Think Green Thursday: Vege Garden

I have never grown spring onion from my own seeds. This year, I am going to experiment.



I germinated these rocket salads on potting mix for my girl who has turned vegetarian.


Now I know what they mean that mint plants can grow profusely and smother other plants. Mint is the only plant in the patch that has survived the smothering of the weeds. I got so many tiny mint plants growing outside the patch. I offered some to my elderly neighbour.


Now you see the neglected patch. It looks a daunting job to clear the weeds.


I started raking a little. My neighbour comes to chat. H e says it's too hard for me and calls me daughter. He suggests I sit down on a stool and use a little fork, and proceeded to go home and lend me his tool. A fork I suspect.


It is contagious, the more you dig, the more you want to eradicate the obnoxious weeds. So you see a beautifully dug garden.


The prize, forty baby potatoes for Sam's dinner tonight.

I just came across this Think Green Meme and thought to myself that this is the kind of meme I would like to join. Many of my posts are already on being green.

I am in New Zealand, in the Southern hemisphere. When you are having fall, we are having spring. This winter had been especially cold and I had abandoned my veg garden. Last summer, I had tomatoes, chillis, potatoes, kumaras aka sweet potatoes, potatoes, spring onion, salad greens and pumpkin.

The garden is over grown and in a sorry state of affair. It is still too cold to grow any thing because we can have a cold snap anytime. The tradition day to grow tomatoes is in October on out Labour day. My retired neighbor had started his garden in preparation.

As you can see, the garden is in a mess, the spring onions and some salads have seeded. All there is left is some mint that has grown outside the garden. It was hard work. I intended to clear a small part of it. What do I see? Some baby potatoes that had grown over the winter. The more I dug, the more I got. In all, there must be forty tiny potatoes. Baby potatoes are gourmet. Sam would love them and he had grown them.

Now, I have a clear patch, 6 feet by 8 feet of nice black volcanic soil. The compost will come out of the compost bin, and all I need to do it to wait for the sun to heat up the soil. The rest of the 60% of the garden will be clear indefinitely.

As I was digging, and finding more and more baby potatoes, I remembered an old fairy tale. The old man had two lazy sons. On his death bed, he told them that he had buried his gold in the field that had been abandoned. The sons dug out every inch of the field and failed to find the gold. Swearing at the old man, ( I think he had died), they looked at the field and decided to grow some crops. The well dug field produced a bumper crop. The sons realised what their late dad had done. They would never have dug the field if he didn't them this "white" lie.