I think I may have an unhealthy obsession with bird houses….

I need a collection of these.
I’m pretty sure I could make a tea pot bird house.
We’ve grown gourds before but never done anything with them.
And I’ve just decided what the kids are getting for Christmas next year!

I am trying to mitigate the bird house thing with other garden pretties…

These beaded garden stakes look pretty, and easy enough for the kids to help make.

We’ve made spider webs like this one for climbing veggies before and they are always fun.

Our neighbors have a little pine forest so I think we could collect enough pine cones to make a lovely rain chain, but I’m not sure where we could hang it.

I adore this stacked rock sculpture… I need to start collecting suitable rocks now!

Of course all these things would look lovely… if we had a garden instead of a forest of weeds!

What garden pretties would you put in your dream garden?

{image by See-ming Lee via flickr}

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Lovely Links – Garden Pretties… is a post from: picklebums.com

Despite planting this year’s veggies way later than we should have, I am really pleased with how the garden is growing at the moment.

The only thing we are eating is lettuce, herbs and the ever present rhubarb, but things are budding and beginning to fruit and flower so I am hopeful that there might be lots of food to come.

It looks like we will once again have a glut of zucchinis!

The kid-made bean support seems to be making the beans happy. Morgan is checking them every day for signs of his favourite snack to appear.

Can you see it? Right there! Hiding among the leaves… We have one, tiny, green tomato! I am still hopeful though!

We’ve never had much success with cucumbers and this year seems to be no different. The plants are still small but they are growing, ever so slowly, so maybe we’ll be able to make enough pickles for us to have one each? Does anyone have any suggestions on how I could boost them along?

We also planted a mixed cover crop over some of the bare soil that we aren’t using this year and it’s coming along great! That darn pretend cat freaks me out every time I go out there, but I don’t think the birds are remotely bothered by him!

I am always surprised what grows in our veggie garden, despite my ineptitude!

Are you growing things?
I love checking out other people’s gardens so if you blog about your garden make sure you leave me a link in the comments so I can pop on over and say hi!

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This Year’s Summer Garden is a post from: picklebums.com

A few weeks ago there was nothing but weeds and grass and clover in my veggie garden.

Then we mowed, and weed whacked and got the tractor out and then there was dirt…. lots and lots of dirt, and a fair bit of mud.

Then the sun came out and I dug in the dirt and the mud. I carted bucket fulls of good dirt to raise up beds out of the mud… and finally I planted.

I know it is already December. I know most of our veggies should have gone in more than a month ago, but I don’t care. I am not a fussy gardener, I don’t care that our zucchinis will be late or that our tomatoes might never ripen. I don’t care if we don’t grow a single cucumber.

It is just nice to be back out there and mucking around in the garden.

And no matter what, there will always be rhubarb… and mint.

What’s growing in your garden?

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In My Garden… is a post from: picklebums.com

Shameful neglect… whoops!

A baby apple tree that we grew from seed.

Hidden strawberry flowers.

Mint hiding in the neglected bits.

Someone let the cauliflower go to seed…

Look what is hiding in my sorely neglected garden!

Join in Wordless Wednesday with My Little Drummer Boys.

Veronica may be a neglectful gardener but she is a passionate story teller and a fabulous blogger. Living in Tasmania with her husband and two kids, Veronica blogs at Sleepless Nights and also VeronicaFoale.com.

 

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Wordless Wednesday – What’s Hiding in Veroncia’s Garden? is a post from: picklebums.com

It’s officially spring here, though the cold wet and windy weather today might have you believing otherwise. Despite the lack of sunshine I am embarking on my annual garden dreaming event. It’s where I look at seed catalogues and browse web sites and dream up gardens that I can’t possibly prepare, let alone plant or manage. Want to join me? Here are some lovely links to get you started…

Some garden blogs that I am loving right now…

A Way to Garden – a US based garden blog with lots of variety. I seem to spend a lot of time reading the pests and diseases section!

Skippy’s Vegetable Garden – This gardener packs a lot into her backyard veggie garden and I LOVE the photos of the garden in all seasons on her side bar.

The Duck Herder - a lovely Aussie blog full of growing goodness.

Au Couer Du Jardin – ever wanted to move to France? Then go drool over this gorgeous French garden. And to think I never used to like flowers much, now I’m drooling over a garden full of them!

Some garden things that I want to do and make…

Good old Martha always has good ideas, or at least her staff do. I want to try these stick plant markers from Martha Stewart.

We kept the old tired when the Big Whit Bus got new ones and the tire guy said we could come back and take as many as we like! I’m thinking of something like this tire wall for one edge of our veggie garden. It seems a good way to make a wall sheltering other plants and raising up some things that really don’t like to be near our clay soil.

I’m going to grow lots of flowers in our veggie garden this year, and I’m collecting sticks to make garden structures. Check out images 2 and 8 from this beautiful Connecticut Kitchen Garden.

Garden resources I love…

All of Jackie French’s gardening books. I own and love Back Yard Self Sufficiency and have borrowed lots of others from the library.

Eden Seeds are my favourite seed supplier. Their services is awesome and they have a huge variety.

And here’s my pinterest garden and growing board for a bit more inspiration.

Are you garden dreaming?
Have you got big plans for a Spring/Summer garden (Or Autumn/Winter garden if you are on the other side of the world)?
Have you got an gardening links to share?

Tell me all about it!

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Lovely Links – Garden Dreams is a post from: picklebums.com

With recent Autumn rain we are once again in the middle of millipede season. Here are some of the things I’ve learnt from battling against these nasty black creatures….

The kind of millipedes we have at Portuguese millipedes and they stink when you pick them up, squish them or when they die. They are feral pests, imported from their natural home of Europe.

Having a millipede drop off the ceiling and into your bed in the middle of the night is the stuff nightmares are made of.

One of the first complete sentences my toddler twins ever said was ‘Burn the suckers’ in reference to how often we swept up millipedes and burnt them alive in the fire.

When there are loads of millipedes they can stop the trains in our area.

We are yet to discover what will stop these creepy mini snakes coming into our house. We’ve tried poisonous chemicals, strips of metal, light traps, even mopping the floors with Detol to deter them from coming in, and yet still they come.

I get several hits a month to my blog from people googling ‘my baby ate a millipede’. And for all those people…all my babies have eaten millipedes and while it is gross, they have all survived.

There are so many posts about millipedes on my blog that a friend suggested I needed to add one to my blog design… so I did. Can you find it?

What do you know? Join in with Yay For Home’s Things I Know link up and share your genius with the world!

{top image by ARHiggins via flickr}

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Things I Know… About Millepedes is a post from: picklebums.com

Life is frantic at the Pickle Farm today.

I have a sick kid, a back yard full of mud and holes, Christmas presents half wrapped and chickens in my kitchen.

Yes, chickens…. in my kitchen.

Two of them.
A black one and a white one.
And no, they are not waiting to be roasted, they are both very much alive.

Raising baby chicks wasn’t exactly what I had planned for the week before Christmas and yet here I am.

It’s those darn delinquent mothers, you see.

She was all keen to have those babies when she sat down and wouldn’t get up all those weeks ago. She was still keen on the idea when they hatched and was all psycho chicken baby protector for the first week or so.

But then, when she got out and about with her two new babies she could hear life going on without her on the other side of the fence. She saw the other hens busily scratching and laying and getting busy. Hamlet the handsome rooster gave her the eye through the gate and that was it. She was off.

Over the fence she flew leaving her babies behind. She wanted to go back to work, and she figured the kids would be fine at home on their own while she laid a quick egg.

The first day she laid her egg and came home. The second day…. well… after she laid her egg one of the girls invited her out for a drink after work, and then Hamlet asked her to dance and one thing led to another and before she knew it she was waking up next to the big black rooster the next morning, her kids left home alone all night.

By the time child protection arrived and attempted to usher her out of the office and back home she was over the whole idea of having kids. Kids just cramped her style, kept her stuck at home on the nest when she should be out laying eggs and partying. She’d already decided she was never going back….

The department attempted to place the two abandoned kids into a foster home, but the potential foster mum had 3 day old triplets and she wasn’t interested in taking on any more responsibility. So it came to pass that Penny and Seed became wards of the state and took up residence in warmest spot in the Department, the kitchen.

We should have known really…. A hen called Snow who is as black as black was always going to be trouble (for the record she was white when she was born).

Doesn’t she realise where she lives?
Doesn’t she know that we are into attachment parenting around here?

Abandoning your 3 week old babies to go back to work just doesn’t cut it on the Pickle Farm. And what’s worse… three weeks after deciding she didn’t want to be a mother she is back attempting to sit again! What? Is she just in it for the baby bonus? Is she trying to rort the paid maternity leave system and buy herself a flat screen TV?

Needless to say the Department has their eye on Miss Snow and she won’t be having any more babies for a while. And Penny and Seed are now happily chirping away in my kitchen and being cuddled to exhaustion by the big kids…. lets just hope they turn out to be hens and not dinner.

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Delinquent Mothers is a post from: picklebums.com

The weather has been crazy here at the pickle farm this past few weeks. Torrents of rain (more rain in 24 hours that we had in a whole month this time last year) and then warm and sunny and then more rain… and more rain… then hot… and then more rain!

Until recently we were still experiencing drought conditions, so I know that we should be very thankful for the rain, and I am, really I am… But I confess, I am just a little bit frustrated by the days and days of constant rain. The HUGE storms that are washing away what’s left of our drive way and leaving the majority of our ten acres under a few cms of water, making a perfect breeding ground for the killer mosquitoes. Just when it seems the ground will dry out enough for us to start digging the foundations for our renovations, it rains again. And it rains and it rains and it rains…

But the plus side to all this crazy rainy-sunny-rainy weather is that the strawberry plants have gone mad!

They are covered in huge lush green leaves and a week or two ago they were crammed with pretty white flowers. Now, instead of flowers, there are berries! Big, ripe, red, lush, strawberries!

We picked nearly 3 kilos of strawberries on Friday afternoon, and that is not counting all the ones we ate while picking!

We lugged the big bucket of berries inside and Muski and I set about sorting them into a big bowl to eat and a HUGE bowl to make into jam.

My beautiful, wild, rough, blonde headed, boy stood beside me at the kitchen bench happily hulling his own berries and saying “one for me, one for the pot”. Sweet strawberry juice ran down my chin and the chin of the smallest member of our family as he tasted a strawberry for the first time (though he didn’t seem to like it much!). The Father Figure stood stirring the big jam pot and the house filled with the sweetest of aromas. The sun shone in the window and the sky was blue for a while….

At that moment I was thankful for the sunshine, and the strawberries, and even the rain.

Then it started to rain again… and it hasn’t stopped since.

Still, home made strawberry jam on piklets for afternoon tea almost makes up for it!

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Strawberry Rain. is a post from: picklebums.com

There is a small war being waged out in our garden. It’s me against the snails and slugs.

Two weeks ago the Middle Boy and I planted out the seedlings that we’d lovingly coaxed into life on our kitchen window sill. There were zucchini, water melon, rock melon, tomato, beans, basil, dill, cucumber, pumpkin and squash seedlings, as well as a handful of flowers. The boy and I dug the dirt and pulled out all the weeds (which was hard work after all the rain we’ve had) and cleared a few small patches of garden to plant our seedlings. Then we fed them and watered them.

Three days later the three bean seedlings, which had been threatening to break through the kitchen window they were so large, were gone.

Gone.

Just one pathetic little stalk left in the dirt.

A few days after that the zucchinis met a similar fate.

I suspected snails and slugs so we set some beer traps and we caught a couple, but still the seedlings were being chomped on. One squash plant vanished over night. Completely. Nothing left. Not even a stalk.

We stepped up our campaign a notch and I started encircling our seedlings with crushed up egg shells, supposedly the snails and slugs won’t cross that barrier.

Then the melons disappeared and some of the tomatoes too. Then, something began chomping on the unripe strawberries!!! This meant all out war!

In a perfect world I’d use only organic, eco friendly pest control methods, ala the beer traps and crushed egg shells. But obviously my world is far from perfect so I went for the nasties…. I snail baited. Under child safe, pet safe (not that any of the chooks, ducks or guinea pigs are allowed loose in the garden at the moment anyway) little shelters of course, but still…. I doshed out the poison.

There has been lots of casualties, the carcases of snails and slugs are piled high in our garden at present, many more than ever died at the drunken snail parties in the beer traps. While I am not proud to have reached for the poison I am feeling the heady highs of revenge. Take that you nasty little seedling munching buggers! You won’t deprive my family of fresh fruit and veg any more!

So I’ve planted another round of seeds to replace those plants that took a hit in the great snail and slug wars of 2010. I am hopeful that our initial encounter has sufficiently depleted the enemies numbers so that eggs shells and beer will be enough to maintain the status quo until the seedlings grow to such a size where they can handle a little nibble now and then. You see I am not all evil dictator… I will share, as long as there is some left for us as well!

For a while, all was quiet on the battle ground. Until, this morning I discovered more holes in my strawberries and one pumpkin plant decimated!

How can that be?
Has the poison lost it’s power?
Or am I facing a new enemy?
Ear Wigs perhaps?

And so the war goes on.

Does anyone have any good eco friendly tips for dealing with snails, slugs and ear wigs? Or suggestions as to what else could be eating my seedlings??

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This Means War! is a post from: picklebums.com

Last spring I ordered an odd variety of corn – golf ball corn to be precise. In the Eden Seeds catalogue it says:

Beautiful diamond shaped kernels, pops bright white, vigorous plant yielding 3 to 4 cobs each up to 4cm.

We planted the seeds, and despite the corn not doing so well (possibly due to total abandonment) we still got about 20 small roundish corn cobs. We hung the cobs to dry and then put them in a container in the kitchen, where they stayed all through autumn and winter, until now.

The kids asked for pop corn and I knew there was none of the shop bought stuff in the cupboard (by the way, you can’t beat a $2 packet of pop corn that makes buckets of quick easy healthy snack!) so on a whim I told them if they could get the kernels off the cob we’d see if this corn would pop.

Three sets of little hands and ten minutes later we had a big container of little white corn kernels. Into the pot they went, a little oil, a little heat, lid on….. then…. pop pop pop pop pop… POPCORN!

I know it’s kind of corny (ha ha) but I’m rather proud that we’ve been snacking on our very own, home grown, home shucked (is that the right word?), home cooked, pop corn.

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Pop Pop Popcorn! is a post from: picklebums.com