Spring

Fruiting Planting Days in Late Spring and There’s Still Room for Endamame and Sweet Corn

by Linda on November 25, 2012

I am really loving tromboncino. Usually by this time of year, my garden is so full that I skimp on the sweet corn because I just don’t have room for it in my intensively fenced beds.  And if I plant it outside the netting, the bandicoots dig it up, then the wallabies and padimelons eat the plant, then the parrots and possums and brush turkeys eat the corn.

This year though, I haven’t planted any zucchini, and it’s amazing how much space that saves. Tromboncino work with all my zucchini recipes and the climbing vine is sharing the south side of a garden fence with tomatoes and taking up no ground room at all.  I learned last year how prolific they are, so I’ve only got four vines in, one in each of the last four beds I’ve moved the chooks off and planted out.  So they are at four different stages.  If I pick them young (like the ones at the front right in the picture) I can just about keep up with them, so far anyhow.

It means I have room for another round of sweet corn.  I have two lots in so far, one planted in August that will be ready for the first picking in just a few weeks now, and one planted in September that will follow on.  I missed sweet corn in the October planting – just not enough room to plant enough of a block so that it would wind pollinate.  Sweet corn is a herd plant – if you don’t have enough of them, the wind cannot blow the pollen from the flowers of one onto the silks of its neighbours, and you get cobs with lots of kernels missing.

I also have room for some endamame.  Or I will have by the time they are ready to plant out and I have moved the chooks on again. I love endamame but don’t plant them every year either.  Now is about the latest I could plant them, since they are day length sensitive and like long days to flower.  These ones will be flowering in  February, just in time before the days start to shorten at an ever increasing rate.

I shall plant the seed in the shadehouse today, coating each seed in innoculant and planting two to a pot in leaf pots filled with a mixture of compost and creek sand. When they are about 10 cm tall I shall plant out.  They grow to about 50 cm tall, so I’ll plant them out in a closely planted row around the southern side of a bed, in front of the climbers but behind all the shorter carrots and beets and lettuces and spring onions.

The dam is dropping but if we have a normal year, it should start to get wetter from now on, so with luck I’ll be able to keep the water up to a fairly full garden.

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Leafy Planting Days in Late Spring

by Linda on November 18, 2012

We are coming up to the summer solstice in the southern hemisphere.  The days have been lengthening rapidly over the last three months – here in northern NSW, we’ve gained over two and a half hours of daylight every day and further south it would be more.  But the days are now nearly at their longest.  Between now and the solstice they’ll lengthen only very slightly.  Then over the next 6 weeks they’ll ll very slowly shorten again.  Over the next three months we’ll gain twenty minutes then lose them again.

It’s really a very noticeable change if you are in the mood for noticing it. Our ancestors did – all the traditional festivals in most cultures (Easter, Halloween, Groundhog day, Christmas, Mayday) are held on these day length marker points , and plants most definitely notice. Most garden crops are highly sensitive to this cycle of lengthening and shortening days. Plants that evolved in the tropics are less sensitive, but crops that evolved in temperate parts of the world got frosted if they got it wrong.  The ones that survived were the ones that could discern, reliably, whether the year was heading towards winter, and the best survival strategy was to hunker down, or whether it was heading to summer, and there was time to bring up a new generation.

Humans have had a say in it over the last few thousand years, breeding varieties that are “slow bolt” and turning bi-ennials into annuals and vice versa.  But a few thousand years isn’t long in the scheme of things. Generally, lengthening days signal plants to set seeds, and if you don’t want them to (parsley, celery, lettuce, silver beet, chinese cabbage, broccoli…) you’re going to be fighting them. Shortening days signal plants to heart up and store food (onions, cabbages, celeriac…) and if you plant them at the right time they co-operate beautifully.

So, if for the last few months it’s been an uphill battle to get leafy greens, you can blame photoperiodism.  The little lucullus (Italian chard) in the picture came up from self-sown seed, and I left it although I knew it would just bolt at the first opportunity, and it has. From now on, it gets easier! Kind of. For the next few months, there’s aphids and grasshoppers and cabbage moths and sunburn weather challenges, and not much room in a garden full of rampant cucumbers and zucchini, but at least the urge to bolt to seed will be more manageable.

So this time I’m planting lettuces, radicchio, parsley, coriander, basil, rocket, aragula, amaranth, and Warrigal greens.  I’ll wait a bit longer for the silver beet – the grasshoppers like it too much, and the brassicas – the white cabbage moths like them too much.

On the plus side, I’m harvesting my coriander, mustard, dill, and celery seed now to store for the year.

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Fruiting Planting Days in Mid Spring – Beans of Many Kinds

by Linda on October 27, 2012

These are the Rattlesnakes planted in July in the shadehouse and planted out in August, the seed a gift from Deb at Footprint Reduction in the Burbs. We’re picking enough to eat every day now, and they’ve joined the ranks of my favourite beans.

 These are the Blue Lakes and the Purple Kings, seed planted in August, planted out only a month ago.  They’re just starting to bear. They are saved seeds, two of my old favourite varieties.  The Blue Lakes are classic french beans, round pods that are tender and crunchy and green.  They are gorgeous young and steamed very briefly.  The Purple Kings have big flat pods a stunning purple colour.  They go green when cooked, and they have a robust beany flavour.  They’re best in slow cooked dishes. They both work well as beans for drying and storage too.  The Blue Lakes have seeds a bit like cannellini beans and the Purple Kings make a good kidney bean substitute.

These are the brown seeded snake beans, seed planted at the same time in August.  They’re a tropical bean, so they’re a bit slower to get going early in the season, and they really like it a bit wetter than it has been.  I’m looking forward to them – they are my favourite bean for salads and stir fries and anything where you want a bean that keeps its crunch.  They bear really prolifically, and the seed makes a decent azuki bean substitute.

And I was going to finish this post with the snake beans I planted out yesterday, seed planted a month ago and raised to lovely, healthy, 15 cm tall seedlings in the shadehouse, planted out this time of year they should just about catch up with the earlier ones.

Except a bandicoot got into the garden bed last night – I didn’t shut the gate tightly enough and he pushed it open a crack – and dug them all up, along with the capsicums and the eggplants and the tomatoes and the zucchini and the squash and the cucumbers.  I spent this morning trying to repair the damage, but he’s broken lots of stems.

I remember my son as a tiny tot answering one of my bandicoot blaspheming sessions with “But mum, bandicoots just like to dig”. They do indeed.

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Leafies in Mid Spring – the Frizzle Weather is Here

October 21, 2012

Pretty well every year we get some days like this, and we have had them as early as this before.  It’s in the high 30′s today (that’s up near 100º for US readers). Most years it’s only a few days in the whole season but I am feeling for gardeners in USA who had a [...]

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First of the Season

October 13, 2012

The first of the season trombochino, just picked and went into a Green Green Polenta.  The first of the season cherry tomatoes, just picked and into soft boiled egg and tomato on toast for breakfast. The first of the season capsicums – these ones are Hungarian Wax.  I’ve picked the first of them green to [...]

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Roots and Perennials Planting in Mid Spring – just the regulars

October 8, 2012

I have some perennials in the shadehouse that I am waiting for an opportunity to plant out – some sage and thyme, some seedling lemon trees and an avocado tree – but there are bushfires not too far away and the weather is brutal on plants right now.  In some places this will be a [...]

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Fruiting Planting Days in Mid Spring – the Sweet Corn Goes In

September 29, 2012

It’s dry and windy and hayfever weather here today, and I wonder whether our water supplies will hold out for what is shaping up as a very dry year.  Last year I planted the corn out directly, making a little hollow in the mulch, digging a single forkful of the composty soil beneath, planting two [...]

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Hilling Up the Spuds

September 20, 2012

These are the spuds I planted back in early August. They grow so fast!  I planted them in a trench about 20 cm deep and I’ve been pulling the compost in around the stems, leaving just the top leaves exposed as they grow.  This morning I hilled them up a bit more – they now [...]

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Roots and Perennials Planting Days in Early Spring

September 1, 2012

Very early spring in fact.  The very first day.  Today and tomorrow are roots and perennials planting days by the lunar planting calendar that I use, more to keep me from procrastination than anything else.  It gives me an artificial deadline that means I tend to be likely to whack something in the ground most [...]

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