Veggies

I thought I better do a post about veggies, seeing as there is quite a sizable veggie patch here. A few years ago we built a sort of circular cage, with a diameter of 12 metres. All the posts are from eucalyptus trees that got slightly burnt in the fire at king lake. They have not been milled and give the whole structure a nice rustic feel. We then wrapped full sheets of concrete reinforcing steel around them as the walls, and had two steel gates made up. Inside it is made up of 8 small beds laid out in a grid, approximately 3m by 1m each, and then a narrow bed that runs around the perimeter, just inside the steel. The steel then acts as an ideal climbing frame for things like beans and pumpkins. Around all the beds are gravel paths which allow plenty of room to work on the beds.

View from outside the veggie patch

View from inside

This seemed like more than enough for growing, but with a few people growing their veggies in there, it filled up pretty quick (Looks a bit sparse in the photos, but they were taken last week, and we’re in the middle of a bit of a crop rotation process). Two extra raised beds have now been created, in semi circles just to the north side of the original circle. there's been a bit of re-landscaping and earthworks in this immediate area, so it does look a bit muddy and unappealing at the moment.

The inner one is empty at the moment, but I planted the bigger, outer one with potatoes and snow peas on Saturday.

Potato bed

I sowed four different types of potatoes – Desiree, Royal Blue, Sebago, and Russet Burbank. There was just enough space to plant a bag of each, in rows 750mm apart, with the stem tubers 250mm apart in the rows. I sowed a few rows of the snow peas between each different type of potato for ease of identification. These were planted much closer, with rows 500mm apart, but seeds 75mm apart in the rows.