For large seeds like peas, it is not worth the seed germinating stage. I plant directly into a seedling raising mix that is mostly good compost with a bit of creek sand for drainage. For alkaline lovers like peas and beans I add a bit of wood ash to raise the pH.
The box is full of a home-made seed germinating mix, mostly creek sand with a bit of compost for water retention. I like using mowed cow pats better – I collect old, dried cow pats and run over them with the mower to yield a catcher full of shredded cow manure. It has few nutrients to speak of but holds water beautifully.
The dam is full of azolla – a little water weed that I encourage because it is symbiotic with a nitrogen fixing bacteria. Like legumes, it can grab nitrogen out of the air and stabilize it in a form that feeds soil and plants that are not so handily endowed with an in-built fertilizer factory.
My perfect storm is at an end, and life is returning to its usual very busy but kinda balanced state. To celebrate, I used this…
Stone Soup is a great recipe for a really low hassle dinner for a large and unknown number of people. The recipe is super simple. Boil a large pot of water and add a smooth river stone and some salt.
I haven’t written a post about gardening for a while, so I thought I should write one about not gardening. At the moment, I feel…
I have had a lovely leafy planting weekend getting grubby in the garden, restoring some sanity after the madcap week and setting me up for…
A wallaby got into the garden last night, and demolished my newly planted sweet potato patch. I spent my whole mowing session this morning devising recipes for wallaby – Turkish wallaby stew, marinated baked wallaby, wallaby kebabs….
This is the very best fruit tree planting day of the whole year, with the ground wet, our wet season ahead, and the chance of killer heat days now low, but still enough months of warm weather left for trees to establish before winter dormancy.
Many food plants are very good at calculating whether the days are getting longer or shorter, It’s how they tell what season it is. The scientific term is “photoperiodism”, and there’s more about it on the gardening page. There’s no point in cheating with photoperiodism. Plants that fell for tricks like that became extinct a long time ago!