What Happened to the Garden?

A while ago a friend asked me how my garden was going. Well like the lack of posts on this blog of late, my garden was also suffering from neglect.

Sure it had started out with a hiss and a roar and I had posted a bit of progress but then it all seemed to stop.

I had been harvesting the odd zucchini when I remembered and we have had a few meals with the lettuce but the rest of the garden just got ignored.

I have reasons for the lack of time but I also just never got around to it either and so the weeds took over.

Yes this is the same garden!!

In fact if you look carefully in the left photo you can see the zucchini plant just above the weeds in the top left corner.
There is also a glimpse of a pumpkin plant in the bottom right corner.

It sure looks lush even if it is just mainly weeds!

Determined to get back into everything I decided to see what I could salvage from my left over summer plantings once I removed the weeds.

Not only that but I had left a frame over some seeds to stop the birds from scratching them out and now not only had the weeds grown through but the carrots and parsnips were well and truly established growing out of the frame.

I carefully rolled the frame back pulling the tops of the carrots and parsnips down trying not to up root them in the process. Most of it was successful and the ones that did come out I replanted hoping they would continue to grow.

There had been plenty of rain the week before so the weeds were quite easy to pull out and it didn’t take too long to discover what had grown, what had survived and a few little surprises along the way.

A tomato plant had grown and had ripened 'fruit'.

The zucchini plant was still producing.

Although a few pumpkin plants had grown from my plantings only one was fruiting, but then I found a whole plant that had self sown right in the middle of the garden. There was no fruit on it as yet but plenty of flowers so I left it there. 

There were even some capsicums still producing green peppers.

I discovered that last years parsnips that I had left to go to seed were already dispersing their seed through the garden and there are parsnips popping up all over the place.


Normally I wait and collect seeds myself to sow but it was doing it all on its own - everywhere!

So once the garden was looking like a garden I planted out some seedlings of cabbage, cauliflower,  broccolli and lettuce and also some peas making a tee-'pea' frame for them to grow up.