If at first you don't succeed...

We recently moved into a new rental property which had a nicely tiered vegetable garden built into the side of the hill. It was empty and overgrown but i figured i shouldn't waste it, and that i might give this growing vegetables thing a go. I had previously grown cherry tomatoes in a raised garden bed at an old house we rented and they turned out great so i was rather optimistic. I weeded the whole lower section of the garden and planted some seedlings i got from a local store. Then i waited...

It wasn't until i got a visit from my mother, up from the south island that i realized i had done it wrong. She commented on now dry the garden looked. I said i was concerned the plants didn't really seem to be growing, especially compared to some vegetables i had seen in a friend's potted garden. She then explained to me that i needed to have dug over the garden and mixed in compost. Whoops!

Photo of the garden as it was

I had planted a beefsteak tomato, lettuce (one i accidentally killed with weed spray, whoops!), broccoli, capsicum and peas.You can barely see the little plants in there! Clearly i needed to fix this problem so i acquired many bags of compost and got to work with digging. I started with the top garden, totally digging it over and removing all of the weeds. Found many little potatoes in there too. Guess that previous occupants must have used it for! I mixed in some compost also. Once that was done i transported as many vegetables as i could from the bottom garden to the top. That left a few stragglers in the bottom garden.

Top garden and me starting to dig up the lower garden

I also decided to fully weed spray the middle garden. Its heavily laden with weeds and pulling them all out by hand just seemed like way too much effort. I'm still in 2 minds as to whether i actually want to use this garden at all. It will be a big job to dig it over. The soil is much more compacted than the other two gardens!
I managed to finish digging over and composting the lower garden. I decided to actually read the ingredients for the vegetable fertilizer that i got and saw i was supposed to mix it into the soil. Whoops! I did at least mix it in with the compost in the lower garden, with the top one i just sprinkled it around the plants and watered it well. I am using number 8 compost from Mitre10, Yates Vegetable Fertilizer and Yates Tomato Food.

The tomato food was a bit of an after thought and i just applied it on top after re-planting my beefsteak and regular tomatoes. I had a slight technical error with the peas. We have these climbing frames lying around i thought might be useful after i discovered that peas like to climb things. It kept blowing over in the wind so i instead decided to break it up and individually stake each pea plant. The poor things have been shifted around so many times! This will hopefully be the last. I also cable tied up the peas and my tomato plants. They seem to look much better now except the one tomato plant that's tiny and a weird shade of purple. Kinda expecting that once to die... Also having issues with my courgette plant which was thriving and now looks a kind of sickly yellow colour. Not sure what is up with that. What i didn't realize when i shifted the plants up to the top garden us that it doesn't get sun all of the day. Could become an issue for my capsicum plant that i'm seriously considering shifting to a spot more sunny.






The gardens as they are today

I decided to get some extra vegetables when i got the compost and fert. I picked up some cherry tomatoes, corn, cauliflower and carrots. All except the cherry tomatoes ended up in the bottom garden as you can see pictured. It looks rather dry in the photos but the soil is nice and damp under the top layer. I found quite a lot of pavers around the place which i am going to use for edging and making the garden a bit more user friendly. I did use them to construct a kind of path under the step ladder. Makes it look a lot tidier than weeds!

The cherry tomatoes i decided to plant in the back garden because it gets a LOT of sun and it also saved me from having to tackle the middle garden ;)
I had been contemplating doing something with the back garden anyway. This at least gave it purpose. Only dug over and composted as much garden as i needed for the tomatoes. The pavers indicate the edge. The other side i'm thinking might be perfect for chilies, if i can get my act together in time.

I also have a single strawberry planted in a pot. It seems to be doing fine!

At this stage i'm not overly confident my garden will be a huge success. It has been a bit of a learning curve and quite hard work! Am hoping it will pay off when we have lots of yummy home grown veggies. More posts to follow...