of it, but when you finish with something, be it the shovel, cow manure or straw bale, most of the time it’ll end up all bunched at the front of the shed.
Then we started tackling a large problem, we have a cherry tomato plant we placed in one of the garden beds and left it, it’s gone wild and has branches off everywhere.
I don’t normally want vines growing in the garden beds, for I’d prefer if they remained open and the vines sat in their own beds, but that wouldn’t make sense for this massive overgrown Cheery Tomato plant – so we knocked together a bit of 2×4, some stakes and some chook wire to form a trellis to hold it up.
The branches of the vine typically break if you try and train them through a trellis, so I took the long branches and cable tied them to the trellis. That should help see them grow – it’s got a lot of fruit on it, but it wasn’t going to be too fruitful struggling with itself.
The pea and bean plants now seem to be larger and growing more. The tree we transplanted seems to be recovering, and aside from a small isolated case, we have eliminated the Citrus Leaf Miner from our citrus trees.
The passionfruit are still showing their strength and are growing more and more each time I look at them, a new tendril, a new height reached.
Our strawberry patch remains interesting, though slow, there’s a heap of strawberries on the first plant, a heap, but they seem to be taking forever to get large and red. There are a heap of runners and more plants that spawned from that singular plant, so it might now be a good idea to look at snipping those off so it can put more energy into getting that fruit growing. The next growth on the strawberries should be even better – there’s a stack of plants, and likely to be more strawberries than the kids could ever eat.
The worm farm is slower than the strawberry patch too – we know there are large and small worms in there (some babies), but the lettuce that was added last week is taking them a long time to get through, the Hessian bag seems to be of more interest to them.
The chickens have well and truly settled in what will be 2 weeks in the chicken run. We have an issue with shade for them which will be addressed in one of many ways, my preferred is to plant out some more fruit trees to shade them in – but that has cost issues for now. Vines running over the entire run would be interesting, but I would have doubts as to how long the netting would last if it had vines growing all over it. Shade cloth might be the solution.
The weekend never seems long enough. Even if you look at the imaginary hour daylight savings adds and subtracts every 6 months.