Garden Dilemmas

Well, the tomato patch is spent, I picked the last roma today. unfortunately a lot of the big pink tomatoes and one lot of romas just rotted on the vine – I really did plant way too many in there. Next year I’m just sticking with the Black Russians and two types of cherry tomato. Now I just have to clear away the old stalks and prepare the way for a heap of rosemary and some other hardy, woody herbs that are good for autumn roasts and bbqs.

It’s been strange weather here; hot at the end of winter; medium spring; very very rainy start to summer and now it’s alternating between unbearably muggy with full cloud cover and clear, hot days where the sun wilts everything (including me!) This has not been very good for my garden, which needs a good mulch and as the retic doesn’t work I’ve had to move the sprinkler around by hand, which does not make planting anything new which needs a lot of water seem very fun.

Then there is the dog. my beautiful, wonderful, sweet, little Pepper. the arch-nemesis of the garden.

Our dog gets about 1.5 – 2 hours of exercise a day, 30-45 minutes in the morning on the leash and the rest in the evening when it cools down. She has about 50 big marrow bones, endless toys, a heap of empty plastic bottles she stole out of the house and 4 cats to play with (yes, we got a new cat. She’s a part persian called Ninja, but Adam let her out for the first time last night and I haven’t seen her since, so we might be back to 3 cats already), but still she has to dig holes.

First I just put dog poo in the holes. That worked – she doesn’t dig those holes anymore, she just digs new ones. Then I tried to wire off half of the yard, in the hope that at least half of the grass would be nice and green for our real estate agent. She dug under the wire. My latest attempt is a green plastic pseudo-chicken wire, with actual wire running through it. She jumps over it.

I’m running out of dirt to fill them in with. This next picture is of a hole that she dug up four times. The last time it took approx 75kg of store bought soil to re-fill it. Then there is the cost of the grass seed to re-seed it. Then there is the fact that because the soil has compost in it, she likes the taste so she just wants to dig it up again. So I chicken wire over the holes. My lawn mower man quit, so now we have to mow the lawn ourselves.

Tomorrow I am off to the pet store to see what other toys and treats I can get her. She has one of those hings where they have to roll the toy to get treats out – the treats just went mouldy because she refused to roll it. She buries her bones and digs them up. She eats her rope toys and leaves little shreds of them all through the house. If she can’t stop digging we will have to start tying her up or turn the chook pen into a dog run and lock her out there when she needs to be outside. I would also like to stress that there is someone at my house for about 20 hours of everyday. While I was typing the first two paragraphs of this, after she had just had an hour and 20 minutes of flat tacking running at the BMX track, she jumped the fence and dug up a hole I’d re-filled.

It is time for drastic measures….

We’ll see how it goes. Hopefully that will stop her for long enough that I can cover and re-seed all the bare patches, even if I have to spread it all over the lawn! $50 worth of chilli, snowed around the backyard. I’ll sneeze every time I go out there.

At least my basil is green and terrific..

First Fruits

A few months ago I dug up a few square feet of my back lawn to plant a vege patch. I made it way too small, so there is lettuce and strawberries and herbs and cucumbers all squished together, which snails love – it’s gourmet feast and they barely have to move to get at it all.

The real showstopper is the tomatoes. You know when you plant plants how you are supposed to read how big they’ll grow and then plant twice as many so you can remove the weaker seedlings once the stronger ones get bigger? There were no weak tomato seedlings. Every tomato plant that I planted (including the ones in pots which had been straggling along for weeks before dug the patch and which I was sure I’d killed by lack of water at least several times) grew and grew and grew. The tallest one now is about 3ft high.

I water them lovingly. I pull buffalo grass out from their edges. I planted basil in between them in the hope that I could have fresh basil and tomato on toast (all I need is a baby buffalo for boccochini and I’d be all set). I spread chook poo and cow poo and water saving crystals anda heap of other stuff around their stems and I poured seaweed solution on themuntil I realised how many midgies seaweed solution attracts. I love love love my tomatoes.

I love to eat tomatoes. Brushetta, tomato salad, skewers, caserole and ragu – yum. So I was quite happy with my over achieving tomato plants, until I realised how long it takes tomatoes to ripen. There has been baby cherry tomatoes on one of the pot plants for what seems like weeks now. Month even. There are millions of little roma tomatoes that refuse to turn any colour but green. So many tomatoes and not a one for me to eat already.

It was a big deal today, because I decided that even though it was still slightly orange, I was going to eat my first tomato. The first yield of my vege patch (apart from the occasional lettuce leaf or cat nip sprig – Momo goes nuts over catnip). It was a big moment.

It was delicious Now I’m just hoping that I don’t get a complete glut of ripe tomatoes all at once and get sick of them.