Blog March 2017.

Its the beginning of autumn and I am busy harvesting climbing beans, onions, silver beet, lettuce, pumpkin and capsicum (above).

It looks as if I will get 4 or 5 of these Golden nugget pumpkins off each of the 4 plants in my garden.   That's plenty for our needs, especially as the butternut will give me another 8 pumpkins.  I think I could at least double these numbers if I were to allow more fruit to set, but I need the space for other plants.

I'm throwing these beetroot in wherever I can find a gap at the moment, but I need to take care since this bed will be sown with an autumn green manure in April (ready for next years crop of potatoes).

The column of Blue Lake Climbing Beans at the back has stopped flowering so I will be harvesting my last beans in that row in a couple of weeks.  I have lettuce, cabbage and turnip ready to go straight in behind them.  This will be the start of the new year's crop rotation (I always follow legumes with lettuce and brassicas).

I'm still waiting for the olives to mature fully.  I should get a good crop this year, and will need to start curing them soon.  The tree is weighed down in places by them and I may need to buy 2 or 3 more 5 litre pails to cure and store them all.

Its a bit wild around here with silverbeet, cucumbers, tomatoes, sweet corn and pumpkins sharing a fairly small space.  Despite this they are all doing OK.

These cherry tomatoes were planted in mid summer and look like they will mature before it gets too cold.

This is one of my two storage boxes used to collect organic waste for the thermal composter.  This one is used to collect green (nitrogen rich) waste, and its the bin of special interest to scavengers.  Last week I discovered a small mouse escaping from below the box through a 9mm gap.

This photo shows the extra exclusion measures used to keep Mickey out.  The unit was disassembled and fitted with galvanised bird netting on the inside of each wall and across the bottom.  There have been no more invasions since the unit was reassembled and put back into service.