fresh to the plate

I'm hoping soon enough to be able to have salad leaves from the garden like this at least every second night... I've planted heaps of different lettuce in all sorts of places. I figure it's $1.98 or so at the shop for a lettuce and I can get 6 for that price as seedlings... and then just continuously pic. I have about 2doz or so (maybe more? need to count them) in at the moment.

I've also decided, after reading quite a few of the Jackie French books, that 'confusion' is my method - confusion+mulch. Bugs tend to go by shape and colour to recognise their potential meals. If you lay things out in nice neat rows they just have an all-you-can-eat buffet. If plants are in amongst others and weaving in and out and under and round, well just as it makes a little more eye work for you to find the harvest, so too it does for the bugs.


If it looks a little chaotic to you then so much the better when the bugs come a-huntin'. A neatly swept path helps with visual relaxation and 'containing' or 'bordering' the chaos if that's something you need from your garden. A garden bed overflowing with home grown goodness ready for the table... who can argue with that? Also planting to attract helpful bugs is good too.

It's working quite well so far - lettuce in with tomato in with lavendar in with lime in with passionfruit in with... you get the idea! Here's to being able to gather an entire meals worth of vege/fruit from the garden. Along with our fresh eggs, it's a pretty good start I think. We'll keep working on it! Also, I'm aiming for every available space to either be bird attracting natives (one side/patch of the garden) or edible. Soon there will be another long narrow plot available for fruit trees... I'm still pondering exactly what to plant - please share if you have a favourite!