Summer is a much harder gardening season than winter in Australia. Most years there’s a set of frizzle days sometime over the summer – days when the temperature is up around 40ºC for a few days in a row.  It can be really disheartening.  Your garden can be looking good one day, then a few days later it’s all fried.

What to do:

Shade. Don’t be afraid of shade. European gardening advice is go for full sun, but not much likes Australian full sun in summer.   The perfect garden site has full sun from the north east round to the north west (because the winter sun actually rises in the north east and sets in the north west), but it has shade in the east and west. Short lived trees like leucaena work well in my subtropical climate.  I can plant them on the east and west of my circular garden beds and they create dappled shade in summer. They are legumes so as a side benefit, they fix nitrogen from the air, and I can use the prunings for mulch as well.

I also plant very intensively so my garden plants shade each other.  Using up all your water and other resources on a small area makes much more sense than spreading it thin to maximise your garden area.  Closely spaced plants shade each other.  And I use the fencing in my very intensively fenced beds as trellises, and grow climbers in preference to dwarf varieties of everything possible.  Climbing beans, cucumbers, tomatoes and squash add to the shade.

Mulch. I try to have a good 15 to 20 cm of mulch cover over my whole garden before the start of summer. I use huge amounts of mulch, for no-dig garden bed creation, for sheet composting and for weed eradication.  In summer though its most important functions are water conservation and insulation.  My most important garden tool is my 5 hp Honda walk-behind self-propelled mower.  With it I can get a trailer load of mulch in less than an hour, and it’s good exercise and meditation at the same time.

Unfortunately the better your soil, the less long-lasting the mulch cover.  Mulch cover over very biologically active soil disappears before your eyes, eaten by all the soil-living creatures and turned into compost.

Water : You do need a fair bit of water. I just use sprinklers and a hose because I have to be frugal with water and that gives me more control. I’ve never tried wicking beds but the idea is interesting and the theory is sound.  I avoid fixed watering systems because I don’t think they actually save labour. Luckily I’m a morning person because the best time to water is in the early morning.

This year is a La Nina year and the dams are full. Some years though I am trying to eke every skerrick of value out of every drop of water. But even in La Nina years, I don’t water every day. Seeds and seedlings in the shadehouse get water every day.  My advanced seedlings get watered in well at planting out. But the garden beds only get a sprinkler if there has been no rain at all for a fortnight or so.  If you water too frequently, root systems learn that the best place to get water is the top 10 cm, and they concentrate there – which is exactly what you don’t want in a heat wave. If you water deeply and infrequently, they chase the water down and that sets them up much better for frizzle days.

Plant the right things: Leafy greens have a really hard time – I generally don’t plant them during summer much at all.  Big leaved things like cucumbers and zucchini like the heat but have a hard time unless you really have lots of water and mulch, so I plant few of them and give those few all the water, rather than having too many and spreading the water too thin.

Plant sequentially: A week of frizzle weather will wipe out everything adolescent in the garden, but seeds and seedlings in the shadehouse are likely to survive, and mature plants with well developed root systems are likely to survive. If you have used up all the space you have available for pumpkins, for example, in one planting, you’ve put it all on black. If instead you have some at every stage, you’re only likely to be facing a few week gap in the harvest.

We are close now to Lammas, the traditional festival that marks the point when the day length passes the point, half way between the solstice and the equinox, when the days begin to shorten at an exponentially faster rate.  (There’s a nice simple graph that explains it here.)  The odds of getting more frizzle days now are rapidly shrinking.  The season coming, at least here in northern NSW,  is a much better one for gardeners.  The best thing I can do for my garden this time of year is go to the beach. The chooks need some cuttlefish and shell grit, the seaweed brew needs refreshing, and I’ve already ticked off one of my New Year’s resolutions.

I went out and mowed this morning early.  Not as early as I would have liked – the mower is noisy and there are neighbours within a hundred metres of the community centre lawn,  so I held back till 7.30 am.  I’m normally up before 5 these mornings, so it meant I had a couple of hours in the garden and shadehouse before mowing.  And still, that gives me a nice hour and a half before 9 am, then another half an hour to unload the mulch and I am in, showered and cool by 9.30.

Next week is predicted to be heavy rain and a nice thick layer of mulch will mean the chooks aren’t squelching around in mud.  The garden needs lots of mulch to survive days like this, and I need an hour or two of physical activity.  I can spend the whole middle of the day writing now without compunction.

I put sprinklers on when I first got up, and moved them around in those few hours, so that by 9.30 every bed had had a good deep watering.  It is days like this that I reap the value of soil with a lot of water holding capacity.  Years of adding organic matter pay off in being able to water heavily and have it all sucked up by the soil. Luckily, though it is a much drier year than average, our water storage is good enough now to afford the water.  Some years I have just had to watch the garden die on days like this.

We don’t have enough to water all the fruit trees, but I use all the grey water on them. We have a couple of trees full of mangoes just about ripe too.  It looked like a bumper year a few months ago but a spell of severe dry made them drop most of the fruit.  Still though, there are enough in our seven fruiting trees to make a few year’s supply of green mango pickle and mango chutney and  still have more than we can eat.

I have heat tolerant tall climbers – snake beans, indeterminate cherry tomatoes, tromboncino, cucumbers helping to shade beds.  In winter and spring, tall climbers are restricted to the south side of beds where they will never shade anything else.  But starting in mid-spring I begin planting them with an eye to heat waves, so that they extend around the western side and give the lettuces and rocket and beets and basil a bit of respite from the afternoon sun.

Not many lettuces in.  They need a lot of water and still they bolt to seed this time of year.  I have a few, of heat tolerant varieties, but my summer salads are not much based on salad greens.  This time of year, salads are best based on tomatoes (at their best now) or beans or capsicums  or cucumbers.   A heat wave sometime about now is so predictable that my garden is pretty clear of the things that are really vulnerable, and the few there are I can afford to sacrifice and replant when the weather changes.

The shadehouse is full of fairly advanced seedlings, each in its own little pot of good compost mixed with creek sand.  It is much easier to keep them watered and cool in the shadehouse.  I’ve recycled quite a few seedlings over the last month.  Germinated them in the seed raising boxes, transplanted them into pots, waited for a spell of the right kind of weather for planting out, recycled them into the seedling raising mix again and planted a new batch of seed when it didn’t happen.  There is a small amount of work wasted in doing this, but it saves a lot off work trying to establish seedlings in tough conditions.  I’m hoping that the rain predicted for new year will herald a few weeks of good planting weather and I can get all the seedlings in the shadehouse now out and established.

I don’t get frost in my sub-tropical garden, so winter is a good growing season here.  It is the frizzle days of summer that are the challenge, when a whole garden can be wiped out in one brutal day.  But just like gardeners in frost-prone climates, you develop a range of strategies to work the odds.

We bought a second hand washing machine a little while ago, just by chance from a couple who had retired to Lennox Head leaving a family home with a great big garden to move into a beach house with a tiny garden. They were doing spectacular things in a tiny space and we talked gardens over tea for so long we nearly forgot why we came.  As we were leaving we were offered a packet of bean seeds, a variety that had been passed down to this great grandfather from his grandfather, passed down through at least six generations and who knows before that.

They are really long, flat beans with a dark reddish brown seed, so sweet that two-year-old Teo comes out to “help” me pick.  He’s not tall enough to reach them but he knows he will be able to raid them straight out of the basket (and that’s called “helping” in Grandma’s garden). They are stringless and delicious lightly steamed too, and they’ve survived the run of 40°C  days this last week (104°F for friends in USA).  My new favourite beans.  Washing machine beans.

My established garden all survived the heat wave – tomatoes and cucumbers, beans and snake beans, pumpkins and squash, zucchini and tromboncino, eggplants and capsicums, basil and spring onions, leeks and Molokhia, rocket and carrots, and all the perennial and semi-perennials.  But anything I had planted in the last few weeks that hadn’t had time to get roots down deep and wide enough suffered despite all my Frizzle Weather strategies. I had planted out some well advanced beetroot seedlings a couple of weeks ago and none of them made it through.

And I have something –  I think a blue tongued lizard – eating seedlings in the shadehouse as they come up.  The lizard is prime suspect because whatever it is is strong enough to break through the netting I have over the seedling boxes.  Today is cool and drizzly, perfect gardening weather.  This week is predicted to be showers.  I have gaps in the garden and nothing in the shadehouse to fill them.  This is cruel!

I’ve planted some Nantes carrot seed directly this morning, which might well be folly – we only need another day of heat wave next week or the week after and they’re gone.  But I’m betting now on the start of Autumn-ish weather.  I’m also planting out into the misty rain another round of beans, and just a couple each of all the curcubits – squash and zucchini and cucumbers and tromboncinos.  And some spring onions and beets and the first of the season’s parsnips.  And in the shadehouse some more basil and lemon basil, Paris Island Cos and red mignionette lettuces, leeks and mizuna.

And some strong wire over the seedling boxes.

I’m very proud of these.  Eggplants are one of my difficult crops. In my garden they are prone to attack by flea beetles.  The flea beetles themselves are a nuisance – they chew holes in the leaves – but not critical.  But they spread virus diseases and the nightshade family (that eggplants belong to) is very prone to virus diseases.  And I live in an area where wild tobacco (Solanum mauritianum) is a  prevalent weed so it is impossible to break the cycle of disease by just having a break from all nightshades.

I’d love to be able to put my finger on exactly what I did right with these.  The seedlings were bought – something I rarely do, and only because I hadn’t planted seed (too disheartened after last year’s dismal eggplant harvest), and then succumbed.  They are “Little Finger”, a variety I’ve tried before, but maybe this is a particularly strong cultivar?  They were planted late in the season – usually I try to get them started in September but these didn’t go in until well into October.  They were planted in a bed that has been well chooked – that bed had the chooks on it at the peak of my crazy busy time and they were there for much longer than usual.  But the bed had tomatoes in it before that, and they’re the same family… ?

My best theory is that they are companion planted with Thai basil on all sides, and the Thai basil was well advanced when the seedlings went in.  Because the bed is very fertile, the Thai basil has really grown big and leafy, but it wanted to bolt to seed a bit so I’ve been breaking off  the seed heads and dropping them as mulch around the eggplants.

I’m going to be sure to save seed from these, and try to remember to run the Thai basil experiment again next year.  But meantime, I’m relishing the idea of Smoky Eggplant and Pomegranate Dip with the pomegranates just coming into season too.

I know in many parts of Australia you are coping with frizzle weather, and my fingers are crossed that there are no fire catastrophes.  But here it is cool and overcast with occasional showers – jealous? So I’ve planted another round of beans – Red Seeded Snake Beans and Rattlesnakes this time, just a couple of metres of fence with each.  I’ve planted zucchini and squash and cucmbers and potkins, just a couple of each.  I won’t plant any more tomatoes – I want to save some spots for next year and I’ve learned to be very careful to rotate tomatoes.  I’ll plant out just two more advanced capsicum seedlings, and I’ve planted another dozen sweet corn.

With any luck we won’t get your heat wave this time, I’ll be able to keep water up to them and they’ll survive, but if they don’t, at least it’s only this one batch of successional planting that I miss.

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