**29th January update -
*I weeded the Lima Beans and Sunflowers I planted around the edge of the garden - they certainly don’t work as well as Mustard to keep the couch grass out 
I also thinned the mustard seedlings. I have plenty of carrot seedlings emerging as well as leeks, silverbeet, parsnip and (I suspect) pak choi. It’s amazing how non-hybrid plants are so great at producing seed 
**What do you do with a Zucchini glut?
Try this quick recipe, it’s also a great way to get kids to eat their vegies.
Potato and Zucchini Fritters
*Peel and grate 4 smallish poatoes, 1 carrot and 2 Zucchinis. Sit aside for half an hour and then squeeze out the excess liquid
*Dice finely a small onion. Add an egg and a little flour to bind the ingredients together. Season with salt and pepper.
*Heat some Olive Oil in a pan and add spoonfuls of the mixture to the hot oil. Flatten the fritters well (otherwise the potato will not cook completely) and fry until golden on both sides
*Enjoy!
**I FINALLY found out where all the eggs were being hidden! Recently the egg count had dropped a bit, and I put it down to the weather. Then I was down to two hens laying - and one hen gone broody. Where she was hiding though I could not tell you! So today the search was on. Eventually she was found - hiding in plain sight. I had spent the entire time looking down low in the blackberries, she was calmly perched higher up in the ivy. She’d spent the whole time watching me! So now I have managed to rescue 13 eggs from underneath her before she pecked me too much. There is still at least one more egg underneath her, but that can wait for another day now.
**I went a bit nuts yesterday in the garden. My hubby discovered the chooks eating my green tomatoes the other day, so we have sectioned off our garden yet again. The chooks now have roughly one third of the yard, and that third has the blackberry problem, so maybe they’ll do something about it now. ;-p
Anyway, I put up yet another chicken wire fence, with a queenslander gate (that’s basically a piece of chicken wire that you unhook to get through), until my hubby is motivated to make another magnificent gate (do you think he’ll get the message?!). I cleared out the original vegie patch that the chooks had been picking over and fertilising while the carrots went to seed. I had also tried growing mustard round the edge of this as a couch grass deterent, and it actually worked quite well. I Replaced these mustard plants with Lima bean and Sunflower seeds. The mustard seeds where sprinkled in the cleared garden bed with about 2,000 carrot seeds (no I’m not exaggerating there) I had harvested myself. I also found some radish seedpods and threw those in as well. In about a month I will sprinkle some onion seeds.
Today I plan to clear the garden bed at the top gate and plant some more bean seeds, now that the chooks can’t get to them, I may actually be able to grow something on it. My plan is to cover all the chicken wire with food plants to create the illusion of more yard.
**We have rain!! Nothing else needs to be said so long as the rain hangs around for a while.
**I am now collecting the rinse water from the washing machine as there just wasn’t enough bath water. Bunnings have nothing in the way of greywater systems at the moment (although my hubby is off to Clark Rubber tonight to see if they have anything), so basically I wait until I hear the machine starting to empty for the second time (this water is cleaner) and run like mad to the laundry. I then plug up the laundry basin and let the water run into it. Once it is nearly full, I shut off the machine and start filling watering cans. From the back door I then pour the watering cans full of water over the porch and into my green waste wheelie bin (which we never use now thanks to the chooks). Once this bin is full I wait until evening or early morning and then fill watering cans for the garden. What has really surprised me is the amount of water that is used by a washing machine. One entire load of water from our 4.0 kg washing machine (set to the lowest water level setting) will fill a small wheelie bin! I have been wasting this much water every day through not recycling!
**So what am I doing now with Stage 3 water restrictions? I water VERY CAREFULLY with bath water. Basically, so long as the water goes on the plant and not on the bits we will be eating, greywater is safe (But I still rinse the veggies VERY well before eating). I was also using milk bottles with holes in them to really cut down on plant/water contact, but it was just too fiddly, so now I use a watering can that has the rose taken off.
Yesterday we picked the biggest Zucchini, against my arm it went from finger tip to elbow.
So what has been happening? Well we are eating a LOT of Silverbeet. And I picked our first Zucchinis today. There are many green tomatoes on the seedlings I bought, and yesterday I found my first tomato on my home grown plants!
