Spring garden Oct 2012

When I named this blog bike-n-bake I obviously wasn't thinking about my other attention-seeking hobby - gardening.  So perhaps it should be renamed grow-cook-eat-ride.  Not quite as punchy though.

Anyway, here's what happened in Spring (Oct 2012) in my Melbourne backyard:


Welcome to galangal, the newest addition, recently potted. A work colleague heard how nuts I was about growing and eating my own produce and kindly dug up some of her homegrown galangal plant to give me. Eager to plant it, and commuting by bike that day, I strapped this little sapling onto my backpack and rode home hoping it wouldn't get destroyed in the wind. It's now kicking ass and four times as big (in 3 months)! Go nature!

"Sunburn garden" - named after suffering to establish this. Thankfully it's full of anti-oxidant rich tasty greens like purple sprouting broccoli, mammoth dill, parsley, tung hou (茼蒿), thyme, rainbow chard and red cabbage. Lots of these leafy greens were eaten in "snoods" - noodles in soup made by me and my hubby.

purple sprouting broccoli



red cabbage

more purple sprouting broccolli with dill as companions

PSB again, with red lettuce behind (Rouge d'Hiver)

red lettuce (Rouge d'Hiver)

blueberries to be! (Nelly Kellie)

the blueberry bush

Hokowase strawberries



other strawberries (whose name I forget!)

"Honeymoon garden" - named because this is what hubby and I did on a rainy Spring day a couple of years ago. There's nothing quite like shovelling 4 tonne of compost and topsoil after tying the knot! My faves in this include the red ranunculas, peony poppies (not in flower), rainbow chard, sage (purple flowers) and French lavendar (at the far end). The pumpkins got ripped out after they proved useless and greedy hogging all the space and not sharing sunlight with others!

blood orange tree and brown Turkish fig behind. The orange blossoms smelled wonderful and wafted around!

Japanese maple, still fighting fit after years of drought (including 46degC on Black Saturday), and providing a leafy home to a nest of noisy mynas. One little fluffy myna got bullied by its siblings, pushed out of the nest and didn't survive very long(nature sucks sometimes). We tried to save it in a shoe box but it didn't eat or drink. The little fella was buried under the maple tree, giving back to what initially supported it.

PET bottle plants according to my hubby. "No!" I say, they're little basils in mini hothouses 

More nursery plants - leaf amaranth in top left, basil at top/centre, bergamot in top right, capsicum in bottom right, yellow zucchini centre/bottom, chia in left/bottom