But the cabbage moths have arrived, and I think that’s about the end for this year. We’ve had a good three months of harvesting broccolini, cauliflowers, kale, pak choi, napa cabbage, mustard. I still have some red cabbage that I’m hoping I can keep going long enough, hand picking caterpillars, for them to heart up. But really, from now on it’s not worth it, at least not here in the sub-tropics.
My favourite crop this year has been Green Sprouting Broccoli, a broccolini really. It has no central head at all, but masses of these little side shoots on a plant that is a good metre tall and the same across. We have been picking a big handful of these literally every day, giving a bunch away several times a week, four plants yielding enough for several households.
I’m cooking it in all the usual broccolini ways – in omelettes, in stir fries, in pasta and Broccoli Tempura, but this year’s obsession has been broccolini (with a few leaves) sprinkled with olive and sesame oil and roasted until they are just crisp, kinda like kale chips with a little more substance. Now is probably a good time to give them up, before we are quite sick of them, while we can still get excited about letting a few go to seed to save seed for planting again in late March.
I used every trick in my arsenal for preventing bolting, but still, just a week or so after planting out, this little Chinese Cabbage seedling has decided it’s just feeling too sexy for its shirt. The days are getting longer at an exponentially faster rate now so everything wants to flower and set seed. OK if you want to harvest the flowers, seeds, or fruit, but not much good for leafy greens.
It’s too late now for planting new seed of lettuces. By the time they are bearing, we will be into the sizzle weather of summer. Too late for celery – it would just get tough and fibrous in the dry heat of spring, and bolt to seed in the lengthening days. Too late for silver beet – it just gets leaf spot in warm weather, and the tiny grasshoppers will be around by the time it is bearing anyway. Much too late for spinach – it will just bolt. I might get some flat leaf parsley if I’m lucky, and the basils have all been bred to hold back from bolting for a while.
I’ve tried lots of things called “spinach” of various kinds that promised to be good summer spinach substitutes – Ceylon spinach, Egyptian spinach, New Zealand spinach. My favourite summer leafy so far is amaranth, and my favourite variety is Mekong Red, which means it’s not exactly a leafy green. Mekong Red grows a metre or more tall and has dark maroon red leaves that you can pick and pick again all summer. You can add leaves and stems to stir fries or sautee in olive oil and garlic and a splash of oyster or soy sauce as a side dish. It’s hardy and productive and tasty enough that we actually choose to eat it when there are beans and zucchini and squash and all the other summer fruiting vegetables to choose from.
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.
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 weeks, and my garden rewards me.
I am putting in a regular round of carrots and beets and spring onions. And tomorrow I’m going to transplant the oregano, which is getting a bit old and stale in the spot it is in and needs transplanting to a new, nutrient rich spot in full sun. I have a few seedlings of bush lemons that have come up on their own from compost, that I might get around to planting out, though those of you who have been here before will understand why it isn’t a priority.
I also today planted out a new bed of asparagus, with seedlings propagated when my mature plants seeded last autumn. The wallabies looooove asparagus, possibly better than anything else in my garden except maybe the sugar cane. If they get in they make a beeline for it. With the result that I have re-established asparagus beds so many times I’ve lost count.
If I can get it established, it can bear well outside my intensively fenced beds but inside the (supposedly) wallaby proof perimeter garden fence. I like planting it on the downhill, northeast side of the beds where it captures nutrient and water runoff and dies off in winter so as not to shade the beds. The bower birds, bush turkeys and possums leave it alone and once it is established, it is bandicoot proof. Once it is established. If I just plant it and water it, they dig it up the first night. This is my latest attempt to foil them – a fence made from the giant bamboo we have growing. It won’t last long, but it only has to last a few months till they are established enough to resist being just dug up. Fingers crossed.
But 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. The cuttings in the top photo were given to me by Camilla (thanks Camilla!). They are planted in a polystyrene box of compost mixed with a little sand. I’ll put another inch or so of compost on top, then keep them watered in the shadehouse till they are established. My research says they like well drained soil but can cope with poor soil. And they can grow up to 5 metres tall.
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!
As it is though, the chooks continue their weeding and soil preparation even when all I have time to do is chuck a bucket of house scraps over the fence each day, and the occasional bucket of wood ash from the stove, and a bit of azolla from my morning walk, and the occasional bag of horse poo that a neighbour sells on the side of the road on my way home and…you get the idea. Once patterns are established, they take just seconds of actual work, and no thinking at all.
But with the slightly longer days already, I’m getting a few extra minutes in the day, and it’s amazing what you can do in just a few minutes. Last weekend I moved the chooks, and yesterday I had a few minutes to I clean out and prepare a seed raising box in the shadehouse, and my garden is on a roll again.
I use poystyrene boxes salvaged from the greengrocer for germinating seed. I find that punnets and pots are too vulnerable to drying out. They are filled with a mixture that is mostly river sand – or fine gravel – mixed with some old compost or mowed, old cow pats. The latter is for the texture, not the nutrients. Seeds don’t need fertilising to germinate. (Whenever you sprout sprouts using just water, you are proving it.)
As soon as the seedlings are up and have their first pair of true leaves, I prick them out with a kitchen fork and transplant into pots with a nice lot of compost and worm castings and seaweed brew, until they are big enough to plant out into the garden. So the seed raising mix can be used over and over, and a box lasts all year. My last box got abandonned when life got hectic, and was sitting there with overgrown, unwatered seedlings left over from months ago, but it took just minutes to get it ready for replanting.
This morning I had a few minutes before work again, so I planted the spring round of leafy greens. Spring is not the perfect season for leafies, especially when it looks a bit like an El Nino is shaping up again and we are in for a long hot summer. Leafies all want to bolt to seed this time of year, and pests like cabbage moths and aphids get busy. There’s no point in me planting silver beet or spinach this time of year, but amaranth does well as a spring and summer leafy, and this year I’m trying a couple of other spinach substitutes – Egyptian spinach, and Orach. I’d love to hear from anyone who has experience with them.
I’m also planting a few varieties of lettuce that do well for me in warmer weather – brown romaine, rouge d’hiver, and 2 star. Rouge d’hiver is supposed to be a cool weather variety, but it is doing well for me in spring planting. I’m planting another round of raddicchio, though it’s a bit risky this time of year. And basil, lots of basil – lime, sweet and Thai varieties. And Italian parsley for tabouli.
I have amaranth and aragula (wild rocket) and dill and coriander all self seeded in the garden, and I’ve planted a patch of rocket as direct planting – something I don’t do often, but they should be ready to cut as baby rocket in about a fortnight, and I only plan to keep them going for a few weeks.
Next week is the fruiting planting break, so as I get time over the next few days I shall get pots ready for beans and zucchini and squash and cucumbers and tomatoes and capsicums and eggplants and chili and pumpkins and melons. I so love these longer days!
Jackie is sitting on 9 eggs. At least we think there are nine. Patrick and Trevor get very upset if we try to go near her. Geese are supposed to be monogamous (or at least “in an open relationship”) for life, but maybe because we have two girls and three boys, both Patrick and Trevor seem to have decided it’s a modern family.
Of all the animals we have tried over the years, geese are shaping up to be one of the favourites. We have tried ducks (too vulnerable to goannas), rabbits (vulnerable, and also defensively vicious), pigeons (a winner for a long while, but then the grey goshawks moved in), goats (way way way too smart, and destructive when they escape), cow (we can’t use that much milk), a pony (huge rows with teenage daughter over whose job it is to clear the crofton weed from the horse paddock), even a draught horse (died of a heart attack in a storm on Christmas Eve – ever tried to bury a draught horse on Christmas Day, when no digging machinery is available?)
The stayers right through have been chooks. Though vulnerable, they’ve been so valuable that it’s worth it. Then last year we added fish in the newly lined top dam. (They’re doing well, now about 20 cm, and we may try eating one or two soon). And geese.
We had a dam. We had grass that needed eating. And we had an idea that geese might be aggressive enough to help protect the chooks. Originally it was just a pair, but a pair turned out to be a bad idea. Xanana (mistakenly named for the Timorese prime minister – he turned out to be a she) was killed by wild dog/dingo pups last summer. Kirsty grieved so grieviously, and we couldn’t keep her alone, so we bought another five geese – Charlotte, Jackie, Patrick, Trevor, and José. Charlotte died of natural causes, so we have ended up with five geese.
Five geese are a formidable pack. They can see off a goanna, make even a large carpet snake think better of it, intimidate a wedge tailed eagle, and so far they have survived a couple of encounters with wild dogs. There are enough of them to keep lookout, and they can fly, swim and bite to get away. They are noisy and sound scary but they are actually really endearing and with handling, quite friendly.
So, in a fortnight or so, with luck, we will see whether goslings will survive, at least long enough for us, and not the wildlife to eat them. There is a plan of goose for Yule dinner at the winter solstice. I couldn’t eat Patrick or Trevor or José or Jackie or Kirsty, but we are going to try to see the goslings as farm animals from the beginning.
But let’s not count the eggs before they hatch. (I think there’s nine).
