This is the lettuces for April and May, planted on the leafy planting days last weekend.  These are my own seed so they are free and bountiful. But still there’s no point in planting more than a pinch of them.  We take lunches and lettuce is in it practically every day when it is in season, and we would have a salad for dinner a few times a week too.  But even so, half a dozen loose leaf lettuces planted each month keeps us supplied.

Buttercrunch is a really good hot weather variety, and this is probably the last round of them I shall plant.  Next month I’ll plant a Romaine loose leaf lettuce, probably Rouge d’Hiver and/or Brown Romaine. Planting different varieties each time gives me a bit of insurance, since they respond differently to weather and pests.  A few weeks of wet might wipe out my buttercrunches, but the romaines will likely survive it.

This trick of taking only the seeds I intend to plant, not the whole packet, out to the garden is a really good way of making a packet of seeds last through multiple successive plantings. I wrote a whole post about it a little while ago.  Such a simple trick for so much benefit.

This is that pinch of seeds today.  It was planted in a coolite box full of home made seed raising mix – half creek sand (fine gravel) and half mowed old dry cow pats.  I’ll prick these out to transplant and re-use the seed-raising mix for the next batch.  It will keep going for years with occasional top-ups.  I like using a deep coolite box like this because I find shallow trays or punnets are too vulnerable. I only need to neglect to water once, or get a really hot dry day when I’m not home and I lose them.  The deep boxes give me much more leeway.

There’s about 18 baby lettuces have come up.  These ones are ready to transplant, and today l shall pot on about a dozen of them, selecting the strongest.  Transplanting them at this two leaf stage is quick and easy and causes almost no transplant shock.  Culling the weaker seedlings is a good pest and disease control measure. It’s hard to do though – gardeners tend to have a weakness for baby plants! But if I plant all of them, I’ll just use up all the garden space and have no room for the next round.

This is the baby lettuces I shall plant out into the garden today.  They were planted as seed a month ago now, at the  leafy planting days at the beginning of January, so they are already a month old.  They were transplanted at the two leaf stage into their own pot filled with a rich mix of compost, worm castings, with a bit of creek sand for drainage.  They have been kept in the shadehouse where I remember to water them.  I’ll plant them out by digging a little hole and putting the whole potting mix and all in it, so they are never bare rooted and suffer no transplant shock at all.  Often I make little leaf pots and I can plant pot and all.  We will be eating them in March and April.

These lettuces were planted as seed back in December and out into the garden a month ago, and we’ve already been sneaking a few leaves from them. About a third of the lettuces in pots never make it out into the garden.  I select the strongest 6 or 8 and recycle the potting mix for the rest.  At any one time, there will normally be at least 3 beds with lettuce pickable in them, some getting to the end, some in the middle, some just starting to bear, 18 to 24 lettuces in all, plenty for us.  Small amounts of sequential planting like this is also less daunting.  Even if I am really really busy, I can normally find time to stick half a dozen lettuces in the ground.  Planting too many at once is not only a waste, it’s also a pretty effective deterrent to planting any at all!

This is the lettuces we’re eating mostly now.  They were planted as seed back in November, planted out into the garden in December, and I was able to start picking them from mid-January. I pick a handful of leaves when we want them. I much prefer loose leaf lettuces because I can do this.  These are a cos variety and they managed to cope with the heat waves of December and January, which was a bit impressive of them.

And this was the December/January lettuces.  I was impressed by the ability of this variety to survive the heat waves, and its resistance to bolting.  They were planted as seed in October, which would be the worst month of the whole year for lettuces in my part of the world.  My springs are often hot and dry, and the days are lengthening which spurs them to bolt to seed.  But these guys hung in through all that, and you can see from the length of bare stem at the bottom how much lettuce we ate from them.  I’ve left two of the slowest to bolt to bear seed.  I’ll collect the seed, dry it in a bowl on my verandah table, and that will be the seed I plant next spring.

I plant a pinch of seeds, pot on a dozen baby seedlings, and plant out 6 or 8 advanced seedlings each month, aiming to do it on the leafy planting days mainly because that’s a good reminder and procrastination buster.  The September to November plantings are a bit of a long shot and I don’t have high hopes for them, which means there is often a period from December to February when lettuces are in short supply. But for the rest of the year this strategy normally means there are several varieties of lettuce for picking any day I like.

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The most labour intensive work in my garden, for quite a few years now, is fencing.  Often I feel like those Greek fishermen you see in movies who spend most of their time mending nets.  Bandicoots are my big problem, and I’ve not yet found the perfect solution.

A proper permaculture solution would be a) get rid of the earthworms, so the bandicoots would go elsewhere looking for food, or b) to eat bandicoots. But besides the fact that they’re protected wildlife, they look a bit too much like big rats for me.  If I could imagine them a big guinea pigs and us as South Americans?  Nope.

Besides, I don’t imagine there would be enough meat on them to be worth the effort.  Killing and preparing meat is not easy – ethically, psychologically, physically – whether you raise animals or hunt them in the wild.  When you do it for yourself and make the connection between the real cost and the real value it changes the economics.

Not that I support vegetarianism as the solution to world food production ethics.  As soon as you start to seriously try to produce enough to feed yourself, you realise that plants and animals are part of a single ecosystem.  If you take animals out of the production loop, the substitutes are pretty unacceptable.  If you don’t have animal manure as a nitrogen source, you’re down to using ammonia produced by highly compressing and then super heating natural gas – a process that uses scarce unrenewables and produces lots of greenhouse gases.  If you don’t have bird manures as a source of phosphorus, you’re down to using ammoniated phosphates or superphosphate, made from scarce and depleting phosphate reserves.  It’s quite possible that running out of available phosphorus will get us before even global warming does.  If you don’t have animal protein sources, you’re down to eating a lot of broadacre legume crops, and doing that in a way that preserves animal habitats and avoids environmental poisons is hard too.

But given the personal and work cost of meat, you would want the result to be very appetising, and I can’t see bandicoots ever making the grade, so I’m down to trying to fence them out.  Buried sparrow wire lasts for around 5 to 8 years, but then it rusts along the ground line and they manage to break through.  In a single night they can make a garden bed look like Flanders fields.  Astounding the amount of effort they put into it.

I temporarily patched this fence to save the crops inside, but I know the patch won’t last.  So it’s trench digging time.  Lucky the ground is moist and soft, but I do wish I could think of a method that didn’t involve constant fence mending.

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Aren’t they pretty?  I was picking for an Indonesian style curry – ginger, galangal, turmeric, lemon grass, chili, Vietnamese mint (and I added  – Kaffir lime leaves and garlic as well) and I couldn’t resist the photo.  Add this spice base to an oily sauce and you have a wonderful curry sauce for fish or meat or poultry or vegetables.  Traditionally coconut milk is used for the creaminess, but that’s a bit out of my climate range and I avoid cans except for special occasions. I use the also traditional candlenuts or the less traditional macadamia nuts or cashews, or yoghurt, or just an extra splash of a nice flavoured oil  in place of coconut milk to give the sauce its creaminess.

In my subtropical climate, all these grow easily. The ginger and turmeric die right back over winter, so much so that I have to mark where they are or I lose them.  They re-sprout as soon as the weather gets warm and wet enough.  I had to try out a few varieties of ginger to find one that worked, but now it is well established and comes back every year.  They just like warmth and water. The Bishops Crown chilis are a medium hot chili growing on a short-lived perennial bush about 1.5 metres tall.  They are fruit fly prone, but so prolific the fruit flies can have most of them, and the chooks just get an extra protein source.  The lemon grass is a perennial clumping grass. I have to split the clumps every year or two or it outgrows itself.  The Vietnamese mint is a very hardy perennial running herb.  It runs, but not too far, so it doesn’t become a pest. It needs a severe pruning back every year too, or it outgrows itself.  The kaffir lime is a small citrus tree, suited to pot growing if you don’t have a lot of room.

The whole set is very nicely suited to a small garden in the subtropics, and perennial herbs and spices like this mean you can magic dinner out of  a fridge that is pretty well empty.

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