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Do you have a vegetable garden &/or grow any Fruit trees? What time & effort do you put into it, and what do you grow?

Peter Aawen

Moderator
Staff member
Yeah, I know it's not Spyder related, but this is the 'Off Topic' section, where we can post/talk about anything we want (within reason/some boundaries, of course) and I'd like to know... ;)

Here in South Oz, where we live in what is arguably the 'best' part of the driest State in Australia, which is generally considered the driest Continent, we basically have a 'Mediterranean Climate', only of late, it has tended to be a bit drier/hotter in Summer (no rain & 40°C+) and wetter/colder in Winter (800+mm/5°C-) than we were used to when I was a kid growing up on the family farm just up the road a bit. I left pretty much as soon as I could cos, cos altho I liked it a lot, I really couldn't see myself staying in a long term career of grubbing around in the dirt, but after doing a lot of other interesting stuff, I ended up having to retire hurt, so I came back to the area a tad over 40 years later, and now I find that I've slipped right back into that 'grubbing around in the dirt' thing, and I'm sorta enjoying how productive it is on so many more levels than just 'grubbing around in the dirt'! 😁

We don't have a big block, and we have moved out & back again a few times for various reasons, but over the 20+ years we've been in this place, I've worked pretty hard on the garden, and I've now got a small but fairly productive veggie garden out the back (with steel rabbit proof fencing dug 450 mm into the ground!) We have a few Citrus trees (lemon, lime, mandarin) in various stages of establishment, but all are producing pretty well; about a 2 squ metre strawberry plot (when the bleedin' things don't turn up their toes on me!) in a home made 'glass-house' that's actually made out of plastic sheeting; a couple of youngish apricot trees that are just starting to produce well; and a few semi-raised veggie plots of about 6 squ metres each, divided up into mini plots that I can easily reach across, in which I'm growing a couple of different varieties each of tomatoes, potatoes, onions, carrots, rhubarb, spinach (mainly the English kind), peas; a few different brassica's (brussels, cauli's, broccoli, bok choy, turnips etc...); and a bunch of 'in-fill' crops, some of which we can pick & eat (radish, mustard, cress et al) and some others that just get dug back in as green manure. I have a mate up the road who shares a couple of barrow loads of cow & chook poop with us every now & then, and two small but working well compost areas, one with a 205 litre tumbler; the other being 3 bays, each about 1/2 cu metre, that I work the old fashioned way (with a fork!) to keep the soil in top nick! 😁

All up, I don't really spend a heap of time on this, probably less than a solid hour a day now, but I do manage to grow enough to keep me'n the Child Bride in whatever veggies are in season and often have enough to share with the 2 'local' kids & their families, plus we try to look after pretty much all of the neighbours who've built around us in the last few years too. Well, everyone apart from the cranky old fart down the road who always complains about everyone/everything in the street, including claiming that I always speed out of the street past his house on my Spyder, even tho I generally crawl out of what's become our little bit of suburbia at less than 10 kph! I did try giving him some fruit & veggies when he & his missus first built & moved in - I packed up a 'Welcome to the neighbourhood' box and when I gave it to him, I suggested that if they told me what they liked out of it, I could probably keep give them more/keep them supplied for the season, but he just took the box inside without a word or even grunt of acknowledgement, kept it for a couple of weeks, basically until everything went manky (I reckon he must've put it under a heat lamp on purpose), then he dumped the lot plus adding some junk mail he'd got back on my doorstep immediately after watching me leave on my morning ride! 😒 Oh well, I guess that's his problem, his loss, not mine! ;)

Anyhow, my questions are - do you have a veggie garden, what time/effort do you put into it, and what do you grow? :unsure:
 
Well first off I am surprised that you are a gardener. But hey, I will Not hold that against you.

I have been doing some gardening since I was a little 6 year old kid.
My Mother always said, "grow your own, because they will taste better". So over the years I have enjoyed reading about Garden projects. It has been a very challenging experience for me.

My Tip is to, 'Start out Small' and see how it grows for you.

So answers to your questions.

Yes I have a small 'veggie garden'.
I have been growing tomatoes from Indiana seeds. They were the 'ones' my Mother passed down to me.
I usually do about 20 to 30 minutes every other day. Rain can be a little problem. Then the weeds get excited and the 'fun' begins. Most people know what I mean.

The wife and I grow Tomatoes, lettuces, green beans 'bush', try a little bit of corn, and peas. Sometimes we grow a watermelon or 3. Watermelons seem to not grow well for me.

Over the years I have enjoyed many different types of vegetables. Some grow well and others are not very friendly. Strawberries are always a big hit and grow quite well. I have three plants of rhubarb that have been growing every year for 30 years. Now that is what I have and enjoy.

My Wife really has the 'green thumb' and really loves to garden. She is good with most plants and flowers.

That's all for now! (y)
 
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Peter, I can remember back a while ago you were saying you had a rabbit problem, I am surprised that they let you have anything! Myself, I have deer problem and we have a love/hate relationship, they love my veggies, and I love them with mash potatoes and pea's! They have beat me down so many times, I have gone to just doing two planter boxes, that look like two pig troughs, with wire mesh shaped like an A-frame house over them. I plant pole beans and cukes in the boxes, they crawl up the wire and I can pick my fruit standing up! This year I put a plant pot in between the boxes and put a tomato plant in it! Then around the boxes about 2 feet out, I put three strands of electric fence wire and charge it!!!!! If I don't do that, the deer eat it down to the ground! I used to have a big garden up the back of the house and they didn't bother it very much and we got along just fine; then they got greedy, and now I have it set up on my tar driveway and have fence around it!!!! It's easier to go to the farmers market down the road, but I love to go out and pick off the vine from my dooryard! 😊 I feed them, :whistle: they feed me!
 
We still have the rabbit problem Mikey - in fact, we had one of our local Councillors around just the other day cos I'd been agitating so much! She told me before she came that she too had a rabbit problem where she was (cos she sees a few rabbits around the place every night! :rolleyes:) Mind you, she lives about 5 km away from the wetlands that we're only 200 metres from (and the Council managed wetlands is where the bleedin' wascally blighters have warrens and breed... well, like over-sexed rabbits! 😖) and she suggested that everyone in the district had an issue with rabbits atm, so she thought that we should probably just get used to it... after all, what harm can a few rabbits do?! :mad:

But at my insistence, she came out here to have a look at the scope of our problem anyway, arriving just after dusk (as I'd suggested), and the moment she got out of her car, climbed over the 1m high wire netting that I've got surrounding my tiny patch of lawn, chasing the dozen or so rabbits that'd already jumped into it out as she did (a poor remnant of a lawn that still gets ravaged every night by at least a few hundred rabbits) she started apologising!! o_O

Apparently, she'd run over about a dozen rabbits just driving from the other end of our street, and before turning off the main drag into our street, for the very first time ever she'd seen the 'moving carpet' of rabbits that every night, come rain, hail, or high water, covers pretty much every bit of clear ground between us and the wetlands as soon as it starts to get dark! So I reckon it's finally started to sink in to her at least, and now at least one Councillor understands that while SHE really does NOT have a rabbit problem at all, WE have an all out rabbit plague to contend with!! 🤬

So yeah, we've still got a rabbit problem, at least out the front! But my veggie garden is in the back yard; a yard which is fully enclosed, bounded by the house on one side (solid brick construction on a concrete slab) and butting up to the back corners of the house, by a 1.8m high colourbond steel fence with a further 450mm of solid steel sheet sunk into the ground so they can't burrow thru underneath it, the fence completely enclosing the other 3 sides! I still inspect it daily, both inside and outside, usually filling in at least a half dozen spots where the rabbits have tried to burrow under anyway, only being stopped by the buried steel sheeting. 😣

But while we don't have any rabbits in the back yard where the veggie garden is, I have had to add some 'possum deterrents' to the top of the fence, cos the rabbits have eaten just about everything the possums usually eat, which means that every possum living within a radius of about 2 km now sees my veggie garden as one of the few sources of edible greens remaining within the area!! I was actually out there 'deterring' a possum (humanely, of course! :cautious:) immediately before I came back inside, opened the Forum, saw your response above, and started this reply. ;)
 
We have a variety of stuff going right now, peppers, watermelon, corn, strawberries, and even though it's late in the season to plant, I found some seeds in the latest ounce of Marijuana I bought and I am attempting to germinate them so I can have some Push Pop # 5 growing for a Fall Harvest.

Pete, laugh as you may but If I can get those seeds to germinate I will be able to harvest several ounces of Push Pop from them all depending on how many seeds I get to pop. Besides having elevated beds out back I also have a green house and was trained by Columbia Care in the method of Super Cropping to grow very large amounts after being laid off by Cisco where I was a Tier 3 systems engineer. Here is a pic of one of my last rooms before I retired.

IMG_20230617_093123466.jpg
 
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Mikey, we have friends who live in the country with lots of Bambies.
They got dog hair from local groomers and tilled it in around their garden.
They swear that it keeps the deer out.
OR fence in your yard and get a big doggie.;)
As for growing things, I have an outstanding crop of weeds (non smokable) this year.:confused:
 
Nothing much grows here. Tried vegetable gardens at our previous house. but it was pretty feeble and took too much precious water.

Natural soil here is a mix of sand and salt desert. Topsoil has to be imported and everything watered every day. Given over to desert plants.

Bit of communal grass out front, but all decking out back and removal of grasses etc to lower the fire risk.

As for critters, have one pair of rabbits that live in a small cluster of trees, a stray cat, an occasional deer and one mountain lion that made a visit this winter. No skunks, raccoons or coyotes this winter though which was odd. Not enough snow to bring them down from higher elevations I guess. We had no snow down here for the driest winter on record.

@Peter Aawen: Have you tried electrifying the fences, at least a wire along the tops and around the base? I doubt the rabbits like even minor shocks to their noses.
 
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