Planting the new vegie garden

After quite a few weeks of busyness and flapping around here and there, I’m finally back to some kind of normal. It’s good to be at home, knowing I have the time to do what I want without thoughts of other things that need attention. I was supposed to be out today visiting a friend but she cancelled at the last minute so I have a lovely day at home ahead of me.

The garden is behind where it should be at this point. Generally it’s planted up in the first week of March but this year, with both Hanno and I being ill, moving the Neighbourhood Centre, and all that involved, and various other little bits and pieces, we have only prepared two beds and planted a handful of squash and tomatoes. We’ll get to work on the garden today.

I went to visit Frances at Green Harvest on Friday and bought a few packets of seeds, so with what we already have here, we are set to start off our main vegetable plantings for the year. This is an important time for us. What we sow now will be feeding us during the year, right up till about November when we will modify the garden slightly for summer crops. We have to get it right and we have to care for the plants as they grow, otherwise it’s a lot of hard work for nothing but a few straggling beans and squash. If we put in the right kind of work, however, those seeds will turn into the most delicious and healthy organic food.

I find the beginning of the new season garden both the most exciting time and the most mundane. There is a world of possibilities out there in the empty beds but seeing bare soil with no growth is very uninspiring. However, once those seeds start germinating, and when we start planting seedlings raised in the bush house, things start falling into shape. Tiny shoots emerge and add colour to the garden, we add structure with climbing frames, planted herb pots and stakes and it’s away. What was once a bare space starts looking like it could become something. Wait a couple of short weeks and beans vines start creeping up the trellis, cucumber and tomato flowers start forming, bees buzz around pollinating as they go, wasps fly in, lady bugs look like tiny oranges moving around and before we know it the first Chinese cabbage is being picked and another season of backyard food is there for the picking.

Our plantings this year are all open pollinated seeds, they include: Lacinato kale, lazy housewife beans, Oregon sugar snowpeas, Brandywine, Roma and Moneymaker tomatoes, Dutch Cream potatoes, country pumpkin, yellow button squash, bush cucumbers, sugarloaf cabbage, silverbeet – colour mix, capsicum (peppers) chilli, Nantes carrots, Tall Utah celery, Darwin lettuce, Welsh onions, radishes, parsley, thyme, oregano, bay and chives. I am looking forward to our seed swap because I might pick up a few other seeds that I could add to our regular mix. Sharon will announce the swap in the next week or so.

We try to stay within budget for our yearly plantings. I put aside $30 a month for the garden and have $75 in my kitty to spend on everything we'll use. It's a bit of a stretch from year to year trying to buy everything we need but more often than not we do it.

Last week we picked up 80 kgs (175lb) of composted cow manure from a local farm, we are still searching for cheap straw for mulch, I have enough worm castings to sink a ship and I have comfrey fertiliser brewing. We are set. If Hanno is well enough we’ll work in the garden together today. If he’s still sick, I’ll do a few things to start us off. I still have seeds to collect from our flowering celery, I have a harvest of rosellas to pick and the citrus need their March feed. Passionfruit and choko vines need to be cut back and I’ll spray the citrus with Eco oil. They’re all small jobs but each is important in its own way.

Our fruit this year is almost the same as last year. We’re growing lemons, oranges, pink grapefruit, bananas, passionfruit, grapes, loquats, avocado, red paw paw (papaya), blueberries, peaches and nectarines. It seems a lot, and while we get a lot of lemons and passionfruit, the others are still growing to a reasonable size and therefore put more energy into growing rather than producing a lot of fruit. Gardening is about time – it’s more about seasons and years than it is about days and weeks, so we need to be patient with the fruit. I write that to remind myself rather than anyone else. ;- )

Oh, I am also growing vanilla orchids. I always forget to write that, but while they’re very healthy I don’t have them in the right situation to flower, so no orchids or vanilla pods yet. I should concentrate on them more and try to get them to flower. There is nothing better in a cake than fresh vanilla bean.

While many of my country women and men will be putting their gardens to bed for the winter, now is a time of abundance here in the subtropics, and I know that Spring is almost here for all our Northern Hemisphere gardeners. I wonder who has their garden planned and seeds purchased. I'd be very interested to read about your plans if you care to share them.