I think this is one of the huge risks in climate change, that urban people completely don’t get. Farmers gamble, constantly. They make educated, considered, intuitive guesses based on gut feeling, the tiny signals that intimacy and experience allow. Those guesses are sometimes right, sometimes wrong. Bad guessers go broke or resort to mining the land. Good ones get it right more often than wrong and succeed. Climate change is…
One of the most important insights that really changed the way I garden was realising just how long plants are babies for.
It is still late winter isn’t it? I really wanted to name this “Early Spring” – the weather has turned the corner here, and the soil is warm enough now to reliably plant capsicums and eggplants and things that won’t germinate if the soil temperature is too low. So this planting break I have planted seeds of:
I’m loving the selection of greens in my garden this time of year. There’s such an abundance, I pick some for us and some for the chook bucket every day. It gives us eggs with glorious deep yellow yolks and lots of Vitamin A.
I’ve taken lots of finger thick cuttings, using a very sharp knife to cut at an angle just below a bud. I’ve dipped the bottom of the cuttings in a bucket in which I’ve been steeping the willow cuttings – willow is a rich source of rooting hormones
I quite like deadlines – they give me a target. Without them I find that, in my busy busy life, things that are important get put aside in favour of the things that are most noisily urgent. And seasons don’t scream urgent, but they don’t wait. They are a wonderful reminder that we humans can argue all we like but nature holds trump cards. We live on a little spinning…
In the southern hemisphere, we are about to turn the corner into Spring. We are about to pass the point on the bell curve when the rate of change in day length begins increasing exponentially. The season of short days is about to end!