One of the things I like about planting advanced seedlings is the instant gratification of it.  This is the garden bed I planted out today – advanced seedlings of lettuce, raddichio,  parsley, chinese cabbages, cauliflowers, leeks, silver beet, spinach, celery, red cabbage, broccoli, kailan, plus some parsnips, broad beans, peas, and snow peas.

This is the bed I planted out just last month with a similar, but not quite the same mix.  I tried a late button squash in that bed, and it’s survived this week’s cold snap and is flowering, so I might just be lucky and get some May button squash. We’re already eating lettuce and mizuna from it.

Today I also planted seed in seed trays:

• silver beet
• cauliflowers
• kale
• leeks
• lettuce
• parsley
• spinach
• celery
• dill
• coriander
• rocket
• raddichio
• cabbage
• yukina
• broccoli

My garden is pretty near frost free and winter is my best growing season for leafy greens.  I shall plant a very small amount of each of these in successive plantings for the next few months, and I’m already looking forward to the first spinach and feta pie of the season, in just a few weeks now.

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Late autumn! Already!

In just a couple of days it will be Halloween in the southern hemisphere – the traditional festival marking the point when the day length levels out again, and we start the 3 month period of short days. The days will slowly shorten now until the shortest day of the midwinter solstice, then slowly lengthen again until the beginning of August.

I’m not a winter lover. I try, but it’s hard to appreciate cold and even harder when it’s wet too.  I live in northern NSW where the climate is really mild, and still I don’t like winter. My garden doesn’t mind it. Winter is actually a really good growing season here, especially for leafy greens. The hard part is getting them in.

Yesterday was a leafy planting day, but it was cold and wet all day. I lit the slow combustion stove in the morning and spent the day baking and playing in the kitchen, trying to ignore all these lovely young kale and cauliflowers and silver beet and spinach and broccoli and lettuces, ready to plant out and itching to get their roots down into the nice, fresh, newly chook cleared garden bed that is waiting for them.

Today is cold and wet again. I could boot myself out into the garden, but the soil is so wet, it will compact really easily if I walk on it and it won’t be good for planting into anyway.  Luckily they are planted in a rich potting mix with lots of compost and worm castings.  They should be right to hang in there till next weekend.  The days are so short now that planting after work in the evening isn’t an option any more.

Their little sisters are in the seed raising trays, and they’re more likely to suffer from lack of nutrients. The seed raising mix is designed to be fairly nutrient poor,  designed for germinating seeds not feeding seedlings. It is half and half creek sand for drainage and half old dry cow pats mown to a fine texture for water holding. The seeds I planted last month are at the two leaf stage and need to be potted on into something more nutrient rich to grow on into the advanced seedlings I like for planting out.

I have silver beet, cauliflowers,  kale, leeks, lettuce, parsley, spinach, celery, coriander, rocket, raddichio, cabbage and broccoli to pot on – just a few of each . So I shall try to use a gap in the showers to do a half an hour in the shadehouse potting on seedlings and call that a day in the garden.  I like the lunar calendar, but I’m not a slave to it.

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I have Oceans Eleven being enacted in my garden.  I’ve got just nineteen pea seeds up so far this year! I thought it might be birds getting them before they germinated, so I put some net over the boxes in the shadehouse.  But they still got got.  So I moved the boxes out into one of my fortress fenced garden beds.  But they still got got.  So I planted all the seeds in pots, inside the bucket (so they don’t drown)  in the middle of this little kids’ pool, with fairly fine wire over the top. But, on the very first night after planting, long before they germinated,  they still got got!!

Something that can swim, climb, get through wire, find the seeds underground, then get away again. Any guesses?

This is the May-June carrots.  They were planted as seed back in January.  We had these for lunch in a tofu, noodles and Asian greens stir fry, and they were yum.

This is the June – July carrots.  They were planted as seed back in February.  They’re pretty well right for now.

This is the July – August carrots. I have a dozen tubes of them ready to be planted out today. They were planted as seed back in March, so it is actually two months now since sowing.  Carrots are slow to start but they’ll take off now.  I shall dig a little hole and plant the group as one in it, bottomless tube and all.  Any excess fertilizing would just make them go all to leaf and no root, so they get no compost and I  prefer spots where a heavy nitrogen feeder like a leafy green has come out.

This is the August – September carrots.  They were planted as seed a month ago, last roots and perennials planting days. I shall move them to a sunnier part of the shadehouse today, so they get a bit more light so they don’t go leggy, but otherwise, they’re right for another month.

And this is the September – October carrots, planted today, companion planted with spring onions using my standard method.  If I had to plant them out today, I don’t know where I’d put them – the garden is too full, the bigger plants will out-compete them, one day of harsh sun as they germinate will kill them.  Planted like this in the shadehouse, I can keep them watered and weed free till July, by which time a lot of lettuces and cabbages will have been harvested to make room for them.

There’s very little actual work involved – I grabbed a bucket of creek sand on my way home last night and mixed it with some old compost to make the planting mix. The sowing takes minutes and the planting out only half an hour or so.  Of course it’s not quite that simple – there’s always seeds that don’t germinate,  mice that get them in the shadehouse, bandicoots that break into a garden bed, floods that drown them,  frizzle days that scorch them, and times when I get so busy that planting days just speed past.  But if I can keep the routine going, I can harvest a dozen or so carrots pretty well most weeks of the year.