In just a couple of days it will be Halloween in the southern hemisphere – the traditional festival marking the point when the day length levels out again, and we start the 3 month period of short days. The days will slowly shorten now until the shortest day of the midwinter solstice, then slowly lengthen again until the beginning of August.
Planted into potting mix a month ago. Look at it now. I think every single clove sprouted, and some of them now have leaves 30 cm tall. I have three boxes like this for planting out today, and I’ll put in another three boxes of cloves for planting out next month. Not that I need successive crops with garlic – they all get harvested at more or less the same…
The Broad Bean seeds I planted nearly a month ago are up and looking healthy, and I have a spot where some zucchini and squash have just come out, so today they’re going out into the garden. It marks a real turning point. The autumn planting is here!
In Spring and Summer, it’s the fruiting annuals that dominate the planting calendar. In Autumn and Winter, it’s the leafies. This is a big and interesting planting break, the first one for the season in this part of the world when I plant brassicas – kale, cauliflowers, broccoli, cabbages and chinese cabbages.
I only half believe that plants pay any attention at all to a lunar planting calendar. But humans are another matter.
The big thing I’ve learned in 30 years of gardening is that if you have a good design that uses the permaculture idea of stacking functions, and you get in a nice rhythm, you can keep a kitchen garden producing really well with amazingly little time or work. The other thing I’ve learned is that if you lose the rhythm, and the stitches in time start missing out on saving…
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.