Garden Update - May 2025

A few pics of my garden - Autumn 2025

We’re mid-Autumn here in the Sub tropics of Queensland (Australia). And it’s so nice to have an Autumn. When we lived in Central Queensland, we just had winter for a couple of months and the rest of the year was Summer. It’s turned cool here and I’m loving it. We live in paradise…….I tell myself that every day. I have been busy planting, transplanting and weeding lately.

Maitland came home from traveling overseas in early March and decided that we needed to grow more vegetables and he promptly got busy building garden beds. In the picture below, where you can see the new garden beds, was previously grass. We have at various times dug up the grass and made beds, but it always gets overgrown again. This time, I have promised to keep control and keep the garden beds tidy and useable. I have since planted more veg, but this shows the first planting which was potatoes. Not only did Maitland do a lot of work setting up the garden beds, but he also installed sprinklers that will now water the entire area. Garden and Food forest.

In the photo above, there are alternate rows of potato and garlic. Both of these were home grown seed potatoes and garlic, which I had kept for planting.

Beans - left hand side is a bean that can be eaten green or kept to dry. The dried bean is white. I have no idea of the variety as Sophie (who lived here for a while) grew them and I found the packet of seeds she’d kept - and every seed germinated. The right hand side are purple king beans and further along I’ve planted a mix of coloured beans that haven’t come up yet. I plan to keep some of the white beans for drying, and I’ll pickle or freeze or ferment the excess green beans.

I’ve planted peas - snow, snap and podding peas, which will hopefully give us plenty to eat. I love peas but have never grown enough in previous years.

A couple of months ago, Maitland planted out brassica seeds in rows in the above ground bed, I have now transplanted them. The above photo shows the area after thinning out. There’s a lot of weeds, but they are just a constant! I will probably mulch around them once the plants get a little bigger.

The two beds above are full of the brassica seedlings that I transplanted.

The photo above shows part of the above ground bed that hasn’t been tidied up - it’s wildly overgrown with fennel, dandelion and weeds! I dug up my ginger this week, which was in an area very similar to this.

I ended up with almost 3kgs of cleaned ginger - some I’ve put straight into the freezer and some I will use for cooking and making medicinal honey concoctions. I like having it in the freezer as I just take it out and grate it into dishes frozen. I don’t even bother peeling it.

This basil plant is still going well, so it’ll be interesting to see how far into winter it grows. I should really make some pesto!

We started re-doing the above ground garden bed, although we never quite finished. However, I dug up all my spring onions and perennial leeks that were randomly planted throughout the above ground bed. This will be an onion bed - it’ll be easier to have them in one spot going forwards.

I have a few random plants in this bed, but I wanted to share a photo of my tree lettuce (the lettuce looking plant in the middle of the photo. It’s a great plant - the cows got in and ate the top off and it just put out new leaves. It will eventually go to seed, but that’s good because it’ll come up everywhere! I struggle to grow proper lettuce here, so this is a great option. This one, which could be a variety of Timor Lettuce will grow to about waist high or more before setting seed.

I took this photo to show the entire garden and food forest. It has changed so much since we moved here 3 and 1/2 years ago. The video below is from when we first looked at the property. It’s certainly changed a little……..