pimp my blog/summer garden update

Welcome to the newly pimped goodness of creating! I'm quite stoked with my novice blogging and html efforts. There are still a couple of random Spanish words around the place that I'm trying to figure out how to get rid of (like "Comentario"). Any advice would be appreciated!

With a new look also comes a new resolution to post more often, and try and actually post some recipes to go under the new recipe list I created. I know its early days, but it's good to be organised! So be prepared to hear from me more regularly this year, and hopefully I will also hear from other bloggers more often too! *hint hint*

Freshly dug: purple dragon, nutri-red, and egmont gold carrots

One thing I will be posting about regularly is my edible garden. I'm still relatively new to the gardening arena, so keeping a record of what worked and what didn't will hopefully help me learn from my experiences and get better. Although seed packets advise you on the number of days till harvesting, etc., it actually depends on the climate in your own garden. Auckland weather is quite different from the majority of New Zealand, and is more subtropical, so it does take a bit of trial and error to find optimum planting times. Any gardening advice is appreciated, and hopefully I can offer a few of my own gems of wisdom that I learn along the way.

Dynamo tomato flowers

The garden is in full swing at the moment. Almost more tomatoes than we can eat, a decent crop of colourful carrots (pictured above), chilli peppers and capsicums growing steadily, strawberries still going strong, and jersey benne potatoes ready for harvesting. We're loving not having to buy produce. We haven't even been to the farmers market for ages because we don't need to. For my birthday I got a dwarf meyer lemon and dwarf tahitian lime - exciting! But I hate that I'll have to wait a few years till I can taste them...

Cocozelle zucchini plant in its happier days

There have been a couple of casualties though. My lone zucchini plant was going strong, giving us a zucchini every day or so, until it was struck by the dreaded powdery mildew. I gave it a milk spray two times but no luck. Now it appears to have given up. Due to lack of watering while we were on our Christmas holiday, some of the tomato plants are suffering from blossom end rot. Once you have blossom end rot, I hear there is not much you can do. The green sausage tomatoes were the hardest hit, but I've still managed to get a couple ok ones off there. I'm experimenting with a few varieties of tomato this summer so we will see who comes out on top. So far dynamo is the winner. What varieties do you rate or want to try?

Currently in the ground/pots:

tomatoes (1 black krim, 5 dynamo, 1 roma, 2 green sausage, 1 garden peach)
chillis (2 asian fire)
mini capsicum (1 jingle bells)
zucchini (1 cocozelle)
potatoes (jersey benne)
strawberries
cos lettuce
mesculn
dwarf beans (total waste of time!)

Herbs:

bay tree
basil (mrs burns lemon, red rubin, sweet genovese)
coriander
chives
sage
thyme
italian flat-leaf parsley
mint

New kinds I want to try growing this year:

kale (caverlo nero)
spinach
sprouting broccoli/broccolini
different kinds of potatoes