Pumpkins and the summer crop clean up begins

Last weekend I pulled the corn. I am currently processing all this by cutting up and adding to a compost heap which will be finished when i remove the tomato and pumpkin and take the mulch from this and add to the compost. The corn provided a reasonable harvest of cobs which have all been eaten, however I will be switching to a different variety next year as the corns lacked some sweetness we are used to from our crops when we lived in Qld. I have heard the open pollinated ones may be sweeter but need to be eaten on picking as they lose their sweetness quicker than the hybrids.

We have picked 10 kgs of pumpkins which are now in storage after having sat outside in the sun for 3 weeks. Today I picked another load of gold nuggets and buttercups. The butternuts are being left on the vines till the very last minute as they need all the time to sweeten their flavours in our shorter summers of Tasmania.

The warmer march and early April has extended the Tomato harvest which large quantities still being picked. While we had one morning this week get down to 2 degrees celsius, the majority of days are still warm enough to continue the ripening of fruits. In the next 2 weeks tho I will harvest the last lot of tomato for indoor ripening.

All of these summer crops have been and will be replaced with a green manure of tic bean which is perfect for my soils which are higher in clay and create a lovely loamy clay when dug in early spring.

The next couple of weeks I have to catch up which a number of clean up jobs as the start of the soccer season and being away for work has seen me not do a great deal in te veg patch apart from harvesting. However on my work travels we stumbled upon a wombat who seemed to be interested in our presence and wondered at a distance smelly our presence often. It is easy to forget how large wombats are and they truly look like little Australian Bears.