Tromboncino is my new favourite vegetable.   I got my seed from Diggers and I think they will displace zucchini in my garden. They grow like a very rampant cucumber, and by using lots of vertical space they conserve my precious intensively fenced ground space.

In my enthusiasm this year, I planted a couple of vines each planting break from late winter on. I now have one or two vines in each bed, growing up the south side fence, and I’ve got to the point where the neighbours and the chooks are just about over tromboncino and I don’t dare go away for the weekend for fear of them taking over the whole garden. Luckily I have a good repertoire of zucchini recipes, that all seem to work well with tromboncino.

I am going to try to see how long they will keep growing through winter. I have one vine that is now almost a year old – survived right through last winter. It is not bearing well enough any more to justify it’s spot, and last winter was very mild,  but still, it’s impressive.

I have let a couple of the fruit grow out to save seed.  This is my first attempt at saving seed from them, so it’s experimental, but I figure they probably go much like pumpkin or cucumber.  I have been picking the fruit at this size – about 30 to 50 cm – for eating, so it has been interesting watching these ones growing, and growing, and growing.

The bulb at the bottom has the seeds in it, a bit like a butternut pumpkin. I’ve washed and dried them, and I shall test a couple for germination this month, though I suspect like the rest of their family they are really a hot weather crop.  We have been eating all the neck part like a pumpkin. It’s not the best pumpkin ever – a bit bland and watery, like a gramma – but it works fine in soups and stews, diced and steamed as a side dish, or in muffins and scones.

If the zombocalypse hits, I think we’ll be living on tromboncino, Jerusalem artichokes, and bush turkeys.

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Roots and perennials planting days from today through to Tuesday afternoon. This is a good time of year for planting perennials in my part of the world. We are past the frizzle days of high summer, but still enough time left for things to establish before going into winter dormancy, and be really ready to take off in spring. We are also coming into what is traditionally our wet season, though in this La Ninã year, that really isn’t a factor. The ground is so wet, it’s even a disincentive.  Although, I guess,  if you’re planting a tree that will be there for hundreds of years, it’s not a bad thing to see the potential planting sites at their extremes.

I’m not really ready for this planting break – it’s been so busy since Christmas – I’ve been chasing my tail. I haven’t got seed potatoes, and I need to visit the local nursery for trees, and the very wet weather has not been kind to my carrot seedlings. Every time I look at the garden, I see so much wanting doing. But I’ve learned that if I just get out an do something, at least on the planting days, I can keep production happening even in the frantically busy start to the year, and avoid that spot in three months time when the chickens of missed plantings come home to roost.

So today I’ll plant out these beetroot babies, and the survivors of the carrots – there’s enough of them to bridge the gap. I’ll get some spots ready for potatoes. We don’t eat spuds every meal. Too many carbohydrates for people who don’t do physical work all day, and who aren’t (deliberately anyhow!) growing. But home grown new season fresh spuds are a gourmet delight, a treat, and for a month or so, a couple of times a year, they’re worth the calories. The November harvest, of the spuds planted in August is the smaller harvest.  It heats up early in spring here, and the hot weather slows down their storage of carbohydrates. The second harvest, in May of spuds planted now is usually the bigger one. So tomorrow I’ll get some seed spuds and if I have the spots all ready for them it will only take a few minutes to pop them in.

I’ll put in another round of carrots and spring onions and beets, and also a dozen pots of parsnips using the same technique as the carrots.  I’m not in an ideal climate for parsnips – they like it cooler for longer than we get. But they are one of my very favourite vegetables so I persevere. They take around 5 months to be harvestable,  and the best ones are those harvested in winter, which means planting in summer. But they’re trickier to germinate than carrots, specially in hot dry weather, and if it’s too wet, they won’t like it either. But if I’m lucky, I may get some ready for harvesting from midwinter on.

And I may just manage a visit to the local nursery on Tuesday on my way through town. We really don’t need more fruit trees, but it’s tempting.

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The bean jars are filling up nicely, but with the wet weather lately, today’s pick was this much for us:

And this much for the chooks:

I love it that they aren’t wasted.  Along with some greens and house scraps, this will feed my chooks for the week. Though they are very spoiled having me shell them for them! Mostly I just pull the whole vines down at the end of their life, and either throw them holus bolus to the chooks, or just move the chooks onto the bed to clean it up ready for the next planting.  They can shell their own.

Beans are so productive. Green beans all summer and dried beans all year, all from just a few dozen seeds planted each month in spring and summer. I have any number of bean recipes – they’re a staple in our household – a good, filling, low GI, high protein, food that can carry a lot of flavours.

And the high protein chook food is a bonus.

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It’s a fruiting planting break by my new lunar calendar, this afternoon through to tomorrow night. We’re off to visit our daughter today. Hopefully I’ll get to do some planting before or after work tomorrow, because I have a shadehouse full of seedlings that are close to overgrown now and need planting out.

I am planting out tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, squash, sweet corn and beans, and putting in another round of all of them as seed. Besides my usual three kinds of beans I have some Rattlesnake beans, homegrown seed, that were given to me. The seed are very beautiful, a bit like pinto beans. They’ll make great beans for shelling and storing, and I’m told they’re a really good flavoured green bean. I’ve germinated most of the seed for planting now. Our winter up here in northern NSW doesn’t usually strike until June, so there’s enough time for a full life cycle and for me to collect seed for planting next spring.  But I’ve saved a dozen of the seeds for insurance, for planting next spring, just in case they don’t like our autumn weather, or in case I have another of my mice disasters.

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. There is apparently a mouse plague over the whole country, brought on by the wet weather. 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 response time. The butcher birds, magpies, currawongs, owls, and snakes will all be breeding up. If I poison the mice, I am likely to poison them too, which will take me backwards in the mouse wars. If I trap them in breakneck traps and throw the bodies out, I feed scavengers like goannas rather than hunters. Best thing to do in response to any population explosion is to try to deal with the consequences in the short term, make sure you are providing the best possible conditions for predators to take advantage of it, and sit it out.

My partner brought me home a present last week. We don’t usually go anywhere near the big chain hardware stores, but he had to go there for something else, and with all my grizzling about mice, it seduced him. The idea is great. It is supposed to detect movement and it’s eyes flash this really evil yellow and it makes what you could, with some imagination, suppose was an owl’s hooting noise.

Trouble is, and it’s one of my perennial complaints, Chinese made junk is our culture’s cargo cult, with all the same characteristics as the New Guinea cargo cult of the late 40’s and 50’s.  The movement detector doesn’t work, with the result that it just goes off non-stop and flattens the batteries.

I’m hoping it works just by looking a bit like an owl anyway. It joins Henry guarding the garden. In fact neither of them do nearly as well as this little guy. I’m hoping he is having a very active love life!

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