It’s been a while (ok, not that long) since I showed you the progress in our veggie patch. Because boy – things are growing. Maybe not incredibly fast, but it is. And every time something sprouts the very first time, I feel a bit like God.

The thing that’s growing more than anything is the snow peas. Seriously, they’re like a weed and just shooting in length every single day. I have a theory that they are related to bamboo. Not that I’m complaining!

Then we have the teeny tiny potato sprouts that made their way above ground in the last few days. It took what felt like forever, but then they were there and plentiful!

These ones reared their pretty leafs the other day as well. Two small plants are growing and just today I saw a third zucchini leaf that was trying to push through the top soil as well. Just like the tomato plants these were kind of slow. I had almost given up hope completely!

These are the little plants that have been with us the longest. Well, we planted them the same time as everything else, but this Rocket was the first to show up. The plants in the next picture, which is Lorelei’s lettuce, followed close behind. 

Spring onions! Of course. They look kinda like our carrots, but I didn’t take any pictures of the carrots. Why? I don’t know.

This is my favourite right now – potatoes! That has probably more to do with the fact that this little leaf (along with two or three more) peeped up today. Eek! Already! 

My only worry right now is that something seems to have been chewing off leafs of my beetroots. On a good note, that certain someone (something?) has ignored everything else, but come on – beetroots are my favourite! Don’t eat ’em. Chew some lettuce instead, we have loads of that. But I get it, it’s not as tasty. Now I just have to come up with some way to protect it without it looking completely silly.

All in all – I’m so so so happy that I actually went and got myself a veggie patch. If you know me you’d never think I’d like it, but turns out I really do. Whenever I’m stressed I just go out in the backyard, breath some fresh air, check the plants and see if they need something. Bliss.

Over the weekend we seemed to be doing what I think everyone else in Melbourne was doing – fixing up and hanging out in the backyard. We bought a garden bed a few weeks ago. Although we put it together alright, we had grossly underestimated the amount of soil required to fill it. It was like trying to fill a black hole with a few pebbles.

Since we don’t have a car, it took us about 3 weeks to get this project going again. But this was the weekend it would happen. So on Saturday we headed of in a rental to the closest Bunnings and bought ourselves loads and loads of soil and compost. I think all in all we got 14 bags. I know. It’s real heavy.

I then spent a good half hour or so just cutting the bags open, pouring them out and mixing them up. I probably went a bit overboard with the whole mixing-the-soil-and-the-compost, but hey, it was my back that was aching the day after, not yours. And there’s also something profoundly relaxing with handling soil. I haven’t felt so relaxed in a long time.

Once the garden bed was filled with soil, I brought out my box of seeds and started writing down what I was about to plant.

Next up – figuring out where everything should fit in. And yes – before you say so, I probably did plant things too close. I’m a newbie and right now I can’t be bothered doing it the right way. If it works, it’s amazing. If it doesn’t, I’ll try again.

Now it was time for the fun part – planting!

Ok, the final product doesn’t look all that exciting. I’ll check back in a couple of weeks to see it there’s been any progress. Until then – keep your fingers crossed for me! Thanks.

Oh my god the weather this weekend! I don’t know where to start to describe it. All I can say is that I am writing this sitting outside in our little backyard. No scarf! No jacket! No nothing! Melbourne felt a bit deserted despite the sunshine and I thought everyone had left the city, but when we headed over to Bunnings to get some soil (well, a lot of soil to be honest) yesterday, we found ’em all. Oh boy was it busy. And I assume everyone did as we did and spent their weekend in their backyards, sipping in some sunshine and getting their hands dirty when prepping the garden for summer.

I’m too busy working today (outside! Yes, I’m very excited about this as you surely have noticed) so I will only share a few snaps I took yesterday in between our planting projects. It’s only a few of our older plants, but hey, be patient and come back yesterday and I’ll share you a bit of the new stuff as well. Promise.