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

[mecsw500]

It's late Spring here in South Oz, and I've been slowly turning in the last of what's left of our the Winter crops; planting this season's/years varieties; and putting in a few of those other veggies that'll take a while to grow. All up, we took close on 100kg of citrus fruit off each of our Lemon and Lime trees, maybe only half of that off the young Mandarin tree; and both the Lemon and Lime trees already have another crop ripening and a whole heap of flowers setting for next season too. The Mandarin tree is still young & fairly small, and I don't want to push it too hard just yet, so I've pruned it back to keep it to a light crop for this season so that it'll put more effort into growing a healthy root system and establishing a strong base tree for the coming years.

I've already got bumper crops of carrots and new potatoes coming on, and we've only just finished picking the last of last season's carrots, tomatoes, broccolini, brussels, cabbage, cauliflower, cucumbers, and red beetroot - we've got some of all that lot preserved/stored/frozen, and our garden kept the extended family and a few neighbours well supplied with all those veggies all thru Winter too, but right now, we're basically between harvests, so we're not getting a heap from the garden (besides citrus) except small amounts of onions, celery, lettuce, strawberries, snow peas, new potatoes, and spinach (the proper stuff, not silver beet), altho I do have new plantings of everything going into their new plots as and when they're ready.

And I did lift, divide, and replant the best of the few rhubarb plants that I had last year as they started to wake up this Spring, so I've now got a couple of really healthy plots of rhubarb going gangbuster out there too - we're taking about 20kg of stalks as long as your fore-arm and thicker than your thumb off those plots every couple of days! I don't think we'll need for too much more than what's already coming on!

The hardest part of all this atm is keeping an eye on it - what with the humidity, rain, and changeable weather that we don't usually have here at this time of year, all the plants seem to be perpetually right on the brink of bolting to seed! If I don't keep an eye on them and removing any stalks as soon as they appear, just one single plant bolting will trigger all the rest too, so within a day we can have a whole bed of bolted veggies that've ALL gone to seed!!

So I'm watching very carefully!

Ah, rhubarb, my favorite. Like everything else, nothing much grows here apart from scrub oak. Everything has to be irrigated on imported soil. Rhubarb won’t grow at all.

We had a scorching hot dry summer followed by torrential rain from the unusual remnants of a tropical storm. Everything burnt to the ground and then flooded after the deforestation in the mountains.

Had the first snow on the mountains above 2800 meters out the back of the house last week. Still OK to ride as it’s about 15°C and sunny, though there may be snow coming next week my son tells me, and he’s rarely wrong.

See how I did the metric conversions for you there.

I hate to ask, but how are the rabbit wars coming along?

 

[Little Blue]

Seems like a good plan. We might go back to composting using
some of the plastic Barrels that are available.

 

[Peter Aawen]

...

I hate to ask, but how are the rabbit wars coming along?

Not really well - the rabbit numbers are back up again, probably worse now than they were at the beginning of the year, only after numerous (& expensive) failures, I finally do actually have a tiny bit of lawn at the moment, surrounded by multiple layers/sizes of wire netting with different levels of electrification/other deterrents - a total of about 5 squ metres, but anything not protected by the same OTT level of protection is immediately eaten out of the ground, roots and all! The rabbits have developed a high level of immunity to the current crop of biological controls, and they seem to thrive even better if we feed them just about any the poisons we're allowed to use! Oh, and the local Council has hired a 'professional shooter' who uses very expensive/high tech gear and has so far never managed to shoot more than 40 rabbits a night - but I can sit out in the middle of my patch of lawn & hit more than 4 times that with my walking stick in just an hour or so!

Nb: I do appreciate the effort you made at 'metrification', but I'm sorry, for the majority of the World, 'metre' is a metric measurement or maybe the rhythm structure of poetry or music; while 'meter' is only ever a gauge or dial, even if it's a device, a dial, or a gauge that shows how many metres it has measured.