Food Garden!

My brother calls me a forage and gather gardener. This is something I have in common with his wife, V. Both of us like to feed our families as far as possible from our gardens and most of the time we each provide the bulk of the vegetables and a lot of the fruit for our households - and there's usually some surplus for the neighbours. While the vegetables we grow are very similar some of the fruit we grow is not. V. grows a lot of tree fruits like citrus and stone fruit - and mulberries. Oh those mulberries. They are glorious eating. She also grows grapes and a few sub tropical species. My focus is more on melons and berries like strawberries and blueberries but I also have grapes. Since I like a challenge I've got a few exotics too - well, they're exotic where I live - like pineapples, goji berries, plantains and elderberries.

This year thanks to my illness and my foot fracture my poor garden has suffered because I haven't been able to go out and do any of the many things that need to be done to keep a garden productive.. Pisces has tried but he is not a gardener so pretty much anything beyond putting on the sprinklers on our scheduled watering days has just not happened.

Fortunately I had planted a few things in the food garden before disaster struck and, although they have not been fertilised, some at least are doing well. I discovered this because The Boot (which was in place for nine and a half weeks) and I have finally separated and I can actually look at what's happening out there. The herbs (the various basils, parsley, Italian parsley and chives I put in the garden before Christmas plus the perennials like the mints, oreganos and thymes in pots on the veranda) are all flourishing. Much to my surprise when I got to the pumpkin and rockmelon beds I counted twenty two pumpkins and six large rockmelons and I found some snake and borlotti beans. The rainbow chard, spring onions and capsicums are looking very healthy, too. We even have a few surviving beetroot. As well there are ripe blueberries, a few strawberries and some goji berries and there will be quite a few elderberries in a few weeks.

It's so much better than I expected and while it's not the harvest I usually have it's something - and even being able to go out and pick some herbs cheers me up. Fresh is always good as far as I'm concerned.