I made it out to my garden this morning after weeks just waving at it on my way to do other things. It was so lovely to be out there again.
My original plan was to plant potatoes. We had the old collapsed rainwater tank at the end of Pie Corner removed, and I thought I would plant spuds there to help break up the soil. Spuds are good to plant in soil that might be heavy – as nothing has been planted there for at least ten years, I thought the soil would be heavy and probably quite lacking in nutrients. Imagine my surprise when I dug down and discovered: a wall. An old retaining wall to be exact, made of railway sleepers, that had been buried under the old rainwater tank. I am a pretty good digger, but I am not strong enough to dig out a retaining wall by myself. I consulted with my husband and we decided that as we are building a new retaining wall in that section of the garden, we will dig it out together when we do that.
So now I have seed potatoes and nowhere to plant them. If only I had thought to check for buried retaining walls before I bought seed potatoes. Silly me.
Giving up the spud planting for today, I decided to dig out the overflowing compost bins and spread some compost around. I do this every six weeks or so, and I think this is why my garden has not really missed me in the past couple of months. The soil is so healthy that with a fully planted winter garden, I can leave it go for quite a while. I dug out about ten buckets of lovely compost, and turned over the rest. I was pleased to see that the compost worm colony has expanded significantly since I last dug over the bins.
Compost worms are not earthworms. They are tiger worms or red worms, and they just like to live in compost and worm farms. They are great little critters. I am not a pet person – I don’t have a cat or a dog, and when people talk about their fur-kids I admit I tune out. But I am really happy to be breeding wriggly worms in my compost bin. They are my friendly little compost buddies, bought in a cardboard box from Bunnos for $20.
Some people will say you can’t feed them this or that – I throw any type of vegetable scrap in the compost bin, including onions, citrus, coffee grounds, and tea leaves. The worms really don’t seem to care. I don’t put meat or fat in the compost, to avoid rodents, but the worms would eat it if I did.
Once I finished digging over the compost and saying hi to the worms, I weeded a bit, thinned the carrots and beetroot (that means going through and pulling out plants that are growing too close together so the carrots can form good sized roots), and picked some veggies. Today I picked Tuscan black kale (also known as Cavolo Nero or Dinosaur Kale), a few carrots and radishes, and some turnips. My husband helpfully picked peas and ate them off the vine.
I grow lots of kale – a dwarf curly kale and the Cavolo Nero. Some of the Cavolo Nero was heavily attacked by green cabbage moth at the start of the season, so I let it be the sacrificial plant and the caterpillars went ham on it. They pretty much left everything else alone while they munched on three Cavolo Nero plants. This is one of the strategies I use for pest control, and I find it works well. I keep an eye on what the pests really go for, and let them have one or two plants to nom out on. I find that if they are allowed to do that, they are like kids at a party: the Cheezels disappear and the grownups are left to enjoy the Camembert. After they pigged out on the Cavolo Nero, they buggered off or turned into cabbage moths or whatever, and my garden has been left alone. They also are a bit thick, so they left the other three Cavolo Nero and all of the curly kale alone. The plants they ate recovered, and now I have all the kale I can eat.
With a huge bunch of kale, I made Ribollita, an Italian kale, white bean, and bread soup. It was so delicious, even the soup-disliking eldest inhaled it like a cabbage moth on a kale plant.
