Late summer harvest

Feb 28th is the last day of the Australian summer, so the demands of harvest must interrupt my dissertation on self-sufficiency as I help the cook process the burgeoning tomato crop.

There is always a hiatus in the garden at this time of year, as heat and lethargy combine to drag our footsteps as we wait for the first rains of autumn to kick-start the soil and the planting of autumn and winter crops. Sheer weariness has set in, as it always does, as we keep water up to growing plants to bring them through to harvest.

But some things are – magically – blooming, especially the sunflower crop, which is a delight to the eye and a feast for the bees. These ‘Multi-Flora’ sunflowers – with many blooms on the same stem - also make wonderful gifts for visitors and birthday celebrations.

Fresh basil, red onions and ripe tomatoes combine in tomato salads to offset the on-going cost of water. Lettuce and avocado also combine in green salads, green beans are a common side dish, and late asparagus shoots still pop up to delight the questing cook.

This year our crop of ’Golden Sunrise’ tomatoes is prolific. This is a variety that was rare enough when I obtained the first seeds from a fellow gardener more than a decade ago. Now they have disappeared altogether from the seed catalogues, and I rejoice that they are still to be found in my garden. Their small 2.5 cm (1”) fruit are low in acidity and less prone to the viral diseases that plague their larger and redder brethren. I pick out the best fruit and carefully scrape out the seeds to carry on their line into future generations.

First coffee flowers

As a seed-saver, there aren’t many vegetable flowers that I don’t recognise. But the first small flower buds along the inner branches of the coffee bushes caught me by surprise.

I’d never seen a coffee bush before I purchased these two in pots some years ago, and I’ve watched them with some concern each year as they weather the hot Australian sun during our long summers. Burning at the leaf margins – despite plenty of water – suggests that solar irradiation might be the problem. Far from their cloudy mountainous home in Ethiopia, and adapted to a narrow range of temperature and humidity, growing coffee on the Adelaide Plains half a world away is a longshot at best.

For all of these reasons, I’d left stand a large comfrey plant that has been growing between the two coffee bushes, shielding their lower leaves with its own broad hairy ones and stabilising the humidity within the microclimate of its canopy. Comfrey plants are also valuable for their ability to draw up nutrients such as potassium from deep in the sub-soil.

But enough’s enough – the comfrey plant was starting to provide altogether too much shade and had to be cut back. And lo and behold – the first coffee flowers were there!

It’s a shade too soon to be putting the kettle on, but there’s sufficient pleasure in raising new  unfamiliar plants. And with recent rain gathered into bins below the chicken shed eaves, there is also the bonus of comfrey tea  - a natural fertilizer - that will come from soaking all those comfrey leaves.

Summer (vegetable) flowers

It’s the summer solstice in the southern hemisphere – the longest day of the year – and its time to remind myself that there’s more to the garden than the seemingly endless list of chores which always peaks at around this time on the Adelaide Plains.

The Christmas morning garden tour will capture the state of my crops – just now it’s time to capture the quiet beauty of some of the vegetable flowers that are blooming in their understated fashion.

Some of these flowers are to be found on plants that have gone beyond their useful productive phase as far as the cook is concerned and remain in the garden only to provide the gardener with next year's seeds. These include leek, onions, celery, lettuce, carrot, parsnips and many of the herbs.

Various other plants must flower before they set their crops – potatoes, beans, tomatoes, chillies, zucchinis, eggplants, capsicums and pumpkins – to name just a few.

Many vegetable and herb flowers are small – only the camera can capture their complexity and intrinsic beauty.

Others – such as those of the cucurbits (pumpkins and zucchinis) – have large and showy blooms that are either male or female and so have different shapes and internal structures.

Some flowers  - such as celery - form large bushes.

Even comfrey – a herb – sets many flowers in late Spring that bees enjoy.

Some of the tallest blooms belong to carrots – these can rise to 2m in height.

Even the other herbs - thyme, rue, lemon grass, wormwood and nettles - are all blooming.

Jostaberry flowers

Everything is going wild in the garden. Here are some flowers of the jostaberry.

The jostaberry is a cross between a blackcurrant and gooseberry. The berries are big and black,  with a lovely taste. The plant is really hardy and easy to grow. I am already looking forward to picking some berries in summer.

Winter planting ends…

After more than nine months of continuous sowing and planting out the seed table is finally empty.

This doesn’t sound like anything dramatic or out-of-the-ordinary, yet it underlines the continuity of a gardener’s life; season follows season and, in southern Australia at least, winter crops follow summer crops with an unstoppable rhythm that the gardener must follow.

Bulbs such as garlic and larger seeds such as peas have also been direct sown. Peas along the fence line will produce a crop for the freezer but, more importantly, they will also capture nitrogen from the air and store it back in the soil via their root systems to be available to the summer crops of beans and cucumbers. The soil is replenished.

Avocados raised from seed are also planted into soil after spending several weeks outside (in the original pot) to ‘harden up’. Avocados need to be sown onto raised beds so that their roots don’t become water-logged over winter.

 

Onions – about 500 of them – are easily enough to sow out but only after weeks of effort to clear out the last of the summer crops.

Beetroot and turnips join them in among hold-over crops of basil, silverbeet, chilli and capsicums.

And all those flower seedlings? ‘Clump planted’ in the front yard to enchant visitors as they walk down the garden path…

 

 

 

 

 

Mother’s Day gifts from the garden

Mother’s Day again, and though winter is now only weeks away, the pressures from the garden remain unrelenting; there is much yet to be harvested and sorted.

But we walk the beach, eat brunch in the Botanic Gardens, take in a meal and a movie on Saturday evening, read some thrillers out loud and do some window shopping. A lovely weekend in all, but somehow I’ve not managed to do any Mother’s Day shopping.

As always, the garden comes to the rescue; sunflowers for the table and eggs, capsicums, spring onions, chillies and salad for the traditional Mother’s Day omelette.

Making grape juice and harvesting sunflowers

The table grapes have finished but the wine grapes (Shiraz and Grenache) are ripe and ready for harvest. As I have only a single vine of each I’ll turn the tightly-packed bunches into grape juice rather than attempt to make wine.

The process is simple, if messy.

Pick the grapes, wash them to get the wildlife out, then push them through the juicer, compost the skins and twigs and filter the juice through a sieve.

The juice tastes fine when diluted with mineral water.

But most of this juice goes into ice cube trays and will be stored in the freezer for making homemade fruit sorbet, along with frozen raspberries, blueberries, mangoes, bananas, peaches, mint and other fruits from the garden. These are whipped up in the Thermomix along with some dried fruit and almonds (to slow down the digestion) and served with whipped cream or fresh fruit salad.

Despite the hot weather, the ‘Multi-Flora’ sunflowers are doing well and make a charming gift from gardener to cook to brighten up the kitchen table and our frequent trips to the garden.

The seeds from this bank of sunflowers will be dried off and stored for chicken food; sunflower oil provides much-needed fuel for the hens in the cold of winter.

The seeds that grew these fifty or so plants were in turn grown on year after year from a single packet of commercial seed purchased for about three dollars many years ago; seed-saving always repays the effort involved in both quantity of seed available and beauty in the garden.

The arduous days of Spring

 The shredder is back from repair and, while the seeds germinate in their trays, yard and bed clearing goes on. All the front gardens in the district are blooming, but I guess few of their owners know that vegetables are also blooming at this time of the year – radish, lettuce, parsley, broccoli, cabbage and other winter vegetables have shot up to several metres in height and are blossoming. If these are not to be saved for seed, then they need to be pulled out and composted in order to make way for Spring plantings in a few weeks time.

 

 

 

 

 

And the problem with the shredder? Water in the petrol! Leaving cans of fuel on cold concrete floors apparently causes moisture in the atmosphere to condense and be absorbed by the petrol so that it fails to burn. The repair guy had kept a half cupful of mouldy water to prove it to me. $150 poorer, I can now offer this hard-won wisdom; store your petrol in tins placed on wood.

And all the old stuff removed to make way for new crops? Tossed on the path outside the bed, where it will dry off in the next few weeks and be shredded in turn.

Autumn seedlings at winter’s end

For too many years we’ve had too little produce in the garden during the lean months of Spring.

But this year, thanks to mass plantings in autumn, the garden is full. With Spring only a few weeks away, all that’s needed is to free these earlier plantings from the mass of nettles and soursobs that have taken advantage of the winter rains and flooded those hard-won seedlings.

Despite our affection for this garden, these are tiresome weeks as we hack away this winter growth. Back and knees and hands remind us constantly of the personal costs of home-grown produce.

But there is a real sense of achievement once known vegetables reappear, reminding us of choices made in front of the seed-table: beetroot, feldsalat (Lambs Lettuce), parsnips, onions, all sorts of lettuces, garlic, parsley and coriander, cabbages, broad beans, silverbeet and so on and so forth.

Only physical labour can bring order out of chaos in a garden. But when that’s done,the garden offers its own rewards – down in the production garden, the almond tree is blossoming, harbinger of the coming Spring.

Gifts from gardener to cook

For far too many years – with the family at home and mouths to feed – I’ve grown fruit, vegetables and herbs, and lived contentedly enough within my green world.

Now, however, as I enter my seventh decade, I find myself reminded often of my maternal grandmother and her love of dahlias, grown in her small backyard in the inner Adelaide suburb of Parkside, where I spent wondrous days as a small boy.

Last year I got rostered onto the Rare Fruit Society stall at a local garden show, and found my attention drifting far too frequently from discussions of pruning, grafting  and White Sapotes to the neighbouring stand run by the Dahlia Society of South Australia. I emptied my wallet onto their table, and came home with half-a-dozen different dahlia bulbs which were duly planted in among the vegetables.

As autumn moves along, these dahlias are producing an abundance of bright and cheery flowers, and its been a special pleasure to pick the best of these blooms to take inside, place in a vase and set these small floral displays on the cook’s desk, to her surprise and pleasure.

I can’t claim any expertise in the flower-growing business, but more than fifty years of growing vegetables leaves one with a general sense of how to keep plants happy and thriving, and to my delight, dahlias respond to this treatment as well as potatoes and cabbages.

I suspect the start of a new gardening passion opening up with these colourful and joyous blooms…

How to Plant Carrots

Five weeks into autumn, and with the weather staying mild and pleasant, its time to harvest the potatoes and plant the carrots while the soil remains warm and un-water-logged by too frequent rain. I’ll be planting four varieties from commercial seed packets this season, as I need to re-establish some diversity in my carrot seed collection, which has concentrated on ‘Nantes’ but does not yet include ‘Topweight’, ‘Chantenay’ and ‘Purple’. (Just how I keep these four from cross-pollinating when the carrot blooms form in two year’s time is a story for another day!)

Purple carrots? According to the Seed Savers’ Handbook the origin of carrots is: ‘Native to many regions, including parts of Europe, northern Africa, Afghanistan and Central Asia. Carrots were first used as medicine. They come in many colours. Purple carrots arrived in Western Europe from the Middle East in the Middle Ages. After considerable selection, these evolved into yellow ones. Not until much later did a Dutch gardener obtain a mutation which had the orange pigment familiar today. By the Middle Ages the Japanese had developed unusually long carrots adapted to their cuisine.’

Carrots need a deep friable loamy soil free of coarse material and without too much nitrogen fertiliser, as this causes ‘forking’ of the carrot root. The best way to create such a soil is to plant potatoes as the lead-in crop; both the mounding of potatoes and the deep digging needed to harvest the potato tubers creates a rich and friable loam. I’ve known for some time now that this small crop of ‘Dutch Cream’ potatoes was going to be disappointing, and I haven’t been disappointed – they're rubbish! (Digging around the potato plant roots when the plants were still green and thriving showed no sign of the usual large tubers present; this sometimes happens with the wrong variety in the wrong place). However, the soil in this small spot – perfect for planting high density carrots – is now just about ideal – deep and crumbly with plenty of organic matter to feed the roots and later, us.

Once the deep digging has been completed with the ‘potato hoe’ – a far better implement than a garden fork – the soil surface is raked level and the last of the mulch and bits and pieces removed. Carrot seeds are fairly small and slow growing, so they need to be kept moist despite being planted in the shallow surface layer just a few millimetres down. I simply scatter the carrot seed across the surface, then use a large 5 mm sieve to cover these gently with more fine crumbly soil particles before tamping down by smacking the soil surface gently with my open hand to ‘bed in’ the seed.

The trick to raising carrot seeds is to find a way to water this very narrow surface layer while preventing it from drying out during sunny weather. In the old days, we used to do this by covering the seeded area with second-hand underfelt, often to be found on footpaths during hard rubbish collection week. Sadly, this wonderful material is becoming scarce – modern carpets use a foam rubber underlay to give it that comforting springy feel. So these days I use folded shade cloth lain on the surface; one can water through this with the watering can while it keeps the soil surface shaded for the first four or five days needed for carrot seed germination. The corners of this shade cloth are pinned down by bricks, or by wooden stakes laid across them. I check every few days to see if the carrot seeds are up; at this point they are rather yellow and in need of sunlight to keep going, so the cover is permanently removed. When the carrots are some weeks old and standing approximately  50 mm (2”) high, thinning can begin to a spacing of just slightly more than the diameter of a fully grown carrot. This ‘scattered seed’ method gives me more carrots per square metre than the old business of trying to raise carrots in rows. As for the old mulch that covered the potato crop during the heat of summer, its barrowed down to the chook yard and dumped for the chickens to scratch through it, turning all those slater beetles and earwigs into tomorrow's eggs.