Opening Day

Growing up as a child in a rural Queensland town, I am familiar with the concept of the backyard vegetable garden and farming in general. My parents had both grown up on farms in the district and had in fact share cropped for the first years of their married life. By the time I arrived, in the late 1950s, they had moved into a house in town and so my first experience with growing things was the vegetable gardens they and our neighbours tended, along with the chickens they kept.

To this day I have a school friend who reminisces with a mixture of delight and regret for the deep red tomatoes that my mother would slice into sandwiches for our lunch. They just don’t grow tomatoes like that anymore, we always say with sigh. But that is not true for many people are growing tomatoes just as red and just as sweet in their vegetable gardens every day. Anyone can do it with just a little effort, knowledge and commitment.

This blog is to help you achieve just that. Aided with the knowledge of my husband, an agronomist of some 40 years standing, with a heritage that includes a tea planter from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and dry land wheat farmers of Irish heritage, and my own knowledge gained from 30 years of gardening, I hope to share the joy of the agrarian life, whether you live in a concrete jungle or out amongst the gum trees.

So, let’s get a sense of humus, shall we?