The days are getting longer at an exponentially faster rate now so everything wants to bolt. Next week will be fruiting planting days, and this time of year that’s easy. Beans and cucumbers and zucchini and squash and tomatoes and capsicums and all their relatives. But this week it’s just a small box of seed – lime and Thai and sweet basil, parsley, amaranth, and I think that will do.
The exciting planting this time is cassava. I’ve never grown cassava, and I don’t know why. It should do well here, and I’ve eaten it in Cuba and liked it.
A well designed, established permaculture garden can keep producing with amazingly little time or energy spent on it. Which is just as well, because mine has had amazingly little time or energy over the last season. If not for the fact that I now have a A Garden With Stamina, I wouldn’t have a garden at all!
When I am away from my garden, it is the herbs I miss most. If I only had pots to garden in, the top dozen plants on the priority list would all be herbs. There are just so many recipes that depend on fresh herbs to move food from fuel to experience, and it is so difficult and expensive to buy fresh herbs. And dried herbs just don’t do it…
Plants know. Well, mostly they know. They do get it wrong, but a lot of years of evolution have gone into picking the change of season. Despite the cold snap we’ve been going through, this morning my garden reckons Spring has truly sprung here.
Leafy planting days today and tomorrow. The trick with leafies this time of year is to think about sex.
Paw paw and citrus flavours go so well together, and luckily I have the last citrus of the season – late mandarins and pomelos – still picking.