How lovely to have these flowers coming on late in your season.

The Southern Cross flowers pretty much all year round. It is a difficult to to keep going for an extended period normally, like a lot of our plants from specialised environments, keeping them going for more than 3 years is difficult. That garden, which I established 30 odd years ago is now but a shadow of its peak as I am unable to maintain it to the level needed. The soil at Mum and Dad's farm is excellent, has superb drainage and will grow just about anything. Indeed we used to say for plant height, double what they tag tells you after you have put 10 bricks on top to slow down the growth. Changed peoples thinking about what could be grown in this part of the world, grew many plants that people said you couldn't and introduced several into the cut flowers/foliage trade.

Looking like I will finally get to pick a red bell pepper today, the first of the season, in May!!

Actually managed to pick two reds that had not really been ripening very well on the plants. Took them inside and fully coloured up now. Will eat shortly. And here they are

In an attempt to get some of the others to ripen I have covered the bell pepper plants. This should keep them going through winter here without too many problems and set them up for next season. The wind we have had recently has jiggled the frame about a bit, need to re-set it one fine sunny day.
That mulch you see in the background is part of roughly 100 cubes of roadside tree trimmings we got this year, filled all walkways between beds with it and around the apple trees, which will have a chook run built over it shortly. Will use the rest for cover for ornamental garden beds.

The finished product
Have enough plastic to fully cover two of the 14 meter long beds if I choose to do so.

That's a really nice set up you've made! Is that a kit of some sort or did you make it from locally available pipe?

Thanks [mention]GoDawgs[/mention] , it is based upon the mini greenhouses that I have from Aldi here (The green pipe). Got hold of light weight tube sold here as curtain rails (white pipe) which come in a range of lengths every half meter from 1 meter to at least 3 m long, those in the picks as horizontals are 2.5m long and I swapped in some half meter high risers in the side. Plastic is from a neighbor, a painter who found a roll of 200 micron thick, 4 meters wide and 50 m long somewhere and offered it to me. I will be able to go to 0.75 m high risers if needed next year. It is light, strong enough (as confirmed by last nights wind) and collapsible for storage. Will need the odd adjustment and push back together occasionally on still days after strong wind. I have enough frames and plastic to cover two beds if needed (I sorta went a bit silly and got a dozen frames when I first saw them as covers are light and I thought they would rip easy, the ties that hold the covers to frames are actually the weak links.

Will you interpelant around the peppers with anything? Herbs, lettuce, etc.?

PlainJane wrote: ↑Sat May 15, 2021 6:52 am Will you interpelant around the peppers with anything? Herbs, lettuce, etc.?

No, I will not need to for now, come spring I will plant more peppers/chilis in that bed, filling in a few gaps and then the rest of the bed, giving us anything upto 50 in total. The next bed over has lettuce and Asian style greens growing well into (Tatsoi, Yakino, Mizuna, Pak Choy etc) and as our winter temps generally top 50F on even the worst days they do well. Also as i am relying on garden sleepers (8x2 inch) and fence posts to hold it all in place, I do not want to open it up to frequently.

Whwoz wrote: ↑Sat May 15, 2021 6:43 am ...I have enough frames and plastic to cover two beds if needed (I sorta went a bit silly and got a dozen frames when I first saw them as covers are light and I thought they would rip easy, the ties that hold the covers to frames are actually the weak links.

You were smart to get them while you could. So many times we find something we like or that works and want more later only to find they're sold out and not being re-ordered. Sigh...

I wonder if there are snap clips that greenhouse suppliers have for attaching plastic to piping that would fit your set up. My 3" x 1/2" ones work great clipping the plastic or netting to my tunnel pipes. Here's what they look like (on the left in the photo):

https://www.greenhousemegastore.com/har ... ittings%2f

Interesting looking Clips [mention]GoDawgs[/mention]. Have not seen anything like them here. The only thing i would have against using them is that I would then need some other way of anchoring the frames to the ground as they are basically side onto our prevailing winds from either the east or west, hence running the plastic out across the ground and laying 8 x2" timbers and fence posts on it to hold it in place.

For those that may be curious about what we in land of Oz have as mulch, this is what I am currently using. Wasn't so long ago that all of this stuff got burnt in the sugar factories to run the boilers.
and on the ground with some garlic poking through

Those of you who came from TV might remember me mentioning a chance squash hybrid the I grew several years ago. This season past I grew seed from the longest keeping one of those fruit, a striped green teardropped shaped fruit the was still in perfect condition on the outside after 15 months storage. Internally it had just started to dry out a bit in one small pocket, the rest was like it had only been picked a month or two before. This fruit weighed about 8 lb and yielded about 60 seeds

This season just gone, I planted about half the seeds and, like the rest of the vegies, they struggled early on. Eventually they flowered and set some fruit, which I harvested on May 8, about a month later than normal.
This is the bulk of the harvest with several fruit that I will keep seeds out of and grow out separately. Ultimate decision on seed keepers will be made when the knife comes out and they get cut.

Two stragglers, one a "normal" butternut in appearance, which will be the next one cut most likely, the other one a very immature green block that will stay on the vine until we get a frost.

So all those different squashes in the pic came from the seeds of that long keeping hybrid you saved? That's amazing. But true. Where I used to work, a UGA professor was doing some crossing work on crape myrtles to find a new one one with dwarf growing habits. He started 500 plants from the seed of one cross. It was amazing how many different shapes and sizes resulted. About every other month he'd go through all the plants and toss out any that would never fit the profile he was looking for. It was really interesting to watch the process.

I've just saved some hybrid Packman broccoli seed and will be starting 12 plants this fall just to see what I get.

Had to reinforce the bell pepper cover after a bit of windy weather a couple of nights ago. Today was first time since it was still enough to so without causing problems due to size of plastic cover. Belted in some stakes and tapped them to the frame
At the same time found some peppers starting to ripen, so picked those, best pick of the season so far, when normally plants would be pulled out by now

Whwoz wrote: ↑Sat May 15, 2021 10:59 am For those that may be curious about what we in land of Oz have as mulch, this is what I am currently using. Wasn't so long ago that all of this stuff got burnt in the sugar factories to run the boilers.

Mulch bag.jpg
Mulch in bag.jpg

and on the ground with some garlic poking through

Mulch on Garlic.jpg

That mulch is super interesting. There are tons of sugar can farms near the coast here but I suspect as you say they use it for something extra. You can smell when they're burning the fields (overly sweet smelling smoke).

Zenbaas wrote: ↑Wed May 19, 2021 3:29 am

Whwoz wrote: ↑Sat May 15, 2021 10:59 am For those that may be curious about what we in land of Oz have as mulch, this is what I am currently using. Wasn't so long ago that all of this stuff got burnt in the sugar factories to run the boilers.

Mulch bag.jpg
Mulch in bag.jpg

and on the ground with some garlic poking through

Mulch on Garlic.jpg

That mulch is super interesting. There are tons of sugar can farms near the coast here but I suspect as you say they use it for something extra. You can smell when they're burning the fields (overly sweet smelling smoke).

[mention]Zenbaas[/mention] the farmers stopped burning cane fields here many years ago, all machine harvested now. Not sure if they still run the boilers in the cane factories on spent cane but I know that for a long time they ran the boilers on spent cane for the bulk of the season after using a different fuel to start them.

Squash:

For those who are interested in where the diversity in the squash cross F2 fruit shown above, the parents are below
Both are C. moschata varieties

Bell Peppers and Chilli

Covering these has been well worth while, the -3.4C frost we had the other day would have wiped them out, instead I picked about 20 bells and chilli
These are ripening nicely on top of the fridge.

Kang kong

This is a true tropical plant I am trying to overwinter. Plants have so far done well, but I have not checked since the hard frost. Two plants under the cover, most of the original growth has died back but quite a bit of new growth has occurred, going vertical rather than horizontal.