Contemplating Carrots

I began this post two weeks ago and it is only now seeing the light of day. I've been playing catch up with my thesis work while resting off the last dregs of this horrible illness (seems it has been doing the rounds of the postgrads at uni, we are all in varying degrees of sickness and recovery.) Alongside this I gathered my first round of essay marking so unfortunately blog posts have seemed to go by the wayside. I wanted to talk about carrots. In fact I want to make a few points about carrots.

1. The balcony garden has plenty of carrots, and I've proved in the past that it is certainly easy to grow carrots in pots. I am careful not to over fertilise (indeed apart from whatever is in the potting mix I don't add anything else at all unless I get accidentally watering-can-friendly on the days I fertilise the rest of the garden, well we all make mistakes, particularly between 6-8 on watering days, that's just way to early for me.) However, this means that most of my carrots are a little on the small side, and perfectly, if a little twistily straight. I never get bifurcation, no rude style leg carrots or mangled looking knobbly wrecks that taste good but would never win second place in a beauty contest unless they were playing monopoly. Yet wait long enough, and you will see everything. Low and behold, my lady's legs yellow carrot!

The giggles I got when I pulled this carrot out of the pot reminded me of a book my dad was given one year as a joke. The book was a series of pictures, with cut outs, where you could place your fingers and they would resemble, arms, legs, and more risque things like bottoms and cleavage. Silly, but respectable because of the beautiful Victorian drawings. Same with the carrot. Silly giggles abound about the inferred rude nature of the yummy root vegetable, then add to that an admiring of its delicious taste.

2. I can't grow purple carrots like the farmers can. No matter what variety I grow, the purple never really gets super purple and it is mostly superficial, a ring of purple around the orange centre. No complaints about taste but when I grow purple carrots I want purpleness, kind of like the yellow ones are yellow all the way through. I sourced the purple carrots pictured below from one of the organic stalls at the Vic markets, and as luck would have it they were purple the whole way through! Absolutely delicious. Most went in salads though the remaining few that got a little soft and wilty ended up in a big pot of spaghetti sauce.

3. Coloured carrots make surprisingly good gifts. I have an academic friend who did not believe my claims of carrots other than orange. I took him one home grown yellow carrot and one of the purple carrots and he was amazed, and later told me they were delicious. Ahhhh for educating the educated.

4. I am trialling a new system with carrots. I planted a pot full of carrot seeds and in each corner added one sunflower seed. Inbetween each sunflower seed I planted a cornflower seed. Seems I havent' taken many photos of it, but from this one below I think you get the gist of it.

Now this meant I sacrificed a few carrots but it has so many benefits. These benefits were:

a) Pretty blue, white, black and hopefully pink (none have flowered pink yet) cornflowers bloom about a month or so into the growing process. This is a good signal to do the first, early, thinning of the carrot seedlings.

b) Stunning sunflowers grow up, adding height and lovely rich golden and red flowers to the mix. All mine are multiheaded and flower repeatedly for a span of over 2 months. Once they are flowering it means it is usually two months in, and time to do another thinning. This time the carrots were bigger and with the thinnings I could have a dainty pixie-sized salad.

c) We haven't hit this stage yet but once the sunflowers are finished, usually about three and a half to four months after planting, the carrots too will be ready for harvest.

d) It is companion planting at its most experimental. Yes I think the roots might affect the carrots on the edges a little but the joy I get from this combination outweighs the loss of one or two carrots. Maybe better still it might make them bifurcate and give me more victorian style giggles.

Anyway I think I might pop to the markets later and get a little fillet of salmon. Mix it with some julienned carrots from the garden and some equally julienned daikon from the garden and there you have one yummy meal. Speaking of meals, I've been taking photos of recent creations lately so I might run a small series on harvests and the kitchen. Each meal has something in it from the balcony garden. Some are basic, like fig, rocket and proscuitto sandwiches, others more complex (i.e. involve more than slapping two bits of bread together!)

Garden Bloggers Blooms Day/Night

As in February so happens in March. Harvest Monday and Garden bloggers blooms day fall on the same day! Again here are just a few snapshots of what is blooming on the balcony garden this early Autumn. Only this time there is a bit of a difference - these are night time shots! I swear my neighbours think I am completely ready to be sectioned, running around a balcony at 10pm with a flashing camera taking snapshots of petally things, and they are probably right!

We also have to introduce a new arrival, the chinese lantern, which has the most amazing red flowers (my ancient camera does not do them justice)

The fuschia is flowering

As is the marigold (or yellow cornflower as special housemate H calls it)

And the black cornflowers

And the blue cornflowers.

The eggplant is putting out a few last flowers

And of course, who could forget, the sunflowers.

Turns out I have a reddish sunflower too, which I only noticed one day when I looked up as I entered the apartment complex. See this fellow faces outwards and is deceptively yellow from the backview! The things you find out when you just look up. No photos though!!!

Sunflowers

Sunflowers, sunflowers, sunflowers!

Dr Zhivago could have been filmed on my balcony and no one would have known the difference!

A Big Look Back at the Balcony Garden in 2009 (a.k.a. there will be tomatoes)

It is New Years Eve and I am supposed to be putting in a few good hours of study on my thesis, making a cheese platter, setting up the bedroom for my cousin and heading off to a very low key night with a few girlfriends. However, I am procrastinating by blog writing and considering it is probably time to take stock of the year that was. To make it interesting I promised gratuitous tomato pictures for those in need.

January, I mostly spent with my folks in Adelaide, so the balcony garden got a little neglected. It also showed me how my parents coped in Adelaide's very hot and dry conditions, they had to install fake grass.

Late January and well into February was boom time on the balcony, despite the evils of the long heatwave, and Black Saturday which ravaged Victoria. However, in my little place it meant visits by the neighbour's cat (who had a habit of sneaking up when you least expected it)

and tomatoes. Lots and lots of tomatoes. My favourite had to be the mortgage lifter, it was addictive! Unfortunately I think the wilt and sunscald will claim ALL prospects of any mortgage lifters this year.

March was time for blooms. My favourite was the snapdragons which were in the hanging pots. They bloomed ALL YEAR, and in September I moved them out of the hanging pots and into smaller individual pots and they were still blooming! Infact it is 38 degrees today and while they are wilting they are still blooming! Amazing

April brought with it more lovely blooms, particularly refreshing were the gazanias and sunflowers.

It also saw the end of most of the tomatoes which made way for the snowpeas, a bountiful crop in the winter.

May saw me turn 29 and reflect on my life thus far. It also brought with it the final tomato. I planted some white cloud tomatoes late in the season and despite being ravaged by wilt a few made it out alive, and straight into my BLT.

June heralded the beginning og the broccoli season. even though it looks like a contender for a bondage club mascot it survived the poorly trellised snow peas around it and provided me with the tastiest broccoli for months ahead. I am planning to plant far more broccoli this Autumn.

End of June and beginning of July and the winter indoor tomato experiment was off. Alas the wilt ended up attcking here too, helped along by some evil little fungus gnats, but we did get a fair few tomatoes off the initial siberian (the one in the back).

In August we had the inagural balcony garden roast. It meant loads of carrots and other yummies and a rather large and painful overindulgence in wine.

In September we met Sid, the unfortunate snail who, along with his comrades, began tearing the balcony garden to pieces. After a brief conversation it was bye bye Sid.

September also saw blossoms galore on the nectarine tree.

October was when the zucchini went in and thrived.

And from November we got ripe zucchinis, mostly baby ones due to the problems with germination and boy flower hiding, and more inportantly we got the ripening of the tomatoes.

Which in December just kept on coming and coming.

And this is the balcony garden as it stood a few days ago.

Although there are now a few more holes, due to the slow but necessary removal of the dying tomatoes. This hole was where a hanging pot once held cherry tumbler tomatoes.

Still the new year definitely looks full of promise! Hope everyone has a lovely new years and see you all in 2010!

Yellow Petals in Peril

Yellow seems to be the in colour in my garden at the moment (and I don't just mean the dying leaves on the tomato plants!!!) There are vegetable flowers and normal flowers alike sharing this vibrant colour. Cucumber flowers are starting to appear, though like the zucchini there is absolutely no gesture towards co ordi nating the sex of the flowers. Male flowers only open when the female flowers are still forming or have died while waiting for the men to show up. I would make some sort of social comment on this, perhaps refering to high school dances, or other such occasions but ...

The sunflowers in particular have been looking radiant of late. There are the two single headed giant ones (which are still smaller than last year's mammoth one that got to over 2 metres in height) and a yellow mutiheaded one.

It is lucky I photographed these guys over the weeks, because NONE of them have any petals left. In the last five minutes, literally while I have been penning this post, gusts of wind took off EVERY single petal from the sunflowers. They also managed to blow over several of the tomato pots! Grrrrrr not happy jan.

Weather Patterns

Picture the scene. Warm, 29 degrees, glass of champagne in hand, lounging in a beer garden with three of my closest friends. Sounds like a lovely Summer thing to do? Maybe a Sunday afternoon? Well for starters it is not yet Summer here, it is spring, barely past middle Spring at that, and the champagne drinking in the beer garden was not on some random Sunday after noon but last night at just before midnight!!! It is definitely unseasonably warm here in Melbourne, days in the mid 30s and evenings that barely dip below the mid 20s. Ok so it is not as bad at the 46 degree weather we had last Summer, but it is definitely wierd for this time in Spring. Lovely weather for socialising, but less good for a newly-starting Spring garden. Indeed even worse for a garden that needs a. ferstiliser and b. thrip spray!


Maybe it was the champagne from last night but I succinctly remember hearing the barman say that today was only going to reach 27. Trusting his word over any online bureau of meterology (come on that would involve turning the computer on and I was far keener to believe the onset of a slightly cooler snap fed to me by the man with the drinks than bother to turn on my lovely new machine that early in the morning.) On this knowledge I popped out into the garden early in the morning (half seven is early enough for me thanks) and happily fertilised the tomatoes that were turning a hideous shade of yellow, added some seasol to the mix for extra luck and then pyrethrumed pretty much the whole balcony until the spray bottle ran out. This is acceptable to do in weather under 30 degrees. It was only when I wandered into uni and turned the computer on that I realised the barman had either fed me a line about the cooler change or was a little mistaken. Today is going to get to 31, at least, and probably more. The weatherman in The Age says its a tad too difficult to get it exactly right but it is more likely to hit the higher than the lower figure.

Hopefully the garden survives. The roots might burn, the leaves too. Who knows. Fingers crossed and toes crossed at present. In happier news the sunflower opened, pictures coming soon, and I found within it two ladybugs (I made sure the pyrethrum went nowhere near them.) On a second happy note while I was drinking my tea on the balcony I noticed a little native bee hovering on and ducking into the strawberry flowers. Luckily I didn't have enough spray left to get to those otherwise Mr Bee would be a dead bee. Loving that even in this hot weather the bugs are having fun and drinking their version of midnight champagne.