Lotsa Lettuce

This frilly green looseleaf lettuce is a local variety that many people in town have self seeding in their gardens. There are usually a few good examples of it entered in the vegetables section of our town show, often with first and/or second prize cards in front of them. I’ve currently got one or two hundred of them scattered throughout the garden. They’re very tasty, are a more useful space filler than the weeds that would otherwise have grown in their place, and the excess get fed to our bunnies or a friend’s goats when they shoot to seed.
The daffodils in the middle of the bed were an edging last year. I’ve expanded this bed since then. When they start to yellow off I’ll dig them up and put them somewhere else.

Continuous Broccoli

Sprouting broccoli- a very useful variety. I bought one punnet, we’ve eaten several times the value of the seedlings already and they’re still going strong. Initially the plant forms a large head, then follows up with multiple small heads like broccolini. The trick is that you need to keep picking the heads without letting them flower, and feed the plants well or they go tough and bitter. Our male bunny escaped one night and sampled two of the plants before we caught him, so I suppose it’s appropriate that we use the bunny manure as our pelletized fertilizer. The spiky grey leaves behind are self seeded poppies-Peony and a single purple type. The Iceland poppy in the foreground is from a bought punnet, but I keep hoping they’ll establish as self seeders too. I pull out the poppies if they get too invasive, otherwise I leave them to add colour and collect the seed for baking. It’s smaller seeds than the bought poppyseed but just as yummy.

Greywater Garden

This pic is one of my “greywater” gardens. It’s planted with ornamentals only so that I can pour the washing machine water on it without fear of contaminating our food with bacterial nasties. The vigorous perennials take up the nutrients in the dirty water, and when I later cut them back to mulch the vegies those nutrients eventually cycle back into our food minus the germs. The plants include yarrows, scented pelargoniums, soapwort, anthemis daisies, lychinis and self seeded calendulas. And the occasional weed that hasn’t yet been fed to either the bunnies or the compost.