The temptation to grow some vegetables was too much! We had a really long garden bed, so why not?
We wanted a raised one to keep the dogs from getting into it. But our sunny spot in the garden had a downward slope. Thankfully, we found
Birdie's raised garden bed, which was perfect! We assembled it, filled it with soil and were all set. On the way, we picked up the 42nd edition of
Yates Garden Guide book. It was written for the Australian environment and covers everything from pests, propagation and watering to a comprehensive plant index suited to the local climate. It also has some great tips from other gardeners which I found very useful.
Now on to picking the vegetables! Naturally, it makes sense to pick the ones that we eat. But not all the ones we eat are easy to grow. For example, cabbages, carrots, onions and cauliflowers need so much space and they can be harvested only for a short time. And some of the others that we eat, are not available here like
mooli (white radish),
bhindi (okra) etc. So, we started with the very basic one - potato.
I got some good information from the
Seed to Plate website, which gave information about various vegetables and how to grow them at home. Potato is the easiest to grow and also helps prepare the soil for other fussier vegetables. We did not buy the seed potatoes which are disease resistant because there were just too many in the bag. After all, I did not want to start a farm! We just planted a couple of sprouting potatoes from our veggie shopping. We also planted a few seeds of
methi (fenugreek) and
dhania (coriander) with the seeds picked from our spice rack. They all started sprouting up plants in two weeks!
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| Seed to plant - methi sprouts |
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| Seed to plant - methi with leaves |
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| Seed to plant - potato shoot |
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| Seed to plant - potato plant |
I mentioned in the previous post to resist the temptation to buy additional items when you buy plants. I learnt that lesson - and then promptly unlearnt it in the next trip! We bought a seed tray and some seeding soil mix, along with various seeds. In the end, the purchase was worth it as gave us the opportunity to try our hand at growing many vegetables. In the picture below you can see cauliflower, coriander, mint, carrot, onion, chilli and pumpkin.
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Seed raising box
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| Seed to plant - Onion |
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| Seed to plant - Mint |
Seasoned gardeners may know that not all of these vegetables grow in the same season. But, we were novices and did not know that. We got seedlings from all of them, but some could not survive the exposure in the veggie patch. We also bought Basil and Chilli plants.
