The mice have been a pain this last year. They got all my pea and snow pea seeds for the first planting last autumn, and all my corn seeds for the first couple of plantings this year. With most plagues of anything, the populations of predators will immediately start building up in response to the increased food source, but the higher up the food chain you go, the slower the…
The exciting crop this week though is potatoes. I plant potatoes in August and February. The autumn ones planted this time of year do much better than the August planted spring ones. Potatoes originated in the high country of the Peru Bolivia border area. They like cooler temperatures, especially cooler nights, than we get here in summer.
It’s an in-between season for fruiting annual seed planting – too late now to put in more seed of eggplants or capsicums, too early for peas or broad beans.
I germinate everything in the shadehouse this time of year. Big seeds like beans and zucchini, I plant straight into individual pots. But small seeds like the leafy greens are all planted in a mixture of sand and mowed cow pats then transplanted at the two leaf stage into individual pots.
This is the very best fruit tree planting day of the whole year, with the ground wet, our wet season ahead, and the chance of killer heat days now low, but still enough months of warm weather left for trees to establish before winter dormancy.
Many food plants are very good at calculating whether the days are getting longer or shorter, It’s how they tell what season it is. The scientific term is “photoperiodism”, and there’s more about it on the gardening page. There’s no point in cheating with photoperiodism. Plants that fell for tricks like that became extinct a long time ago!
Today and tomorrow are the first leafy green planting days of the year. Witches are not superstitious, so I’m a bit skeptical about the lunar…