Hello Everyone- Welcome to my Gardening Blog.
We have decided to give our market gardening dream some serious time and start making it happen. It has long been a dream of mine to be able to grow vegetables efficiently to sell some of it, to pay at least for the soils, nets and seeds etc. Its starts to get a little costly when you start buying tonnes of soil and metres and metres of netting.
Anyway we thought we are not getting younger and we seem to be getting busier and there never seems enough time or the right time to begin our market garden dream. There is no time like the present so we have begun. Now that we have decided it will be a steep learning curve as there is more to it than just growing plants as I have learnt by reading a few articles on market gardening.
Would you believe there is lots of maths involved, with marking out garden bed sizes , rows , yields , number of plants for the space and the list goes on.
I am so excited and so is Steve. He will be doing all the heavy work and I will too off course , but there are limitations especially since I am much smaller than him. We are starting with what we already have except for the new soil and netting that we need.
We have marked out a new large area that we will get new soil and start planning where what we want to grow will go.
We are going to learn so much and add to what we already know , as well as gain skills on planning and marketing.
We are going to be Chemical Free and use our own Chicken manure and try to grow a mix of vegetables in winter and summer. I will be doing lots of record keeping , this is the part I hate. I usually start out enthusiastic, but then lose interest , or lose the record book. I will have to be more vigilant.
Our idea is to be able to offer our customers fresh vegetables ( and Fruit- we have some fruit trees) in a vegetable box package as well as sell at markets and perhaps to a select few restaurants.
And so it begins , this wonderful dream of ours to build a market garden on our YarraLina property and work together . I am sure we will find our strengths and weaknesses, but most importantly we will be putting our ideas into ACTION.
This winter we are on growing Garlic, Broad Beans, Sugar Snaps, Snow peas, Kale, Broccoli and a few other plants ( once we work it out). We are also using this winter to record yields etc to gain a better understanding how we can make it all work.
In the Garden
Planting the 2018 Garlic
Monaro Purple
Planted 320 cloves in 14 Rows 21/4/18
This is an older picture- I am going to try to still be creative with my vegetablesKent Pumpkins - 2018 - this pumpkin weighed 5.7 kilo. This vines were transplanted from seeds that fell and there were lots of them so I picked the strongest ones and nurtured them until the rain came on Feb 24th and then the plants exploded with female flowers, much to my delight.
Snow pea Bed
1m X 2 m bed
planted 86 seeds.
Also planted some Ice burg Lettuce seed.