This is a good time of year for planting perennials in my part of the world. We are past the frizzle days of high summer, but still enough time left for things to establish before going into winter dormancy, and be really ready to take off in spring. We are also coming into what is traditionally our wet season, though in this La Ninã year, that really isn’t a factor.…
The mice have been a pain this last year. They got all my pea and snow pea seeds for the first planting last autumn, and all my corn seeds for the first couple of plantings this year. With most plagues of anything, the populations of predators will immediately start building up in response to the increased food source, but the higher up the food chain you go, the slower the…
Remember the mulberry cuttings I took back in late winter? A lot of them failed to take. They grew some lovely healthy looking green leaves but it was a trick – just the cutting drawing moisture up. When I checked, there was no real root development. But a decent number did take.
From late winter until now, I plant climbers – beans, cucumbers, squash and tomatoes – along the fences all the way round from the eastern to the western side, and sometimes (usually a bit more lightly) on the northern side too. The tallest beans even start to climb across the netting over top of my beds, the beans hanging down like fruit. But from late summer onwards, I start planting…
You need real tomatoes – sun ripened, in season, varieties bred for taste rather than transportability and artificial ripening. For real decadence a few different varieties so you can savour each kind.
One of the best things about planting advanced seedlings is the head start you get. I think people tend to forget how long plants spend germinating and as babies. These seedlings are a month old already. If I’d planted them directly a month ago, this bed would have spent all that time hardly used, just inviting weeds.
It’s such a good disguise. It looks just like a ladybeetle. If I didn’t catch it actually in flagrante eating the leaves on my squash, I would think it was a good guy.
The trouble with luffas is that I want them for Christmas, to go with my handmade soap. But I can’t plant them early enough here for them to mature and then allow time to clean and dry before Christmas.
I really am too far north for brussels sprouts, and climate change is only making it worse. Every few years, just often enough to keep my hopes up, I jag a combination of variety, timing, and weather that gets me a crop. But most times there is just not a long enough period of cool weather for them to form sprouts, and I get loose leafy sprouts. I should give…
I‘ve started bringing in the garlic. It’s a good crop this year, which I’m really pleased about. I think, like a lot of gardeners, I was extra conscientious about planting this year. I really really didn’t want to end up buying Chinese garlic. As well as all the usual concerns about what agricultural chemicals may have been used growing it, and the methyl bromide treatment demanded by Australian quarantine, there…