a visit to piggs peake for a wine tasting or meal can also extend to a walk through our feature gardens and organically grown vegetable gardens.
one of the garden residents is a bit shy and perhaps best described as a quiet achiever. walking through the kitchen garden, which is uphill from yellow billy restaurant, if you pause for a few moments you might catch a glimpse of a tiny jacky lizard. in exchange for cleaning up some of the insect pests in the garden, these delightful lizards live rent free in amongst the plants.
also in the kitchen garden you can see the lebanese and telegraph cucumbers slowly weaving their way up the wire mesh on the northern edge of the garden. the cucumbers are destined to be made into pickles and enjoyed later in the season at yellow billy.
if there’s such a thing as global warming of climate change then try explaining that to our plants. at the moment in our other garden east of the yellow billy kitchen, our heirloom tomatoes are experiencing temperatures in the high twenties one day then back to almost winter temperatures another day. these black krim tomatoes are hanging out or perhaps better described as hanging down waiting for the warm weather to come so they can ripen, then they’ll appear in the legendary sauces that are created at yellow billy.
a south American gardening tradition is the 3 sisters technique. this involves growing corn as a main crop, then growing beans that use the corn stems to cling onto, with squash planted underneath the corn as a ground cover. the beans add nitrogen to the soil which benefits the other 2 plants. the squash helps to reduce the evaporation of moisture from the ground which benefits the corn and the beans.
our variation this season is the 2 sisters approach. the golden bantam corn is another heirloom variety and produces 2 cobs of corn per plant, with the yellow button squash growing nicely in between the rows of corn.
if you’d like to revisit our website next fortnight, we’ll post some updates on how the garden is progressing and whether the weather has kicked into summer mode.
Cheers,
Andrew
