What I Harvest in a Week & Gardening Jobs.

 I thought I might do some posts occasionally on a week of harvests from the garden. I am a very scrappy food gardener, and mostly forget about succession planting, but I realised recently that I do eat something out of the garden every day. Sometimes it's just a bay leaf, but sometimes it's enough for a meal. So here is a week of summer harvests from the garden, and a week of garden jobs. 

Monday: Eating tomatoes and home-grown cucumber pickles on toast for lunch. Transplanted baby larkspur plants from the front garden to my flower garden out the back. The front garden is my dry garden, but having transplanted an olive tree and a native shrub out of pots and into that garden a few weeks ago, I have been watering that spot, and lots of weeds and self-sown plants have sprung up, including the larkspur, which came from a 50c punnet of sad larkspur on clearance that I planted here six years ago. I haven't seen them since I stopped watering, but the seeds have been lurking in the soil all this time waiting for some moisture at just the right moment. Soon I will have a little larkspur garden as a bee magnet out the back next to the vegies. I love re-using plants!

Sometimes the harvest is very small. One Ronde de Nice zucchini, and the last handful of the first crop of green beans, which has been lush and prolific. The second crop of beans is coming along but it is not so enthusiastic. A different bed, different soil, may need a nutrient boost.

Tuesday: Pruned half the apricot tree. The best time to prune stone-fruit trees is after the fruit is finished. The warm, dry weather means less potential virus spread. Also, in my shady garden, lopping a metre of growth off the top of the apricot tree means another hour or so of sun on the tomatoes. 

Wednesday: Pruned the other half of the apricot tree. That's mostly done now, although I am a serial tree pruner, and sometimes while standing in the garden communing with a tree I realise that it needs a branch taking out to give it breathing space. I have a window of about a month to continue my occasional pruning habit.

I cut back the hebe bush which has just finished flowering. Hebe bushes get very leggy if not cut back regularly, and I have the added motivation of needing it compact in order to open the front gate. I also cut back all the Boston ivy around the gate and the letterbox so the postman can get to it. He arrived to deliver a package while I was doing this, and appreciated my handiwork. I am a gardener who likes appreciation.

Harvested a handful of tiny tomatoes, a zucchini, some rocket for a salad. I cut the last leaves of the winter kale which is going to seed, and pulled out the kale plants, thanked them for their service, and laid them to rest on the compost heap. I cut the seed heads off my very small dill crop. I have had very little success over several years growing dill. If anyone has dill growing tips, let me know. So far, I have had the most of my limited success growing it in part shade with lots of water. It seems very temperamental, but maybe it's just me.. anyway, the few heads I harvested yielded quite a lot of dill seeds, more than enough for next season's seed, and some for pickling. After a stressful week, pulling seeds off dill flower heads is very calming.

Thursday: Went out to put the sprinkler on in the back yard and accidentally weeded a whole garden bed ready for baby silverbeet and lettuces. I took out the winter silverbeet with stems as tall as I am, and have little babies the size of my pinkie to replace them with. This afternoon I went to the garden centre to buy some compost, and brought home two trees as well.. I have been looking for a nice mandarin and orange at a good price, and found them today:) A cara cara orange, which looks like a blood orange, and an emperor mandarin. Does anyone have these? Have I made a good choice? I am going to be planting them in half oak barrels on the narrow front garden strip which is bounded by a tall concrete, vine-covered wall. This wall retains a lot of heat at night which I am hoping will keep the citrus happy in the winter. I've been eating up nectarine and rhubarb crumble. Nectarines from my tree, rhubarb from Mum's garden.

Today I harvested another small handful of tomatoes. Tomatoes are still ripening on the dead tomato plant...

Friday: My neighbours went away and I am watering their garden and feeding their canary. They begged me to pick zucchini and cherry tomatoes from their garden - yes, it's that time again, Too Much Zucchini Season - and they also gave me a bag of perishable groceries from their fridge, so I am not harvesting from my garden today, or probably tomorrow either. I made banana cake with the neighbours' brown bananas. It's very hot, so all I am managing in the garden is watering.

Saturday and Sunday: It is hot, there are social activities. I water the garden. I have a little nap. On Sunday I paint the side of the house. This is the fourth year of painting and I am up to the fourth wall! This is a slow and painful process as I detest painting, not least because of all the stupid faffing about that needs to happen before you even get paint on the wall. 

I took a banana cake to a house warming, and gave half of the other one to Paul. My gardening consists of reading a detective novel while watching a turtle dove taking a bath in the birdbath, and admiring how the evening light catches the verbena bonariensis.

So here we are at the end of the week, starting a new one, even, as the week waits for no woman to get around to publishing a post. So here we are, in the middle of the next week, I'm picking grapes off my own grapevine! More soon..

Tell me what is going on in your garden this week, whether you have an abundance of tropical fruit or maybe you are snowed in..