Spring has definitely sprung and like everyone in the inner west, today we visited Bunnings to get our vegie/herb planting on.

This year, rather than keeping everything in individual pots, we decided to turn rancho farmo into a mobile raised bed of sorts.

I think we now have enough sugar cane mulch to last us for the next six or seven years.

This year we have:

• basil
• thai basil
• italian parsley
• coriander
• baby spinach
• rocket
• oregano
• thyme

We’ve a couple of different varieties of cherry tomato, but these are located in their own pots (they are magnets for caterpillars, so we’ve discovered isolation is key). The mint plants from last year are still doing well and have their very own, very large container, as is/does the chili (which we thought dead, but which has bounced back with a vengeance).

Our search for pickling cucumbers was spectacularly unsuccessful, so Don has gone with standard cucumbers in the hope that we can harvest and pickle them while still small (if we can’t, well, we’ll just have them in salad).

We’ve abandoned the companion planting idea, as this did precisely nothing to alleviate the caterpillar invasion last year (even though marigolds are very pretty).

Interestingly, when I tried to find the original rancho farmo post, we were surprised to learn that we did not start planting until January 1 this year! Hopefully we will have a more extended growing/harvesting season because the difference in taste to stuff from the market is amazing.

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