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…
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