I love citrus season here.  I just went up, in my slippers, to check the top tank, and the lime tree was dropping fruit, and the less favoured mandarin tree was loaded with mandarins that are small and thin skinned but sooo sweet, and then I passed the lemon tree, and the kumquat, and then the grapefruit.  By the time I got down to the house again, my shirt was full of citrus. I’m feeling a batch of Lime Syrup coming on, and maybe some Lime Pickles too.

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All this long weekend is fruiting planting days, and all I have ready to go in are these few.

I have finally worked out a way to keep the seedlings from the very intrepid mice that were getting all of them before they germinated. But it is drastic measures!  I keep the pots in the Weber, try to remember to put the lid on at night and bring it inside, try to remember to take the lid off and wheel it out where it can get a bit of light before I go to work in the morning.  I’ve failed in the remembering bit a couple of times, and come out in the morning to find they are all gone.  If you are hearing echoes of very bad language, I think even the blue cables must be blushing!

I try to remember the permaculture principle that a glut of anything is a feast for something, but I don’t really know that I want the population explosion in snakes that would logically follow this mouse plague.  I am trying to keep my imagination focussed on lovely storybook owls feasting!

But meanwhile, this weekend I’ll be planting out these few Oregon Giant climbing snow pea seedlings, swearing all the while about how the mice have forced me to plant them all in one pot and raise them too big, rather than use my usual method. The roots will be unavoidably damaged in separating them for transplant but hopefully they’ll recover.  The variety is supposed to be very resistant to powdery mildew, and in this wet year, and this (relatively) warm climate, that’s important.  I shall dig in the wood ash from the stove before I plant – peas like a more alkali soil and wood ash is a nice way to drop the Ph.

I’ll also plant some more pots of climbing peas and snow peas to keep the succession going.  I’m harvesting the last of my green beans now, and looking forward to the start of the pea season.

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This time of year is such a good season up here for leafy greens. We are now eating the first of the silver beet, chinese cabbages, lettuces and kale for the season, and the rest are not too far behind now. That’s them in the top left picture. They were planted as seed three months ago, potted on two months ago, planted out last month into a bed beautifully prepared by the chooks, and now, they’re turning into silverbeet frittata for breakfast, salad sandwitches for lunch, and Chinese cabbage sauteed with garlic and lemon juice for dinner.

My garden is pretty nearly frost free – occasionally I get a light frost and the lighter lettuces will be damaged but rarely killed outright. I never usually get frosts heavy enough to damage the brassicas – broccoli, kale, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, cabbages, chinese cabbages – or the raddicchio, spinach, silver beet, celery, parsley, rocket, aragula, or leeks. So I’m planting out all of them today. That’s them in the top right picture.

I have a new bed that the chooks have prepared over the last month and advanced seedlings that were planted as seed a couple of months ago, and potted on a month ago. They were all in individual pots so the planting out was very quick and minimally stressful for them. I have selected the strongest seedlings and ditched about a third of them. It’s a nice mixed planting, no two things the same next to each other, and since I’m only planting out the selected strongest seedlings and I expect to harvest all of them, I’ve only planted out what we will eat in the month (with a few extras for giving away). About the same amount also went out as infill planting in older beds, replacing the zucchini and squash as they finish up (after a good top dressing with compost and mulch).

I have another round of all the same batch of leafies ready for potting on today. That’s them in the bottom left picture. I’ll select the strongest, about a third more than I actually intend planting, and pot them up in a mixture of creek sand and compost, water them in with seaweed brew, and keep them in the sunniest part of the shadehouse for another month. At this two leaf stage, they are easy to transplant – it’s a half hour job – and they won’t suffer for it. I’ll have some punnets of left-over seedlings to go down in the mailbox tomorrow as give-aways. What goes around comes around, and when my seedlings fail, there’s a chance someone else will have some to fill the gap.

We are coming up to the winter solstice in about three weeks time, but until then the days are still getting shorter. So leafies planted now will not want to bolt, but rather wait until their lovely fine tuned endocrine sensing system tells them the days are getting longer, spring is on its way, and it is safe to set seed. So I have one more opportunity to safely plant them all again. By next planting break, it will be getting too late to plant the bolters. They would just be starting to look like maturing in September when the hot dry weather will likely hit, and the cabbage moths will start appearing again anyway.

So I’m planting another batch of seed in the seed raising box vacated by last month’s seedlings. A gorgeous, sunny winter day playing in the garden. Life is good.

Just a really quick post today, because this weekend we are celebrating the winter solstice (which actually falls on Monday).  It is something to celebrate for light-lovers like me – the days are way too short at the moment!

From Monday they will begin to get longer again, imperceptibly at first then faster and faster.  It is where all our lovely mythic tales about the child of promise, born in the depths of winter, come from.  We celebrate with a big baked feast with plum pudding and handmade gift exchange, for about 70 people.  It is one of my favourite annual events.

With all the excitement and guests though, I won’t be doing much gardening this planting break, so it is just as well that it is too late here for broad beans, too early for beans and tomatoes.  The only fruiting plant suited to planting right now is another round of peas and snow peas.

Happy Yule!