romantic home: This Weeks Five Frugal Things on a Friday

الخميس، 28 مارس 2019

This Weeks Five Frugal Things on a Friday

Hello Dear Reader,

Did I mention we have had rain? Well, we have and I'm still relishing in it. The days are much cooler and the raised garden beds are really wet for the first time since we built them. We have started to remove the spent pumpkin vine, but there are still 4 really good sized pumpkins that are taking their sweet time to ripen. It may be some time before I can plant out an autumn crop.

In the end garden bed, where the lemon and lime tree is, I have sowed a row of Mustard Green, it is a lovely leafy green asian veg that is easy and quick to grow. I planted those as I had read it helps combat nematodes in the soil. You see, when I removed the pumpkin vine that was growing there I found little nodules on the pumpkin vine roots, a telltale sign of nematodes. My plan is to sow a row of mustard green seeds every third week, eventually covering the whole garden, hopefully it will be a win/win situation with us being able to eat a continuous crop of leafy asian greens and the soil being treated for nematodes.

We hadn't improved the soil in this end garden as we had wanted to wait to let the citrus trees establish themselves before we disturbed the soil too much. Last weekend we dug through 3 bags each of compost and animal manure, I also read that enriching the soil counteracts the spread of nematodes in the soil, so fingers crossed, with the mustard green crop, compost and manure we will have healthy soil.

What's happening in your garden at the moment?

Now on with the frugal stuff-

1. Sowed saved mustard green seed in the garden. I collected this seed a while ago from when I was growing mustard green in the vegpod

2. Saved the pumpkin seeds from another homegrown pumpkin. I will keep a few big plump seeds to sow next spring/summer. We intend to plant just one pumpkin vine next spring/summer and let it grow throughout the long hot summer just like we did this year. I won't try to grow anything else in our cruel summer again. I will keep a few and roast the rest when the oven is on next.

3. Ate only 2 meat based meals this week, the rest was fish, prawns, veggie and pulse based meals

4. Sewed 3 more tiny houses each day, I only have 18 to go to finish the quilt. Then I have to sew all 80 of them together, add a boarder, sandwich the layers together, quilt and bind it. I would like to finish it by Easter for my grandniece.

5. Fed the compost bin all the fruit and veggie scraps as well as the shredded paper from our shredder. I shred the free local paper to add carbon to the compost.