Feast or Famine

If there is one thing that gardening teaches you it’s how delicately poised we are between feast and famine. A season that started out looking like it would give us a bumper yield quickly turned to a not so great one.  The late winter and early spring rain that gave us some spectacular growth also brought killer mosquitoes and a fruit fly attack that hammered our tomatoes.  I did however with an intense program of baiting and trapping manage to save enough to get a few bottles of ketchup and enough pizza sauce to see us through the year. 

 Once the fruit fly had finished the mice attacked and clobbered the corn and the remaining tomatoes. The little devils where and still are eating everything in sight including the beans on the vine.  Again I did get enough in the freezer to see us ok for most of the year but the poor neighbors missed out on the overflow.

 Still it’s not all bad news, since the mice haven’t learned to dig yet we managed to get a decent crop of spuds. About 50 kgs from the new bed and I still have some to dig over at the neighbors in a patch that I commandeered while he wasn’t looking.

And as it seems the mice don’t like onions we ended up with a good supply of those as well. The plumcot I planted winter last has produced its first fruit which I saved from the fruit fly by bagging, so we got a taste of those.       

 

My new PV system is on site and will be up and running shortly and the drive is progressing at a slow but steady rate. It should be ready for operation well before winter arrives and should deal nicely with any amount of rain runoff we are likely to get.  I ended up fabricating another gutter form because casting one a day was just too slow. We have been sling them into place about every half dozen or so but boy are those great lumps of concrete heavy, definitely a two man and a boy job.