November 2010 - Rain and More Rain

So far in November 2010, the Gosford area has had 168mm of rain in 11 days.

This has provided plenty of water for the vegetables to thrive.Unfortunately the wet weather has also increased the number of pests in the garden. Many of my young plants have suffered from bug attacks. The solution is to ensure that the foliage is sprayed regularly with Pyrethrum (Defender) and that Snail baits are used around the garden to reduce the numbers of snails.


Most of the seedlings planted two weeks ago have survived and the lettuce and tomatoes are going very well. The chili plants have suffered from pest damage and were also being slightly shaded by the parsley growing in front of them.

My next job in the garden will be to add a few more large tubs. I am going to move the chili plants to a tub near the citrus trees. This area gets a lot of sun and will be more protected from ground pests.

The pumpkin plants are getting larger and I will need to remove the wire mesh from this end of the garden to allow them to spread.

Until next time. Enjoy your gardenings.

Week 22 - Seed Planting

Over the past two weeks, it has been a time of maintenance and care of the plants recently planted. The watermelon, lettuce and tomato plants are all growing well and I have been using pyrethrum on the new plants to ensure they do not succumb to the same pests as destroyed my Bok Choy plants. It only took a couple of days to cause the damage in the second photo.

During the weekend I also planted some more seeds to get some  seedlings to fill some of the empty spots in the garden.

I have planted some more lettuce varieties. Roma tomatoes and capsicum. These are the three vegetables that we most often use for lunches at home.

The plan for the next couple of weeks is to get the rest of the garden planted out with seedlings and hopefully get some produce from the strawberries and capsicum plants.

Week 7 - Lots of Growth

During the last week we got over 100mm of rain. Including about 20mm of rain in about 15min on last Sunday.

This meant that we have had a great deal of plant growth over the last week. The tomato plants have almost doubled in size in 7 days.

The lettuce have grown quite a lot and hopefully in a couple of weeks we will be harvesting some lettuce.

The squash plants have thrived and are now starting to produce prolific shoots and leaves. They are very healthy plants and I am expecting to get a good crop of squash.


The strawberry plants have started to flower and to protect the fruits from birds I created a wire mesh screen to place over the plants.

The final work done this weekend was to put some snail baits down in the garden bed and re-mulch the beds where the mulch was washed out during the torrential downpour last Sunday. I also sprayed the leafy vegetables with pyrethrum spray to protect them from pests.