It has been a great start to the growing year in the Blue Mountains so far. Photos this month show a few tips for getting good growing results in our mountains climate and anywhere you have limited space. Polytunnels or covered and protected growing spaces are ideal in the mountains where we have to contend with highly variable weather and wind and animals (looking directly at you marsupials, parrots, bower birds and lyrebirds). Often having some sort of covered space can make a huge difference to your eventual food production. It can help preserve the plants and conserver moisture and stabilise the temperatures and humidity levels and extend your growing time by months – both at the beginning and end of the warm growing season. Plants like mizuna, rocket, lettuce, mint and other leafy greens can grow so fast that they out compete the weeds and reduce stress for you. Even beans, squash and tomatoes can be used to suppress weeds. Why not get some food from your empty spaces! Also growing smaller varieties can aid in getting faster crops and more produce. There are many varieties available – both old heritage and new – that can be grown in containers and moved around to take advantage of the sun and shade to get the best and easiest results. Shown here is a small fast growing and very productive eggplant that represents the ‘original’ early small egg sized and shaped varieties that gave eggplants their name. There is also a tasty white version of this available which really does look like a bunch of eggs growing on a bush. ‘Black Beauty’ is an heirloom variety of Zucchini from the USA circa 1957. It’s a compact grower (for Zucchini) and produces wonderful tasty fruits and is very productive for a small space. Also shown is ‘Hopi Yellow’ Watermelon which a very old yellow fleshed variety originating from the first peoples of the USA. Yellow and orange coloured flesh was actually very common originally but marketing of the red flesh varieties eventually dominated through the mid 1900’s so that now every one now thinks red is ‘normal’. This variety is a nice small growing vine and produces fruit quite quickly that are ideal for a small garden space – especially if you can give it some heat and lots of water and fertiliser – they respond well to growing in a small covered space like a polytunnel or even near a wall that gets heated with the summer sun.

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It’s that time again!
This is just a quick reminder that the next scheduled meeting for the year 2023 of the Mid Blue Mountains SeedSavers is on at the Bullaburra Progress Hall this coming weekend.

Sunday 18 February 2024 from 10 am till Midday

Help celebrate the Blue Mountains SUMMER!

It’s time to put more seeds and seedlings in and plan for the rest of the sunny growing summer and even to plan early for the upcoming autumn. There are now seeds to be harvested from the spring and early summer that have ripened up in the recent warming sunny patches of weather. And there is still time to get some of our fast growing summer favourites into the ground.

Come along and talk about growing things with like minded people.
Hope to see you there celebrating the current productive growing season!

The address for the Mid Blue Mountains Seedsavers website is:
https://midbluemountainsseedsavers.org/

We do now have a Facebook page as well:
https://www.facebook.com/Mid-Blue-Mountains-Seed-Savers-1629533990602860/

These regular notifications are sent out directly from the website if you subscribe to that email notification list.