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…

Sorting out the sad seedlings

Seedlings – like human babies – outgrow their cribs not long after birth, and have to be put into a proper bed or face decline.

The cucumbers above could have gone out at six weeks after sowing, but here we are at seven weeks and the inevitable must happen, no matter what is happening on the rest of the property (and that’s another long shaggy-dog story…)

The real problem has been a week of hot weather (40 degrees centigrade, or over 100 degrees Fahrenheit). The seedlings would never cope with that much direct sunshine and heat, no matter how frequently I watered them, so they have been covered for most of the working day with heavy-duty shade cloth, waiting for cooler weather to start their new lives.

However, for this transplanting process to work, much preparation is needed,

Firstly, the water melons need to go in, as they are bigger and their garden bed has been prepared weeks in advance. The planting technique is simple, and has been explained last week when the zucchinis went out. So that was the easy bit, and helped postpone the cucumber plant-out for one more day while cook and gardener gathered their strength and got things sorted on the rest of the property.

The next garden bed to be opened up, for the cucumbers and the rest of the seedlings, has dried out since winter and the soil must be ‘woken up’ and brought back to life by applying water some weeks in advance. This is expensive, and 44,000 litres of water (over 11,000 US gallons) have been used in this past fortnight alone to bring the garden through the heat wave. This, despite very slow and careful irrigation via drippers laid under mulch.

The chickens have worked over this moistened strip of soil and tilled it to a fine tilth while cleaning out any resident insect pests. Now they are pushed to the outside of the fence, and ‘gutter guard’ mesh has been tied along the lower edge to keep them from sticking their heads through to destroy the seedlings (cucumbers have to be planted close to the mesh to allow them to climb up it).

So the cucumber seedlings are planted at 45 cm spacing, then surrounded by barley straw mulch. The upper part of these seedlings are almost buried in the straw; this will allow them to lie dormant for the next week (forecast to be in the cool twenties) with their leaves out of the sun for much of the day while their shocked root systems recover and get a new grip on their very own piece of rich dark soil.

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.

How to plant zucchinis

Thirty-six days after planting zucchini seeds into potting mix the seedlings are ready to be transplanted into the garden beds. Leaves look like miniatures of those that will adorn the adult plants and they are starting to crowd each other in the seed tray.

Of all the seeds planted five weeks ago the zucchini seeds developed the fastest, perhaps helped along by the large store of energy and nutrient supplied by the parent plant when the seeds were formed a year or two ago.

All seedling have to survive ‘transplant shock’ - disturbance to their root systems when the seedling is planted out into full sun conditions and into soil at a different temperature and moisture level to that in which it has grown up. This often leads to immediate wilting, and so one must ensure that the seedling has had plenty of water right up until plant-out to fully hydrate it. Seedlings should also have been ‘hardened up’ by being out in full sun all day long rather than under the shade cloth covering many nurseries. If possible, I plant out on the evening of a cool day. This gives the seedlings time to settle in before coming under high atmospheric demand under the midday sun.

There’s one other thing that I have to look out for; insect attack. Earwigs and slater beetles in the mulch come out to feed at night; they are especially thrilled to find new and vulnerable seedlings to feast upon. I guard against this by putting the hens into empty seed beds for a week or two prior to planting; their scratching and hunting completely wrecks these pest populations.

I do have one more trick up my sleeve to combat insect pests; short lengths of PVC 90-mm pipe that I saw off long lengths of storm water pipe to act as seed guards. Not only do they keep pests out, but they also stop mulch blowing over the seedling and weakening it by blocking access to sunshine and photosynthesis. These guards are pushed about 10mm into the soil (without touching the top roots) and pinned down with galvanised hooks normally used to hold the irrigation piping in place.

Much of the soil preparation has been done over winter by the hens; they have kept weeds and insect populations down and broken up the surface mulch. That’s mulch that I’d laid over the beds in late autumn to capture the winter rains in the soil profile. Now it provides the cover that will protect the seedlings from too-rapid fluctuations in soil moisture while they strive to get their root systems deeper into safer and moister soil. Because this is now ‘old mulch’ it doesn’t steal nitrogen from the seedlings in breaking down; it’s already done so.

These garden beds are all fenced, so now the hens are locked out and the pre-established drip lines turned on to show me where the wettest spots are along its length; these mark the best locations for planting the seedlings, as I know they will have first access to irrigation water even when that water becomes scarce or is being dried out rapidly by the giant leaves of the mature zucchini plants.

The seedlings are lifted out of the seed tray by hand so that the root mass between seedlings separates readily. As much of the original soil as possible is kept around the seedling’s roots. The seedling is laid into the crumbled bottom soil of a hole dug in the wet soil alongside the drip line. The soil is gently returned to surround and cover the roots and tamped down with slight pressure to ensure that the soil and roots are in good contact without too much air. Finally the seedling guard is added and pinned down. Dry mulch is laid around the outside of the guard to prevent the soil water around the seedlings from being exposed to direct evaporation by the sun.

Sixteen zucchini plants are sown in under an hour; many of these will find their way into soups, vegetable side dishes, quiches, the freezer or used as food for those hens who worked so hard to prepare the ground for their arrival.

The Christmas rush ‘down-under’

Few folk in the northern hemisphere can fully appreciate the Australian gardener’s dilemma at this time of year; spring plantings are reaching a crescendo in concert with end-of-year pressures such as Christmas and New Year parties, school and University final exams,Christmas shopping pressures and the start of the annual summer holiday season that shuts down businesses and services during the month of January.

Just think Christmas in June, and you’ll have a mere taste of just how hard-pressed gardeners in the southern hemisphere are when it comes to firing up their crops among all these other activities that are thrust upon them!

So this past weekend was pretty typical  - a movie night on Friday evening with the family, birthday shopping with a grand-daughter on Saturday morning, the engagement celebrations of a nephew on Saturday afternoon, dinner for the newly weds on Saturday evening and again on Sunday evening, and birthday celebrations at Warrawong Sanctuary for the granddaughter on Sunday afternoon.

 

Yet the potatoes, climbing beans, and dahlia bulbs got planted out, the celery and capsicums seed trays were re-seeded, more pumpkin seeds got sown, the watering system in the onion and garlic beds got tweaked, the grape-vines and broad-beans got watered, and the lemons got collected and delivered to the local organic coffee shop who use them for cleaning purposes.

Is it any wonder that Mondayitis afflicts Australian gardeners worst than most others?