The Vegie Garden

We just had the 1st 'Hands on' practical gardening class at the Worongary Organic garden. Firstly, the student were treated to a garden tour which encompassed the extensive vegetable beds, wild bee hive, liquid manure barrel and huge rainwater tank (which is a godsend in this current dry spell). 

The soil that I will be using to fill my raised vegie beds at home with, will be a mix of my Springbrook Clay Loam, mushroom compost and course river sand. The reason I am really wanting to use my soil is that it is rich and will hold water and nutrient well. The down side is that it can hold onto too much water for the rainy season here and that it is filled with weeds!

Today we had a beautiful bunch of children decend upon Tom's Garden at Worongary. We did such amazing things as plant corn, pumpkin, basil, tomatoes, cucumber and beetroot. All the kids learned how to not only plant, but water and mulch in the new seedlings and seeds too. 

We've beenso busy lately! At the Worongary garden, we have been busy clearing the summer rampantness, then manuring, mulching and planting and gearing up for spring.

Had a great time promoting Franchi seeds at the Nambour Plant Expo. We saw a heck of alot of people and told them about heirloom seeds, growing them in QLD and our favourite varieties like Capsicum Lombardo, Eggplant Prosperosa, Zucchini Striata d Italia, Pumpkin Marina di Chioggia and Tomatoes Principe Borghese and  Red Pear. See the pics below!

I was priveliged enough to be asked to speak again at the Celebrity Garden Event at Cleaveland this time. I did a talk on edible container gardening, Tom Rivett from the orchid society talked about growing and propogating orchids whilst Colin Campbell covered container gardening and a heap of gardening jokes!

It's truly incredible how much harvest we have been able to get out of our winter garden. I have to say that the all star has been the 

I can't belive it, we planted these turnips from seeds in the ground 6 weeks ago and they are already ready for eating! Well, these 2 are anyway, they are the 1st of the crop. I used Franchi seed "tonda a colletto viola" which means simply "Round with a violet collar"! 

There's nothing so awe inspiring, economical or time saving in the garden as direct sowing seeds into the garden. 'Direct sowing' means simply to plant seeds into the final growing position either into the garden soil or into a pot. This is as opposed to sowing seed into containers to be transplanted later as seedlings.

As part of my vegie garden classes, I always like to do some hands on or demonstration work. In this class, after learning about Planting for an Autumn/Winter Harvest, we did some seedraising into eggcartons and toilet roll tubes which are great to use as biodegradable punnets. Of course we used Franchi heirloom seeds! See the happy faces; they'll be even happier when they see their seeds come up and happier still when they are eating their harvest!