RMan and I met our first ever blogger friends on Friday. Rae & Dino from African Bliss were on their way to Cape Town, and dropped in for too brief a visit. How do you cram getting to know someone into an hour... :( They are wonderful, open, friendly people - and we both wish that they lived closer. Finding, and finally meeting, people that you have so much in common with is uplifting - and not to be squandered. Thanks guys - for taking the time to break your trip, schlepping along our sand road, and for dropping in :) Now, when are you next coming our way...? lol
This passed summer was a complete washout as far as growing sweetcorn was concerned. Three full packets of seeds only produced eight sweetcorn pants - why, because the hares kept nibbling the tender young shoots. Those few plants which did survive battled. (I lived in constant hope of more showing themselves above ground, especially as I planted the 2nd, and then 3rd packet, but alas the hares with their nocturnal visits prevent that from happening)
So, I tried manually cross fertilizing the flower heads - obviously I didn't do a good enough job.
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| Evidence of inadequate cross fertilization |
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| The centre of the sweetcorn husk showed distinct seed head origins |
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| Cabbages chewed to death by hares |
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| Stir fry consisting of home grown sweetcorn, Baby Emerald squash, carrots, cabbage, the last of my fresh yellow heirloom tomatoes and onions. |
I may be slow on the uptake, but once I get the full picture I will go all out to prevent the same situation from occurring again - ever...!
Gum poles for corner and centre supports, with Black Wattle droppers fixed along the sides to form walls.
I'm please to tell you that it's working - the new veggie patch "walls" are too high for the hares to jump over and my cabbages and peas are coming on fabulously this winter :)
Next spring we will be adding a shadecloth roof which will allow me to grow veggies there during the heat of summer. I'm not going to bother with shadecloth walls - the wattle "dropper walls" will suffice as windbreaks / dappled sunlight. And anyway, the field mice eat a hole in the shadecloth so that they can access the goodies inside. So adding it to the walls is pointless.
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| My old shadecloth veggie patch to the right of the pic and the new one in the background |
We have all those alien black wattle trees in the area around us.
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| Black Wattle droppers as walls - you can see in the foreground how many pathetic sweetcorn plants the hares left me |
And once again they came in handy.
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| This veggie patch is slightly bigger than the original shadecloth one - that will allow me an extra veggie bed |
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| The new hare proof veggie bed, with my original shadecloth one in the background. We have used the bark which falls off the wattle / bluegum firewood we order for the Rosie as mulch in the veggie patch bed pathways - hopefully that will mitigate the winter rain sticky clay effect when I need to harvest some veggies |
Next spring we will be adding a shadecloth roof which will allow me to grow veggies there during the heat of summer. I'm not going to bother with shadecloth walls - the wattle "dropper walls" will suffice as windbreaks / dappled sunlight. And anyway, the field mice eat a hole in the shadecloth so that they can access the goodies inside. So adding it to the walls is pointless.
