ATTACK OF THE GIANT MELONS PART 2 - THIS TIME THEY'RE HUGE!!!

First day back at school yesterday and once I had the kids settled I went down to check the school garden I made last year, which I had planted with watermelons hoping for the kids to have some at break up which we did, just!. It hasen't rained for 4 weeks and I hadn't really expected to see much down there.

WOW, this sucker is huge!

There is enough watermelon here to feed a small 3rd world country, I think there is a parents morning tea tomorrow and we will cut it then. There is another one in the patch about 2/3rds the size of this one.

ATTACK OF THE GIANT ROCK MELONS!!!

It's hard to guage the size, however take a look to the left of the picture and you can see the edge of my pizza tray, that should help you to see that this rocky is huge...

The rain we had at Christmas has given everything a boost. These rocky's grew from the compost and I have just let them go, I have at least 4 of these monsters and a heap of small (regular?) ones as well.

Citrus Pests

While walking around my garden the other day, contemplating how to go about tidying up all the weeds, I noticed a couple of pests eating my citrus tree leaves. On my Kafir Lime I had scale. Scale is a sap sucking pest, and if allowed to take over will eventualy kill the plant. With a Kafir Lime you eat the leaves, usually in Thai dishes etc, I also like to put them in my Carona's, so scale probably wouldn't taste all that good and would probably make my beer go flat!
On my Lemon and Orange trees I found leave miners, these little critters eat away at the inside of the leaf leaving the leaf looking all twisted. Both of these pests are easily kept under control with White Oil. Summer White Oil is an emulsion of a thin oil (white spirit or parafin oil?) with dish detergent and water, Winter White Oil can be made using a cheap vegetable oil. During summer the heavier vegetable oil will clog up the pores on the citrus leaves and choke them.

Winter White Oil Recipe
http://www.aila.org.au/canberragarden/maintenance/white_oil.pdf

Pineapples

Every time I buy a pineapple I stick the top in the ground with the hope that one day I'll get a pineapple fruit to grow.
Over the years I have 2 pop up that were small and sour. Now I've have 4 up all at the same time, hopefully with all of the rain these sould be a bit sweeter.

Frog's!

You very rarely see frogs in the city anymore. However at Grandma's - heaps of them, and what a joy to hear them all sing when it rained, it was almost deafening. Just check the dunny before you go...

New Garden for Grandma

While on holidays we stayed with my wife's parents. They live in a small saw mill town southwest of Gladstone. They have had no rain for over 10 months and the ground was rock hard and had 25mm cracks, it was so dry! While we were there they had over 125mm of rain which was good, however they still need over 250mm in one event to get the river to run again.

Grandma's vege patch had to be sacrificed to make way for a new car port a few months ago. Grandma and Grandad are 70 and 80 years old so I thought I would make them a garden where they don't have to bend too much. The good news is that off the car port a 10,000 litre tank is being installed just for using on the garden, it is so important to be able to make a water commitment to the garden, even more so when you are relient on tank water for your house.

When I arrived I noticed the packing sheets for the roofing iron were still there (you don't throw out anything when you in the middle of nowhere) I check to see if I could use the sheets and hunted around for some timber, I found some 125mm x 50mm hardwood that was part of the old tank stand. Grandad had all the tools I needed, I planned back the hardwood, trimmed the sheets of iron to the right height, cut the timber to length, drilled and bolted the timber together to make the corner supports then screwed the iron to the corners. Grandad had a great idea to use an old hose split down the side and placed over the sharp edge of the iron so you wouldn't get hurt while gardening. These cost hundred of dollars at large hardware chains and don't look nearly as stylish as my scrap heap one. The dimensions of this garden are approx. 3000mm x 1500mm x 750mm.

Into this I made a no dig garden, being in a saw mill town wood chip was easy to get, the farm up the road had a few bales of straw we could have (fodder was scarce due to no rain) and there was manure galore down by the roadside a couple of minutes drive out of town.

See my blog on No Dig Garden info :-

http://40dollops.blogspot.com/2009/10/no-dig-garden.html

It Rained!!!

Just got back from a couple of weeks holiday I've only mowed the lawn twice in the last 6 months, and that's only been to vacuum the leaves! The day we left I think we got 35mm water, and every day since then it has rained in some degree for 14 days.
I told my neighbour to help himself to the silverbeet, he didn't, the leave are over 2 feet long!!!

Not to mention the weeding I have do!!!

I have potatoes in here somewhere, the rockmelon vine has almost swamped the apple tree, and the grass has grown about a metre into my beautiful soil. Lots to do.

Can't bitch too much we need it!