Posted by Skud on December 18, 2014 at 22:49

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I'm so very, very behind on my gardening. I was travelling heaps and had lots of other commitments through October/November, which is peak spring planting time here, and nothing got done. I've come to the realisation that if I'm going to do work that involves that sort of travel, I need to cut myself some slack on the garden front, and not expect to eg. raise tomatoes from seed. Instead, I can buy seedlings. Which is what I did, in the end. I also hired someone to mow my lawn, which was blocking me from doing a bunch of things because I wanted to lay out more no-dig bed but the grass was so high and my lawnmower so useless (it's a little electric one, and I now have a large and triffid-like "lawn") that I couldn't even get started.

Anyway. Current status:

  • most winter/spring crops are finished, still have some cavalo nero ticking along surprisingly well considering the cabbage moths
  • my broad bean crop was late-sown but delicious; will definitely plant more, and earlier, next year
  • I have self-sown sunflowers, which are now considerably taller than I am; next year, I will make a point of scattering the seed intentionally in places where I want them.
  • I've been tossing arugula and sorrel seeds all over the place down the back of the yard, as I pull out or cut back plants that have gone to seed. Hopefully they'll grow in abundance next year!
  • I've planted half a dozen tomato plants, some from friends and some from the shop and a couple that actually made it from seed – I am honestly not quite sure what I have but I think there's a tommy toe, a couple of jaune flammes, a wild sweetie, a lemon drop, one other biggish red one that I forget the variety of, and I have a few San Marzano tomato seedlings (raised from seed) ready to go in when I do get the new no-dig beds sorted. They'll be late but better than nothing.
  • I bought eggplant seedlings as my seeds didn't make it, and planted half a dozen "black beauty" and one "bianco rosso" or something (those beautiful pale ones)
  • I planted a habanero pepper (bought fairly advanced from the nursery) and some kind of Thai chilli, and I have a range of others coming up from seed which will be ready to plant out when the aforementioned no-dig bed is done.
  • Haven't planted a single zucchini or any other kind of squash yet, argh! But I planted them late last year too, and that was fine.

In short it's all a bit of a mess but it's sort of getting there, and it's better than nothing.

With regard to the development of Growstuff itself, I'm delighted with our move off the mailing lists and over to Growstuff Talk and would definitely love to invite anyone who's interested in how Growstuff is built, or just generally what happens under the hood, to come over and chat with us. We have an Idea forum where it'd be great to get more people's input!

Some recent discussions that you might like to weigh in on:

Also new: the other day I did some work on updating our README on github and making a better Get Involved page on the wiki. Hopefully they make it easier for people who aren't necessarily coders to see how they could be a part of this :)

This afternoon, I'm going to try and get some of that no-dig action happening and maybe even plant some squash. Wish me luck!