Success!

 Having endured 5 years or so of diminishing return on the hard work of maintaining a vegetable garden, we undertook a complete redesign including digging out all the tree roots from the neighboring trees, adding lots of manure and mushroom compost. The results speak for themselves ! These are a new variety of  tomato for me and I wasn't quite sure how they'd go, but Tasmanian Chocolate seem to be really good with lots of huge fruit and many more developing too. The possums and birds don't seem to have discovered the tomatoes thank goodness.

For many years we've grown the South African favorite Gem Squash, but always up a vertical trellis with mixed success. This year we've grown them horizontally supported by a sort of table of heavy duty mesh and what a difference! There are about 10 squash developing at the moment and we have already eaten 6 or so. The breeze can get in under them to limit the likelihood of mildew and the vines only have to pump sap horizontally rather than pushing uphill when the vines are vertical. Now we only have to battle the constant visitation of rats and mice!