Garden activities for this afternoon

With all the rain that we have received over the last few weeks, you really have to grab any time you can in the garden. This afternoon was one such break in the weather and I jumped to it!

Watered the worms, as the little brown ants are back and after heading to a Worm Farming seminar the other weekend, I have learnt they are attracted to your farm if it is a little dry. So, to the tap I headed and poured about 3 litres of water through the system. Let's hope that makes a difference.

Another task was to reduce the fruit on the lemon tree. This task for me has been delayed since I learnt that this was something that I needed to do.  The reason for my delay is that I am a bit of a skeptic when it comes to my gardening capabilities and I am forever thinking that more is better because at least it is growing right! Wrong! Thinning fruit on your lemon tree will help the development of the fruit. Also thinning seedlings of some vegetables means that you will get a more productive and appropriately sized reward at the end of the growing season. But I do find it difficult to take this advice.

So, as I said I got to the lemon tree and its fruit reducing task this afternoon. What made me tackle this task, was not the learned gardener advice about this matter, but the fact that I noted some sooty leaves on the tree and thought it best that I remove these "diseased" leaves completely. Once into this task and examining my lemons on the tree I noted those lemons that were touching another lemon where attracting scale insects at the connection point. So, this rapidly bought me to removing the less promising fruit from each of these situations. My tree looks a little less burdened by its fruit load, but hopefully at least I won't lose all my fruit to some disease or insect! Now that would be a trauma! Especially since I want to make my first home made lemon cordial from all the fruit on the tree.

After the initial gardening episode this afternoon, dinner needed to be prepared. Sweet potato was on the menu for dinner tonight and due to my lack of sweet potato using recipes of late, the one that I cooked tonight had started to sprout little roots. Rather than putting these sections of the sweet potato straight into the compost bin or worm farm I thought it might be worth trying to grow these. So, a later afternoon activity saw me burying these sections with their roots attached into a recently cleared out garden bed with a bit of my home-produced worm castings. Let's see how they goes. If they do take, it will be a good crop to loosen the soil and de-compact the bed for future crops. 

Hope you've found some time amongst all this rain to get out into your garden.....maybe just pulling those weeds.


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