Autumn Planting: Beds 4 & 5, (also ranting about insurance companies)

Well I think I've been ranty enough in the last couple of posts, and though I was tempted to air my opinion on the insurance company Youi, who helped themselves to $459 from our bank account WITHOUT our permission, and after a long conversation grudgingly agreed to pay back some of it on the condition that they keep $150 and insure us for third-party insurance.

We are a bit bamboozled as to how this occurred as we paid them via cash transfer when we took out insurance last year.  It seems they kept our details and decided to use them to withdraw cash from our account when we did not inform them that we were not renewing our insurance.

Of course we didn't inform them, we are switching to someone else.  Why would we inform them?? When we switched away from NRMA we simply did not renew, no further action on our part.  They left our bank account alone, but did call to find out why we didn't renew.

Youi, you suck and you will never have business from us again, AND I am informing the ACCC and Choice, AND I am taking steps to have you legally prevented from accessing our account EVER AGAIN.

Erm. Ahem.

I did it again. Sorry about that - I just get so sick of these huge corporations that think they can just help themselves.  Anyway...

Autumn Planting

In the vege plot I work on a six bed rotation system which is basically as follows:

Bed 1: Root vegetables
Bed 2: Legumes
Bed 3: Onions
Bed 4: Tomatoes
Bed 5: Sweetcorn/Pumpkins
Bed 6: Potatoes

This time of year is when I'm starting to plant up the new beds, and prepare them for various vegies that will go in in July and August.  In the next few posts I am going to go over each bed, and today it is Bed 4 the tomato bed, and Bed 5 the sweetcorn pumpkin bed.

Bed 4.  The Tomato Bed

• Actually its two beds.  
• These beds have just finished growing sweetcorn and pumpkin, and as you can see the left is still home to The Pumpkin of Hope (miraculously still pumpkining, unlike the Eggplant of Indescribable Joy which rotted and died, SIGH).  The pumpkin plant itself is suffering badly from powdery mildew, and I've been hacking it back which is why its looking so motheaten.  But at the moment I'm leaving the bed on the left alone until the pumpkin is ready.

• The other bed is presently home to 10 baby strawberry guavas, there at the front.  They will be moved soon to make a hedge at the front of the house, but were so tiny when we got them that I've been nurturing them, so that they have a small hope of survival out the front.
• This has not left me with much room to get ready for the tomatoes, but I have dug over this bed  and planted green manure (an old Diggers clever clover kit) in the non-guavaed bit.

• Once the pumpkin and the guavas are gone I'll put in more green manure, which I'll dig in a few weeks before the tomatoes go in.

Bed 5: The Sweetcorn and Pumpkin Bed

• Now this bed has big problems.  Due to my own ignorance and not using a crop rotation plan I ended up with root knot nematodes.
• Below are two celeriac's that I dug up today, both from that bed, the left one is not affected by nematodes the one on the right is - interestingly it seems the problem is worse in one area of the bed than others, go figure!

• This bed should have been growing potatoes previously, but with the nematodes I knew there wasn't much point.  So I grew potatoes elsewhere this year, and just grew a few odds and ends in there, quick growing things like zucchini.
• You can't get rid of nematodes, but I do grow a crop of mustard and dig it in each year and that seems to help.
• So right now, this bed is dug over and I've put in some green manure with extra mustard added to the seed mix.  
• The few scraps of green are some self-seeded basil and chillis I found - normally I'd plant them elsewhere, but with the nematodes, what grows in this bed, stays in this bed, or goes in the council green bin.