おとなりさんの花＠My neighbour flower

This is my neighbour flower that I was admiring yesterday. The flower is very big. Bigger than my face. I took this picture yesterday when it was drizzling. Could see some water spot in the picture. I can’t remember what the name of this flower plant on top my head now.

Looks like a lady with a wide brim hat giving you a sideways glance.

Top view a wide brim hat with a plume. This flower looks very elegant. I saw several small version of this flower in central market and very expensive for one stalk.

Lucky for us this flower plant is adjacent to our veggie patch. Looks like a part of our veggis patch too.

Freezing Cauliflowers

We are having excess cauliflowers this week. I only had a few minutes in the veggie patch this week before I am off to lab. This morning I see many cauliflower curds are looking very matured,

Mik helped harvest all those matured looking cauliflower today and help to keep them in the freezer today. We harvested five cauliflower curds today.

Cut into small pieces.

Blanched for about 2 minutes. The stem greenish colour is a bit different and look more softer. Before blanching it still has the crisp crunchy look.

Seal and pack ready to be frozen with label as a reminder. Five time meal for us and ready to be prepared anytime. I have not google yet on how long we could keep it frozen but I think at least 6 months should be fine.

We only had cauliflower last year in August and it was not enough to preserve them. We had to wait almost a year to taste our own home grown cauliflower again.This year hopefully we could prolong the cauliflower production in our veggie patch.

BANZAI!!! We already have frozen cauliflower pack that could be our saviour when nothing edible is in the patch or  for whenever we have cauliflower craving in summer or autumn.

I don’t have a scale to know how many kilos I have harvested so far for cold season brassicas.

But this is a harvest tally memo up till today;

Broccoli ~ 10 curds

Cauliflower ~ 10 curds

Bolted Wong Bok ~ 14 plants (sigh)

Self-seed flowers or veggies make gardening easy

Triple surprise this morning. The cineraria,polyanthus and viola is blooming after I had recently posted about waiting for them to bloom. Wonderful to see them blooming side by side. Extra bonus with the French marigold  as they self-seed by itself on that spot like a final touch up to make it look like a flower fest. We don’t have to sow any French marigold seeds anymore because this is their hot spot where they self-seed readily. Sometimes French marigold seedling become invasive, we scoop the seedlings and transfer them to other patch. Minus work on sowing seed and this flower plant is good to keep nematodes away! In addition to that save money on seed potting mix.

A Nice surprise too this month is many viola seedlings are found in the veggie patch. I did not expect violas I planted last year will self-seed so easily.

One of the spot viola seedlings are getting crowded under our chili plant. I have to transfer some of them later to a different place or pot up some for community fruit and veggie next month.

Transplanted some of viola seedlings in this wood box at the edge where pink radish seed has just germinated,growing carrots (just notice I have to thinned them) and waiting for brown onion seeds to germinate. It will be fun to see in a month or two how they are growing together in this box.

A smiling purple face with a yellow lipstick greet us this morning. Something has been busy making holes in this new viola petals. We found not only self-seeds flowers in the patch but self-seed tomatoes too!!!  Do you think I should have a go with this seedling? Will they give me good harvest? The leek will be annoyed with me if I don’t make up my mind soon about these self-seed tomatoes seedling.

Spring countdown…

Upsy Daisy here is budding ~ gerbera

I received two pots of gerbera plants for mother’s day in May this year from Rayyan and Ilhan. Since last year whenever I went to Bunnings I will longingly gaze at the gerberas and feeling undecided whether I want to buy them or not. Well the cheapest you can get for one pot is usually around AUD7. I still don’t understand the reason why I was holding myself back from buying them when my husband usually will comment don’t think too much just buy them. Finally he found an excuse to buy it for me with a good reason.

I tried to grow Gerbera jamesonii (Gerbera daisy) from seed but not even one seed germinate for me. Failure attempt even though I tried on different time of the year. Did some reading that it is not easy to grow them from seed as you need fresh seed. It is better to take new divisions of the gerbera plant during cooler month.
They give me pretty flower through May but stop producing flower in June. Now early August they start to produce bud. I can’t wait to have them blooming in the garden again.

Growing without a hot house

The temperature is still cold to grow warm weather lover vegetables and we don’t have a hot house. Luckily I saved this two medium size (at least 30cm tall) plastic bottle from being thrown to the recycle bin. Might as well recycle them for my pleasure of gardening make my own hot house. I cut some hole for drainage and the top part cut closer to the lid as possible.So I have a tall pot later on.Cut like you could open a rubbish bin lid and make it easy to water.  I sow some cherry type tomato seeds and cherry type capsicum seeds. When the seedlings are tall enough to transfer and weather permitting, I will leave one seedling in each plastic bottle to grow. Since it is a cherry type fruit vegetable, it does not have that deep root system to give a thought about it. Well I could always transplant the plant later if they don’t fit in this pot or as a Christmas gift in December .

If they grow well in this pot, I could grow many of them this summer without having any dilemma regarding space.

Cineraria has produced many buds since last month, However it still have not bloom. This is the first them I planted cineraria so I am not sure when are they going to give me a glorious show. Judging from the buds, I think we have 4 colours cineraria plants.