The days are getting longer at an exponentially faster rate now so everything wants to bolt. Next week will be fruiting planting days, and this time of year that’s easy. Beans and cucumbers and zucchini and squash and tomatoes and capsicums and all their relatives. But this week it’s just a small box of seed – lime and Thai and sweet basil, parsley, amaranth, and I think that will do.
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.
The turmeric is flowering, such gorgeous flowers. They’re hidden deep within the foliage, but the plant is very good looking anyway. At least in summer. It doesn’t work so well as a decorative plant because it dies right back in winter – a period of yellowing daggy looking leaves, followed by bare ground with not a trace of the bounty underneath.
I live smack bang in fruit fly territory. Bactrocera tryoni – Queensland Fruit Fly. They seem to be getting, if anything more prolific as the climate heats up, and I think over the years I’ve tried every known method of control, short of spraying, which I can tell without trying it wouldn’t work.
t’s a nice planting day today and I’m sort of ready – which is just as well because I have to go out and I’ll only get an hour or so in the garden today. I have advanced seedlings of carrots ready to go out, and places to put them, and seed raising mix for another batch of seed using my standard method for carrots. And the same for beetroot…
I have Principe Borghese and yellow cherry tomatoes. Both varieties are chosen for their fruit fly resistance and mildew resistance (autumn is often wet here), and they will cope with cold, so I expect them to keep bearing well into winter now. I have one Blackjack zucchini. There are several bearing now, and the tromboncino. I’m learning not to overdo it on zucchinis! I have a couple of Rod’s Lebanese…