Gardening - Veggie garden expansion and cleanup!

Good day everyone! Zak here from Cape Town, South Africa. This past weekend I took some time out in the garden and made some beautiful progress!

Soon after getting started there the kids began to join me. @aimeludick started helping me while @merenludick and @matthew-williams played in the garden nearby.

I divided the garden up so there is still a great amount of space for the kids to play but there is a fence that separates my veggie garden from the area the kids would use to play.

I still got the boys involved in one way or another, sending them for little errands from time to time.

This picture is of before I got stuck in. I did some work on previous weekends and only about a 4-5 weeks ago this place was completely dry and barren.

With a lot of extra water, weeds and grass also started to grow all over the place, some of that needed to be sorted out.

Then I started planting Basil and other plants as well. Let me focus in on some of the work that got done.

I recently separated a triple head of onion that I gre from a kitchen cutting.

This is the first time that I am growing onions and doing it this way.

The main bulb looks fine and one of the two others looked alright.

This one has a yellow stem so I harvested it. This gave me a little pickling onion sized bulb. I shall chalk that up as a success!

Interestingly, this bulb had grown its ow. Roots so I left the other one to see if it shall recover.

This is the other secondary bulb.

This is the garden bed next to the first. Basil, garlic, onions and parslane in between.

Parslane is sort of like a weed.

That is the way it has been treated by most gardeners for a long time.

It has become more and more general knowledge that parslane is both edible and extremely nutritious!

The best idea is to treat it as sort of like a spinach. Similarly, parslane also contains high levels of oxalates.

So if you have issues with kidney stones, avoid it as much as you avoid spinach!

The newer of the two compost heaps received a bunch of tree cuttings last week. This is starting to mature now.

This third growing box was actually the first one that was established in the garden.

The mint still grows here. Surprisingly they were being bullied by the grass and weeds while people told me that the mint would take over everywhere.

Anyway, with a but of TLC this has recovered. I am attempting to do some direct planting into this bed.

One half (on the right) will be green beans and on the right will be Garden Radish. I have no idea how viable the seeds are so I have to use it while I can so I can move on!

Here is @aimeludick (Aime Ludick) who is helping me in the garden.

She is giving me a hand clearing out that last patch in the corner of the second garden bed.

At the same time she also harvested the Parslane which we then washed off and use in the kitchen!

The first bed is starting to look amazing!

The second bed is also coming along nicely. Here are a lot more onions planted out from cuttings.

Here is Aime's little harvest. What we always do is we have one container for harvest and another with the weeds and cuttings that go into the compost.

In my raised garden box I had a bit of a surprise! I didn't plant this!

So here I know I had some sort of cucurbit, a pumpkin thing. So I did what I could.

I phoned a friend and then used Google Lens. This identified the leaves at Kabocha Squash or Japanese Pumpkin.

This makes sense, I bought a little Japanese Pumpkin some months ago and it's bits and pieces went into the compost.

So this is not the depth of soil I wanted here, I wanted it deeper.

But... now this plant is growing here. So I will just go with the flow and let it grow. I am seeding some cauliflower into the soil in this box. I haven't done that before either. So we will see what happens.

Here is a close up of the leaves. If anyone has a better idea of what this is, I am all ears!

In the last corner at he top left I direct planted carrot seeds. We shall see what happens there too.

All that remains is to keep all the soil moist.

Thank you for reading my post! Happy gardening!

Cheers!
@zakludick

Hive South Africa