Before.... and After!

There's not a lot to be done during summer in this garden, except to relish the product of all that excited labouring beforehand. So I found myself recently browsing the pics of the garden since it started about 6 months ago. 6 months! That's all the time it's taken to get an empty backyard to turn into a productive organic garden.  I had genuinely forgotten how different everything looked beforehand. And as everyone loves a good 'Before...and After' shot, I've taken a few to add here. 

Thanks garden - sweet mother of corn, you're good. 

The Beans. Before...........

After.....!

The First Garden Bed. Before...

After (its a jungle in there...)

A pile of bricks left by the previous tenant. Before.... 

After....an outdoor armchair!! (absent: large pillows)

The Sunflowers. Before.....(everyone - sigh)

After .... I'm a lumberjack.

The Tomatoes. Before.... (pre-planting, Luke attends to the babies..)

After .... (a couple of days away from eating!) 

Devonshire Teas and Inbreds

It's time I gave a little nod to The Big D C - The Digger's Club. Get past the heinously dorky (can you put those two words together?) name; They are really quite rad and I am a proud member of their little clan. Most of the hunches I've had, I've weasled from these guys. 


Some of the Digger's Club's favourite words - 
* organic
* seeds 
* heat zones  
* cold zones
And these two - heirlooms and hybrids. (insert slow jazz flute instrumental here)


Heirloom tomatoes are open pollinated or are grown from seeds passed on down continually from generations of plants. Heirlooms = good for us! 


Hybrids tomatoes are inbreds! (yes, like the good folk of netnok) They are bred to last a long time, be machine picked and can usually carry the weight of a good sized brick. Hybrids = bad for us (grr).




Along with great arguments for the preservation of backyard gardens, cheap seeds for all seasons, and quarterly magazines filled with juicy information,  the Digger's Club has two delicious organic gardens, one of which we visited recently.  For a couple of morning hours, we had the garden and the gardeners' advice all to ourselves. After beating their ears on when and how to and which ones to do it to, we wandered around and got excited about plants. 




And then Jo licked her chops and made a beeline for the ......DEVONSHIRE TEA!! (is there no more glorious meal??? I mean, honestly??)


An exquisite place, filled with goodies - in plant, food and people form. 


http://www.diggers.com.au/.

a native hunk o' spunk

mmmm.....devonshire teas.....

Planting tomato seedlings

And just to be sure, some teenager seedlings as back up. 

Ye Can't Kill a Tommy

I went to clean up the dead bodies, empty the lake of watery potting mix, say a few words for the helpless seeds who were drowned recently. But surprise! Here they were waving their little green arms at me. About ten of the original twenty seeds had survived the deluge and managed to push their way up to the surface.  They're now gleefully fit and tall and almost ready for transplanting to the great flat plains of the vegie patch. Ye can't kill a tommy, says my mum. Testify. 

Big Dirty Hands

a few violent deaths

 This weekend we were treated to a deliciously sloshy downpour. Racing to get under cover, watching the lawn rise up an inch a minute, the plants drinking, the dogs resigning to bed in daylight hours. I've never thought of rain as a destroyer of things. I fear for the burning of little budding things in the sun, or seedlings beaten in the wind but never the rain. 
This weekend the rain destroyed a few things. The tomato seeds were drowned. The firstborns, the sunflowers, had their heads eaten off by the great rain lovers, snails. 
A little disheartened. A first failure in our garden adventures. RIP tomatoes and sunnies.