Sowing seeds for the vegetable garden

Food production in the backyard is a simple activity that takes in a few elements of the simple life philosophy. It helps with debt reduction and saving, it encourages sustainability, self-reliance, organisation and preparedness, it helps with food security and waste (compost) and it is one of the things that will help slow you down. I'm really excited about our new season kitchen garden. A couple of days ago I went through my seed box, identified what new seeds I needed and bought them on Saturday. With the price of fresh food going up all the time I want to make sure we produce as much as we can to eat fresh, and to preserve for later in the year. Apart from rising prices, I'm determined to serve local food on our table as much as I can and if that food comes from our backyard, that's even better. I'm planning to be as thrifty as I can be in the garden this year so I will plant seeds instead of seedlings.  We often buy seedlings from the markets and even though they're a good price, they aren't as thrifty as planting seeds. We resort to seedling because we're rarely ready to plant when we should be, but this year I'm primed up and ready. This year I want to do it right the entire season.

If you have a lot of seeds from previous years and you're unsure about the viability of some of them, you can test to see if they're okay. It will save you sowing the seeds and hoping the'll pop up. Simply take about 10 seeds from the pack you want to test, take three sheets of kitchen paper towel, wet it slightly and pour the seeds onto the wet towel. Wrap both ends in and then roll the towel into a cigar shape. Fold it in two, then put it inside a plastic bag. You don't want the seeds or the towel to dry out. If the seeds are still viable, they will shoot in a few days. Give them about 10 days before you throw them out but if you see little shoots coming out of the end of the seeds, you know the rest of the pack will produce vegetables and are fine to use.

Above are Portuguese cabbage seeds during their test for viability. Unfortunately, after growing the seeds for a few years, they're no longer fertile - they didn't sprout, despite the moist and warm conditions. I received the seeds from a gardener in Melbourne, Andrew (I think) and liked the cabbage a lot. If you're still out there, Andrew, I'd love some more seeds if you have any to spare.

This is our vegetable garden last Sunday morning. It's survived a hot summer, hungry pecking chickens and no attention for two months. It's time to get her ready for the season ahead.

Our precious elder tree has borers and the dry summer has made it drop most of its leaves on the sunny side.  Luckily, new shoots are appearing after the rain and a bit or organic fertiliser. This place is our favoured place to sit in the garden.

Sunday morning I sowed the seeds for our first Sugarloaf cabbage, cauliflower, daikon, curly kale and tomatoes. I also have a cutting from our elder tree in a pot because the elder has borers and we'll have to replace it in the next year or two. I plan on growing all the above as well as peas, beans, onion, lettuce, Japanese spinach, turnips, carrots, swedes, garlic, cucumbers, radish, zucchinis, chillies, strawberries, Welsh onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes, pumpkins, herbs and flowers to bring in the bees. I hope to only buy fruit at the market, although we are growing oranges, mandarins (tiny ones in their second year), lemons, youngberries, blueberries, strawberries, loquats, bananas, passionfruit and grapes. I want to buy some thornless raspberries to plant along the front of the new section of the chook house. If we can grow all that consistently, I'll be a very happy woman and we shouldn't have to rely on buying vegetables for a long time.

One of our blueberry bushes is producing well. The others are a different type and I hope they'll give us a good crop later in the year. I know now to cut the blueberries back so I hope that will increase yields in years to come.

The navel orange is full of fruit growing fat and juicy. It's started putting on a lot of new growth too.

The youngberries haven't had enough water over summer but are still producing a small amount of fruit. I'll have to fertilise them soon and provide a good covering of mulch.

Our loquat tree is full of flowers this year. It's the best year it's had for a long time.

This is a crazy mix of grape and passionfruit vines. The passionfruit is already putting on very big fruit this year.

I realised when I was watching Carol Klein's Grow your own Veg on You Tube recently that our growing season here - which is out of kilter with southern Australia's, that we're more in line here with UK and European gardeners. We start planting in March and continue right through until November, when we stop planting but keep harvesting until January or so. We leave the gardens for a couple of months to rest over the hottest months and then get ready to do it all over again. I wonder if there are some gardeners out there who will be starting their gardens up again in March. Would you like to garden along with us?  If so, send two photos in every month and if I can work out how to do it, I'll set up a Pinterest page to show all our gardens together. Are you interested in doing this? Don't send the photos yet. I'll set up the page first and let you know.

Above is our little orchard looking back towards the front of our house. This is Hanno's work shed and our second water tank.
Below: looking towards the chicken run, the picket fence is the side of the garden. Those large trees in the run are a native fig, a pecan and a lemon tree. We've planted a second lemon in the corner of the fence line.

Sowing seeds is the most cost effective forum of vegetable gardening. You'll also have a much bigger range of seeds to choose from.  You have to be more organised and have your seedlings ready to plant at certain times during the year but if you can do that, it's a worthy exercise. In my next post, I'll write about planting seeds and caring for them until they reach the stage when they're planted out in the garden.