I try not to do gluts. With the new, tiny garden area sequencing has become even more important – 60cm trellised row of snow peas each month, no more or I will run out of room to plant before the end of the season.
The green doesn’t look real does it? But it is, late winter in my garden and skies that look too blue to be real and garden greens that look too green to be real.
Tall climbers planted around the south side of a bed will never shade anything to the north of them, and with roots in newly cleared and fertilised and mulched ground and all that vertical space for sun capture, this is the most highly productive space in my whole garden.
Sequential planting is such a lifesaver! This whole year seems to have been routines-out-the-window so far. I love routines. Once you have worked a system down to the point where it just works and you turn it into a habit, it just gets done in incidental time, and incidental time doesn’t count.
I think this is one of the huge risks in climate change, that urban people completely don’t get. Farmers gamble, constantly. They make educated, considered, intuitive guesses based on gut feeling, the tiny signals that intimacy and experience allow. Those guesses are sometimes right, sometimes wrong. Bad guessers go broke or resort to mining the land. Good ones get it right more often than wrong and succeed. Climate change is…
One of the most important insights that really changed the way I garden was realising just how long plants are babies for.
This is the time of year to appreciate all the brassica family. Not too much longer now and keeping the cabbage moths off them will be too much of an effort. It’s also the time of year to make the most of spinach and silver beet.
I love parsnips, and I can get them most of the year, but the best ones are the ones harvested in winter, which are the ones planted in late spring – the absolute hardest time to keep things moist for weeks while they decide to germinate.
Does it seem odd eating just one vegetable for dinner? We do it quite often. Variety is the key in nutrition, but it doesn’t all have to be in the one meal. I also love platter meals, where dinner is served on one platter for everyone to help themselves from, rather than individual plates. It’s a nice sociable way to eat. This recipe is great for a fast, easy, informal…
Saag just isn’t photogenic. Unfortunately, because it is very delicious, and I have bucketloads of silverbeet (chard if you are not in Australia) in the garden at the moment and saag is one of the very best recipes I know to use bucketloads of it (and still want to come back for more tomorrow).