Pole beans

The same small argument breaks out each year between cook and gardener. And the topic of contention? “Dwarf beans versus climbing beans”.

Why this should be so has much to do with the differing pace between kitchen and garden.

Up at the house, meals have to be pulled together in a matter of hours, whereas the gardener operates on a seasonal time scale that stretches on interminably through our long hot summers.

Dwarf beans mature more quickly than climbers but produce a once-only flush of pods that are soon eaten, leaving the garden bean-bare. Nevertheless, “plant the dwarf beans first!” cries the cook early each Spring, hungering for something fresh and green to delight our palates after the months of broccoli and brassicas in late Winter.

Sadly for us both, this specific dwarf-bean-planting conflicts with all the usual Spring chaos that runs on for four months as old winter crops come out and new summer crops go in. “There’s just not the room yet…” declaims the gardener.

Yet somehow that same gardener always finds time to plant out the climbing beans, knowing that they will bear longer and that he will not have to kneel down to pick them if sent back to the garden to gather in whatever the current recipe demands.

Is it any wonder then that the gardener receives so little sympathy from the cook when her chickens – in their never-ending search for edible greens - reach through the mesh bean fence and eat the developing beans shoots bare to half a metre off the ground?

So the gardener – never one for overt warfare – uses ingenuity to push beans up out of reach of those short-legged chickens. Netting protects them at ground level as they grow to the top of the mesh fence, then bamboo poles stuck vertically in that same fence allow the beans to grow up another metre, greatly increasing the productive capacity of the crop compared to those stumpy dwarfs with their large footprints.

Finally, as in every year, the cook’s mutterings die down as each new dish of tender beans is brought up to the house in autumn and the overflow is blanched and stored in the freezer for the lean bean times.

I’ve had two tranches of climbing beans this year, and a warm winter is forecast.

I wonder can I make that three before the frosts hit?

Pumpkin planting and garlic hanging

Planting out the tomatoes seemed a simple objective for a weekend in the garden. After all, I needed only to drop a small punnet of a dozen pumpkin (squash) seedlings into the existing garlic bed first and I’d be ready to get into it.

Fifteen hours later, with the pumpkins and garlic sorted, it had become abundantly clear that the tomatoes would have to spend another week in their pots and I’m left to rue my complete inability to guestimate just how long any particular job in this garden will take.

Gardening – like painting the house – is 95% preparation and 5% actual doing.

In order to get the pumpkins in I needed to get the garlic dug out and hung in the shed, the watering system tested, the soil profile re-wetted, some ‘blood and bone’ fertilizer in to feed the colossal pumpkin plants that will produce a crop, the drip tubes back on, the pumpkins planted (15 minutes) and the mulch back in place.

Along the way the cook offered to pull about 100 onions that were going to seed early (the chooks had buried the working end of the drip line and they’d dried out), leaving me to hang those in the shed too.

As for the tomatoes, all I managed was to wet-up that bed, water the pots and get mulch onto the soil to minimize evaporation.

Maybe next week?

‘Potting-on’ tomato seedlings

Mother Nature is taking her own sweet time to finish ending the broad-bean crop in the garden bed in which I’m planning to raise this year’s tomatoes. I’m going to have to ‘pot them on’ to tide me over for another week or two until I can get in there and prepare their new home…

Because I save my own seed I can afford to plant more tomato seeds than will become tomato plants. This sounds wasteful but protects me against germination failures. So I select the strongest plants and move them along to larger pots.

This is a simple-enough process, though it’s hard to toss out young seedlings as ruthlessly as this job demands.

A clump of seedlings is broken out of the original seed tray and one or (at most) two are kept in the hand then moved to the larger pot where I’ve previously placed a small layer of potting mix. The thing is to leave the healthiest plants with the longest roots covered by the most soil; a job for a sharp eye. The roots are dangled over the bottom layer and one’s spare hand can be used to grab potting mix and pour it gently around the plant until the pot is full and the first small leaves are just covered.

Tamp down and move on, while keeping track of labels.

Propagation box

It's still winter, but now is the time to start the first seeds. I am keen to have some biggish seedlings when it is finally time to start planting. Chillis, capsicums and eggplants seem to need longer to grow to a decent size. What to do?

Make your own propagation box!

Take some styrofoam boxes.

Add heat mats (in this case they are actually reptile mats).

Put your trays on that. (The seedling punnets will go in there.)

Cover with an old window.

Get yourself a thermometer with a probe, so that you can measure the temperature of the tray.

Start sowing! :)

As you may be able to see in the picture, the temperature inside the box climbed to 24C within a few minutes.

Growing avocados from seed

Inside each ripe avocado lies a single giant seed surrounded by succulent flesh. All that’s required to grow your own avocadoes on the Adelaide Plains - after digging out such a seed - is a whole lot of patience and room in your garden for an enormous tree up to 20m tall.

The most commonly available avocado in local shops is a variety called Hass, but the cook has taken a liking to a less-common variety named Reed, obtainable only for limited periods from a local organic fruit store. So we decided to grow this favourite on from seed and wait the four to six years that it typically takes before our efforts will bear fruit. This is a pretty risky business because there’s a real chance that the fruit produced will be different to that of its parent. Most seedlings available from nurseries are grafted onto rootstocks from cuttings of plants of known quality; the net result is a fairly expensive mature potted plant. As we’ve lost a number of these commercial avocadoes over the years there’s a decided reluctance in this household to spend money on more of them – hence the propagation of multiple plants from ‘pits’ at far lower financial risk.

We've grown these avocado pits on a kitchen cupboard under a sunny window; this ensures that we notice when watering is needed. A pot was filled with potting mix and the avocado seeds half buried at the surface. These seeds are slow to germinate; it has taken about three months for the seed to split; the single stem then appears like a matchstick stuck in a ball of plasticine. This grows up to about 300 mm tall before popping out leaves. In the next few weeks, as winter sets in, I’ll plant these three avocado seedlings side-by-side near the existing Hass avocado that is the lone survivor of all those commercial failures.

Perhaps the home-grown route will prove more successful? As they grow, these young trees will certainly have to be espaliered or pruned to keep them within the bounds of the property.

Transplanting garlic

The second year after planting a new garlic crop from purchased garlic bulbs is easier than the first; one can transplant garlic that has escaped harvest.

Heck, lots of garlic bulbs escaped harvest this past summer; chicken-shed building took over the agenda and I never did get around to digging at least two rows of Shantung and Monaro Purple garlic.

Luckily for me, Mother Nature was back-stopping my gardening failures and these full bulbs have sprung back to life and popped up with perfect timing. I gave the rows a good soaking then lifted these clumps of garlic with the shovel. As soon as they come out and the surplus soil has been gently brushed off they go into a tub of rainwater laced with Seasol, a seaweed solution that lacks nitrogen and phosphorous but helps the bulbs survive the transplant shock (or so I’m told by my friendly garlic expert mate).

Transplanted garlic is planted in the same way as onion seedlings; the individual plants are gently pulled apart to separate their root systems. They are then laid one-and-a-half bulb diameters apart up against the wall of pre-hoed trenches. The loose trench walls are pushed back over the roots and bulbs to cover them then patted down. It doesn’t matter that the garlic plants are now lying somewhat sideways; they will straighten up as they chase the light.

I like garlic – its  easy to grow and is easily our most valuable crop by weight; the price of garlic rises at certain times of the year to as much as $40 per kilogram. Its quick to plant, stores well and makes the cook happy when there’s a good stock of it up at the kitchen. Several hundred bulbs have been planted out in a single morning. These will be ready for harvesting mid-summer (around Christmas time in southern Australia).

Best of all, one need not keep buying or holding back harvested garlic bulbs; just leave some of the crop in the soil for transplanting the following year. Quick and cheap!

Spring seedling plant-out begins

Seeds saved in previous years were planted out three weeks ago and lettuce seedlings are already far enough along to be planted out - the first of the massive replanting effort ahead of us right up to Christmas and beyond.

Other seedlings - tomatoes, dill, red cabbage, basil, beetroot, capsicums, chillies and various herbs, are still a week or two away from needing to come out of the seed trays. Bare patches in the seed trays show me where my seed has gotten too old and is now non-viable. Other (rarer) varieties like purple-tiger chillies and chocolate capsicum have germinated poorly but adequately.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Only two of my thirteen vegetable beds are in fact ready for plant-outs, so I have to juggle with the plan a bit and shift the lettuce into the bed designed for bush beans. As Eisenhower said “Plans are useless, but planning is invaluable”. Plans often go bust in this garden – this one crashed due to expediency.My main concern when planting soft-leaved seedlings like lettuces is to do all I can to avoid the ‘transplant shock’ that occurs when their delicate root systems are yanked out of friendly potting mix and stuffed into real soil. So I’ve spent the past week wetting up the sub-soil of this one bed ready for this occasion. Now I just hoe in the trenches and bung clumps of lettuce seedlings into the ground along the drip lines at regular intervals.

A few hours later, and a couple of trays of lettuce seedlings – several hundred lettuce plants – are in and away.There’s nothing new to me in raising lettuces, but this year I’ll be experimenting with better ways to manage the soil moisture such that these lettuces reach the table as soon as possible with the least stress to them and us. So I’ve added soil moisture monitoring equipment to this bed.

Why go to all that expense? Simply because the cost of water is now by far the largest expenditure in providing home-grown fruit and vegetables to the kitchen. To measure is to know. And as it was me that invented this gadgetry, there are always a few spare units left over and lying around at work, so I bring them home and put them to work in among my own vegetables. Pottering around among them suggests new ways of designing and using them in the broader scene of Australia’s irrigated agricultural regions.

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.

How to grow bottling tomatoes

The universal sentiment in this house, shared by both cook and gardener, is that tomatoes are a lot of hard work to raise; planting, staking, pruning and tying seem to go on for months, consuming more management effort than any other vegetable or fruit. Furthermore, there is a real sense that all this handling and pruning transfers diseases between plants.

So this year is different – we separated tomato crops between those for salads and sandwiches (a small number staked and tied in the usual way) – and the bottling tomatoes grown in the commercial way – on the ground on a barley straw mulch mat.

The Red-a Marl tomato variety that we planted has been grown over the road from us for nearly fifty years by an old Italian gardener. I was given the seeds on his death some years ago now. So these tomatoes can be considered to be well-adapted to our local climate – one of the great advantage of seed-saving between generations of local home gardeners. His hard-working wife would turn his tomato crop into sauce for all-year round consumption with their pasta.

Four months after planting in rows beside the drip tube irrigation system, and with zero handling, these tomatoes needed to be picked before the mice got them all (an obvious disadvantage of ground-grown fruit in an organic garden). For gardeners more fastidious than I am, these tomato beds would not be a pretty sight; tomato vines sprawl all over the place and intertwine, grow huge laterals and ripen at different rates because of variable sunlight access and shading.

Both green and red tomatoes are picked, leaving some on the vine to ripen further. This harvest will lie around the house for another week, allowing further ripening on old towels laid in shallow trays. However, the idea is to pick them in no more than two trips down the yard, with bottling tomato sauce day restricted to a single weekend.

Finally, there’s not much point in growing bulk tomatoes without growing bulk basil; rows of basil have been grown on either side of the tomatoes as companion plantings and destined for the same sauce. Planted in advance of the tomato seedlings, close-planted basil also forms a sturdy hedge for the tomatoes to lay their limbs on, keeping at least some of them above mouse height. The garlic harvest will be taken from storage; it too is an important part of the sauce-making process.

Clump lettuce

There are innumerable jokes about lettuce, most of them corny, and some deadly accurate: -

Q: What water yields the most beautiful lettuce heads?
A: Perspiration!

Planting lettuces out one at a time is my idea of hell, so I have developed an easier method that can only be described as ‘clump lettuce’.

 

First I make lettuce seed trays from old pie trays and pieces of wood, Chux wiper clothes to line the bottom and cable ties to hold it all together. This is then filled with potting mix to about two centimetres below the brim, mixed lettuce seed from my vast collection sprinkled liberally on top, then another centimetre of potting mix tamped down on top of that. This hangs out on the seed table for about six weeks while being watered each day with rainwater. By then it looks like this: -

No way am I going to separate all this seedlings one from the next and plant them separately in tiny holes along a string line.

Instead I hoe a furrow through my richest soil that has been turned over by the chicken flock, well watered beforehand then left for a further week to allow the soil to come alive again after this fallow period.

At 10cm intervals along the row, I plant ‘clumps’ of lettuce seedlings that are simply torn apart from the root-bound seedlings lifted out of the tray lines.

So what happens at harvest time?

The lettuces all compete for soil, moisture and nutrients in their space, and the cook wanders along picking the most tender leaves off what ever looks good for the salad.

This thinning process supplies us with regular salads without the hassle of digging out a whole lettuce and disposing of the root ball.

Once sowing has been completed (and only a few rows are sown each week to ensure different rates of maturation) drip lines are laid beside the lettuce rows and turned on, as such leafy seedlings wilt quickly. The mulch layer that covers our soils right through summer is returned around the individual seedlings to prevent evaporation from the soil surface.

The last step is to lay shade cloth or shade cloches over the seedlings for three to four days to give the ruptured root systems a chance to recover and spread out to find moisture.