Easter weekend 2019 gardening jobs

I love Easter. It’s easily my favourite holiday. I love the traditions; the food (Hot Cross Buns! Chocolate – and I don’t care what anyone says, the chocolate at Easter tastes different and better); the four days off; catching up with family and friends. I love that we have enough time to spend time with family, veg out a little, and still have time to get a few things done around the house and garden without feeling rushed or stressed like you often do at Christmas.

This year in the lead up to Easter weekend, I had the ~~plague~~ an upper respiratory viral infection for several weeks and as a result, I have not been able to do anything except grumble in the direction of my poor, sad garden. Autumn has been very warm and dry, and everything just looks thirsty and in need of some TLC. I had a ton of jobs on my list but no energy for heavy gardening labour as I recovered from what the doctor assured me was a “flu like virus” but what I feel certain was the second coming of the Black Death. It was so bad we had to cancel a planned holiday so I could catch up on all the work I missed. I’m pretty cranky about it, when all is said and done.

This has been a Public Service Announcement to have your annual flu shot. Apparently I did not have the flu but one of a family of ‘flu like viruses.’ All I can say is, jab my arm.

Anyway, I did survive, and decided to take it slowly by doing a little gardening every day, interspersed with Hot Cross Buns and Season 6 of Game of Thrones. Gently does it. Don’t want to end up looking like a White Walker.

Day One (Good Friday) we went on our annual pilgrimage to the Easter Fair in the tiny country town of Meadows (regular population: 1300, Easter weekend population: one million). This event is a classic country fair, complete with Marshmallow Bunnies, Hot Donuts cooked while you wait, sausage sizzle, white elephant stalls, and Nanna-made pickles and jams. I have a list of items I buy each year (Marshmallow Bunnies and Hot Donuts, natch), which includes plants and bulbs. This year I was looking for interesting succulents for my lounge room. I bought some beautiful German-made succulent pots in Melbourne and have been looking for the right plants to put in them. I found them for the low, low price of $6 each, along with Daffodil and Iris bulbs. Unfortunately I have no idea about succulents so I do not know what all of them are called.

I don’t know the name of this succulent but I do love it

Smiling Hanger with Jellybean Plant

Pincushion Plant and another succulent in German self watering pots

Day Two, after we ate the Hot Cross Buns from the Easter Fair and made a trip to the brand new ENORMOUS Bunnings (So big! So green!), I potted up the new succulents in my fancy schmancy German pots and then spent a ridiculous amount of time arranging them on the shelf.

A note on the Big New Green Shed: it’s the same as all the others. There, now I have found that out so you don’t have to. You’re welcome. I did pick up more bulbs (ranunculus, anemone and freesias to sprinkle around the garden like Easter eggs), and blue sweet pea seeds. Sweet peas are my favourite flower, and I always plant them on Anzac Day as my mother taught me. I have three varieties to plant this year: Bijou (saved seed from last year, that I plant each year and is constantly excellent), a variety called Surprise (purchased from last year’s Easter Fair), and this blue variety. I also have poppies, kale, cauliflower, romanesco and green sprouting broccoli, leeks, lettuces and silverbeet to plant.

Adorable children visited and chocolate and Marshmallow Bunnies were handed out to much joy. Easter rocks.

Day Three (Easter Sunday), started with a Hot Cross Bun and a Salted Caramel Lindt Ball, reminding me again of why this is my favourite holiday, and a visit to an adorable three year old to hand over more sugary treats.

Our backyard soil needs considerable work after its hard slog over the Summer. I dug over the compost and pulled out a nice lot of compost for one section. Then I spread Rapid Raiser and Blood and Bone fertiliser over the bed I am planting garlic this year, and watered in well. Tomorrow I will dig in some cow manure, then let it sit until Anzac Day when I will take four bulbs of our precious homegrown garlic and plant it for the new season. Homegrown garlic tastes so much better than bought garlic, that it is always worth leaving room for it in the garden.

My husband de-seeded five very seedy lettuce plants that I had left to form seed heads, picking off thousands of tiny lettuce seeds. We will plant them out on Anzac Day as well. While he was doing that, I weeded and trimmed back some of the boysenberry canes for safety and tidiness.

The boysenberry and I have a love/hate relationship. Last year was only its second year, and it fruited quite well with very little care required. Its thorns prevented pests like birds pinching any, so we actually got a nice little crop. Those thorns though make it very painful to prune and manage, and like all brambles, it spreads like crazy. I dug out many rooted brambles today and potted them up in case anyone else (friends, enemies) wants ~~Audrey II~~ a delicious berry plant in their backyard.

Tomorrow is Easter Monday, the last day of a lovely, relaxing weekend. I plan to tidy up my dry, weedy front yard, feed all the plants, and plant some seeds into my seed trays for Winter veggies (a little late but given how hot it has been this Autumn, I think it will be fine). After that, I reckon I will have just enough room for one more Hot Cross Bun before bidding farewell to another glorious Easter weekend.

Gardening Jobs, Weekend 9-11 March 2019

A miracle happened today: I went to the Big Green Shed and only bought the item I intended to buy.

I know, I’m freaked out too.

The truth is, there is not much point buying new plants right now. The weather is still too unpredictable to plant anything, and the soil is too sad and depleted from the hottest Summer on record (it’s official, sadly). We still have not had a decent rainfall, and I am not sure when it will come. I looked at all the beautiful plants and thought: patience, my pet. I could see their future if I gave into temptation now and planted them in my dry and sad garden. So I bravely left them on the stands, and walked away, sad but resolute.

Also, I’m going to the Melbourne Flower and Garden Show in three weeks and you know I will be blowing a wad of cash on bulbs, seeds and garden paraphernalia designed to attract the green thumbed and gullible. The Big Green Shed will still be there when I return, broke and happy.

So what did I do this weekend? Maintenance. Boring, necessary garden maintenance. Everything needed a feed, a weed, and a water, so that is what I did. No fun planting or buying, just the basic boring jobs that every gardener must do to keep the soil healthy and the garden looking decent mid-season until it is time to do the exciting stuff.

That is why I have no pictures: a broom and a pile of weeds just aren’t that interesting. I did discover some more of the amazing Kenternut pumpkins (from another vine), bringing the total to about six. I hope these hybrid pumpkins taste good, or I will have been watering and growing a bad pumpkin all Summer. I’ll do a taste test soon and let you know. Fingers crossed for deliciousness.

I also picked another pile of rhubarb, and another dozen or so passionfruit from the vine that just keeps on giving. I am going to make a passionfruit slice, a dessert that has fond childhood memories for me, and possibly a rhubarb and strawberry pie.

Gardening jobs, Weekend 23 & 24 February 2019

It’s been a couple of years now since my grandmother passed away, and finally the roses I planted in memory of both sets of grandparents have started to flourish. The climbing Mr Lincoln rose was planted in memory of my grandmother who passed away when I was 16. I have also planted a climbing Pierre de Ronsard and climbing Gold Bunny, with the aim of having them climb the front of our house. They have all taken some time to establish, especially the Gold Bunny, which seems quite miserable most of the time. My grandfather’s Gold Bunny was magnificent, so I am hoping that mine will get over its current state and grow to be as beautiful as his was. By far, the happiest is the Pierre de Ronsard, which has already produced about a dozen beautiful blooms. The red rose pictured is the first of the Mr Lincoln roses we have had. My husband and I were so happy to see it appear. These plants are important to me as a living memorial of grandparents that each passed a love of gardening on to me.

Summer Roundup

Time in the garden has been rare over the past couple of weeks. I have been busy with work and family, and I am travelling for work again this week. Coupled with the intense heat we have experienced this Summer, my garden is looking quite sad.

This Summer has been one of the hottest on record, and we recorded the hottest day on record. We have had almost no rain to speak of. This has affected my vegetable garden more than the rest of the garden, which is well established. We almost lost a newly planted avocado tree, but my husband’s careful watering and shading of the tree has enabled it to recover, thank goodness. We did lose all our tomato plants in the end, which really grinds my corn. We had a great early start with the tomatoes, and then a week of intense heat with temperatures over 45 degrees, including a day of 47 degrees, really knocked them. Some plants died outright, and the rest never recovered. They continued producing fruit but the fruit didn’t properly mature. Even the chilli and zucchini plants, which are usually reliable producers, failed to produce.

The corn I planted this year produced, but cobs were smaller. Beans produced very few pods compared to previous years. We have plenty of pollinators in our garden, so I do not believe that was the problem. The soil was prepared properly, in the usual way. I believe that it was not possible for us to water enough to replace the loss of moisture caused by the extreme heat.

Successes

There were a couple of successes, however. Pumpkins sow themselves in our garden, popping up out of the compost. I let them ramble, because I have the space. I figure if they produce some pumpkins, that’s great, and if they don’t I have not lost anything. The vines help suppress the weeds and shade the soil.

Last year I grew Kent (also known as ‘Jap‘ in Australia) which I did plant, and Butternuts, which popped up on their own. This year, I appear to be growing a Kent-Butternut hybrid! It has the shape of a Butternut but the skin markings and colour of a Kent. I have not seen this before (others probably have) but for now I am calling it a Kenternut. Or should I call it a Butterkent? Either way, it is fruiting pretty prolifically and we are looking forward to trying it.

I’ll save some seeds of this mutant and see if I can grow it again next year.

The rhubarb plants I divided a couple of years ago have been growing great guns. I divided them again this weekend, as the plants are enormous and becoming crowded – something I might live to regret considering it is going to be another week of 40-plus degrees. We are eating rhubarb every week at this point, even in the Summer. I know some people don’t like it, but I have always loved the stuff. It’s best baked with some maple syrup and strawberries, served with custard.

Dividing rhubarb is very easy. Just dig up the plant, and hack it in half (or more) with a spade. Make sure each crown has a bit of root. Replant each piece. I have even planted a rhubarb crown I found on the ground several weeks after I dropped it there, and it still grew. It is pretty hard to stuff it up, which is why I am not too worried about doing it this week even in the hot weather.

The passionfruit (classic black) exploded with fruit this year. Our passionfruit vine is named Odette. We take great care of her, feeding and watering her regularly. She is enormous, brilliant green, and very healthy. This year she rewarded us with hundreds of passionfruit. We have given some away, frozen it, and of course, eaten it. My husband loves it, and so does our neighbour, so there is always someone willing to eat it daily. I freeze it in ice cube trays for when the weather is cooler. Then I will make passionfruit slice (my favourite) and shortbread.

The pomegranate tree (Pomegranate Azerbaijan) is producing for the first time. Having never grown them before, we were unsure how long it would take to produce (this is its third year). A major storm in September knocked the tree sideways, and we thought we had lost it. I staked it and it was able to recover. We are very much looking forward to our first pomegranates. Mostly I just love looking at them on the tree. They are so beautiful.

This Summer we also had our first real boysenberry crop. Afterwards, I pruned the spent canes and then had the fun job of disposing of the prickly prunings. Boysenberries are thorny and unpleasant vines, but I think this is why we were able to keep so many of the berries for ourselves instead of losing them to birds. No bird was brave enough to get in there and pinch one. I don’t blame them, being pricked by those thorns really hurts. I was stabbed on more than one occasion.

Finally this weekend, I turned the compost, and dug out the fresh compost to spread around the roses and newly divided rhubarb. I gave an extra helping to the Gold Bunny rose, in the hope that it will cheer the poor thing up.

For the next couple of weeks until the cooler weather sets in, we are on a care and maintenance plan for the garden. I am considering trialling a different planting regime for Autumn and Winter, given the change to the seasons we experienced last year: longer warm weather, much less rain, dry Winter. I think home gardeners need to adapt to climate change, but I am not sure yet how to do it. Our traditional practice of Autumn planting and Sprint planting needs to change. Any ideas?

Weekend gardening, Weekend 27 & 28 January 2019

After a week of record heatwave conditions in our region, this weekend was about repair work, mostly. About half the tomato bushes were pretty much dead, so we picked off the tomatoes that were left on them, and pulled the bushes up. I pruned the dead leaves off the other bushes, and we watered them well.

Half my potted plants died, including all of our window boxes on the balcony. We watered the poor darlings twice a day, but the hottest day in half a century did them in. We also lost some of the plants under the fully shaded patio; this gives you an idea of the intensity of the heat.

My baby avocado tree may still die. It’s previously chirpy new leaves now resemble pot pourri, making for one very sad gardener and an even sadder tree. I am hoping that ongoing watering will bring it back. It is shaded, but alas – see above re hottest day in half a century.

Our two mornings in the garden weren’t all doom and gloom. We had a gorgeous garden helper on one day, my three year old niece, who helped me pick corn and started digging out our potato crop. She informed me that she “doesn’t like eating ‘tatoes, but I do like gardening ‘tatoes.” We spend an enjoyable half an hour digging spuds until she announced that it was very hard work and she had had enough. We went inside and ate freshly picked sweet corn for lunch, followed by cupcakes with rainbow sprinkles as a reward for all our hard work.

The following day, my husband and I continued our spud harvesting. We planted Red Otway potatoes in October 2018. We do the traditional trench planting method, hilling up the plants with soil and sugar cane mulch as they grow. We stop hilling up once we have run out of soil and have calculated the cost of the mulch is not worth the amount of spuds we can possibly get.

Digging up spuds is a dicey affair. You have to be careful not to cut them with your spade. Our method is to dig around the base of the plant carefully (see above), exposing the tuberous treasure below. My niece was quite delighted to find tiny potatoes still clinging to the roots of the plants after I dug up the large potatoes, and made me pull off and keep every tiny spud.

This was our second year growing potatoes. In 2017 we harvested the week before Christmas, and our potato crop was prolific, but small in size. This year we waited another five weeks and were rewarded with much larger potatoes (similar weight crop). We planted only one variety this year, choosing the Red Otway variety because it had performed the best for us in 2017. From 1 kilogram of certified seed potatoes, we harvested 10 kilograms of potatoes.

A former colleague informed me that growing potatoes is a waste of time and money, given they are so cheap to buy. I probably can’t argue with his overall economic assessment, as he is much smarter and definitely richer than me. Potatoes certainly could not be described are as a cheap crop for the home gardener. They require an investment in certified seed potatoes, mulch, fertiliser, a lot of space in your garden, and water during warmer months. But I still enjoy growing them. It is almost impossible to buy really fresh potatoes in the shops, and new potatoes taste wonderful. Growing your own also enables you to grow varieties you might not be able to find in the shops. Red Otway is a lovely potato, that is not commonly found. Lastly, it’s fun. Sitting outside in the sunshine with a three year old as she sits in a big pile of dirt searching for hidden treasures is just a great time, even if she doesn’t like eating ‘tatoes (she refuses to believe chips are ‘tatoes).

This brings me to my second harvest of the weekend, Painted Mountain Corn. This ancient variety is hundreds of years old, and is grown for maize and for popping. I grew it for fun and interest, and because I like to help continue endangered heirloom varieties.

I picked the corn once the husks had dried on the stalks, and dried it in the oven on a low temperature. I was stripping the kernels from the cobs and showing my youngest child, a teenager of 14, and explaining that we will be able to pop it on the weekend. I was telling them the history of this corn, and how continuing to grow corn like this contributes to the genetic diversity of the planet.

They stared at me for a long moment, listening to the ‘plink plink’ go the kernels falling into the tray.

“You are such a hipster. Even worse. You’re a nerd hipster.”

Correction: a nerd hipster with a jar of rainbow popcorn.

Tomatoes! Gardening in the Summer holidays

To say that Australian gardeners look forward to the Summer gardening would be an understatement. We quite enjoy growing the Winter vegetables of brassicas and broad beans, but the fact is that Summer is where it’s at in the Southern Australian garden. Our Mediterranean climate means that if we are privileged enough to have some dirt, we can grow almost any Summer vegetable, from climbing beans, to corn, to chillies, potatoes, berries, zucchini, cucumbers, pumpkins, and eggplants. But the King of all of the Summer vegetables is the tomato.

Aussie gardeners have access to both Australian heirloom varieties and international breeds. There are some newer varieties of tomatoes we cannot access from America or Europe due to our strict quarantine laws, but for the most part we are fortunate to be able to plant hundreds of varieties and never have to plant the same tomato twice if we don’t want to.

This year I am trying some new varieties I have not grown before:

Rouge de Marmande (red ribbed beefsteak heirloom variety, pictured above foreground);
Red Truss (red round F1 hybrid variety, pictured above);
Pineapple (yellow ribbed beefsteak variety, not pictured);
San Marzano (red pear variety, not pictured);
Cherry Black Russian (black or purple cherry variety, not pictured).

The Pineapple and San Marzano I grew from seed, so they are taking longer to reach maturity. The Cherry Black Russian is in a pot and is struggling, I think because I have not had time to feed it as often as I should. The Red Truss is maturing the earliest, but the winner so far for yield is the Rouge de Marmande, proving once again that heirloom varieties can compete for yield and pest resistance with hybrids. The plants are weighed down with fruit and are so heavy that I have to use several stakes to hold up the vines. I estimate several kilograms of fruit per plant at least. Most are still green but each tomato is about the size of a flat tennis ball.

Unfortunately I forgot I had saved seed of Jaune Flamme last year! That was our best producing tomato last year. I will have to make sure I plant it next season.

To prepare the soil for tomatoes, I used homemade compost that has been generously inoculated with aged chicken and pigeon poo, and a mix of blood and bone and mushroom compost. I then add side dressings of compost during the growing season that is spread around the plants under the mulch (I use sugarcane mulch). We water regularly during the hot weather, but in mild weather only about twice a week. We water deeply each section of our garden for about twenty minutes.

Each plant is staked and tied up. I try to recycle my stakes and ties as much as possible. While some people suggest this could cause pests, I have not had any issues. To prevent passing on any soil borne pathogens to next year’s crop, after each growing season, I let my stakes lie out in the hot sunshine for several weeks. This is usually enough to kill any lingering bugs. Then I store them in my garden shed, which is also very hot in the late Summer and Spring weather. If anything nasty survives this seasoning treatment, then I say more power to it. I also try not to plant my tomatoes in the same section of the garden two years in a row. While most gardening experts suggest a three year cycle, they probably have more space than I do. Two years will have to do it.

Personally I believe that good soil preparation and organic gardening methods are the best pest prevention. A friend recently visited and noted the lack of weeds and pests in my garden (I do have a black scale infestation on my lime tree that I am currently battling with eco pest oil, as it is killing the tree). I believe that my garden is well balanced because I do not poison weeds or bugs: this welcomes beneficial insects to the garden that take care of any visiting pests, or at least keeps them in check. Ditto weeds: while I do hand weed, I don’t spend my life doing it. I pull some up as I walk around the garden, and let groundcovers and mulches keep the rest in check.

Occasionally a tomato or an apricot is munched on (we lost a few apricots to bird pecks) but if we refuse to share garden produce with the rosellas, we will cease to see them in the garden. Sometimes they sit on our balcony, looking gorgeous and flapping their wings. I’ll give up an apricot for that.

Weekend jobs – 27th & 28th October 2018

“Why is it that every weekend we end up at a garden centre?” my husband muses, as we pull up at the Big Green Shed.

He’s exaggerating, frankly. Clearly, a tree nursery is not a garden centre.

And that place that sells the donkey poo is an organic apple farm that just happens to sell donkey manure by the bagful for a buck.

OK, the plant sale last week – that was at a garden centre. But the free sausage sizzle made it totally worthwhile. And today’s expedition for an additional compost Dalek was a necessary pitstop. War on waste, etc. Doing our bit, etc.

I’ll admit, as soon as the weather warmed up, it was like a switch flicked, and every weekend has been all gardening, all the time. It was as if I was a little kid with my nose pressed up against the glass, waiting until my mum told me I could go outside to play. As soon as I got the nod, I was out like a shot. Now I only come inside when the sun comes down. Or when I have to feed my kids.

Seriously though, who wants to be indoors in weather like this?

Anyway, we got the Dalek home, and my husband and I surveyed the veggie patch. So many jobs and not enough time to do everything that needed doing this week.

He offered to hill up the potatoes, which have been growing like crazy now that the weather is fine almost every day. The spuds are planted in a deep trench, and now that they have poked their heads up, they will need hilling to ensure continual growth. I left him to do that while I turned the compost, transferring the top layers in the old bin to the new bin, and digging the ready compost out to the garden.

The addition of pigeon poo (a friendly gift from my neighbour a few weeks ago) activated the compost so quickly that the bottom half of the bin was full of ready to use compost, while the top half needed to be moved over to the new bin. It’s a messy job, but I honestly don’t mind it. I put the ready compost around new tomato plants, on some mounds ready for zucchini plants, and in a bed I am preparing for tomatoes.

Now I have one half-empty compost bin, and another empty bin. Since we have started composting, we have reduced the household waste we send to landfill by half. Other changes, like switching to ground coffee from coffee pods, and leaf tea from teabags (mostly) has also helped. We still produce more waste than I am happy with, but composting is the single most-effective waste reducing effort that we have instituted in our household.

My husband picked the rest of the broad beans and broccoli – another kilogram of broccoli and 2.5 kilograms of broadies – and then went inside to shell and freeze them. Meanwhile, while I took on the task of mulching with sugarcane mulch. I only managed one bale today (we have at least three bales worth of mulching to do). It’s a huge task in our garden, and I will have to finish the rest next weekend.

Heading back out in the early evening to look over the garden, I noticed that the potatoes had already grown over the hilled soil and the mulch. No wonder spuds fed an entire nation!

Mind you, broad beans probably could too…

Gardening jobs – Weekend 13 & 14 October 2018

It’s halfway through Spring and the flowers are out in force. Bees are buzzing, lavender is going off it’s rocker in my garden – so much so that it self-seeds everywhere and I pull it out like a weed – and the whole garden smells like sweet pea flowers. It is a beautiful place to be right now.

Foreground: Thyme and lavender (pink) in flower

The Summer bearing fruit trees are starting to set fruit, and the Autumn bearing fruit trees are bursting into bud. The first blossoms burst on one of our apple trees today: an early variety called an Early Macintosh. This is its second year, and I am so excited to have fresh apples. The other apple tree, a Cox’s Orange Pippin, can’t be far behind.

This will be our first year of a decent apricot crop. The tree is three years old now. Last year, we scored about a dozen lovely, juicy apricots, but it is really this year that all our patience and care will be rewarded. As you can see from the photo above, the tree is heavily laden. Thinning sacrifices some fruit to make way for the rest of the fruit to develop. While I have no problem thinning carrots or onions, for some reason I can’t stand thinning fruit, so my husband did it for me.

My first job this weekend though was to give everything in pots and containers, including the raised beds, a feed of seaweed extract, Charlie Carp organic liquid fertiliser, and Go Go Juice, a liquid probiotic and soil conditioner. Go Go Juice is great stuff: a local company here in South Australia, Neutrog, makes it. It helps to nourish the soil as well as the plant.

After feeding the tomatoes, strawberries and chillies in containers, I planted out some new basil seeds – Cinnamon Basil, and Lettuce Leaf Basil. I planted these in the pots with the tomatoes and chillies, as basil is a good companion plant for these. I use a lot of basil in Summer for homemade pesto and salads, and I love trying new varieties. I could not resist trying Cinnamon Basil. It sounds so beautiful. Lettuce Leaf Basil apparently tastes and smells like regular basil, but grows larger, ruffled leaves.

Tomatoes, strawberries and chillies in pots

I planted out the tomato seedlings (Rouge de Marmande, and Red Truss) that I have been growing out over the past month. I bought these as seedlings in little punnets in early Spring, and then transplanted them into larger pots. This has given them the time to grow to larger, tougher plants, and for the soil to warm up properly. The soil up here in our Southern hills area of Adelaide really doesn’t warm up enough for Summer vegetables until now, so the tomatoes have been having a nice cozy time in our patio. The patio receives enough sun to keep them alive and growing, but is sheltered from wind and rain. I raise all my seedlings in there.

This extra time also gave me an opportunity to prepare the soil and harvest the last of the Spring greens and brassicas to make room for the tomato plants. I still have broccoli and broad beans in the garden, but over the past six weeks I have been slowly making way for the Summer vegetables.

This has included preparing a large bed for corn and beans. My husband dug through a couple of bags of donkey poo a few weeks ago, and we have let it sit since then. Today I dug it over again and planted two varieties of corn: Jubilee Corn, an F1 hybrid sweetcorn I grew last year with great success, and Painted Mountain Corn, an ancient heirloom variety, grown for popping. This corn was grown by First Nation peoples in the Americas before colonisation, and nearly became extinct until a concerted effort by seed savers in that country. The seeds of the Mountain Corn are beautiful, jewel-like things, coloured blue, purple, red and yellow. I almost hated to cover them with soil, but I cannot wait to see these plants grow.

I planted climbing beans alongside the corn. The beans will provide nitrogen to the growing corn, which is a very hungry plant, and the corn will support the beans as they grow. I planted two heirloom varieties: Scarlet Runner, a green bean that has beautiful red flowers, and Climbing Butter Beans, a yellow, waxy bean that has beautiful purplish black seeds.

The last little job was planting out some Golden Zucchini and two varieties of pumpkin. I am once again trying the Lakota pumpkin – in a different spot in the garden – but if it proves a dud again this year, I am giving up on it. I am also trying another heirloom called the Australian Butter, a squat, golden pumpkin with heavy ridges. It looks sort of like an orange Queensland Blue. Of course, I cannot go without planting the traditional Butternut, and last year’s big success, the Kent – but I ran out of time this weekend so that will be a job for next time. The fun thing about gardening is that there is always a next time: another job, another plant, another flower.

I picked another kilogram of broccoli, some broad beans, and peas for dinner. I love watching my kids tuck into a bowl of vegetables straight from the garden. I showed them how to slip the broad beans out of their skins (although when they are this young and tender, it’s not entirely necessary). They got a kick out of popping the slippery green beans out of the skins and slurping them up. Gardening creates fun, sensory food experiences for children. Plus the flavour of fresh peas straight from the garden is incomparable.

Just as I finished planting tomatoes and pumpkins, and went inside to shower the dirt of myself, the rains came down and stayed for quite a while. Grow, my pretties [insert cackle here].

Composting

Composting is an activity that is critical to the organic garden.

It is also important to reducing waste in landfill and minimising your carbon footprint. Composting green and kitchen waste creates a closed loop system for your household waste.

When kitchen scraps and green wastes are thrown in a bin and sent to landfill, they don’t break down into compost. Landfill is an anaerobic environment; instead of breaking down, the scraps turn into a sludge and release methane, a greenhouse gas. Most of landfill waste is made up of food waste. Anything homeowners can do to reduce this will cut greenhouse emissions and our collective household carbon footprint.

We have a compost bin in our backyard, and an internal compost bucket in the kitchen to hold kitchen scraps. My kids are regularly reminded to throw their fruit peelings and avocado skins in the compost bucket, rather than in the bin. I especially loathe to open the garbage can and discover a discarded banana peel. My kids will hear an enraged cry: “Who chucked a banana peel out? Compost! COMPOST!!”

Banana peels are powerhouses of nutrition for garden plants, and I will stick my hand in the bin to retrieve a banana peel if I see one.

Compost not only reduces waste, but creates healthy soil. Australian soils are heavily depleted. They were not meant to sustain the cropping we have subjected them to for the past 250 years, and require replenishing. Recent research has found that much like human guts, the soil is dependent on a vast microbiome of beneficial bacteria and fungi that helps to feed plants and the species that feed on those plants. Compost contains many of those bacteria and fungi, replenishing what we remove when we grow plants and wash nutrients away.

Making compost is pretty easy, but also easy to get wrong. These are the main ways to stuff it up:

Make it too wet
Make it too dry
Unbalance the ingredients
Don’t turn it

We make compost two ways.

Compost Bin Method

We have a black, cylindrical compost bin we purchased from Bunnings for $40. It has a lid on the top, and two sliding panels that can be removed if necessary. It sits on the ground and can be moved around the garden when empty. I call it a Dalek Composter because it has the same rough shape as a Dalek and it exterminates my weeds and scraps.

The basic recipe for compost is a 50/50 mix of ‘greens’ and ‘browns.’

Greens are: weeds, grass, lawn clippings, kitchen scraps. Kitchen scraps means almost anything that comes from your kitchen that was once alive, with the exception of fats, meats and dairy products. Peelings, tea leaves, coffee grounds, leaves, avocado skins: these are the most common kitchen scraps to end up in our compost bucket and then into the Dalek. Some people say not to add onions or citrus to the compost, but I do. I wouldn’t add a whole bagful of oranges, but a few lemon peels won’t hurt.

Browns are: manures, straw, shredded white or newspaper, leaves, wood chips, old potting mix and soil. I also add moderate amounts of woodash from our fireplace, but only a few handsful at a time. Woodash adds potash to the brew, but too much can raise the PH as it is alkaline. That being said, my husband admitted to me the other day that he accidentally tipped an entire bucket of ashes in the compost bin a month ago, and the worms are all still wriggling away, so it can’t have done too much damage.

Manure is very important, particularly if it is chicken or another bird manure. Composting is positive for the manure, and manure is positive for the compost. Manure ‘activates’ the compost, helping it to break down much more quickly than if it had not been added. A few shovels of chicken poo can speed up the process by six weeks. If you don’t have manure, a cup of blood and bone or dynamic lifter will do the job.

Composting is also important for bird manures. Bird manure is high in urea. Their manure has to be composted before use, or it will burn plants. Six weeks in a Dalek and it will be good to go.*

The final important ingredient is compost worms, 1000 of which you can literally buy in a box off the shelf at Bunnings for $30. Toss them in the bin along with your compost scraps and let them go.

I don’t pay attention to my worms, except to toss them back in when I dig the compost over. They are fed when I top up the compost, and the moisture in the bin keeps them watered. We share a mutually beneficial relationship, but we don’t need to overshare.

The mix of browns and greens should be roughly equal. I don’t layer it carefully. I just toss it in as I have each component, and every month or so, I dig it over. I do this the annoying way, but lifting the composter up, shifting it over a bit, and then re-digging all the contents back into the bin. You can buy fancy compost aerators that go all the way to the bottom of the bin and apparently make my cumbersome process unnecessary. However, I like to dig it over. When I do this, I can see how it is progressing, and make any changes. If it is too dry, I water it. If it needs more brown or green, I can add it. I can see whether the worms are still alive (they are).

Truthfully, I never have to water my compost – if anything I have to watch the moisture to make sure it is not too wet. If it looks like it is getting too soggy, I need to add some more browns.

Making compost is a lot like making pizza dough. You can tell by eye and feel if it is going to work out, and if it seems too soggy or too dry, add a little more flour (brown) or a little more water (green). Knead it (turn it) and let it prove until it is ready. In Summer that will be a lot less time than in Winter, when the cold naturally slows down the composting process.

Just don’t make pizza with it. Grow tomatoes with it instead, and use them on a pizza.

If using a Dalek, you can lift the little side flaps and just dig out the bottom layer. Then push down the top layers with a shovel and keep adding.

*If you ever get your hands on elephant poo, compost the heck out of that too, unless you want elephant sized weeds in your garden. Don’t ask how I know. Just trust me.

Next post: Trench composting

Gardening jobs – Weekend 6th & 7th October, 2018

October is tomato season in our region. I know this because the local weekend gardening show on the ABC, listened to by all people in South Australia over 60 and me, ran its annual Spring tomato segment this weekend. People call in and text the varieties of tomato they are planning to grow this season, and other gardenerds take notes. While I wasn’t exactly taking notes about the tomatoes, I was texting my friend about scale and citrus gall wasp (we have the scale, she has the gall wasp), so we are officially gardenerds. If you hadn’t already figured that out…

This year I am planting eight varieties of tomatoes:

Pineapple tomato (from seed)
Moneymaker (from seed)
San Marzano (from seed)
Jaune Flamme (from seed)
Black Cherry
Tiny Tim
Red Truss
Rouge de Marmande

I am also planning to find a Rapunzel tomato to grow from the balcony outside my bedroom, from which I have successfully grown cherry tomatoes in previous Summers.

I have planted the Tiny Tim and Black Cherry in pots already. The Red Truss seedlings, an F1 Hybrid, went in the garden on Sunday afternoon with a shovelful of compost and a handful of blood and bone. The seed plantings are still in their infancy, only just having popped their little heads up out of the jiffy pots.

Harlequin Carrots and Red and Golden Beetroot harvest

This was Spring harvest weekend, as we had to start making room for our potatoes. It’s at least a month late for potato planting, but we have had such a long growing season for our Winter vegetables. I still have heads forming on some of the broccoli plants, and I am unlikely to see cabbages at all this year – it is just too warm now. However, I have picked a quite astounding amount of broccoli – two kilograms on Sunday alone, so I can’t complain. I would have liked at least one Purple Cape cauliflower, but I guess the Romanesco broccoli will have to satisfy me. I gave some away to friends and my sister, and we made soup with the rest. There is still more out there, shooting delicious side shoots.

My husband discovered a cache of compost that I had forgotten I made. We have a worm tower that sits underground. Most of our worms live in our compost bin, but I recently tossed a whole heap of weeds and scraps in the worm tower, and chucked a couple of handsful from the compost bin on top. The worms from the compost bin got to work, and when my husband removed the lid he discovered that in six weeks the worms had created perfect compost.

He dug it out for me to use in the garden, and we topped up the worm tower with more weeds and scraps. He replaced the worms and hopefully in another six weeks we will have more compost. I dug the compost around the rhubarb plant, an apple tree, and into the soil of the newly planted tomatoes.

Can I take a moment to say how much I love compost? Kitchen scraps thrown in the bin do not rot the way they do in compost; because landfill is anaerobic and the scraps are usually in plastic bags, they turn into sludge and produce methane, a greenhouse gas. At the very least, these scraps should go in the green bin where the council should dispose of them in the proper way. However, green bin pickup in our area is only monthly, and a month’s worth of kitchen scraps in a green bin will be pretty ripe. By contrast, our compost bin doesn’t smell bad, and eventually ends up back in the garden where it will feed the soil and by extension, us.

Potato planting

Planting potatoes is something gardeners do purely for kicks. Potatoes are cheap and easy to come by, so it’s not like we can’t go to Woollies and buy a bag of spuds easily enough. I just like growing them – but I am also well aware that I am lucky enough to have the space to devote to growing them. And by choosing to grow potatoes, I am giving up the opportunity to grow something else.

Potato growing: a lesson in opportunity cost.

I am also well aware that I am lucky enough to have a partner in crime bonkers enough to spend his Sunday afternoon digging trenches to plant them. The trenches in the photo above don’t look that deep, but they are quite deep and took a long time to dig. In the end he had to dig five trenches to plant two kilograms of certified seed potatoes.

We are growing Red Otway potatoes. Last year we grew Red Otway and King Edward, and we preferred the Red Otway. They grew slightly smaller in size than the King Edward, but were more prolific. They were also a good all rounder for our purposes. And they were delicious.

Dig the trenches as deeply as possible, and plant the tubers at the base of the trench, about 10-15 cm apart. Use certified disease-free seed potatoes, unless you want to take the risk of spreading a fungal disease to your soil. We bought ours from Bunnings.

We ‘chit’ our potatoes before planting. Potatoes usually have several ‘eyes’ from which the sprouts grow. ‘Chitting’ the potatoes simply means cutting the potatoes into several pieces, each one with an eye/sprout. Let them dry out for a couple of days, then plant each piece. This way you end up with more potato plants from one bag of seed potatoes.

Cover with soil – but not all the soil you have dug up to create the trenches. Just cover the potatoes and then wait for them to sprout above the soil. Then hill up with soil and let them grow above the hill. Keep hilling them up as they grow. Eventually you will run out of soil and you will have to use straw. Keep doing that until you decide the cost of the straw is not worth it – when your potatoes are roughly the price of a barrel of oil per kilogram, stop.

When the potato vines flower (a pretty blue flower), let the potato vines die down, and bandicoot one plant. This means to dig down the side of one of the plants to check the size of your potatoes. If they look good to go, start digging!

Gardening jobs – Weekend 29th September – 1st October 2018

You know you might be a gardener when you return from a trip to the local wine country to find your neighbour has left a bag of fresh pigeon poo on your doorstep. Because it was accompanied by a bag of homegrown oranges and lemons, we assumed it was left as a gift and not a warning to get out of the neighbourhood.

Or, you might be a gardener if on said trip to wine country, you don’t visit a single winery, but instead you visit a garden centre, a herb nursery, a tree nursery, and make a stop at an organic apple farm to buy apples, honey, and two bags of donkey poo. Because, well, donkey poo: $1 a bag. We left with local bluegum honey, a box of herbs, chilli plants, tomato plants, an avocado tree, a grapevine, compost, apples, and donkey poo.

McLaren Vale is home to a specialist herb nursery, Hillside Herbs, and a specialist fruit tree nursery, Perry’s. Whenever possible we try to buy our fruit trees from Perry’s, as their trees are always excellent quality. They also give good advice.

Hillside Herbs is an amazing place. They specialise in herbs and succulents. They also have a range of heirloom chilli plants in varieties that I had never seen. We like to grow at least three types of chillies each year, so we were very excited to find this large range of chillies. I grow tired of finding the same old batch of jalapeños, habaneros, and birds eye chillies at the nurseries every Spring. I try to seek out different varieties at gardener’s markets, but even then it’s same old, same old.

We had a good chat with the owner about the different chillies, and bought some new plants to try, as well as some new herbs: variegated golden oregano, variegated lemon thyme, caraway thyme, borage, salvia magic magenta, and two cherry tomato plants (Tiny Tim and Black Cherry). I’m excited about the caraway thyme, which I grew many years ago but had not been able to find since. It is a beautiful herb: it looks like a standard thyme plant but smells strongly like caraway. What it says on the label, really.

I don’t enjoy growing succulents so I didn’t buy any, but even I enjoyed looking at their hothouse full of stunning succulents and was almost tempted to try growing a couple. Then I remembered my skill at killing them, and stopped myself. They were too beautiful to inflict me on them.

I have been slowly working on my husband for us to plant an avocado tree for a while now. He was reluctant to plant anymore fruit trees on our property, as we already have quite a few, and typically avocados require two trees (an A and B variety) to successfully bear fruit. However, we only have two dwarf apple trees on one side of our backyard, and no other trees on that part of the property.

We chose a Reed avocado tree, which has three main benefits. Firstly, it is self-fertile, meaning we do not need an extra tree for pollination. It is also not too large: while some avocado trees, like the Hass, grow to 10 metres, the Reed is relatively compact, topping out at about 4 metres. Finally, the Reed avocado, while not so easily available in shops, is one of the largest and tastiest avocados, producing cannonball-sized, green avocados that do not brown when cut. Reeds do not transport as well as Hass avocados, making them harder to find in supermarkets.

Planting an avocado tree was much more hassle than I expected. We were given a list of seven steps that were were told to strictly follow if we wanted the tree to live. Given that this was not an inexpensive tree, we chose to follow their strict instructions. Avocados apparently hate to have wet feet, so must be planted in a mound of compost mixed with soil to ensure good drainage. After planting, a wind barrier must be erected for protection and kept in place for 18 months.

Shade cloth windbreak for the avocado tree

Very regular watering and monthly feeding with citrus food keeps it going before fruiting in the third year (fingers crossed).

Our other fruit trees are showing the results of good nutrition and careful pruning. It looks like the Trevatt apricot has a bumper harvest in the making. My husband is telling me he will have to thin the little apricots to make room for them to grow. I know he’s right but I hate thinning fruit – it always seems so sad to me. This is why I get him to do it. This is the third year for this apricot tree, so it should be the first year of a proper crop.

This was a long weekend, so we had extra gardening days. The long weekend Monday we had a long list of gardening tasks, chief of which was planting our new acquisitions. In addition to planting the avocado tree, we planted out a Thompson seedless grapevine near our patio. I am hoping to train this up over the patio for additional Summer shade (and delicious grapes). With these latest additions we now have the following fruit trees and fruiting vines in our garden:

Apricot;
Black mulberry;
Passionfruit (Nellie Kelly);
Pomegranate;
Feijoa;
Apple (Early Macintosh)
Apple (Cox’s Orange Pippin);
Boysenberry;
Raspberry;
Lemon (Meyer)
Lemon (Lisbon);
Lime (Tahitian);
Grape (Thompson Seedless);
Avocado (Reed).

My husband would like us to plant a Cherry tree and I would like to plant a dwarf Blood Orange tree. Then I think we are officially out of room for trees (although I would love to have a Quince and a Black Genoa Fig – but I think we would be pushing it). All of the trees we do have are very young and most have not reached fruiting stage yet. I am hoping that in the next year or two we will at least be able to manage several months of the year without buying any fruit from a store.

My husband also had the fun task of digging donkey poo through the part of the garden set aside for sweet corn planting a bit later in the season. Because he loves me and he is a good man, he did it with as much goodwill as he could muster. Because I love him, I managed the pigeon poo, which was much smellier. The pigeon poo went straight in the composter. Pigeon poo is an amazing activator for compost due to its very high nitrogen component, and over time it will turn my compost ingredients into beautiful, sweet smelling compost. For now, it is pretty ripe. Never put straight chicken or any poultry manure straight onto the garden: it is full of urea and will burn your plants. The donkey poo was already pretty well composted and could go straight on. Even then, we will let it sit for several weeks before we plant the corn into the soil enriched by the manure.

Finally, we planted out tomatoes and chilli plants into pots, and fed all the plants in raised beds and pots. I grow cherry tomatoes and chillies in pots as I find these tend to do best in containers. Larger beefsteak style tomatoes I will grow in the ground in a few weeks time. I have ordered basil seeds from the Digger’s club to plant in the pots with them.

Next week: potato planting. It’s a little late, but we should just manage a crop of spuds before the end of Summer.