Today and tomorrow are the shortest days of the year.  I find it really difficult to appreciate short days, so I’m very glad I don’t live further south.  This far north the short days are not all that short – sunrise is 6.40 am and sunset just before 5 pm – a daylength of over 10 hours. At the other end of the year though, the days are not all that long.  At the summer solstice, the sun will rise around 5.45 am and set around 7.45 pm – a daylength of  14 hours.

Long day onions need 14 hours of daylight to bulb up, and we don’t get it for long enough this far north.  Onions are strongly day-length sensitive, so you need to choose your onion variety not by your climate but by your latitude.  This far north I have to choose short to medium daylength varieties, or they just go to seed without developing a bulb at all and I have a fairly short  planting season. Most of the year I’m limited to spring onions.

So this is the last onion planting opportunity of the year for me and there’s limited varieties that are both short enough daylength and able to be planted this late.  I’m planting Gladalan Brown this time.  I’d love to be able to get hold of some Wallon Brown seed since they are better for storage.

I’m planting the seed in seed raising mix – half creek sand, half mature compost – in my leaf tubes in the shadehouse.  I shall plant them out in the garden in about a month’s time, by digging a little hole and dropping in the whole tube, creating a little clump of half a dozen or so onions.  By spreading them around the garden like this I reduce the risk from pests and diseases. I keep them away from the peas though, since they are unfriendly to the bacteria that legumes like peas depend upon.

I have a fair number of onions of various kinds in the garden now, but we eat so many of them that there can never be enough!

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If I were at home today I would be planting potatoes.  In my frost free garden, I would be planting them straight out – making a small burrow and covering the seed potatoes with 10 cm or so of composty soil, giving each plant about 50cm of elbow room in each direction so that I can “hill up” the plants as they grow with more compost.

“Hilling up” just means piling soil, compost, and/or mulch up around the stem,  leaving 20 cm or so of leaves exposed. Potatoes are not really a root crop – the tubers grow off the stem, not the roots, so the more compost I am willing to devote to surrounding the stem, the more potatoes I will get. I would be picking a sunny, well drained spot in the garden that can do with a good top-dressing of compost after the spuds are finished so I am not tempted to stint the hilling up.

I would not be planting too many of them – we’re not active enough to eat high GI carbohydrates at every meal, and  now that I have no huge boys at home to feed the demand for potatoes has gone way down.  But home-grown new potatoes are such a gourmet delight I grow them, like the asparagus and strawberries, as a feature and delicacy rather than a staple.

If I were worried about frost, I would still be trying to get them started off now, even if it meant sprouting them in large pots of composty soil in a warm spot in the shadehouse.  Frost will kill the young leaves, but the hot nights of October will make the plant just burn all its calories rather than storing them in new tubers.

I would be planting the certified seed potatoes I ordered by mail order so I know they are not affected by a virus that progressively lowers the yield in each generation. I have been “chitting” them by leaving them out in the light (but not direct sun) on the verandah table to develop eyes since they arrived.  In my sub-tropical climate, they are bound to get aphids carrying the virus, but it won’t affect the yield in this generation.  It just means that I can’t save my own seed potatoes year after year.

But I’m not at home.  I’ve managed to organise a few days away at the beach. So potato planting will just have to wait till next week.  Lucky I’m not a purist!

A couple of months ago I wrote a post about time, thinking forward, and how much gardening involves being aware of the seasons in advance.  I still get trapped by the turning of the wheel of the year.  Stop, I’m not ready for you yet!

I’m not sure whether you call this mid-winter or late winter – it’s close to the cusp – in just under a week now we will start the steep bit of the climb towards the long hot days of summer.  It is really a little too early to start planting the seeds of the summer crops, even in my frost-free sub-tropical garden. Most of the summer fruiting crops use soil temperature, as least partly, as a signal to germinate.  But it is too late for any more peas or broad beans.  They would just be starting to bear when the October heat would bring on powdery mildew and aphids.

So I’m taking a gamble this weekend and putting in a few seeds of capsicums (Corno de Toro), eggplants (Snowy and Red), tomatoes (San Mazano), tomatillos, and basil (lime and Thai).  The seedling mix is quite sandy and I shall keep it in a sunny spot in the shadehouse so as to get the soil temperature up.  If I was really keen I’d use a window pane over the top to make a mini-glasshouse, and even put the box on top of a compost pile to use its heat.  But pushing too hard is not usually a good idea.  Like any kind of forcing, problems just break out somewhere else – in diseases or lack of pollinators or slow growth.  And in any case, I’ll be flat out finding room for them until the cabbages and cauliflowers and broccoli and broad beans are out.

For twenty years I’ve been trying to decide whether the lunar calendar is a bit of superstition – an old wives tale that seems to work only because you see what you are looking for – or whether it is folk wisdom accumulated by generations of gardeners with a lot more to lose by getting it wrong than we spoiled Westerners with a supermarket in reserve

And I still can’t decide.

In the end I have come to think that it doesn’t much matter. I find the calendar works just to keep a nice rhythm to my planting, and that’s enough. Anything else is icing.

There are two traps that the lunar calendar helps to neatly sidestep. The first is the boom-bust cycle of crops. One of the secrets of eating really well out of a garden is to plant very small quantities of a very big variety, and plant them sequentially.

Obtain a yield is the permaculture principle, but twenty lettuces ready at once is a problem, not a yield. It will have you trying to think up recipes for lettuce soup, and there is a good reason why lettuce soup has never become a culinary staple! You really only need two or three loose leaf lettuces bearing at once, but you need another two or three coming on to replace them, and another two or three seedlings nearly ready to plant out, and another two or three of the strongest just germinated babies selected for potting up. Even so, it’s a total of four or five in the garden and four or five in the shadehouse. You need rocket and aragula and mustard cress and mizuna and baby beets and celery and parsley and shallots to go with them, but you only need the same tiny quantities of all of them. You can eat very well out of a very small garden if you can get this right.

The other trap is the way the seasons have a habit of changing before you know it. The fashion industry has got the concept, that you need to be running sales on jackets and ordering stocks of bikinis before the feast of Candlemas (or Imbolc) which marks the still hidden start of spring. In just a couple of weeks now the days will begin to lengthen at an exponential rate. I’m still getting used to the idea of putting socks on before I go out to the garden in the morning, and already it is nearly time to start planting eggplants and capsicums again.

Time has a way of slipping away. The lunar planting calendar creates a little automatic reminder: what’s the season, what can be planted now, plant another round.

For the last few months the shadehouse has been full of leafy greens, but it is coming to the end of their season now. Seeds I plant now will need to cope with the long days, heat, dryness and wind of our usual October weather. They will need to resist the temptation to bolt to seed in the lengthening days, and most of all, they’ll need to warrant their spot in the garden when there will be eggplants and okra and capsicums and button squash all barracking for a spot.

So, this is a long way round to saying, today and tomorrow are leafy planting days according to the lunar calendar, and I’m planting out the advanced seedlings of  silver beet, spinach, broccoli, kale,  celery, parsley,  and pak choi.   But I’m planting a new round of seed of only amaranth and oakleaf lettuce, silverbeet and rocket, and saving the rest of the space for the summer crops that are just around the corner now.