My Little Patches of Green

My little patches of green are constructed of leftovers stumps and corrugated iron from our house construction. Why haul these things off to the tip when you can reassign their duty into relieving my back pain and growing the lovely vegetables that you can no longer find at the supermarket?

They are far from pretty and many would turn their noses up at their el rustica, but I love them. We filled them with left over hay fed through the mulcher with a variety of animal manures (cow, horse and chicken), dried grass clippings and a small amount of soil both from our property and of the imported variety. I like to think we have a taken a permaculture spin on the plantings, but if the truth is to be known, the name of the game has been pure randomness. Growing trellis' have been reappropriated from various sources, a children's rope climbing ladder now encourages our snow peas verticality. Likewise, some leftover galvanized mesh. A lovely section of wrought iron screen door is the new sky scraping home for green peas.

Our plantings for this year have been small as we are just starting out gardening again. We have:

Tomatoes - 10 different varieties
Snow Peas
Green Peas
Capsicums
Drumhead Cabbages
Wombok Cabbages
Pumpkins - at least 5 different varieties
Apple and Lebanese Cucumbers
Kipfler, King Edward and Dutch Cream Potatoes
Purple Carrots
Mustard Greens
Celeriac
Rhubarb
Asparagus
Various Lettuce breeds
Cauliflowers
Broccoli
Zucchini
Jerusalem Artichokes
Artichokes
Eggplants
Brussel Sprouts

I think every gardener waits with anticipation for their tomatoes to ripen...we are no different. They are bountiful in numbers, but still lacking their fully ripened colour which indicates that evenings spent watering the garden beds means snacking on summery tomatoey-ness has not arrived yet. Thank goodness the green peas are up for some summer munching/watering.