It's Spring 2020 - Summer Vege Garden

Hey there! Welcome to our family blog! Our family consist of Daddy Vegiemitey, Mummy Vegiemitey, Master Vegiemitey and Little Miss Vegiemitey. We are very excited to start a blog together to capture our journey into vegetable and suburban gardening. 

We are located in Donvale, a leafy suburb in Eastern Melbourne, Zone 3 (AU)  / 9 (USA) and we experience warm/hot summer and mild winter. We have a very small backyard but fortunately our house is south facing meaning we get a lot of sunshine along the back wall of our house. It is here where we grow most of our vegetable in containers.

Last year we were quite successful with growing some eggplants and Thai bird eye chillies but we were completely unprepared for tomatoes, and our zucchini plants were stubborn and kept spawning only female flowers. This year we are determined to make it work!

Here is our plan:

• 4 x Zucchini Plant* (more on this later)
• 4 x Tomato Plants
• 10 x Eggplants
• 2 x Chilli Plant
• Various lettuce + Carrots
• Beans
• Sugar Snap Peas
• 4 x Strawberries
• 2 X grape vines

Yes. 4 Zucchini Plants. You read that right. We know if this goes right this year, we might become buried in Zucchinis before end of Summer but we do love our zucchinis. And as I mentioned above, we were so disappointed last year with the plant throwing out only female flowers that we need to cover all our bases to make sure it was not going to be a repeat this year. We suspect this might be due to the rich soil we grew the Zucchini in and they were so happy that they forgot about the male flowers. This year we are planning to vary the amount of fertiliser we use across the 4 plants and see if we can get one to grow some male flowers. Fingers crossed. 

At the moment, we have seedlings from seeds that we planted in early August (06/08) and they are growing happily in the grow tent we purchased last year. We don't have a lot of space where there are direct sunlight that can be kept warm so this investment has been very valuable. We also hooked it up to a grow led light and a heat pad to make sure the plants are happy. 

Just a quick note about the grow LED Light, last year when we used it, the light was too strong and burnt the leafs. It's strange because we measured the lux and it was well within the expected range of 8k to 10k. All the leafs turned purple and we gave up on those seedlings. We are not sure if they didn't grow well because of the burnt leafs, or if it was because it was too cold because we only purchased the grow heat mat this year. Either way, we decided to defused the direct light with 2 layers of baking paper right under it thanks to Daddy Vegiemitey quick thinking. The lux says 5k which is a bit low but the seedlings appears to be healthy and happy.

Grow lamp with 2 layers of baking paper.

This was mid August with another 2 weeks to go before Spring. We pre-germinated the seeds in yakult bottles with cotton buds because it saves us from planting multiple seeds in each pod. The moment the little root starts showing, we pop them into its own slot in the tray. For potting mix, we just used last year compost potting mix sifted through a homemade mesh sieve to get all the big bits out. We also baked the soil at around 100 degree for 45 minutes to sterilize it. (Beware: baking soil produces a strong smell, good ventilation required.)

This was taken 2 weeks back and Day 1 of spring. Everything getting bigger now. Our Zucchini seed didn't germinate and we had similar issues with that batch last year too. Fortunately we got some new zuchinni seeds just in case and was able to quickly germinate them within 3 days on the heat pad! In this picture, they already have 4 real leafs out!

This was today, Day 11 of spring. We couldn't believe it but our zuchinni is already flowering. We'll be planting them out this weekend. We've been putting it outside on sunny days here and there so hopefully they will transplant well.

See the little flower bud? Looks like a male flower!

That tomato plant on the bottom picture is going crazy! Need to transplant to a bigger pot soon this weekend. Really looking forward to it.

In our next post, we will hopefully have our seedling planted out, and perhaps we will share some progress on our flowers and fruit trees. Until then, please take care!