Category: Growing Food
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Growing Mushrooms From Spent Mushroom Compost
Bags of mushroom compost are cheap, and will grow more mushrooms than those expensive kits you can buy at chain stores. And the fresh mushrooms they grow taste incredible!
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Backyard Escargot
Would you eat escargot (i.e. snails) in a fancy French restaurant? Would you buy prepared snails from a deli and cook them at home? What about eating snails from your garden? I was doing some research, trying to figure out how to get rid of snails in gardens, and discovered that the garden snails we…
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Front Yard Makeover
When we did our house extensions about 5 years ago, we didn’t really do much with the front yard. We always meant to come back to it someday, but never quite got around to it. We never bothered to plant much in the way of trees and shrubs either, since we didn’t want them to…
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Potato Harvest
Sarah and I dug up the potato bed this afternoon. We got just under 6 kg of small to medium sized potatoes. There were a lot of very small bite-sized ones, so we’ll be cooking them up first. I think we planted the Dutch Cream seed potatoes in late September or early October. We planted…
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December Full Moon Phase
We’re now into the full moon phase. This is supposed to be the best time for planting root crops and perennials, harvesting for storage, taking cuttings, and dividing plants. According to [Aussie Organic Gardening](http://aussieorganicgardening.com/blog/?p=197), here’s what we should be doing in the Illawarra this week: >During Full Moon phase, beetroot, carrot, parsnip, and radish can…
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Dinner From The Backyard
We had a great dinner tonight, with almost all of it coming from the backyard! Megan made an awesome baked pumpkin quiche (store-bought pumpkin, and 4 eggs from Molly). The egg yolks made the quiche really yellow, much more than store-bought free range eggs do. The only down side is that now we’ve got none…
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December First Quarter Moon
According to the information I found in various places on the net, the first quarter moon is the quarter for strong leaf growth. According to [Aussie Organic Gardening](http://aussieorganicgardening.com/blog/?p=197), during the leadup to the December full moon in the Illawarra region (a temperate climate): >Before the Full Moon, cabbage, lettuce, silver beet, dill, and sunflower can…
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What Is Lunar Planting?
Lunar planting, or lunar gardening, does not involve nude gardening at night by the light of the moon! It is all about timing your gardening activities to coincide with certain phases of the moon. [Here’s an example](http://aussieorganicgardening.com/blog/?p=198) of how much difference some people claim lunar planting can make to your gardening success. I’ve read various…
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Phases Of The Moon
You may have noticed that I’ve put a moon guide in the left-hand sidebar of this site. It shows what phase the moon is currently in, but I thought it would be useful to put that into perspective across the whole lunar cycle. The moon changes appearance in a continuous cycle, through 8 recognizable phases:…
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My First Seedsavers Meeting
Sometimes it takes me a while to get around to writing up these entries – last weekend I attended my first [Illawarra Seedsavers meeting](http://green-change.com/2008/11/10/upcoming-illawarra-seedsavers-meeting/), and it was great. There were about 10 people at the meeting. Being my first, I didn’t know what to expect, but the other people were all very friendly and welcoming.…