Wednesday 23 September 2015

Colour coding a vegetable garden

I spent the weekend planning the vegetable garden, building supports and structures for tomatoes, runner beans and cucumbers.  I built a prototype of the cages I need for the tomatoes as well as the trellis for the runner beans and cucumbers. The instructions, I noted in the gardening journal for Shawn as a guide that will enable him to replicate them while the seedlings are still small.


Vegetable beds 
Support for the tomato plants
With 10 different tomatoes I had to keep track of which seeds I sowed where so as to enable the colour coding of the tomato beds. I made a frame that I placed in the vegetable bed and marked every box with the type of seeds that I sowed in each.


The frame for the tomato seeds
I discovered that I mostly bought black and green tomato seed. Some of the tomatoes I sowed are Black Krim, Black Seaman, Green Zebra, Green Giant, Green Grape and Black Cephus. It will be interesting with the chocolate and yellow bell peppers. The red sunflowers I sowed in one of the herb beds.


Orange and red beetroot
Yellow, purple and orange carrots
Egyptian white garlic
With the vegetable garden being quite full, the harvesting and planting of the different crops needs to be finely timed so as to ensure that the new seedlings have an empty bed prepared and waiting when they are ready to be transplanted.


The naartjie tree covered in blossoms
The Naartjie tree is covered in blossoms promising a good crop this season as if trying to make up for the loss of the last crop.

Strawberry flowers and fruit
The Strawberries are covered in flowers and tiny fruit. Nothing says summer quite like a bed of Strawberries. The garden is ‘happening’ and it feels like I am in heaven with so many surprises in stall for the spring and summer table.

1 comment:

  1. Apart from this remarkable sowing and planting planning exercise, I suppose that you already have specific ideas of how they will feature in a variety of summer dishes! Well done.

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