You can call us City Farmers

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Hey guys,

Okay so it’s been a little while and the season changed so I think it’s about time for another update.

If you read my first blog about entering my farmer girl era, you might enjoy an update? I write this from our small home in the city, a gated community with a really tiny space for gardening. Looking into the sun reflecting through the lush grape vines that were dried out sticks just a month ago.

We’ve made so many improvements and additions to the garden, and we’ve started getting into a habit of harvesting on Wednesdays. With the more frequent cutting of the herbs and vegetables, we’re reaping a lot more fruitful harvests.

We’ve also moved around and replanted a few sections of our little home garden and the garden currently consists of the following:

Herbs

Oregano
Chives
Spring onion
Coriander
Parsley
Mint
Basil

Vegetables

Tomatoes
A few kinds of Lettuce
Baby spinach
Spinach
Broccoli
Cauliflower
Pepper
Eggplant
Gem squash
Carrots
Leeks

The fruit trees are also starting to slowly sprout

Strawberries
Blueberries
Grapes
Peaches
Plums
Bananas
Lemons
And we’ve just decided to try to grow a pineapple from a store-bought fruit again

Last year I kept a pineapple head alive for a whole year but it didn’t grow so thought it was dead and threw it out. It was actually still alive and the roots were growing, but because the plant stayed pretty much exactly the same. I threw it out.

It has been such a bonding experience since getting married, as my husband absolutely loves the garden as well, and most days it seems more his than mine. We are learning a lot and also facing some challenges.

For some of our challenges, we have found solutions but some are still a work in progress:

Snails & slugs

The first issue in the garden was our “crops” being eaten and completely destroyed by slugs and snails. They love lettuce, strawberries and some of the other vegetables getting completely mauled by the little dudes so we managed to find an eco-safe snail bait. For the most part, it helps but you have to reapply often and everywhere. Last year we had almost no joy with our lettuce bushes because they would eat them to stubs before they even had a chance to grow.

Caterpillars

The second issue we faced in the garden was literally hundreds of little butterfly caterpillars eating all the broccoli leaves and making the underside of the leaves their home. We initially cut the leaves off and tried to save what was left of broccoli but had to get an eco-safe spray to keep them away. We only harvested a little broccoli last year so hoping this year will be better. We’ve also moved them to a new location but they are yet to show promising growth.

Weird growth

A lot of our fruits and vegetables have had some really funny shapes and sizes coming out of the plants or they would grow for a while and then stop at a certain size and start dying. Not sure what we were doing wrong but decided to remove some of the plants from the plant boxes and re-planting them directly into the ground where we could. But with the limited space we have, I’m not sure they would have a significant amount of growth here.

Birds

There is a ton of really beautiful birds living or visiting our complex and even though we’ve made them bird feeders and given them a space to enjoy, they have been nibbling at our crops and we have been trying to keep the grapes a secret from them and hiding the teeeeny grapes behind its leaves but not sure how we will manage to save the little harvest that awaits us because they are wild birds and we can’t enclose our trees to make it unreachable for them. Hoping to find a way around it, as only one of the grape trees has a little bunch of grapes growing.

Apart from all of the edible trees and plants, we have been tending to some of our pretty, decorative plants and trees and struggling with our bougainvillaea and for the life of me, I cannot keep a mulva tree alive. Everyone tells me it’s one of the easiest things to grow but somehow I keep killing mine.

If you guys have any tips or tricks for us to become better home farmers, please leave us a comment. We are really trying to create a sustainable little oasis in the little space we have and so far we’ve managed to eat from the “urban city” garden every week and it feels unimaginably rewarding to enjoy the literal fruits of our labour.

With our slowly growing crop, we only manage to harvest enough for our household and to share with some of our neighbours in the complex and we’ve also been learning how to dry out the herbs so we wouldn’t have to keep buying those from the shops.

The herbs are insanely fragrant and flavourful, especially in comparison with the ones from the shop but they also have a limited shelf life as we don’t use any preservatives or agents to prolong their lifespan.

Looking forward to the fruit harvests and if you guys are interested in seeing some of our growth as farmers, in the city, please head over to our YouTube channel and subscribe. We post shorts on there weekly and it would be great for us to connect there!

Have a fanTAZZtic week!

Tazz