Green living adventures....

Summer days in our garden and the heat sees us watering like crazy (lucky we have big dams) and only able to do the bulk of the work in the late afternoon but so much is progressing and the days have been full of learning and just playing around in the dirt.
Over the last week we've planted turnips and silverbeet (spinach), tigger melons and I've just planted my pumpkin seeds......
We're also harvesting quite a few foods - below is my coriander seed harvest! I've chopped off all the stems and will now leave them with the seeds on to dry out for a few weeks in paper bags before sifting all the seeds and placing them into spice jars, I'm quite excited to have our own little stash of this herb and what's more I bought the seedlings as rejects at a nursery for only 50cents. It always pays to look in the clearance/reject section of a plant nursery....most plants only need a little water or care and they repay you so much :)

This is our other harvest - our sunflowers. We got heaps of seeds from our flowers and they also attracted lots of bees to our garden which helped the other plants. We are now starting two more gardens with some of the seeds.

cut and ready to leave in the sun for a few days to dry before rubbing out the seeds.

Strawberries are one of our families favorite fruits so we have to grow a lot of them to keep everyone satisfied with so many mouths all wanting that sweet taste. At the moment we have 4 long rows of strawberry plants and we are now propagating their runners and planting out more rows once they take root.
It's so simple - we just place pots of dirt beside the plants and put the runners into the pots where they find the dirt and take root. Once the baby plants are chugging along we snip them from the main plant and into their our garden patch they go ready for next season......

This is a tiny little mango tree that I have grown from seed......It's the way of nature but it sure does feel special to grow something from seed.
We will be starting a fruit tree area soon next to our vege garden so that is where this lil guy is destined for - we've also got a pomegranate tree growing away too.

And who is this?  Why little baby 'Arabica' coffee plant of course ....always the way I start my morning so I couldn't resist giving a coffee bean plant a go myself :)

And our mini greenhouses made out of cut juice and soft drink bottles are perfect for shielding the new baby capsicum plants from the toads who dig and tromple everywhere uprooting the poor seedlings (This is how I lost all of my celery seedlings that popped up, NOT happy Jan!)

And what else does every green garden need why feathered friends of course!!!! Meet Classic and Roast our new chickens! Already they've become so much apart of our family spending time with us while we garden. Our children love them and run around finding them grasshoppers and bugs LOL
Once these two start laying eggs that will be another item ticked off our 'provide for ourselves' list......

Til next time...........xxx