Top tips for your vegetable garden

Hanno digging the garden over yesterday.

We're back in our garden again so we can grow fresh food. For the past couple of weeks, I've been sowing seeds and tending them in the gentle protection of our bush house. While I was doing that, Hanno was digging the beds over, adding manure, compost, lime, blood and bone and worm castings. Adding all those nutrients to the soil before we start and aerating it by turning it over to spade depth is what gives us a healthy garden every year. Gardening is a mixture of a little bit of hard work and a fair bit of easy work, you have to put the effort in to get the rewards. This ritual that starts our growing season, is the hard bit, after the plants are in and growing, it's just observation, tying the plants to stakes, fertilising, watering and the all important pay-off - harvesting. Then replanting our succession crops.

Along with all of that there is a mix of tasks that increase the likelihood of success and keep the soil alive and healthy. New comers to gardening often read about the planting and harvesting but there's not a lot said about the side tasks; the work that increases your chance of success. So I thought it would be a good idea to tell you what we do here. Hopefully it will help you get good crops every year while maintaining healthy soil - which is truly sustainable gardening.

Last year's garlic.

Growing garlic

Now is the time for planting garlic in many parts of Australia (and other parts of the world). If you've been growing garlic for a while, you'll have a healthy collection of good quality bulbs that you separated out from last year's crop. These should have been the biggest, most healthy looking specimens you could find. If you want to cultivate good garlic, you have to start off with good genes. Work out how many garlic heads you want to grow, you'll need one clove per head, and put that number of cloves into a brown paper bag. Fold it over and put the bag of garlic into the crisper of the fridge. Leave for a couple of weeks and then plant out. This will fool the cloves into sprouting when they come out into your warm earth. They need at least a couple of weeks, so work your timing out and refrigerate your garlic accordingly.

Potatoes will be planted when they start sending out shoots. I'll probably cut some of these larger spuds.

Growing potatoes

It's also potato planting time!  We have a couple of kilos of organic potatoes sitting on the back verandah table waiting for shoots to form.  When they do, we'll plant them in trenches and cover them. If you want to plant potatoes in a month or so, buy them now so they can develop shoots before they are planted. Potatoes are quite an easy crop if the weather is kind but watch out if there is a lot of rain. The tubers can rot in the ground. Make sure you plant into rich soil to which a lot of organic matter and manure has been added, water well and wait for the green tops to appear. You can hill soil up around the green tops to increase your yield. Give an extra feed of comfrey tea when the flowers appear. When the green tops die down, they're ready for picking, although you can steal into the side of the plant after flowering and take out the small new potatoes. Cook them straight away and serve with butter, fresh parsley, salt and pepper and you'll know then why potatoes are usually on the list for most home gardeners.

Watch out for night time pests

These will be different in various areas. We don't have a lot of wandering marsupials here but I think we currently have a bandicoot that is digging in the newly dug garden, searching for worms and seeds. I remember my sister had possums that used to eat her French roses as well as raid the vegetable patch. The solution to the problem will depend on what pest is visiting your garden at night. Here, we're decided to put in a set of solar light in the garden. We hope that by providing a small amount of light, that will keep the wandering night creatures down on the creek where I want them to stay. Whatever pest you have, think carefully about how you can deter it without harming it.

The Barnevelder sisters.

Don't be afraid to move plants - organise your garden to suit each season

We've just removed a big clump of pineapple sage. Some will go into the garden a bit further over where it suits our planting this year, other pieces of the clump will be potted up and stored in the bush house and probably replanted out the front as flowering plants. I'm also going to strip all the chillis off the bush, cut it back and plant it in a pot to sit in the bush house for a few months. In spring, we'll replant it in the garden. Capsicums and chillis keep growing here over winter but they never produce fruit, so as long as we can keep the plant healthy over the colder months, it will serve us again in spring. I'll probably do the same thing with the capsicums/peppers. The last of our garden plants on the move are the strawberries. I dug them up yesterday afternoon and will wrap them in moist hessian until they can be planted out again for winter berries.
Warning: some plants cannot be moved. Parsley, for instance, generally dies when its roots are disturbed. Make sure you check out the requirements for any plant you want to move.

Plant comfrey

Comfrey is such a useful herb. It's used as a compost activator, fertiliser tea, mulch for tomatoes and potatoes and if you grow enough comfrey, you'll never have to buy fertiliser from the nursery. Yarrow is another good herb for fertilising and it gives you a beautiful flower as well.

Sprouting broccoli and brown onion seedlings, to be planted out next week.

Making fertiliser

Get into the habit of doing this because it will save you a few dollars each year and will allow you to made weeds, chook poo, comfrey, yarrow or worm castings into nutrient-rich fertiliser.  Basically, any kind of fertiliser tea is made by adding the main ingredient - be that manure, plants, weeds and adding water to it. You allow it to steep for a few days, then dilute the resulting tea down with more water and pour it on. Fertiliser tea is excellent as a spray over the entire plant because the leaves will take the nutrients in, but you can water it in around the plant roots too. My favourite fertiliser is comfrey tea. Plant a couple of comfrey plants near your compost heap and use it frequently to make tea. It's great for green leaves as well as flowering plants because it's high in nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium and many trace elements. How to make comfrey fertiliser here.

Staking plants

It's always better to stake taller plants. Fruiting plants such as tomatoes, will bend and snap under the weight of their fruit if they're not staked. Make use of old stockings or cotton rags cut in strips for your ties, don't use string because it will cut into the tomato stalks. I know it seems like a pain to go around each tomato plant to tie it, but you'll be rewarded for your work.

Three of the eight blueberry cuttings I took.

Propagating

Don't forget to propagate as you go through the growing season.  I've taken eight cuttings from the blueberry bushes and I have them in the bush house, in moist potting mix. I'll keep them moist and hopefully, be rewarded with a few new blueberry bushes, free. Gardening can be a costly exercise so if you can cut down on your expenses by propagating from what you already have, you should do it. This can include saving seeds at the end of the season. Of course, if you do want to save seeds for next year, you'll need to start off with open pollinated/heirloom seeds.

Watering

If you've got a vegetable garden going, I hope you've thought about harvesting rainwater from your roof to water your plants. The cost of water is increasing and you should include the cost of water in your garden expenses calculations. If you want to garden sustainably, think about collecting water for the garden.

Harvesting at the right time

This sounds so obvious, it seems like an insult to put it in, but harvesting at the right time is a skill to be developed just like all the others. You'll find every garden book will tell you to ripen your tomatoes on the vine. However, if we do that here, we get tomato grub and no tomatoes. Observe your garden, trust your instincts and go with what you think you should do. Learn from your mistakes and over the years, you'll build up the skills that will help you garden well in your climate. Tomatoes don't need sunlight to ripen. They need warmth and they will ripen very nicely in your kitchen. So learn about when to harvest according to the conditions in your garden. Peas and beans are best harvested younger rather than older, as are a lot of things. Lemons can be harvested when they're ripe and can sit around in a bucket for a couple of weeks - you'll increase the amount of juice you get if you do that.

Soaking your seedlings in a weak seaweed liquid for a few hours before planting will help a lot with transplant shock.

Succession planting

Have the next crop ready to go in when the preceding crop is harvested.  Often you can just take a few leaves off a plants and let the plant keep growing but when you pick the entire plant, soon you'll be left with a bare patch. Look on your seed packets, or online, to see how long your plants take from seed to germination to harvest and using that information, plant more seeds to follow up when that first crop is due to be harvested.

If I could only give you two pieces of information about gardening they'd be these two: 

1. Always prepare your soil well and plant into rich soil.
2. Look at your garden and work out what's happening - with the watering, insects, pollination, fertilising, pruning, spacing. Be actively involved in learning about the plants you've chosen to grow and trust yourself if you think you should change what you're doing.

I wish you all a very successful growing season. I know how important it is for many people, it is for us too because we can't afford to buy a lot of organic food. If we can grow our own, it gives us the freshest possible vegetables and fruit, we know how it's been grown, there are no food miles attached and it makes us feel like we're doing something worthwhile.  Happy gardening everyone. ♥

Further reading
The surprising healing qualities of dirt

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