More babies & Feb Home-Saved Seed Winners

Rayyan is recovering well no more fluid around the heart. But the doctor did caution us about his arteri pulmonari is still narrow and leaking. At the moment, I am so happy to see Rayyan very cheerful after what he has gone through. His personality dramatically changes after recovering from surgery more cheerful, happy, chatty and more confidant. He used to be very anti-social and so serious face most of the time, always hiding his face to other people. We were struggling on putting him weight as he don't have that much energy to eat and usually vomit during his feeds. It must not be pleasant experience for him because of that he don't enjoy food. Now he begin to like food and always ask you he wants the food you are eating which can make mummy cries tears of joy. Hooray, no more vomits but he must learn how to chew. We hope he gain weight and thrive after surgery or else we have to feed him through tube again as supplement in 2 weeks time.

 Finally we got around choosing which garden will our February home-saved seeds travel randomly. I written the name on the paper, roll them, shake and my 3 assistants chose~
Rayyan pick ONE ~ Onenezz (I had difficulty coaxing him to give me take a look at the paper, its mine he said).
Ilhan pick Bangchik ~ My Little Vegetable Garden (absorb watching in the night garden, picking more than one not listening).
Lenay pick Catmint ~ Diary of A Suburbun Gardener

Autumn is near and we feel like we have second spring at the moment. Plants are loving the weather showing fast growth and hopefully giving us more produce. I have also noticed many self-sowed seedling around the garden. Self-sowed flowers that I had planned to sow like calendula and nasturtium. Maybe I don't have to sow them now just scoop these seedlings and rearangging them with brassicas later. We have one periwinkle plant which have been in the garden before we moved here, its perennial and very hardy survived through each season by it ownself. This month I found many of perwinkle babies around the garden. Catmint has made a recent post which is very interesting about 10 invasive weeds in Australia and one of it is periwinkle! A very nice read so hop to her blog from the link above.

 March is also the month to sow herb. We have many varieties of herbs to try this year~chervil, dill, fennel,ect. Hopefully with all this herbs in my hands, I will try new recipes and skill up my lack of culinary knowledge in using herbs. I can thick off sowing lemon basil this month as I found several seedlings in one of the containers. This year we collected some coriander, celery and parsley seeds. The bolted plants flower on different time so I did not have to worry about cross pollination. However these plants were growing approximately close to each other less than 50cm apart. Now in this patch, I have hundreds of self-sowed seedlings which look almost similar to each other and I cannot identify which is which as these 3 plants are umbeliffers. Umbellifers (coriander, celery and parsley) seedlings at early true leaves stage development does look similar to each other. I have to be more patient and wait for them to grow before making a decision about these babies.

Self-sowed tomatoes and pumpkins seedlings are also growing in the garden. I may keep tomatoes but not pumpkin. Let see if we get lucky this year with harvesting tomatoes in winter. We were lucky with chilies fruiting in last winter. Sunflower seedlings also popping out from compost. If they bloom will be very excited , if not chop as green manure.

Any self-sowed plants in your garden at the moment?

How about a "Companion Plant" week somewhere in the month of April?

It will be nice to share some ideas about maximising the use of space and crops with companion planting and, less energy, time and money to deal with pest.