In The Garden: Getting My Geek On

So it's been a tumultuous kind of week or two round these parts, but hopefully things are heading back to normal-ish. I can live in hope anyway!!

Aside from drinking a tonne of coffee, any down time this week has seen me embracing my inner garden nerd. I've had my nose stuck firmly in some of my favourite organic gardening books and planning what we'll be planting in August/September, and figuring out how our crop rotation system is going to work. I've also been planning out the front garden, which we'll plant in September/October.

Toby is having his christening next weekend, so it's all hands on deck to get the place looking good before then, but once that's over I'll be garden-crazy all the way. I really want to have the beds in place and the soil worked on by the time August comes. (Or maybe the middle of August.)     

There are a gazillion different gardening resources out there, but in the effort to keep it as simple as possible I've decided to choose two or three resources and just stick to their advice, otherwise I find one book will contradict another and I just wind up confused.

So in case you're keen on starting your own vege garden, I thought I'd list the resources I'm going to stick with as I build and start the garden.

Organic Gardening magazine is great, but they have recently released their third Essential Guide, and they are all excellent. You can buy the newest one online, and the others on special order or from ABC shops:
- Getting Started (bed construction, composting, soil, growing in pots etc)
- Fruit (A-Z of fruits to grow at home)
- Veges (A-Z of veges to grow at home)

City Food Growers website is awesome. There are free and paid versions of the subscription (the paid version is so worth the $50 a year) and it will personalise the planting details based on your postcode, as well as offer a list of the best plants for your area, when to plant, what to plant with and common pests and diseases. It's incredibly helpful and I find I look at it most days when I'm trying to figure out what I'll be planting.

Gardenate app for iPhone. It has less detailed information that the City Food Growers website but it has the benefit of being portable, and it has a Garden Notes section where you list what you planted and when, and it will track the harvesting progress for you. Handy to keep track of the details that seem so simple at the time but will get pretty fuzzy pretty quickly.

So that's where we're at currently. And thank goodness for the gardening distraction, otherwise the past weeks may have seen me consume way too much wine and chocolate! Gardening as therapy = win!