A great pre-harvest ramble at a nearby vineyard

I simply love love love baking my own whole meal bread

There really isn't that much to it. A bit of flour, salt, yeast and water... A bit of elbow greese... Oh and a tiny touch of magic (that would be the oven)

Who's been at my peppers and strawberries??

Having got rid of blackfly and greenfly my plants were looking lovely and
healthy again. I have had my first batch of strawberries and my pepper plants were bearing baby fruits... Life was great...

But then!! I started to notice that an increasing number of my plants have irregular holes in their leaves and that there were slime trails on the soil and the leaves. The baby peppers have disappeared and half of the new strawberries batch were eaten, especially the ripe ones. I decided to keep an eye on the garden and then one night, there it was, lurking in the dark, perching on one of my lovely little pepper plants stripping it down and eating it to oblivion... It was a mighty ol' slug... Yuk!!

I quickly removed it. It was massive!! and then ran back inside to scour the net on how on earth do I stop these little suckers from finishing off my vegetable patch.

I read the coolest thing ever: that humans have a new weapon in the eternal battle against slugs and snails - the double espresso. Apparently, slugs and snails hate caffeine, researchers have discovered and soon enough the chemical could become an environmentally acceptable pesticide.

I quickly disolved 3 tablespoons of instant coffee (that I don't like) in a jug of warm water and poured it around the most affected plants, mainly the strawberries, the peppers, the mints and some of the flowers, repeated that a couple of times (this time I poured it everywhere) and now I can actually say that I haven't seen any new unusual holes in my plants!! Yippeee My pepper plants are actually shooting again and I'm now waiting for a new batch of strawberries to ripen. I don't think I'll be eating any homegrown peppers this season but I feel great that I managed to salvage my crops :)

Ladybirds to the rescue - the day the aphids attacked...

A few weeks ago, when the summer was hot and humid greenfly and blackfly were the bain of my garden. My neighbour lent me her insecticide as a quick way to get rid and I must say using it a couple of times it worked a treat. I then felt guilty and started looking for more green ways of fending off those little pests. I read that squashing them (finger and thumb approach) was guaranteed method to eliminate them and/or spraying them with soapy water was another, for the squeemish among us or if the infestation is simply too severe. But then, I found out that ladybirds and their babies (ladybird lavare) feed on aphids like greenfly and blackfly - a natural pest control... Yay!!

Apparently, each larvae will eat large numbers of pests before pupating and emerging as a ladybird (between May and August)

How to encourage those lovely ladybird lavare into my garden, I hear you ask? Well, apparently ladybirds like the following plants:

• Black Spleenwort
• Broad buckler fern
• Evening Primrose
• Gorse
• Great Mullein
• Hard Shield fern
• Harts Tongue
• Ivy
• Lady fern
• Maidenhair Spleenwort
• Male fern
• Polypody
• Red Campion
• Royal fern
• Spindle
• White Campion

So, if you have any of those you should be OK. I'm definately going to be adding some of those to my garden; especially evening primrose, ferns and some lavendar (for bees and butterflies too)

Fretting about tomatoes not ripening...

I love gardening and over the years I have tried my hand at planting all sorts of vegetables herbs and flowers and just wanted to have one place for me to write about me and my gardening musings... so enjoy!

Here is one of my three tomato plants. I planted them in May and they've been growing at a nice steady pace ever since... started feeding them as soon as the first flower truss has set with small fruits. Fed the plants every week with a liquid tomato feed but we had a fairly warm August and while the plant foliage was plentiful and I had quite a few fruits popping here and there there was no sign of ripening, so I took some advise from the net and now I'm eating red tomatoes :)

Getting Them to Turn Red

TomatoeGardening.com say that the red color of tomatoes won't form when temperatures are above 86oF. So, if you live where the summers get quite hot, leaving tomatoes on the vine may give them a yellowish orange look. It's probably better to pick them in the pink stage and let them ripen indoors in cooler temperatures. They also advise that Tomatoes need warmth, not light, to ripen, so there's no need to put them on a sunny windowsill. Place them out of direct sunlight -- even in a dark cupboard -- where the temperature is 65 to 70F.

Another recommended method is to put unripe tomatoes on a shelf and cover them with sheets of newspaper. Every few days check under the newspaper and remove ripe fruits or any that have begun to rot. The newspaper covering helps trap a natural ethylene gas that tomatoes give off, which hastens ripening. Some people wrap each tomato individually, but this causes a lot of work when you want to check for ripe tomatoes: You have to open each one! You can also place tomatoes in a paper bag with an apple or banana. The fruits give off ethylene gas, which helps to speed the tomatoes' ripening process. Good luck!!

I love my tomatoes!