This is a post from this same day, five years ago. And here I am again, with even the mice reliable as ever.
We went to Brisbane last weekend and I missed the leafy planting day, so this weekend is a garden catch up.
I’m planting in seed trays:
- silver beet
- cauliflowers
- kale
- leeks
- lettuce
- parsley
- spinach
- celery
- dill
- coriander
- rocket
- raddichio
- cabbage
- yukina
- broccoli
Just a few seeds of each – there will be at least a couple more rounds of most of them before the season is over, and I don’t want to run out of room. Most of these are frost hardy, at least for the very light frosts I might get, and some (like kale) will cope with heavy frost.
I’m planting into pots filled with a mix of mature compost, creek sand, and wood ash from our slow combusion stove:
- the leafies that I germinated last planting break, now at the two leaf stage and easy to transplant.
- Climbing peas (Telephone)
- Snow peas (Oregon Dwarf)
- Broad Beans (Aquadulce)
The mice got about half of the pea seeds I planted last time. The cold snap has brought them in. But that’s ok, I potted up about a third more than I wanted to plant out anyhow, so I’m not too far down.
I’m planting out into the garden:
- the leafies I germinated time before last and potted on last month, now 10 to 15 cm tall and going strong
- the survivors from the mouse attack
And that will bring me back up to date!
Our first year has been really good in helping us decide what we do and don’t want to grow. At first, we tried to grow everything, and then gradually realised what we really like to eat, and what we can do without.
Sooo…we’re going to grow lots of kale (and forego spinach and silverbeet – no-one in the house will eat silverbeet, and the spinach was never as popular as the kale), peas (but no broadbeans – they grew well, but again, no eaters), beans, broccoli, rocket and maybe some cabbage (although they take so long to grow that they end up all buggy).
Because we’re slightly shoddy gardeners, the garden is full of self-seeded bits and pieces at the moment, including perennial leeks, broccoli and some confused tomatoes, which keep fruiting, thinking they’ll get to ripen in the 4C weather! 🙂
Continental parsley is now a perennial – it grows on the very edge of the bed and sits on the outer edge of the chook dome, so the girls leave it alone. Basil is coming up everywhere (we let lots of things go to flower for the bees) and still going strong despite the cold!
Exactly! Easy gardening is growing just the right amount of just the things you love at just the time you want them. Too many people make hard work of trying to grow things they don’t really want anyway. We love spinach, under an egg on toast, in a spinach and feta pie, in a curry – but if there are no eaters, there’s no fun in growing it. And I agree with you about cabbage. I think in very cold climates, because it stores quite well, it would be a staple. But we only eat a couple of cabbages a season. I’d usually prefer a Chinese cabbage – and they’re much faster and easier to keep free from bugs.
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