My little vege patch

A small change from sewing, but something I'm equally proud of and having plenty of fun doing; my vege patch.

This year I decided to try my hand at growing veges. I've never really done any gardening before so it's all a bit of an adventure, and I'll be the first to admit that I'm only interested in growing things that produce stuff for me to eat.

So without further ado, here's my vege patch:

I have three types of tomatoes, two types of strawberries, snow peas and spinich.

While I don't have any tomatoes on the normal tomato plants yet the cherry tomatoes are doing great:

The snowpeas are also doing well, I have quite a few snow peas of various sizes (although I need to look up when to know when to harvest and eat them):

And the spinich is doing great, I can just go and take leaves whenever I want some for a salad, or a sandwich, or cooking and it just keeps on happily growing.

Sadly the strawberries don't seem to be doing very well; I have a couple of little strawberries that are appearing, but the plants themselves are actually much smaller than they were and not looking happy at all. They're looking a bit better over the last few days but still not fantastic, any idea what I might be doing wrong?

I have also had a go at growing carrots from seeds. I have managed to get the seeds to germinate and start growing like little blades of grass, and some even start looking like little carrot seedlings, but then for some reason they just die and I have no idea why! Help?

In the spirit of saving water, which is a must here in Victoria, I spent some time on Sunday working out the cycles on the washing machine so that we can move the hose that drains the water into a large bucket to collect the grey water from the rinse cycles. Collecting the water from all but the first rinse cycle fills the bucket, and my washing powder is 'grey water safe' so it's all good to put on the garden. I also learnt that one cycle on our washing machine uses about 55-60L of water.