OCTOBER IN THE GARDEN

It is pretty interesting how well things are looking in my garden despite the lack of real rain and considering the water restrictions - I have barely watered anything except new seedlings, of course, and most of the garden looks great. Down below though it is desperately dry and long, slow soaking of fruit tress is necessary to get a good crop. It is ludicrous that the gov...no, this is not about that. The secret of the success is probably the fact that, like Andrew, I covered the garden with biscuits made from 30 bales of peastraw, at great expense, back in late August. Usually I wait until October when the soil has warmed up. This year I thought it more important to save the water that was in the soil and the warming of the soil would be delayed but too bad.

Nearly all my little seedlings grown from everyone's seeds are in the garden - next to be transplanted are Cath's red and yellow capsicums - slow to germinate but growing like mad in the seed-frame so now they are about4 or 5 inches high.

I have been doing the annual replacement of the peastraw wall. All the 1 year old peastraw which is now full of worms and the bottom half rotted down to a fine, black compost, is spread around the new seedlings in the veg garden beds and then new bales put in place to remake the wall.
There is always a bit of a gap behind the bales, here and there, despite my best efforts to shape the ground behind just right for the new bale, and I fill this up with finished plants that I am removing, such as fennel fronds, weeds, any old plants with stems that are too hard to chop up and put in the compost etc. This all breaks down and gets shovelled up onto the garden next year.

I have had a wonderful little surprise when I found that some of the White Shahtoot mulberries were ripe. What a treat - such unexpected flavour and sweetness from such funny looking little white tendrils. I only planted this tree last year and it has grown like mad and produced dozens of berries this year. Those in this picture are still green because I ate all the white ones before I thought of taking a photo!

Here I have grown some potatoes that my mother gave me, in a pot as I don't want them in the garden any more.

Here are my gorgeous boys , from left, Alex , Jack (not ours but still gorgeous), Hugh and Roger. Yesterday we all went to a lovely little bohemian place near Jack's for lunch. It is rare to all be free at the same time these days so this was a treat.


Who knows what November will bring...