One Green Acre » Gardening

Rain Rain Rain

AndrewD — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 08:19:10 +0000

So much rain has fallen over the past 2 days, over 112 mm and it is still raining. One thing is it has prompted me to create a rain page so I can track the rain fall here at One Green Acre.

Check it out here http://onegreenacre.com/rain/

Some More Fruit

AndrewD — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 00:03:43 +0000

After a long layoff it is back to some fruit plantings. Last year we planted approx 12-13 fruit tree’s this year not as many. The plan for this year is mainly for plum & cherry (and a few others). So what has arrived so far, and what we have named them (remembering we name all the fruit trees).

Presidents Plum (Obama)
Angelina Burdett Plum (Angie)
Nottingham Medlar (Un-named)

Now as the medlar is unnamed, any suggestions out there. The medlar is a fruit you only eat when rotten, also it has been referred to as a dogs arse amongst other names due to the look of it.

From wikipedia

“In the 16th and 17th centuries, medlars were also bawdily called “open-arses” because of the shape of the fruits, inspiring the presence of boisterously or humorously indecent puns in many Elizabethan and Jacobean plays.”

From Romeo and Juliet

Now will he sit under a medlar tree,

And wish his mistress were that kind of fruit

As maids call medlars, when they laugh alone.

O Romeo, that she were, O that she were

An open-arse and thou a poperin pear!

I am still planning another apple, a sloe plum and a few more nut trees, but more on those when they arrive.

Betula pendula (Silver Birch)

AndrewD — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 13:29:46 +0000

One of the trees we are planting is the Silver Birch (Betula pendula). Now if you had been reading this blog you would know that most plants here do have a reason for being planted. Well The silver birch is an amazing tree. It produces a sap which, like Maple Trees can be boiled down to produce a syrup (not as good as maple but a sweet syrup). You can produce a Silver Birch wine or beer and there is a ton of other things you can do with it. Anyway in a few years (I am hoping approx 5) I can start tapping them in spring.

I have 4 of them so far and I expect to buy another two. I think I should get a decent quantity of sap out of them and I will tap 3 per year. Wikipedia states “A small birch (trunk diameter about 15 cm) can produce up to 5 liters of sap per day, a larger tree (diameter 30 cm) up to 15 liters per day.”

As stated above you can either use the sap to make a dry white wine or a beer, in fact Queen Victoria’s Prince Albert made it his favourite drink when in residence at Balmoral.

And an old English recipe states “To every Gallon of Birch-water put a quart of Honey, well stirr’d together; then boil it almost an hour with a few Cloves, and a little Limon-peel, keeping it well scumm’d. When it is sufficiently boil’d, and become cold, add to it three or four Spoonfuls of good Ale to make it work…and when the Test begins to settle, bottle it up.

Anyway some other uses are

Inner bark – cooked or dried and ground into a meal
A tea is made from the leaves
The bark is diuretic and laxative

And a bunch more.

Labels for Seedlings

AndrewD — Sun, 31 May 2009 02:15:37 +0000

One thing I am really bad at is labelling my seedlings. I always think I will rememebr but never do, and when you have quite few different seeds in the punnets it makes for a mystery surprise. So today at our ‘cheap’ store’ I bought two packs of over sized paddle pop sticks. Hopefully this will solve the issue and no more mystery plants.

Garden Tags

Planted The Garlic

AndrewD — Mon, 18 May 2009 03:37:36 +0000

Probably a bit late, but the garlic is now in the ground. Last year was the first time I ever grew garlic and was surprised at the great crop I ended up with. I planted Festival (a small garlic with that extra bit of punch)and 3 other varieties. The Festival seemd to do the best so I orderd 6 bulbs of that variety again from garlicfarmsales.com.au. They also sent two complimentary bulbs of Aria, so we will see how that goes as well. This year I have a dedicated garlic bed, and a bit more room so besides the above mentioned garlic I also included some of mine from last yeras crop. All going well I expect approx 80 bulbs come summer.

Rain Gauge

AndrewD — Sat, 02 May 2009 22:38:19 +0000

After 18 months and good rainfall the last two weeks of April (90 mls for the month) I decided to get a water gauge, and obviously to record how much rain we do receive her at One Green Acre. I plan to store this info in an online Google spreadsheet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Docs). Hopefully I will discover how to embed a spreadsheet here into the website.

Our location is higher than the actual main street of town, and sometimes it can be wet down there (only 2kms away, if that) and not a drop here, so there is probably differences in the rainfall that is recorded by the BOM. The location of mine is in the vege patch away from any trees and houses.

Of course the day we bought the rain gauge, the rain was ending and since then there has been nothing in it, not a single drop.

Rain Gauge

So Summer Has Now Passed

AndrewD — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 01:10:32 +0000

Yes Summer in Yass has now passed. The morning and evenings are cooler and of course the days shorter. The hottest day over the past two weeks being 24.

So how did the summer produce go. I would rate it a 6 out of 10. We did not get things in the ground early enough and we had no back up plants for the late frost that hit us.

What worked?

Tomatoes, approx 15 kg of tomatoes, mostly cheery and grape variety. Witha few kgs of Roma and less of the Amish. Also I really did not truss them up, definately next year I will truss them up and at least double them up. Of course we are still enoying some of the tomates as semi dried (in the oven) and bottled. And we also cooked a lot and froze them (no more of this).

Potatoes, had approx 15kg at the end, not enough. Probably under watered and under nourished and definitely need a lot more next year to plant.

Zucchinis, nothing else to say really, they get grated into evrything (including dog food) and when they become too large the kids can enter them in the Yass show.

Cucumbers OK, not great but enough, back to buying them. Pumkin. mmm Frost killed off teh first lot but we did get some butternuts and all going well we may have two Queensland blue (still growing).

Beans, foprget it. Besides all my beans for drying being killed off in the frost, I must be the only person in Australia not capable of growing beans.

Capsicums, forgot which capsicum I planted, but is of a small variety, still a few coming thru.

Egg Plant, Now there was a surprise – three plants and we may still get a few off before the first frost comes in. Definately more next year so we can bottle some.

Beetroot, were good as were the spring onions

Corn, well thast a 2 out of 10 and I say that because thats about as many good corn cobs we got. Not sure what went wrong there but most of the cobs did not fully develop. But the chickens still loved them.

Chickens, while not really a crop I recommend two – three birds for any family. Easy to look after, not expensive to feed and so far they are all healthy.

Watermelon, got this great little watermelon seeds and they produced these small fantastically sweet watermelons. After dinner these were the perfect size to cut into 4

Later I will add some pics as well.

Harvesting

AndrewD — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 23:14:02 +0000

What have we been harvesting recently? Lots of tomatoes, cherry and Roma in particular and the Amish soon to turn red. We have been eating them and I have been supplying some to people in Sydney and at present we still have 2kg in a basket in the kitchen. We have approx 8 kg of potatoes and we still have 6 plants (Nicola) to harvest (probably next weekend).

The cucumbers and zuchini are coming on strong and we made our first zucchini pickle of summer (and probably not the last) We have been getting a few cobs of corn as well and of course beetroot, radish and lettuce. All the onion has now been pulled up and we did have about 35 (more purple than brown). Definately a lot more onion next time.

The First of Many

AndrewD — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 02:15:50 +0000

Well while we have had salads from the garden and other odds and bods todays frittata is almost all home produced. The salad, tomatoes, spring onion and cucumber all from the vege patch and the frittata itself the eggs are from our chickens and the all the veges (potatoes, tomato, garlic, herbs) are home grown to.

Our First Rasperberries

AndrewD — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 23:12:29 +0000

Forgot to say this earlier, we picked our first rasperberries last week, just a few this year, but we expect a bumper crop next year. Next time there are some reday to pick I will take a photo.