Autumn Chill

It’s autumn in southern Australia and plants are beginning to slow down as soil temperatures fall and daylight hours rapidly drop away. All this starts once Easter is over and the first rains bring the soil back to life; the autumn chill is coming.

Only a month ago I was protecting seedlings against too much sun and heat. Shade cloth over new seedlings produced the worst seed table I can recall in a very long time. One week they were thriving (photo on the right) and then – phlat!

The most likely problem is that the commercial ‘premium’ potting mix I used lacked sufficient nutrients to provide these seedlings with the energy they needed to cope with extremes of heat and shading, no matter how carefully I watered them. So what started out as excellent piece of planning – an early start to the autumn plantings – turned into a near-disaster, with many seedlings lost.

So the seed table was moved to a sunnier spot, new potting mix obtained from a more reputable supplier, and new seeds planted. All the usual winter stuff - red, brown and white onions, orange and purple carrots, kohl rabi, beetroot, parsley, tatsoi, whitlof, all sorts of flowers (for the Spring display), mitsuba, mitzuna, filderspitzkraut, chives, garlic chives, Black Spanish and Miyashiga White radishes, raddichio, endives, ‘Fat Hen’ salad greens, ‘Freckles’ cos lettuce and thyme.

More netting is dragged out of the shed to cover these seed trays before the blackbirds get in there and flick up the potting mix in their search for worms; the fragile seedlings are all too easily buried.

The ‘home paddock’ garden bed has been dormant all summer for lack of available water; this has been mulched and watered and the soil restarted to receive these autumn/winter crops and the remnants of the summer seedlings.

April brings the first serious rains we’ve had in over six months; weeds and remnant vegetable seeds spring up all though this soil. Direct-sown lettuce does particularly well, along with broccoli, cauliflower, ‘rapa’, silverbeet and corn salad (‘Feldsalat’ in German). It doesn’t look like much now, but it will all get sorted before the soil cools too far.

All this goes on while the last of the summer crops are harvested – pumpkins, zucchinis, basil, eggplants (aubergines), capsicums (peppers), beans, avocadoes, grapes and peaches. The citrus trees – mandarins, grapefruit, oranges and lemons – are already starting to show colour.

And the current soil temperature? Over in the production garden soil temperature is monitored automatically and continuously. I need only log onto the internet to see that the long slow slide into winter is upon us. So now it is a race to get those seed-table seedlings to a sufficient size to plant them out before cool soils stop them altogether.

Shade House

Summer has struck with a vengeance. 42C are forecast today.
Even when the plants receive enough water (not always the case around here), the sun can burn some of the bigger-leaved plants.

These shade houses are easy and quick to put up. They are also very quick to dismantle, and can therefore be as temporary or permanent as you want them to be.

Take a length of light-weight rebar, push one end into the ground, then form a tunnel and push the other end into the ground. Put some shade cloth over the structure. Tada!

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.

Backyard (German) veggie patches

Life winds along, and once again we find ourselves – both cook and gardener - back in southern Germany. We’re here to lend the old fellow a hand with cooking and cleaning and the comfort of family nearby.

He’s 86 now, and a widower since this time last year. He’s paler and slower and his old knee injury exacerbates his limp. And so it is, for the first time in over thirty years of flying half way around the world to visit, that I am allowed to play a part in tending the small veggie patch that he has cared for so lovingly all these years.

German veggie patches – like those down-under in Australia – have shrunk in size and importance over these past three decades. This ones a doddle – it’s so tiny I feel as though I’m playing at growing things! Yet its pleasant to be outside, doing something useful other than eating cake and drinking coffee and never quite managing to have a holiday. At least it is winter back home, and I can count on the rains to carry on the irrigation cycles in my absence.

In the eight months since I was here last, Germany has been beset by torrential rains, flooding, cold and chilly soils. Gardens are lagging at least four weeks behind schedule, and we’re already well into a summer that has had no spring. By contrast, I’ve endured eight months of heat and drought down-under, with no rain at all and water bills going through the roof. Somehow my allotted rainfall seems to have been diverted northwards…

The soil here is different too – loose and grey and sandy, ground down by the weight of glaciers that covered these areas for tens of thousand of years during the last ice age, and before they retreated north. The water-holding capacity of these soils is low, as is the organic matter content, and so I find myself lightly cultivating the surface layers to act as a natural mulch to prevent evaporation on those days when the sun actually shines.

Some of the mandatory visiting takes us back to the home village, and there behind the staid and unlovely facades of houses along the street front lie even bigger gardens. I have a small stake in these gardens too – over the years I have carried small gifts of vegetable seeds to German friends and relatives from my Australian collection; varieties not found here anymore. ‘Mortgage Lifter’ tomatoes, ‘Lazy Wife’ beans and ‘Royal Oak-leaf’ lettuces are always a source of pride and connection between us as we make our tours of these ancient veggie patches.

Somewhere I sense that this part of my life is drawing to a close. When the cook’s father goes, there will no longer be that pressing need to keep up this family connection, and I will have lost a good friend. Sure, we might at last be able to spend our holidays travelling that vast and southern ancient continent, and feel free to head to Asia rather than Europe every year for our annual holidays.

But I’ll miss the old bloke. We always got on, drinking beer together companionably on the back porch in the late summer evenings in these northern latitudes.And despite my faltering grasp of the German language, he always made the effort to explain things to me, harking back to his own poverty-stricken childhood in the village, with its close dependence on small veggie patches such as the one before us now.

I’ll bet he never dreamed of a future where his backyard veggie patch would one day be tended by a fellow gardener from far-off Australia…

Autumn plantings in an Adelaide Kitchen Garden

Harvest and autumn plantings are combining to keep cook and gardener busy at a time when many other gardens in the district are beginning to wind down following ‘summer only’ crops such as tomatoes, zucchinis, beans and cucumbers.

That this new round of plantings is possible owes much to the mild Mediterranean climate that we enjoy here on the Adelaide Plains; dry hot summers followed by cool wet winters. The absence of serious frosts owes much to the nearby ocean and allows us to grow all sorts of useful foodstuffs through the coming cooler months.

Indeed, some of these crops need short days and cold nights to begin to bear fruit or edible flowers or bulbs; asparagus, garlic, red, cream, white and brown onions, broccoli, broad beans, kohl rabi, cabbage, cauliflower, Brussel sprouts, potatoes, leek, Cos lettuce, parsnips, peas, Daikon radish, corn salad, shallots, kale, rocket, Mesclun mix, Mizuna, carrots, Chinese cabbages and stir-fry vegetables such as Pak Choy and Wong Bok, celeriac, silverbeet and spinach, turnips and swedes, chives, dill, coriander, fennel, marjoram, lemon balm, comfrey, nettles, parsley, peppermint, sage, rue, rosemary, sorrel, wormwood, nasturtiums and sunflowers are some of the herbs and vegetables, while the almond and citrus trees (grapefruit, oranges, mandarins and lemons) will also crop in late winter and early spring. If space permits, green manure crops such as barley or wheat will be grown for chook food and next year’s mulch. Raspberries are coming into their second (autumn) crop.

So seeds saved last year were planted out in February, protected from ultraviolet damage by shade cloth and are now entering garden beds that the chicken flock has worked over for weeks to clear of insect pests that grew in the summer mulch. Water has been going on in these autumn/winter beds, even when they lay fallow under mulch during the hottest days of summer; this is an important part of the preparation for planting, as it keeps the soil biota (worms, fungi, bacteria, insects) alive and healthy for the arrival of the new seedlings.

So now a whole new round of plantings begins while the soil is still warm, while there is that wonderful soft yellow autumn light to drive photosynthesis and growth until well into May, and while we wait for the refreshing autumn rains.

Growing crops year round is an essential part of getting the garden to provide fresh food to the kitchen and for the maintenance of harmony between cook and gardener – a relationship often strained by early autumn as we try to cope with the sheer abundance of crops that must be handled.

And what are we looking forward to most at the moment? Fresh rain-fed salads and green beans, the first capsicums and a cold crisp evening worthy of new pumpkin soup!

Australia Day Garden Tour

One month on from the Christmas Day garden tour, the garden hangs on the brink of peak harvest and life in the bottling and pickling department up in the kitchen is beginning to overtake the frenetic activity in the garden these past few months.

Australia Day fell on Saturday 26th January, and the ever-pragmatic Australian government makes sure that we don’t miss out on our public holidays, time at the beach and barbeques with friends by giving us today (the following Monday) off work.

Where the Christmas Day view of the garden was pretty bleak, the passage of a mere month presents a wall of green foliage as cucumbers, basil, beetroot, tomatoes, eggplants, capsicums, zucchini, beans and melons all rise from the mulch along the drip lines to provide a semblance of reward for all those days spent raising seedlings, planting out and moving water.

In pride of place this week is the developing ‘cucumber wall’; the daily bucket of peaches and zucchinis will soon be joined by the daily bucket of cucumbers of all sorts.

So its a good time to have friends and work colleagues; we can swap away surplus for things that we don’t have.

Christmas morning garden tour

Christmas morning dawned to perfect weather, and in this brief moment of quiet while the world sleeps, I’ve got into the habit of touring the garden to take stock of how the summer growing season is progressing. This small reflective tour helps me get some perspective on this important facet of our life; cook and gardener are in complete accord when we come to providing fresh home-grown fruit and vegetables for our kitchen table. No matter that our budget of time and money is heavier in this department than most folks – the garden and the nutritious food that it produces is part of our lifestyle.

There are no jobs to be done, so all the tools are back in the shed. Everything has been organised to carry the garden through Christmas Day and Boxing Day while we deal with 22 folk coming to lunch and the arrival of two of our three sons and their partners and friends from Melbourne and overseas.

Harvest is still a few months away – around March – although the zucchinis are already in flood. All the home-grown seedlings have been planted out and are now growing quickly in the long warm summer days here on the Adelaide Plains – melons, silverbeet, cucumbers, beetroots, tomatoes, basil, pumpkins,beans, onions, lettuce, capsicums, eggplants – the list goes on, as it does every year.

There are really two gardens in operation this year; the production garden down the back of the property (photo at top) and the ‘seeds garden’ where scruffy plants – parsnips, celery, kale, parsley, broccoli and such like - have burst forth into flower during their second spring, to be head-high now and covered with seeds that will refresh my seed stock for many years to come. More detail on these later this week…

Down in the onion patch, the garlic has just been harvested while the onions still need a month or more of warm weather to finish.

 

 

 

 

 

In the orchard, red and white table grapes are forming green walls amidst peach trees laden with fruit, while the lemon tree is still carrying about a ton of fruit that we have no idea how to use.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Over in the potato beds, the ‘Dutch Cream’ potato plants are flowering – a sign the potato tubers are now forming underground. Only when these plants die back will I begin to think of digging for their harvest.

And what do I make of all this?

My main concern is water, and just how much it takes to produce so little food for the table. For most of us townsfolk, this cost is out of sight behind supermarket price-tags – professional farmers pay about 1/10 of the water price I do because I’m farming in the suburbs and using town water rather than river water.

While I’m convinced that I can grow almost anything I need here in this climate and on these soils, I’ve still about a decade of learning ahead to come to grips with backyard farming on half my current water consumption. That will mostly mean better handling and distribution of mulch to keep the soil covered from winter onwards – no mean feat when crop rotations are going on.

Ah well – Happy Christmas! I expect that I’ll be better at this by next year. Now its time to sit in my garden shelter and look out at this year’s efforts before the Christmas rush begins…

Summer seedling-sowing Saturday

A quick tour of the dwindling number of vegetable gardens in the neighbourhood shows me lagging weeks behind the pack in the annual race to have tomatoes on the table by Christmas Day which, in Australia, coincides within just four days of the longest day of the year.

Yep, I’m late again, but I’ve longed ceased to care -  I’ve come to recognize the benefits in late summer of having my vegetable garden crescendo just when all the racers are petering out. I guess I’m the only guy around here to have had tomatoes still running on into September, hanging off leafless vines that look as though they should (and did) die during the winter.

The other valuable thing about running seedlings up all the way through Spring (as against trying to prod them into action in the cold days of late Winter) is that slow-growing capsicums (peppers) and eggplants seem to be able to grow to full size by late autumn, hang out in Adelaide’s Mediterranean climate through the cold days of winter, then set their first fruit in the early days of spring the following year while the racers are still fiddling about with potting mix.

But no matter how I rationalise all this, seven weeks have passed since I sowed the Spring seeds, and this weekend they just have to be planted out, planted on into bigger pots, or tossed. So I rise at 5.30am on a summer Saturday to face the biggest plant-out of the year. The cook’s seen this coming – she’s booked herself into an all-day seminar someplace else, and so the next fifteen hours will either make or break the gardener and the garden.

Still, the chooks have cleared the beds, and I’ve been watering up for two weeks so that the seedlings will come out of wet pots into soil as wet as I can get it. The beds are already mulched; I just need to hoe the sowing rows along the drip lines and get down on my hands and knees for the planting.

Newly-planted rows of seedlings are covered with cloches and shade cloth for up to a week, allowing their fractured root system to recover before they face the full heat of the Australian sun.

At the other end of the process, in one of the other dozen garden beds, the broad beans have finished  and dried off, and when tomatoes, beetroot, silverbeet and basil seedlings have are all been planted, this slumbering bed has to be cleaned up and the broad bean seeds that have escaped the cook’s depredations gathered, shelled and sorted for next year’s crop.

Perhaps its here that I’ll plant out the last seeds of spring - the capsicums and eggplants that are the last seedlings lingering on in seed trays down on the growing tables…

How to grow raspberries in a warm climate

Most commercial berries are grown in cool-climate areas such as the Adelaide Hills. Much head-shaking was the general response to my queries about why I too couldn’t grow raspberries down in the warmer areas of the Adelaide Plains. I guess I was just too stupid to listen to the naysayers, so went ahead and planted anyway, but in the coolest spot in the garden.

My reward has been a handful of raspberries shared with the cook on our breakfast cereal each morning throughout spring, a flourishing of fruit somewhat earlier than those still ripening up in the cool valleys of the Adelaide Hills.

And where is this raspberry-haven in the garden? On the cooler south-side of the massive rainwater tanks that sit stolidly at a pleasant cool temperature through the heat of summer. Each tank holds just over three tonnes of winter rainfall, so comes into spring at a pretty cool temperature anyway, warming only very slowly as the season progresses.

The variety I’ve planted out is called ‘Willamette’ – a bare-rooted winter gift from the berry experts up at the gnomes' house high in the ranges behind Lenswood. This variety fruits twice a year, in spring and autumn, before being cut back hard as winter approaches. I’ve set up a trellis that follows around the wall of the tank; this carries the weight of these thornless canes.

Finally, the raspberries receive only the sweetest and coolest water I have – directly from the rainwater tank behind them. I flood their roots each morning for the few minutes it takes me to pick my breakfast berries. I figure I’ll get a small portion of that cool water back the next day for my trouble.