Growing Archives - Page 9 of 10 - Growing and Gathering

Preserved Beetroot

I’ve never been a fan of Beetroot.

I think I was put off it as a kid when it would come in a burger (common addition to a New Zealand burger) and even if I took it out, it would leave a big, soggy, bright red stain on the burger bun that I would then have to eat around.

Or maybe it was from reading too many historical novels that would describe a hideous sounding meal including boiled beets.

Either way, they’ve never been a vegetable I’ve warmed too, and so it is another vegetable that I never used to grow.

We absolutely love Chillies, and we eat A LOT of them.

Which is why we absolutely have to grow our own, because if we didn’t, come Winter when they are out of season, they easily fetch up to $6 for 5 pretty sad looking red chillies and we’re refuse to pay that much for them.

We have been really lucky with our chilli plants and always get a pretty good crop. But it’s always sad to see these lovely ornamental plants shrivel up and die when Winter sets in.

Well it used to be sad, before we began growing our Chilli plants as perennials.

Propagating Boysenberry Plants

Boysenberry plants are a wonderful addition to any edible garden.

When allowed to thrive, they produce loads of fresh, sweet, fat fruit which is delicious whether it’s eaten straight off the bush, still warm from the Summer sun, preserved as Boysenberry jam or frozen and used through the year for fruit pies and smoothies.

As a kid, I remember a friend whose parents had the most prolific Boysenberry bush. We used to sit in the backyard after school and eat as many as we could until all the ripe berries were gone. I always hoped another lot would ripen before I was invited to go around again.

It’s no surprise then that when we first started our garden, and knew we wanted to make it an edible garden, one of the first plants I wanted was a Boysenberry plant.

Growing Garlic From Last Seasons Bulbs

As you are eating your Summer harvest of Garlic, don’t forget to put aside a few cloves from each bulb, for planting in Winter.

Garlic bulbs are grown from individual cloves like the ones in the picture above. With the right growing conditions, each clove planted goes on to produce a single Garlic plant with a bulb containing as many as 20 cloves.

Which makes growing Garlic wonderfully self-sustaining.

Pruning Blackberry Plants

Among the many berry plants we have on our 1/4 acre, we have four Navaho Blackberry plants which are an erect, thornless varierty that produce large crops of delicious, fat, sweet black fruit.

Well normally.

This Summer, we didn’t get such a great crop from two of our Blackberry plants.

The fruit was dry and sparse and the plants weren’t looking that healthy.

The other two plants did really well and produced a fantastic crop. But as always in our garden, we want more!

Now that the Strawberries are mostly done fruiting, it’s time to prepare for next years patch. Really? This soon? Absolutely! If you want to expand your patch or plant another patch, you will need more plants and there is no …

Preserved Beetroot

Growing Perennial Chilli (or Chili) Plants

Propagating Boysenberry Plants

Growing Garlic From Last Seasons Bulbs

Pruning Blackberry Plants

Propagating Strawberries

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