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.

Gardening in extreme conditions

The temperature in our State hit record highs in the lead up to Christmas. Across the country, bushfires have been raging, some of them for several months. While I personally like hot weather, and manage the hot weather well (acknowledging that I have the privilege of working indoors and have a roof over my head), of course all gardens and wildlife across the State struggled. A State of Emergency has been declared in one state, while as I write this, we are waiting for a severe storm here after several days of plus-40 degree temperatures and high humidity.

I thought it would be worth writing about how those of us that love to garden manage to do so in regions where the weather or terrain can be extreme.

The climate in our region is sometimes described as ‘mediterranean’ but it would be more accurate to describe it as ‘arid.’ The arrival of Europeans and other non-Aboriginal people to this region after colonisation has forced a different approach to land management, most of it not suited to the very dry conditions. While this year has been drier and hotter than usual, in most years we have a relatively dry Winter, with the highest average rainfall 71 mm in June. This year the rainfall was lower, with only 54.6mm falling in June.

Our Summers are extremely hot, with an average temperature of 29 degrees centigrade and very little rainfall. In late January, we can generally expect at least a week of temperatures in the high 30s or low 40s. In the past couple of years, this has changed. We had a week of mid-40s temperatures in December, and are experienced another late last year. It is likely that the rest of Summer will give us some periods of temperatures in the high 40s (it already has).

Our warm Springs and warm Autumn periods make our region perfect for growing a wide array of Summer vegetables and fruits, particularly tomatoes, zucchini, chillies, and eggplant. However, for the home gardener, the extreme Summer conditions and low rainfall can present some unique challenges.

Some gardeners I know are giving up altogether in regions with strict water restrictions and very low rainfall. In our region we have water restrictions, but they are not as strict: we can water with sprinklers before 10am and after 5pm. In many parts of Australia, there are level 2 water restrictions in place, allowing only use of a bucket or watering can at those times, or drip irrigation for 15 minutes. In weather of 40 degrees plus, this will not be enough to keep most vegetable gardens going.

Drought tolerant gardening

When we moved in here, the previous owners had tried to address the water issue by planting a mix of succulents (agaves and aloes), along with some ground covers and trees. Unfortunately, the trees they had planted were inappropriate for the block and the succulents they had planted, while drought tolerant, were planted too close to other plantings. Everything was crowded in together.

We removed everything and started again. We wanted a productive garden and a sensory garden, where everything could either be eaten or enjoyed by our children and niece and nephews as a sensory experience. We also wanted plantings that could act as a natural mulch or ground cover to protect the soil from the heat, and that did not require too much water once established.

Herbs are a great choice. Even some varieties of mint, which people think requires a lot of water, is drought tolerant once established. We have found spearmint and apple mint to be the most drought tolerant. We planted the following herbs and have found they require almost no water once established:

Greek oregano
Common thyme
Lemon thyme
Golden creeping thyme
Sage
Pineapple sage
Spearmint
Apple mint
Lemon balm (Melissa)
Garlic chives
Parsley (Curly and Continental)
Lavender (English, Italian, French)
Rosemary

These plants have self-seeded around the garden and created swathes of living mulch, protecting the soil from the baking sun. We rarely water these; they are watered by the rain and pick up some incidental water when we water the fruit trees and roses.

Roses are also quite drought tolerant. We have three climbing roses. One is admittedly struggling, but it is picking up. The others, planted at the same time, are happy and healthy and are watered about once a month in the Summer, and not at all the rest of the year. They seem quite happy.

Our front yard faces west and is on a hillside, which means that it receives full sun in the afternoon and evening. In Summer, this is very hot and bakes the garden. We have planted deciduous fruit trees that provide shade for the rest of the garden, and mulch the areas that are not ‘self-mulched’ by the ground cover herbs. The trees are now well-established and we water these about once a week in Summer and Autumn until the rains begin (this period is stretching out longer and longer, unfortunately). In Winter and Spring we don’t water the trees unless it is particularly dry. We have a mulberry, apricot, pomegranate, lemon, and passionfruit vine in the front.

Vegetables

Last year, we lost most of the vegetables to extreme heat, and gave up until Autumn. This is because I was busy with work until late December and did not plant until late. The plants were not strong enough to cope with a 47 degree day. This year, I knew I would likely be busy again in November/December (I was), so I established the garden earlier. I hardened off the tomatoes, capsicums, chillies, eggplants and zucchini seedlings in smaller pots outside so they would be tough as nuts before they went into the ground. This meant that they were well-acclimatised to the micro-climate of our garden. We water them, but not daily, so they receive a deep early soak on very hot days instead of daily short waterings. We fed everything with extra compost and pelletised chicken manure, and mulched the heck out of everything.

The vegetable plants sailed through the first lot of 40-plus days in December with no worries – in fact, they put on growth. We had another 40 degree day yesterday, and all the plants look happy.

Water

Our rainwater tank collapsed during a storm and we have not yet replaced it. It was one of those old galvo jobs, with no pump and about a 2 litre capacity. I think it knew it was useless and collapsed from the shame. It is on our list of things to replace this year, before Winter. As such, we are on mains water only to keep our garden alive. This makes gardening pretty expensive, so for environmental and cost reasons we have to consider our water usage carefully.

I think about the plants I choose to grow. If we had to give up some part of the garden to save the rest due to extreme drought conditions, it would be the vegetable garden, as much as it breaks my heart to say it. Vegetable gardening is the most fun but it is also the most water-dependent. Certain vegetables require more water, so they are not worth growing when water is expensive and scarce. If we had Level 2 water restrictions, I would not grow vegetables at all, except a few in pots, like chillies.

We water only during the water restriction times. We get up early to water or water late after the heat has reduced, to prevent evaporation, and we set a timer. We don’t water the ‘lawn’ (such as it is) ever. We don’t water everyday except in extreme heat. We mulch the soil with compost and sugarcane or pea straw to prevent water loss. We also mulch our pots.

Mulch

You cannot garden in Australia, particularly the arid areas, without mulching. Mulching prevents evaporation and soil erosion. Mulching is both an environmental and economic choice – it reduces the amount of water used in the garden, and saves your precious soil from blowing away.

I use a combination of homemade compost, well-rotted sheep manure, coir, and sugarcane to mulch the garden. I use sheep manure around the fruit trees, applied in a thick layer in Winter. Coir is used on pots and raised beds. The rest of the garden receives a mix of compost and sugarcane mulch. This is a continual process, as the mulch breaks down over time. Other people prefer pea or lucerne straw to sugarcane, but I like the loose texture of sugarcane, and the fact that it is utilising a waste product from sugarcane production. Some people use bark chips as a loose mulch, but our pest control specialist has told us that this could encourage termites, which is the last thing I need around my place (I don’t know if this is true or not, but I am not taking chances on that).

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 – 22nd & 23rd December 2018

Well. It’s only been two months.

Imagine being someone that is slightly obsessed with growing things. Then imagine that you have not been able to grow or plant or do anything in the garden in the peak growing season of the year. This has been my existence for the past two months as my workloads have skyrocketed and I have spent my weekends in front of a computer screen. My job is entirely deadline focused, so there has not been a way of getting out of it. My poor garden.

Actually, the garden has been fine. My husband has maintained the watering, and everything I planted at the start of Spring just tootled along at its own pace. The tomatoes were in dire need of tying up when I went outside yesterday, and there was hella weeding to be done, but nothing else seemed amiss. Nature finds a way.

Garlic drying in the sun. Varieties: Melbourne Market and Cream

I dug up all the garlic, and now it is drying in the sunshine. We are expecting four days of extremely hot Australian weather, so that should be sufficient to dry it out before I bring it inside. We use a lot of garlic so this should last a couple of months. I guess I will have to plant more next year if I want to grow enough for a whole year.

I tested out a new shovel by digging up the compost from the two compost bins. One was half full, while the other was full. Both were ready to use. One had truly incredible compost in it because I had used pigeon poo from the next door neighbour’s aviary. It breaks the compost down very quickly. The corn and tomatoes got a great feed yesterday. The other contained rabbit poo and straw, which also broke down very well. Considering I have not had the time to give my heavy feeding plants a good feed this season, this should make up for it.

I am growing two types of corn this year; an heirloom painted mountain corn and an F1 hybrid called Jubilee that I grew last year. The mountain corn is already producing cobs. I expect it will be another month before the Jubilee follows. My experiment of growing beans up the corn stalks has been somewhat successful. The beans are growing up the corn as planned, but the beans are growing much faster than the corn. I started building some additional supports yesterday to help the corn so it would not be strangled by the beans. I also made the error of planting Scarlet Runner beans next to the corn, not realising that this bean grows enormous! It is the largest growing runner bean and requires a much sturdier frame than a poor corn stalk.

Now all the weeds are cleared and plants fed, I am going to figure out if I have time to grow a quick crop of eggplant and zucchini before the end of the season. I can’t believe I have not had time to grow a single zucchini this year.

It was so lovely to be outside in the dirt again, even if it was mostly digging up weeds and shovelling pigeon poo.

What’s been happening in my garden?

Probably, tons.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been out there to do anything or see anything much lately. I have had ongoing major deadlines and have been working most weekends. Sadly, my poor garden has been left to ramble on, unattended by me.

I have glanced out at it every now and then, and did spend a morning a few weeks ago clearing out the dying sweet peas (*sniff*) and laying some much needed mulch before the very hot weather hit. Aside from that, my husband has been keeping on top of the watering for me and I have been working.

I am hoping that over the Christmas break I can pay some attention to my poor neglected veggie patch and salvage what is left of the prime growing season of the year. I wanted lots of pumpkins this year; instead it is looking like I may end up with zip.

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 20th & 21st October 2018

As part of a concerted effort to ‘relax,’ my husband and I decided to forgo our usual Saturday routine of housework and other ~~crap we hate~~ chores and headed out to a big garden sale. This garden sale was made extra special because it had a free (that’s right, free) sausage sizzle. We were there, baby. We lined up like the rest of the sad sacks with nothing better to do, and got our free barbecued snouts’n’entrails in bread, smothered in mustard and tomato sauce. A perfect artery-clogging waste of 10 minutes on a Saturday, probably resulting in 10 minutes reduced lifespan later down the track.

I have been wanting a hydrangea plant for a neglected shady corner of the front yard, and found one at the sale, along with a beautiful carnation bush, all for 30% off. We got out of the sale with a carful of mulch, plants, and potting mix for less than $80 and called it good.

This was the weekend that I vowed to remove the remaining broccoli plants to make way for the Summer seedlings. And yet, they are still producing more than a kilogram of broccoli heads and sprouts a week! So I decided to leave them a little longer, and to start slashing down the broad beans instead.

Some people do not enjoy broad beans, perhaps remembering the grey, overcooked bullets of their childhood. In fact, they are a delicous, elegant vegetable that is very useful in the garden as a soil improving crop over the winter time.

Nitrogen nodules on the roots of a broad bean plant

Broad beans, like all leguminous crops, are ‘nitrogen-fixing.’ Simply explained, this means that they draw down nitrogen from the air, and store it in little nodules in their roots. They use this nitrogen to feed the plant. Nitrogen-fixing plants are good for the soil, because when they die, the nitrogen in the little nodules is released into the soil, nourishing it. Runner beans, peas, and broad beans are all good crops to grow either before or after heavy feeding crops (for example, corn or tomatoes) to prepare the soil. I am planting tomatoes in the bed that held my broad bean crop, and I have planted climbing beans directly alongside the corn crop.

I picked half the broad beans and slashed down the plants, leaving the roots in the soil to release the nitrogen. I left the slashed plants on top of the soil, as although I am planning to mulch in the next couple of weeks, I did not have time this weekend. The pile of broad bean stalks will help the soil retain moisture in the meantime. I’ll pick the rest of the broad beans next weekend.

With the 2.5 kilograms of broad bean pods we picked (no kidding), we gave some away, and used the rest to make Jamie Oliver’s Broad Bean Pesto recipe. My husband patiently shelled and blanched and then skinned all those beans! He deserves a medal.

If you grow broad beans, or even buy them frozen, I recommend this recipe – delicious and easy (unless you have to shell two kilos of broadies).

The rest of my time outside was spent pricking out my tomato seedlings and replanting new seeds. I am trying yet again to grow watermelon. As with cucumbers, watermelons are my white whale. Hopefully I don’t suffer a similar fate as Ahab…but I doubt anyone was dragged to their untimely demise by a watermelon plant.

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!