These are the Rattlesnakes planted in July in the shadehouse and planted out in August, the seed a gift from Deb at Footprint Reduction in the Burbs. We’re picking enough to eat every day now, and they’ve joined the ranks of my favourite beans.

 These are the Blue Lakes and the Purple Kings, seed planted in August, planted out only a month ago.  They’re just starting to bear. They are saved seeds, two of my old favourite varieties.  The Blue Lakes are classic french beans, round pods that are tender and crunchy and green.  They are gorgeous young and steamed very briefly.  The Purple Kings have big flat pods a stunning purple colour.  They go green when cooked, and they have a robust beany flavour.  They’re best in slow cooked dishes. They both work well as beans for drying and storage too.  The Blue Lakes have seeds a bit like cannellini beans and the Purple Kings make a good kidney bean substitute.

These are the brown seeded snake beans, seed planted at the same time in August.  They’re a tropical bean, so they’re a bit slower to get going early in the season, and they really like it a bit wetter than it has been.  I’m looking forward to them – they are my favourite bean for salads and stir fries and anything where you want a bean that keeps its crunch.  They bear really prolifically, and the seed makes a decent azuki bean substitute.

And I was going to finish this post with the snake beans I planted out yesterday, seed planted a month ago and raised to lovely, healthy, 15 cm tall seedlings in the shadehouse, planted out this time of year they should just about catch up with the earlier ones.

Except a bandicoot got into the garden bed last night – I didn’t shut the gate tightly enough and he pushed it open a crack – and dug them all up, along with the capsicums and the eggplants and the tomatoes and the zucchini and the squash and the cucumbers.  I spent this morning trying to repair the damage, but he’s broken lots of stems.

I remember my son as a tiny tot answering one of my bandicoot blaspheming sessions with “But mum, bandicoots just like to dig”. They do indeed.

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Pretty well every year we get some days like this, and we have had them as early as this before.  It’s in the high 30’s today (that’s up near 100º for US readers). Most years it’s only a few days in the whole season but I am feeling for gardeners in USA who had a whole summer of drought and searing temperatures this year – the warmest year on record.  We have better water storage now than we have ever had, but still I am looking at dam levels and wondering how much we should reserve for firefighting, and how many days like today I can keep water up to my garden.

Our house is well designed and defended – a dam in front and downhill from the house, and another at the top of the drive. No gum trees close to the house.  Firebreaks and tracks. Lantana and weeds brushcut for a good distance around, and the geese are doing an excellent job of mowing.  But the recommendations after the Kinglake fires were that no home is defensible in the kind of catastrophic fire conditions that have always been an outside chance but are now fast becoming an inside one.

I’ve had sprinklers on early this morning, and I have mulch several inches thick over all my beds.  But still, planting leafy greens in these conditions is a big ask.  These lettuce seedlings were raised to advanced seedlings in the shadehouse and planted out into deeply mulched bed with lots of water-holding organic matter in the soil.  I only planted half a dozen of them – I don’t want to try to keep water up to more.

The beans are much better at coping with frizzle weather than lettuces. Even cucumbers are better.  I’ve planted another round of lettuces, rocket, and basil (sweet, lime, and Thai) in a seed box in the shadehouse, and potted on those germinated last month into individual pots to hold for another month in the shade, where I can individually water them.  But with the chances of frizzle weather increasing exponentially as the Arctic melts, I’m watching where every drop of water goes.

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I have some perennials in the shadehouse that I am waiting for an opportunity to plant out – some sage and thyme, some seedling lemon trees and an avocado tree – but there are bushfires not too far away and the weather is brutal on plants right now.  In some places this will be a good time of year to plant perennials. Here, early autumn is a better bet.  Our wet season runs from January through to April, and since we hardly get winter frosts, there is enough time for things to establish before winter dormancy.

This time of year in this part of the world it’s all about fruiting annuals. I have more corn and beans and tomatoes and eggplants and capsicums and trombochino and squash and pumpkins and cucumbers and zucchini in the shadehouse than I will have room to plant out.  So it’s just another round of the regular, staple roots this time – carrots and beets.  I hate daylight saving. It steals time from me in the morning when I could usefully use it and gives it back to me of an evening.  But I managed this morning to find half an hour to plant out these beets, pot on the ones in the seed germinating box, and plant another round of seed.  Hopefully I’ll get to the carrots tomorrow – bit late for the planting break but near enough.

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It’s dry and windy and hayfever weather here today, and I wonder whether our water supplies will hold out for what is shaping up as a very dry year.  Last year I planted the corn out directly, making a little hollow in the mulch, digging a single forkful of the composty soil beneath, planting two seeds per station and weeding out the weaker one as they grew.  It’s wasteful of seeds, and hard to sacrifice all those babies, but if you only plant one seed per spot any non-germinations leave a gap. And you always lose a few, to birds or mice or drying out or just the luck of genes.

This year I’m planting all my corn in the shadehouse in little leaf tubes I make out of the leaves of a decorative plant I need to prune regularly, secured with twigs and filled with a mix of compost, worm castings, and a little bit of creek sand for drainage.  This is the second round for the year, and I’ll get another one or two next month and the one after.

Partly it’s so that I can plant out only the ones that germinate and are strong and healthy, in a nice close pattern in a block with no gaps.

Partly it’s to conserve space, or rather space-time.  Corn is wind pollinated and won’t self pollinate. It does best in a block of at least a few dozen plants, with enough warm dry weather when it flowers (at the top) so the wind can blow the pollen from one plant around the silks of the corn on its neighbours.  So it needs some space.  And corn is also a heavy feeder so any old space won’t do.  The chooks are still busy clearing and fertilising the bed I want to plant these out into.

But mostly this year it’s to conserve water.  If I planted them out, I’d be watering a whole bed every day, even twice a day in this hot dry weather. I can keep this box of seed well watered in the shadehouse till they are nice strong little plants with well developed roots.  I shall plant them out by digging a little hole and putting the leaf tube in it, then pulling the soil and mulch back in around.  If I am lucky enough to get some rain before planting, I’ll water them in but from then on they’ll only get the sprinkler about once a week in dry weeks.

Besides the corn, I’m potting up the tomatoes, eggplants, and capsicums  I planted last month.  They’ll grow on in pots for another few weeks before they need to be planted out and by then it might have rained.

A couple of La Niná years and you forget just how precious water is.

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