GARDENING - Garden update before Christmas 2022
Hello everyone. Zak here from Cape Town, South Africa with another gardening update. My veggie garden project uses a lot of recycle/upcycled materials and this is meant to give it a sustainable effect, not spending too much money on it, but spending a bit of time in my garden with my kids, which is therapeutic!
It brings me great joy to see how big the plants have gotten. Sometimes it is not immediately noticeable, but when I go through my old photos I can see the rapid growth and I am quite proud of all of that!
Soon I will have nice home grown tomatoes and I have quite a bit of herbs already... I am busy expanding the garden so more shall come soon!
Let's go through thos pictures!
Tomatoes are doing well. Some of them are starting to change color.
The Bell Peppers in the step up garden are nearly as tall as the Sweet Basil!
In the middle, step-down section, the little Watermelon plant @lex-zaiya is still chugging along. Albeit slowly...
There are weeds... a lot of them. This is what they look like when they are big.
I do not mind them too much between the pathway stones and such...
But they tend to spread everywhere...
They popped up in the pots I used to germinate Radishes.
This is a few days later and look at the Basil go! The Nastrutium is not doing as well as it had attracted a massive amount of aphids. But that was its job. Now the aphids are gone and the Nastrutium has survived!
Those little weeds are everywhere!
There is this strange cucurbit I did not plant on the right hand side... We shall see. I will let it grow out in the meantime...
The Mint is doing that mint thing...
I do not know why but this Tomatoe bush on the end is not looking too happy. Suggestions welcome.
Right. I must say, germinating out of seeding trays and pots is a disheartening experience. Compared to my glass jar method where the germination percentage is way higher on the Bell Peppers, I think I shall go back to that way and plant them out once they are little plants.
@matthew-williams (Age 10) giving me a hand with the compost heaps.
@aimeludick (Age 14) giving me a hand with deweeding the pots. @merenludick also helped me yesterday, but my phone was flat.
Another interesting looking plant I am sure I did not sow. Any idea what it is?
Look... Radishes using my glass jar method. There are more germinated alive seedlings in here than all the other pots and things combind. I did this jar because I wanted to see what the germination time is. I think I may have to build a Seedling box...
As usual, no good building material is left to waste. There was construction nearby and they were throwing all of this out!
@aimeludick and @matthew-williams helped me get them to the house and into the garden. Thanks guys!
@merenludick was washing dishes. Thanks my boy.
Well, that's it for now!
Cheers!
@zakludick
You have a lot of plants in your garden. For sure you will have plenty of harvests soon. And in that way, you and your family have a safe and healthy meal prepared on the table soon.
That is indeed the plan! 😁
Just a heads up on the radishes, most root vegetables don't do well with transplanting. Let me know if you're successful.
My watermelon died, and I'm trying to keep the cantaloupe alove.
Indeed. I will keep that in mind. These are still very young.
Germinating out of seeding trays and pots is always like the lottery, I can tell you that from experience. My dad is going to start the process most likely at the end of January and we'll see what this year brings. I need to check out your jar method to see if we can apply that. Do you have a post somewhere about that?
We had that type of weeds too and it's a pain honestly, especially when it starts growing. That last (or first) tomato isn't looking good indeed, but I can't give you any tips till I don't see it from close. Anyway, its faith will be decided soon as there are only 2 options.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! 🎅
I actually do but let me see if I can dig it put of my post feed lol.
@erikah These are the ones you want to read to check out that Jar method. Thank you very much for all the support!
Getting Seedlings Ready for the Garden! Green Pepper Germination
[VEGGIE GARDENING Update - Lots and lots of Green Pepper seedlings! Quick and easy garden upvote!](https://ecency.com/hive-140635/@zakludick/veggie-gardening-update-lots-an
Cheers! !PIZZA
Thank you for the link, I'm going to check it out. Cheers and happy holidays :)
Hey, it looks like you're blacklisted by hive watchers. I suggest you solve this from their discord server.
What now? Why is it that I am blacklisted?
I don't know why and I'm not 100% sure that you're on the blacklist.
When I was curating your post from a community, I got this notification from the bot that this creator is blacklisted by hive watchers.
So you may want to talk to them and check if you're really on the blacklist or not. If not then fine and please let me know in that perspective but if yes, then you should sort this out.
Try contacting Hivewatcher in their discord server.
https://discord.gg/Ue9uTDP4BZ
Here's the discord invite link in case you're not there.
It's been sorted out. I was subscribed to some old post authority thing from 4 years ago that was flagged as a scam. I am no longer blacklisted. Thank you for the heads up!
Projects like this deserve recognition.....
Thank you very much. 🙏
Super garden .. you have lot of plants. I also garden lover.🤗
Thank you!
I remember that I commented on one of your first posts about gardening when there was nothing in your backyard! It's awesome to see that you made huge progress in just a couple of months! So inspiring!!!
I have picked this post on behalf of the @OurPick project which will be highlighted in the next post!
Thank you so much! Yes, it is really cool to see how it progresses!
I gifted $PIZZA slices here:
@zakludick(2/5) tipped @erikah (x1)
Send $PIZZA tips in Discord via tip.cc!
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Awesome! Thank you! Activity is best!
You're welcome. Merry Christmas to you and your family 🎅
Merry Christmas!!
Awesome garden! Love to see people growing their own food especially with some homemade compost. Keep up the good work.
Those pesky “weeds”, the one that looks like a succulent, is called common purslane (Portulaca oleracea). They are awesome to eat and very nutritious! Not everyone’s cup of tea and our modern society has unfortunately demonised so-called weeds. (Do not eat anything you cannot identify and are sure what it is though!)
Enjoy the composting and gardening. Looking good.
Common purslane. Interesting! If they are edible, then, like nasturtiums, they should not be removed completely!
Thank you for the heads up.
Just to be clear. You mean these right?
Just a heads up and warning. It takes many years to positively identify wild herbs (i.e., stuff you did not plant yourself) and to do it over the internet and photographs is tricky to say the least. So please be careful, and do your homework before consuming anything but do not be afraid!
That said, here is a post I did a while ago on purslane and I think how to identify it. I am no expert, just an enthusiastic herb eater!
Here is a photograph I took of some purslane in my garden this morning:
I hope this helps a bit! But google purslane identification and see what you find.
Wait I found a cool website. I think she is South African. Check out her website!. I think purslane was an important herb in South African food way back. I cannot remember where I read about it.
Anyways, sorry for the longish reply! I am a little mad about wild herbs, haha. Enjoy and be safe!
Wow. Love that content!
It DOES look like purslane.
Let me look closely...
Really does look like the stuff... so just need to eat it right... though I see there is a number of regular foods that contain oxalates... before you mentioned it now, I had no idea what oxalates WERE... but I have now done some research.
I should at least try it and educate mysel
There is some interesting research on oxalates (oxalic acid) and acidic food like yogurt and fermentation. I going to write some posts this week about this topic!
Life is a never ending journey of accumulating knowledge! Enjoy the journey.
Indeed! I think all this knowledge shared as we do on Hive is invaluable peer-to-peer information. Untouched by media and governing bodies who regulate knowledge based on ulterior motives.
Yes! That is the best part of especially the herbal hive community! So many lost knowledge is made permanent on the chain. I think we all have an obligation to share our knowledge and to find old knowledge on the brink of extinction. I think I will begin to do this in the future! Interviews with those who still cook with local foods and so on!
Awesome! That is an admirable mission!
We live through our culture and food is one of the biggest ways of expressing ourselves!
Indeed it is.
And part of that is also a post-modern concept that we should be fighting against where massive amounts of the population do not even know how to feed themselves.
The population, I feel, is largely uneducated in how to make food, and how to grow food. I know grown men and women who cannot cook and unless it was part of their job, they have no idea how things are made. Even fewer have any idea of how to grow and harvest things.
Once again, the technology is there for us to create more efficient systems, but this is sadly missing.
So true, my friend, so true that is why I started composting and growing my own food, but also starting to teach myself how to use herbs and identifying them. Sometimes the things you want to grow does not like the climate and so on, and other things proliferate.
Like the purslane!
This week, I think, I will share my purslane and spekboom chutney recipe! It is literally free food (the purslane) growing in our backyard and people do not realise that.
Our systems are designed to keep us from broadening our minds.
Homemade Chutney? Now this is something that I need! Haha!
Yeah, the more we do ourselves, the better.
It is like the Eskom situation. There is just no way that company has the ability to fix its loop of issues. No money to supply and no supply equals no money. I should write a blog-rant about this but I also see the opportunity for a way for individuals to claim more self-sustainability as a cause of this.
Initially, it is so very expensive for people to go to alternate power... THAT too is because the supply of generators and inverters is a centralized market that is so pricey, only the rich have it... I am educating myself on the power that is available to everyone...
I recently had this conversation with my dad! He wants to get an inverter with batteries. My girlfriend’s dad has bought thousands of rands worth of batteries. When loadshedding is so bad the batteries cannot charge full and they essentially break. It all sounds like a weird money making scheme at this moment. And like you said, the rich can obviously make it.
Getting to that point of self sufficiency where you can relatively live without the need of big corporations is very hard in our time. But the joy and life satisfaction that comes along with doing it outweighs any other luxuries in my opinion.
Yeah, when you make your own chutney, two things happen: you never run out of random ideas to turn into chutney, and the stuff from the store just does not work anymore.
This is because in order to beat the corporations, we need to work as autonomous communities. The labour and buying power of the many should outweigh that of the few but because we follow the exact economic model that profits the rich the most, we cannot break out of it.
We literally need to change the way we do things and then this can change. Together, we can actually do a lot. The general population are actually responsible for DOING the most things. Not the other way around.
They own the most, but that only works if we continue to give them our energy and mind.
Oh yes this falls in the middle of my work in philosophy and my Ph.D. People are so drenched in their ways of being that something radically different will not be an option.
Because we need to actively create new ways of living and ways of understanding ourselves beyond that of the status quo.
Okay that is a very philosophical way of just saying we need to grow our own food and share that knowledge amongst people who seem to thing that food comes from woolies or spar. It is about getting people to again find the need to live without an over reliance on corporations that does not have their best interest at heart.
I'm learning new things in terms of the gardening, but the other thing I like to study and practice is my ability to make and build stuff. This is to further that concept, not just the food bit, but the ability to build stuff and even how to make your own tools!
There is a joke, I think Joe Rogan told it, about how one day no one will know how to build an iPhone haha. We compartmentalise building thins so much that only a handful of people know how to actually build things. So yes, that is also a very valuable skill!
It's so lovely watching all these delicious and beautiful things growing in our garden! I mean the plants... Not the children 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 really. It's something else all tiger thee when crafting home cooked food and desserts to be able to harvest what you need from the garden rather than store bought stuff. Especially herbs. There is just no comparison, flavourwise!
This is awesome @zakludick 🙌
Have you seen all this recycling in the garden building @new.things?
BTW, Zak if you aren't following @riverflows you might like to. She's awesome at growing things. All the things. Including lots of food! Which she is then equally good (or maybe even better) at cooking!
Thank you! I will check her out!