The very hungry caterpillars

Unfortunately our seeding bok choy plants were visited by some very hungry caterpillars. They stripped all seed pods from two of the bok choy plants, which could have been a couple of hundred of seeds.

I did try to show them the error of their ways and see if they would eat the morning glory weed that keeps invading everything, but alas they would not eat the weeds and therefore had to be destroyed.

In good news my new batch of sunflowers and potato plants are growing strong. It is really interesting to see some 20cm high and others just germinating.

New life

I spent a few hours in the garden pottering around with the new seedlings and enjoying the fresh air.

We have a new batch of potatos coming through

Potato seedling

Our Bok Choy has been starting to seed for the last month. I lost some seeds while away in LA, but most are still fresh and still need to dry out. I collected one stem that was ready to harvest. If one stem gives us this many seeds, we are going to have a lot of little bok choy plants very soon.

We have potatos

Three months ago we had some potatos that had got lost at the back of the cupboard. They had sprouted but instead of putting them in the compost we decided to plant them. The effort to dig up the rows was more than we had planned as we discovered our soil is full of roots and rocks and very hard. We didn’t think we would see anything from them given the soil conditions yet a couple of weeks later we looked out into the yard and discovered baby potato plants.

After doing research on how potatos grow, I discovered that they would grow, flower and then die. I actually really liked this cycle because it meant that a dying plant was actually a good thing and that the plants wouldn’t be in that location for a very long time. A little while back I noticed that they had purple flowers and recently noticed that they were nearly all dead. We scored 26 potatos from planting about 10. 4 are babies, 3 are green or partially green as they grew above the soil and the rest are ready to be made into something yummy.

Our bok choy has seeded and the seeds look ready to harvest in the next few weeks. Our garlic, shallots, silverbeat are all still going strong. All these were planted from offcuts from the kitchen and are sitting in pots. My parents in law gave me a wonderful 1mx1m planter box, which I have now set up with cabbage and some more potatos – this time only eyes that I cut off. Our plant it and see what happens process seems to be paying off!

I was planning to take more photos of all the plants, but I had forgotten to charge the camera battery and the spare (oops).

I have pumpkin seedlings

The pumpkin I was cooking the other day tasted lovely so I decided to plant the seeds. It was a really quick plant and forget until today when I noticed I had 22 seedlings growing. We really don’t need 22 pumpkin plants but I’m sure some will grow stronger than others, especially if I continue giving them very little attention.