I’ve started bringing in the garlic.  It’s a good crop this year, which I’m really pleased about.  I think, like a lot of gardeners, I was extra conscientious about planting this year.  I really really didn’t want to end up buying Chinese garlic.  As well as all the usual concerns about what agricultural chemicals may have been used growing it, and the methyl bromide treatment demanded by Australian quarantine, there was the vague concern about how close China is to Japan, and garlic planting season was right after the tsunami and nuclear meltdown.

So I’m very pleased to have about 60 corms in, and another couple of patches left to harvest – about 100 corms all up, enough for a couple of corms a week for the whole year.

Getting them to last the whole year is the next challenge. With decent curing and storing, you can expect six months or so, but stringing it out for 12 months means being conscientious about this next bit too.

Rule Number 1: Grow Some Varieties that Store Well

Bit late for that now, but I planted some softneck varieties because they tend to store better, along with some hardnecks that grow larger and do better in my less-than-garlic-perfect Northern NSW climate. I’ll use the hardnecks first and hope the softnecks store till next winter.

Rule Number 2: Treat Garlic Like Eggs

I read this somewhere and thought, what a good way to describe how gentle you have to be.  Fresh garlic bruises easily, and the bruising is an injury that will shorten it’s storage life. We’re used to thinking of it as a hard vegetable, but that’s the already cured stuff.

Rule Number 3: Pick it at the Right Time

Hard not to get too impatient.  Garlic is in the ground so long, I keep wanting to pull the last of it.  Patience.  When a third of the leaves have yellowed. Not before.

Rule Number 4:  Pick it in the Right Weather

It is much easier to clean and dry it without damaging it if it is already dry and in dry soil.  Pick a nice dry day after a few days without rain or watering.

Rule Number 5: Don’t Leave it Sit in the Sun

If you have a lot to pick, do it in batches and get it in out of the sun before it gets sunburned and stews.

Rule Number 6: Leave the leaves and Roots On

There’s a temptation to neaten it all up, but it will cure best with the leaves and the roots on. Just brush off any clumpy dirt.

Rule Number 7: Hang in a Warm, Dry, Airy Place to Cure

Under my north side verandah roof is ideal – it gets a nice breeze and it’s warm without getting hot enough to cook the garlic. Dark isn’t important, and the fridge is a bad idea.  You want air to be able to circulate right around every clove, so the traditional braids are practical as well as beautiful.

Rule Number 8: Don’t forget to Choose and Reserve the Best For Next Year’s Planting

I’ll buy some garlic to plant, and I’ll plant some just because it has sprouted early.  But, like all plants, there is genetic variation. If I remember to choose the ones that have done really well in my climate and soil type I’ll get a better yield than just buying new seed bred somewhere else every time.

If I follow all the rules, it should keep it should keep me in garlic right through the summer and autumn. But by the end of autumn next year, some are likely to start sprouting whatever I do. I’ll plant the sprouting ones and use the garlic shoots and leaves instead.  That will reduce the yield of cloves, but keep me going with fresh garlic through winter and spring till the next harvest.

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I cleared out the spent snow peas this morning and mulched up where they were ready to plant out some tomatoes next fruiting planting break.  I ended up with this bowl of pea seed.  Now the dilemma: should I save them to plant next year, or make hummus of them?

On one hand, it’s enough to make a nice little batch of hummus, and I have newly harvested garlic and still some lemons and some tahini.  On the other hand, it’s much more valuable as seed – there’s about 400 seeds in there,  roughly $25 worth.

But on the other hand, they’re Oregon Giant, which I don’t mind as a variety and I’d like to plant again, but they’re not the variety I loved for years but forgot to record where I got the original seed from and then forgot to save seeds, so lost the variety.  I’d rather like to buy seed again next year and keep trying to find it again.

But on the other hand my snow peas all did pretty well this year (after they got through the stage of mice eating them before they even germinated), and it was a wet year, one to test them against powdery mildew, which is usually my pea bane.

But on the other hand, these seeds haven’t been selected as seed – they’re just the ones that I didn’t get around to picking. There’re not the biggest, sweetest, strongest, earliest.  And they might have crossed with the peas planted at the same time.  But on the other hand sometimes that kind of cross gives good results, or at least interesting ones.

But on the other hand, they’re lovely fresh organic peas and will make the best hummus.  It’s a dilemma.

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Sweet potatoes are one of the most frustrating crops for me.  They need a frost free site and slightly acid soil, so they grow really well here.  This year I got a great crop, but only because I had six months without chooks. With no chooks to clear them,  I had some fortress fenced garden beds that I had just let go, and a sweet potato vine found it’s way in and thought it was in heaven.  Lovely composted, mulched soil and no wallabies.

It gave itself away by overrunning all the weeds though. Within a few months that little vine had covered the entire bed and yielded about 30 kilos of sweet potatoes.

The year before I got none.  To quote my own post from that summer:  “A wallaby got into the garden last night, and demolished my newly planted sweet potato patch. I spent my whole mowing session this morning devising recipes for wallaby – Turkish wallaby stew, marinated baked wallaby, wallaby kebabs….

I checked the fortress fence for holes, but I think it got in across the verandah through the house and into the garden! It’s not as if it is very hungry – after the recent rains I have trouble keeping up with the mowing – it just likes sweet potatoes better.”

So now I have a gate from the verandah of the house into the garden – which is a real nuisance – it was great to be able to nick in and out of the garden with hands full without having to close a gate. A few months ago I forgot to shut it one night and the wallabies gave the mint and the sugar cane a very radical pruning. Luckily it was before the asparagus got going or the language might have been even worse.  They must check to see if it is closed every night!  So now it is one of our evening rituals to check the verandah gate is shut.

But, on the plus side, no wallabies in the garden, at least for a few months this time, and I am daring to hope I can plant sweet potatoes.  It rained heavily night before last, so I don’t have to water them in which means the bandicoots shouldn’t dig them straight back up again tonight. The bush turkeys get a few, but most grow a bit too deep for turkeys.

They’re not usually a perennial.  Conventionally they  are planted in spring and harvested in autumn. But when I’ve had a patch established before, I’ve just let it go and dug up a sweet potato or two whenever I want one.  The’re too rampant for my fortress fenced intensive beds. I want to grow them as a semi-wild ground covering semi-perennial.

Sweet potato will grow from either a root or a cutting, so there are two ways to plant.  One is to just plant a sweet potato you buy from the greengrocer.  The second is to plant the vines.  I have some vines that are growing inside a spiral where the chooks are going to go in a few weeks, so I’m using the second method.

It’s very easy.  Just weave a little crown  like the top picture and bury it with the vine underground and at least some of the leaves out.  Like this:

That’s it. Try to convince it to stay in the area you planned for it and every few years, retire an old patch and plant a new patch to prevent a build up of nematodes.  In March start looking for tubers.

I have one of my usual rounds of carrots and spring onions in the shadehouse ready to plant out, and I shall try to get them in this afternoon after work as well. The discipline of not putting planting off is one of the major benefits of the lunar calendar.  It’s only a dozen little tubes of seedlings to plant, quite do-able after work, and just half an hour of garden work at the right time means I have continuity of supply – fresh carrots out of the garden and no need to bother with freezing.

And we have a pot of left-over chicken stew for dinner, already made.  Red Leg the rooster has made three meals so far.  Will be nice to have dinner ready to just heat up on a planting day.

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Yesterday’s planting.  Note just three zucchini seeds, three tromboncino seeds, three cucumber seeds. I’m being restrained!  They are all fresh seeds, no leftovers from last year, and I have been sorting them like this before  taking them out to the shadehouse, so I am getting good germination rates.  I planted into potting mix in the shadehouse, and I shall choose only the strongest one or two of each to plant out into the garden when they are this size.

The rest I shall give away as seedlings, or just recycle the potting mix.

I already have the first of the summer fruiting annuals, planted in late winter, starting to bear.  And two other rounds planted since coming on.  It’s still only late spring, so there are at least a couple more rounds to plant if I want to be harvesting zucchini and cucumbers right through to the first frosts next year.

A lot of the summer fruiting plants tend to be space gobblers.  You stick in just three or four zucchini, doesn’t seem like much, but by the time you give them a few square metres each of space there’s the whole garden filled up, no room for spring onions and beetroot, let alone for another round of zucchini next month. And even using every zucchini recipe in the repertoire –  zucchini fritters for breakfast, frittata for lunch and fricassee for dinner – there are only so many zucchini you can eat, and only so many you can foist on innocent passers by.

I’ve learned. It’s taken me a long time to learn restraint in summer annual planting.   Even with tomatoes I’m starting to learn restraint.  I like to grow enough to bottle and dry some, but  I also like to be fairly diligent about not planting them in the same spots for two years in a row or they start to build up soil bourne diseases.  If I plant too many one year, the next year is lean – last year was a lean year with no bottled tomatoes for winter. Natural consequences.

Only the beans I can go nuts with.  What we don’t eat fresh I let dry on the vine for dried bean dishes.  But even then, I want to leave enough trellis room for at least three more rounds.

So restraint is the mantra.

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