An Adelaide Kitchen Garden - 2014

In the quiet hours of Christmas Day morn I tour the garden and think back over the year that was, as is my habit.

A kitchen garden exists to supply a family kitchen with fresh and dried fruit, berries, vegetables, culinary seeds, eggs and herbs, to supply firewood and fresh flowers, to store produce and to provide the ingredients for refreshing juices, salads and whips.

The gardener's job is to somehow provide fresh seasonal produce year-round at a lower expense but with higher nutritional content and convenience than shop-bought produce. That it is even possible to break even in this never-ending cycle demands literally decades of practice, continual improvement and an intimate feel for the local soil and climate.

Given this long gestation period, both garden and gardener need to be somewhat forgiving of each others failings. So these annual retrospectives need to be tempered with a dash of ‘I’ll do better next year!’

With the Christmas turkey roasting in the oven and the cook supplied with fresh-picked lettuces, red onions, zucchinis and cucumbers for salads, I head outdoors with my camera and notebook. Here’s what I found…

On the deficit side of the ledger has been the high cost of water - 460kl (about 122 000 US gallons) - and about one thousand dollars worth of mulch and irrigation fittings.

On the plus side I've spent almost nothing on seeds or seedlings, thanks to my seed-saving activities. The new chicken shed was finished and has functioned sturdily despite those sparrows that figured how to get inside despite my counter-measures. The chicken flock has two new (and younger) hens who have settled into their foraging and scratching duties. Likewise the old chicken shed has been transformed into a  storage shed and finally sealed up properly, with the out-of-control bamboo thicket made to disappear at last.

A huge old pine tree has also been removed – those needles were forever blocking gutters that needed to be kept clear to catch rainwater. The same with the chestnut tree, which has been trimmed back upon threat of divorce. Deeper mulching throughout the garden has been the key to water savings while making garden paths a softer and more pleasant place to walk.

Some of the crops that have responded well to a better watering regime – guided by soil moisture monitoring – have been asparagus, avocado, raspberries, coffee bushes, kiwis, plums, mulberries, table grapes, citrus, apples and peach trees.

Even my early attempts at grafting apples and pears are finally bearing fruit – I just need to net these trees soon to prevent rainbow lorikeets from decimating the harvest.

Over in the ‘lady-finger’ banana plantation I’ve removed all the big old palms in the belief that stronger ‘hands’ of bananas will grow on new palms, or so someone ‘in the know’ has suggested to me.

In the garden beds can be found all the usual summer vegetables – tomatoes, egg-plants, silverbeet, capsicums, beetroot, pumpkins, zucchinis, climbing beans, white brown and red onions, garlic and manzana chillies.

Avocadoes grown from seed are starting to take hold with the first fruit appearing on the oldest tree after a four year wait. Peach trees are burdened with fruit and the almond tree has produced nuts for the first time after a long unproductive spell, thanks to deeper mulching and better watering.

Some things are still in a state of chaos – that giant pile of shredding material still awaits that time when I can sacrifice a whole day to noise, dust and stink to recycle garden trimmings back to the earth.

So, not a bad year, but much work lies ahead staking tomatoes and other solanums (egg-plants and capsicums), growing bush-beans, harvesting onions and garlic and planting out more carrots and lettuce. Some beds lie empty awaiting rain and winter crops, for I cannot afford to irrigate them nor have the time to plant them out.

All around me folk of my generation are retiring and asking me when I too plan to stay home and do a ‘proper job’ of looking after this garden - I can only reply that that is still some years away.

So in summary, the garden is OK, but not rating more than 7 out of 10 for productivity; I’m simply too tired and time-poor for a better result. That won’t change anytime soon.

But on another front both cook and gardener have shifted up another generation, becoming (biological) grandparents for the first time. There too we’ve had plenty of prior practice, with a parcel of neighbourhood kids learning to bake, make and plant things in Oma’s kitchen and Opa’s garden and workshop.

Welcome to the world, Zoe Beth.

Weird things in a winter garden

Winter is upon us in southern Australia, yet there is no let-up in the effort required in the garden. If anything, pressures are building back up again as I try to make space for onions, beetroot and spring flowers (still in the seed trays) while trying to keep the rain-fed chaos of self-seeded pathways under control.

I’ve given up even pretending to be on top of things. But I’ve found a few odd moments to catalogue some of the winter wonders springing up all over the place…

 

 

Adding some winter colour to the verdant green of the overflowing beds, my chilli collection is starting to ripen and will be used to refresh my seed collection as they mature.

 

 

And what are the names of all these chillies? Sadly, I forget. Some are spherical, some are small pointy multi-coloured ones with an upright characteristic, others are deep purple and some are the regular long skinny droopy ones alongside a different variety having a bell-lantern shape.

There is beauty in vegetable gardens if one looks closely.

Among the rogue salad collection are the Italian bitter lettuces that I know I grew on purpose, didn’t eat much of, but then let the plants go naturally to seed because of their pretty blue flowers, so unlike the thistle-type flowers of all other lettuces.

Now they are all over the dirt pathways, and we find ourselves making long detours to allow them their own space rather than treading them underfoot.

 

 

In the orchard, one of the peach trees is still suffering from the after-effects of the massive 2013 peach harvest and is now under attack from bracket fungi where limbs had to be removed and the bark on the main trunk started to split.

 

 

 

 

The tomato crops and their bamboo frames have had to be pulled out to make way for the onions. All the old mulch and new weeds have had to be hoed out and thrown onto the pathways for natural composting. This soil and weed mix will soon be covered with new barley straw to over-winter and break down under the scratching of the hens and the softening effects of the winter rains. This ‘path composting’ process will deliver soft mulch and fresh organic matter to garden soil as it accumulates year after year.

All the necessary hoeing turns up plenty of earthworms; the chooks follow my work closely and enjoy the fresh protein. Every meter or so I turn up some soil-borne grubs that I believe (without any evidence) to be ‘mole cricket larvae’; these are a special delicacy to the hens. I pick them out of the trenches and throw them in front of the flock where they are snatched up.

Ah well, that’s my fun for the day. Now its back to planting out all those onions…

Autumn garden tour 2014

The autumn equinox is upon us - day and night are the same length of 12 hours - as southern Australia slides gently towards winter while the northern hemisphere Spring commences. Summer crops of tomatoes and capsicums, basil and zucchini, climbing beans and pumpkins, cucumbers and eggplants are being harvested, while winter crops of cabbage, leek, broccoli and kale are coming off the seed table and entering the still-warm soil.

It’s been a harsh southern summer, and to have brought the garden through these extremes has taken even more effort and care than usual; someday soon the water bill will turn up and is likely to be approaching $1000 for this last quarter and this huge garden.

On the positive side of the slate, some of that expensive water has brought the citrus and banana crops through the summer in good order; they are ripening and healthy rather than marked with that weariness of trees water-stressed for too long.

We grow rows of basil plants for pesto which we freeze and eat throughout winter; this past summer’s crop has also been healthy and productive despite the heat. Chopped basil leaves over sliced tomatoes and bocconcini cheese make a pleasant addition to lettuce, capsicum and cucumber salads with our main meals.

 

 

 

 

 

The surprise runner this year is the early autumn garden developed after an unexpected rainfall of 111mm (4.3”); here Chinese cabbage, five varieties of dwarf bean, spring onions, lettuce, broccoli, late zucchini and cucumber crops are growing well in the cooler shoulder season.

In among the rarer vegetables in this garden, ‘Triamble’ pumpkins are maturing, delicate ‘Purple Tiger’ chillies are adding beauty, ‘Lazy Wife’ climbing beans are producing at last in the cooler conditions and ‘Chocolate capsicums’ (peppers) and ‘Freckled Cos’ lettuce add novelty to our salads.

Regular Butternut pumpkins coexist with the Triambles without cross-fertilization; they are different species.

Coffee (‘Arabica’) bushes and comfrey share a spot in the orchard, chestnuts are ripening, Willemette raspberries are producing a small autumn flush and German filderspitzkraut cabbages are coming along on the seed table beside lettuce, leek and Italian broccoli.

The floor of the orchard – turned over and fertilized this past month by the scratching of the hens – has been raked and free-seeded with silverbeet and bulk lettuce seeds that are so abundant in a seed-saver’s garden. When the rains pick up, these green plants will provide further food for hens and humans.

Sadly, its been a totally unproductive year for the many peach trees scattered over the property; there were simply insufficient ‘chill hours’ of cold temperatures during the previous mild winter to set fruit properly this past spring.

In the shed, boxes and tubs of seed heads are starting to accumulate; lettuce, sunflowers, cucumber and silverbeet will soon be dried off and tinned for next year’s crop.

Down the back of the production garden, the last of the summer zucchinis flank the bed of ‘clucker tucker’ being grown for chook feed.

Midsummer garden tour

A summer garden has its roots in the hopefulness of Spring plantings. So there comes a point in mid-to-late summer where the gardener must face up to the success or failure of months of effort to produce useful crops. Has it been worth it?

Reaching this judgement is a visceral experience formed while moving through the garden on other business and thinking about other things.

Factored in here are (for me) a sense of what’s changed this year. Have I made progress with the infrastructure in the garden such as the watering system, the netting of fruit trees to win back precious fruit from the predations of wildlife, or the extent of the mulch cover that protects the soil?

One of the tenants of organic gardening is that one feeds the soil rather than plant. Are the plants healthier and bearing well? Is the soil soft, cool, dark and friable?

All these impressions are integrated over time by the gardener, but the definitive impartial judgement is that made by the cook whose harvesting activities are the final arbiter of whether or not a garden is producing. Are the expected seasonal crops finding their way to the kitchen, the table, the neighbours, the cellar and the freezer?

In the background, the costs of operating a large backyard garden are high – water, mulch, seed, fencing, irrigation fittings, chook food and shed-building materials cost quite a bit while the income is only that of the displaced cost of eggs, fruit and vegetables that would otherwise be purchased down at the local organic store, plus the unquantifiable health benefits of an active life spent outdoors.

And this year’s report card?

A sense of weariness heads the gardener's impressions. Perhaps it’s the overhead of building a new chicken shed and restoring the old, or the battle for crop survival in the extreme heat that increasingly marks our summers. The garden feels as though it has survived but not prospered this year – this could all be turned around by a single giant thunderstorm whose rain would work a miracle of growth and energy in the garden that no amount of irrigation water seems to be able to bring about.

Fruit production – aside from citrus and berries – has been almost non-existent this season. The peach crop was zero and the table grapes failed in some mysterious way. Garlic, onions, zucchinis, kale, cucumbers, basil, silverbeet, pumpkin, asparagus and lettuce have all done well. But beans have struggled and the jury is still out on the tomato crop, due in about a month’s time.

The fruit trees – including the avocado – are all healthy, mulched and watered, which is something new; in the past they’ve been left to fend for themselves over summer. The lemon tree and banana grove have been trimmed at last, but the raspberries – bless them – are taking over the garden. The bamboo patch has been brought to order after a decade of neglect.

And the cook’s take on the gardener's efforts? Ah well, that’s a subject only a brave man would raise deliberately… She continues to be busy coping with the flow – bottling, pickling, making pesto and kimchee, feeding my greens to the chickens, producing delicious meals. Perhaps I’ll ask her after the tomato crop has come though and her own pressures are behind her when the cooler and gentler days of autumn arrive in a month’s time…

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…