My Productive Backyard
Turn your backyard into a productive food-growing paradise
Cheap and easy enclosures to prevent birds, possums and other animals eating your fruit and vegetables.
We have a real problem with bower birds attacking the vegetable garden and parrots and cockatoos eating our fruit. So, I have had to come up with ways to prevent our crops being taken. One of the cheapest ways to stop animal attack on your crops is to construct...
A few tips on where to put your vegetable garden.
There is a lot of interest around growing vegetables at the moment so I thought I would share with you a few tips on the best place to site your vegetable garden. These few tips will help get you off to a great start with growing and harvesting your own food. Your...
How to harvest beautiful parsley from your garden all year.
Parsley (Petroselinum crispum). It is a fabulous herb full of nutrients and flavour and very easy to grow all year. There are two main types: Italian flat leaf (continental) parsley and curly leaf parsley. Flat leaf parsley is by far my favourite, with its softer...
Make your own Rhubarb Mojitos
I always have lots of rhubarb in the garden around Christmas and for a few years now we have made rhubarb syrup a couple of weeks before Christmas to make Rhubarb Mojitos on Christmas day. It looks very festive and tastes sensational. So, if you have rhubarb in the...
Deciding what to grow in your summer vegetable garden.
It is that time of the year when everyone is talking about what they are growing in their vegetable gardens and the hardware stores and nurseries are full of seedlings and seed. Sometimes this can be a bit overwhelming and you often see people buying one of everything...
Producing your own Mesclun mix all year round.
So, what is Mesclun? according to https://en.wikipedia.org Mesclum (French pronunciation: [mɛsˈklœ̃]) is a mix of assorted small young salad greens that originated in Provence, France. I use mixed young leaves constantly, and in great quantity in salads, on sandwiches...
How to fertilise your vegetable garden for a continual harvest.
I ask a lot from my vegetable garden. As soon as I remove a crop, I am replanting something back into that space. This allows me to make the most of the space I have and to achieve a great harvest all year long. However, this continual production depletes the soil of...
Finding your Mr Dependable Veg. The vegetable that grows easily in your garden and gives you a harvest all year.
I like to have one or two dependable vegetables in the garden all year. Those veggies you can put in, take very little care and yet they will always give you a great harvest. For me my top dependable is Broccoli. I don’t know if it is my soil, the position of the...
A few tips on how to keep rats and mice out of your chook house.
As soon as the temperatures start to drop in Autumn and during the cold months, especially if there is rain as well, I will often find evidence of mice in my chicken house. Totally understandable from their perspective, it is warm and dry, safe from predators and...
Mulch-a great addition to the garden but only if it is weed free.
I use mulch everywhere in the garden. In the vegetable garden, the orchard, the cutting garden and ornamental areas. What is mulch- It is anything that covers the soil and excludes light. It is usually some form of organic matter, but it can also be inorganic, such as...
Wonderful Wombok.
Chinese cabbage or Wombok (Brassica rapa subsp. pekinensis) is a wonderful cool season crop. It is the perfect late summer/autumn crop as they prefer warmish temperatures of around 18- 20 to become established and grow. They will start to form a head as soon as the...
March Madness.
Early Autumn is by the far the busiest time of the year for me in the productive garden. In winter I have most of my major crops in so just do a little continuous planting of the quick harvest crops and spring though busy doesn’t have the franticness of autumn and...