Archive for the ‘Garden’ Category

Planting Seeds

Friday, September 28th, 2007

Planting seeds and raising seedlings are two of my favourite springtime activities. Little tomato and pepper seedlings are already raising their heads, along with heartsease, calendula, basil, parsley, tomatillo and numerous others.

These are the tomato varieties we are growing again for a second time this year:

Moneymaker — a medium-sized red tomato that cropped really well for us last year and proved pretty blight resistant. Delicious flavour!
Russian Red — another medium-sized red tomato. Last year it also proved tasty, a good cropper, and pretty blight resistant. It’s semi-determinate and fairly compact, which means less work delateralling.

We are also trying the following varieties for the first time this season:

Gardener’s Delight (also known as Sugar Lump) — a cherry tomato that is meant to bear prolific crops of sweet and delicious fruit.
Green Zebra — a green stripy medium-sized slicer. I grew this one in California for a couple of years, and found it delicious and hardy. The fruit also look beautiful. We’ll see how it fares here in our much more humid conditions.
Humboltti — I got this packet as a freebie from Koanga Gardens. The fruit are meant to be small and yellow with pointed ends, and great taste.


The Farmlet wizardress in action

There are so many wonderful-looking tomato varieties listed in the seed catalogues that it’s hard to choose which ones to try. I struggle to exercise a bit of restraint and to stay mindful of how much space we actually have in our garden! I hope we’ve made good choices for this season. Now we are busy clearing and preparing garden beds so that we’ll be ready when it comes time to transfer the little seedlings to the garden.

Peas and lettuces have already been planted out. The lettuces are doing well, and we have just enjoyed the first leaves for our dinner — in a salad with beets and corn salad (also from the garden). I have finished erecting protective tent-like canopies made of marix cloth over the rows of peas. Now we hope they will be able to recover from the damage done to them by the large family of brown quail who like to visit the garden.

Creatures on the Farmlet: Live Ferments, Quail, Possum, Rattus Fattus

Sunday, September 23rd, 2007

The batch of sauerkraut made from the first of our red cabbages turned out well, and I’ve now got a second batch ripening in the kitchen. It is fun to make lacto-fermented condiments from our own vegetables. This ancient and ingenious method of food preservation actually increases the nutritional value of the vegetables, and the red cabbage sauerkraut comes out a fabulous purple-pink colour. These days, our kitchen sports a lineup of live ferments on the bench. As well as the fermented cabbage, we are making kefir and Caspian Sea yoghurt out of fresh milk from our darling Coco, and water kefir using lemons from the garden. A kombucha “mushroom” grows happily in the dark of a cupboard, producing a delicious drink for us. We enjoy having all these creatures living in our kitchen and sharing our food with us. I like to call them my pets.


Purple cabbage pet

Just outside the kitchen window are some more creatures with whom we are less happy to share our food. For the last few weeks, varmints have been raiding our lemon tree, and eating the skin off a whole lot of lemons. We suspect possums, and Kevin has been lurking around at night with the rifle hoping to catch them in the act. So far, no luck. These creatures are mighty stealthy. Kevin also set the possum trap under the tree. To our annoyance, the critters have taken little interest in the trap — apart from using it as a step ladder for reaching more lemons. Finally, a couple of nights ago, Kevin went out and saw the dead body of what he thought was a small possum in the trap. On closer inspection, he found he’d caught no possum, but a very plump and healthy rat: Rattus Fattus. We hoped this might be the end of our problems with the lemons, but the raiding continues (whether by rats, possums, or both) despite the presence of traps and continued forays with the rifle. Very frustrating! We had no such trouble last year.

Other creature trouble involves our newly planted crops of spring peas. We looked out the window one day to see that the marrowfat peas had been almost totally defoliated. I suspected snails, and was out in the garden in the rain that very night, trying to hunt down the culprits. Our search yielded surprisingly few slugs and snails, and we retired for the night feeling rather perplexed. We didn’t have to wait long to gain a better understanding of the situations. Looking out the window yesterday morning, we saw a whole family of fat little brown quail flocking through the garden beds, pecking and nibbling at the tender leaves of our greenfeast peas. We love watching these round little birds playing in the garden, but they are not welcome to trash our whole pea crops. After scheming for a while about inviting my parents’ cat out here for a vacation, or making quail casserole, we resolved to make row covers out of some salvaged marix cloth that we have stashed away in the garage. That way, we hope to continue sharing the garden with our little quail friends while protecting the young pea seedlings from their ravages. The peas look very sad and pathetic, and we hope they will recover from the attack!

AS WE GO TO PRESS: Kevin here. A little while ago, Becky called out and said that she heard a possum. I grabbed the .22 rifle and went outside. Locked and loaded, I scanned the trees with my flashlight. Maybe 20 metres from our kitchen window, there he was: Possum, destroyer of worlds, in a tall eucalyptus tree. He let out his call/bark for good measure.

“Tonight, you die,” I replied.

He won’t be getting any more of our lemons.

Early Spring in the Garden

Saturday, September 8th, 2007

It is beginning to feel like spring here, and there is a lot to do to prepare the garden for the new growing season.

Recent work in the garden:

* We have covered the area designated for the maize patch with black polythene, hoping to knock back the kikuyu grass before digging the new bed. We have also covered over another area for a new potato bed.

*The first potatoes have already taken off, and I’ve been outside weeding and mulching them. We hope to have new potatoes in time for Christmas.

*Jerusalem artichoke and yacon tubers have been planted in a well-dug bed, and Chinese yam is just beginning to sprout inside the living room window.

*We have been clearing out some of the crops that have over-wintered to make space for spring planting. Some of last year’s collards are now massive. We are giving them to the goats as we pull them up.


Becky with collard. Bonnie the dog likes to help.

*We have harvested the first of the “red drumhead” cabbage and globe artichokes. We enjoyed the artichokes last night, with a dipping sauce made of melted butter and juice from freshly-picked lemons. The cabbage has been transformed into two jars of stunningly purple sauerkraut. We are waiting eagerly for the sauerkraut to ripen, so that we can sample it!


Early bounty

*The chamomile I dried last summer for tea has kept us supplied right through the winter — and I drink a lot of chamomile tea! Now the chamomile is flowering again, and it is time to start harvesting it once more.

*I have planted out the first of the spring lettuces in the garden (green “tree lettuce” and “asian red”).

*Three kinds of peas have germinated, and are almost ready to transplant into the garden. This year we are growing “green feast” (a green shelling variety), “purple flowered snow pea,” and “marrowfat” peas to dry for winter soups. We have to hurry up and fix the trellises for all these peas to climb on.

*Carrots, beets, salsify, cilantro and summer brassicas are also sprouting.

*It still feels a bit cold outside for summer crops like tomatoes, peppers and beans, but I plan to start sowing seeds for summer crops in pots inside the living room window next week, so that they will be ready to go into the garden as soon as possible.

We are hoping to have the summer garden quite well established by mid-November, when our baby is due. We’ll see how we go!

Compost Pile

Monday, August 27th, 2007

Kevin recently mowed down a big patch of canna lilies. Today we spent a good part of the afternoon gathering up the cut plants and layering them into a big pile just over the fence from the vegetable garden. The mulch from the canna lilies seems to be full of carbon. Tomorrow we plan to gather some cow dung and make a big batch of nitrogen-rich manure tea with which to douse the pile. This is the biggest of several compost piles that we hope will be ready to enrich the garden in the coming autumn.

I spent a good part of last autumn being rather lazy (I like to think this was related to being in the early stages of pregnancy), so did not plant lots of compost crops in the unused vegetable beds as I’d planned to do. As a result, our present composting efforts are not as extensive as we would have liked. Still, we are doing as much as we can, and are on target to keep building up the amount of compost we are producing on the Farmlet season after season. I have already purchased seed for compost/ green manure crops to go in this autumn (broad beans, lupins, mustard, phaecelia, asparagus peas), and have written reminders in the garden diary so that we’ll be sure to plant them.


Compost pile

With the heavy clay soil we have here, it is crucial that we keep adding large quantities of organic matter every time we re-plant the beds. Last season, we were lucky enough to have a number of large bales of spoiled hay from my cousin’s farm, as well as a huge pile of mulched-up tree branches from my parents’ place. That gave us a fine start for building garden beds. This year, we are still in the position of needing to bring in extra organic matter to improve the structure of our soil. We anticipate having to do this for the first few years until a) we have established a good base of garden soil, and b) we have a decent quantity of our own compost coming on line.

Though in principle we dislike the idea of hauling in organic matter from outside, we feel this is a wise use of our “petro-chemical dollars.” Establishing a good base of soil in our garden is one of our highest priorities. At this stage, we are also adding lime and gypsum to the vegetable beds, and are looking into remineralizing the soil on the Farmlet as a whole, by spreading rock dust.

NB: In the photo the compost pile has come out looking somewhat cone-shaped. It is actually rectangular in shape.

August Garden

Monday, August 6th, 2007

At the moment, it seems that we don’t really walk around the Farmlet. Rather, we wade and slither. Everything is sodden, and we and our animals are all feeling ready for some spring weather to dry things out just a little. Even though the farm is soggy and the garden scruffy, August finds us full of plans and hopes for the growing season ahead. We have drawn up plans for the spring and summer garden, and the new packets of seeds we ordered have already arrived.


Lemons

Today, I started organising the area under the front porch that I use for starting seeds. I had the help of my parents’ elderly dog, who is lodging with us while they are on vacation. The “to do” list is long at the moment. A couple of overgrown areas of the house paddock need to be cleared and covered with black polythene sheeting without delay, if we are to extend the vegetable garden for the coming season. Garden beds need to be cleared, and compost made with whatever we clear out. Then the beds need to be prepared for planting. It is certainly encouraging to see how good the drainage is in our vegetable beds compared to the rest of the house paddock. We are glad for all the work we have done over the past year to improve the soil structure. . . but more time and hard work will be necessary to build the soil up to the levels of our expectations.

It is exciting to have some new kinds of seeds to try, as well as favourites from last year. One such favourite is the New Zealand heirloom “Tree Lettuce.” It proved very bolt resistant last summer, and was also remarkably pest free. We have a new lettuce to try, as well: another heirloom called “Asian Red.” It’s also meant to be a good summer lettuce — resistant to bolting and pests. I’ve planted the first lettuces already, in little pots by the window, so we’ll see how they go.

Some of the vegetable varieties that we liked and are growing again this year include:
Green Feast Peas (a shelling pea, prolific, sweet, and every bit as tasty as the name suggests)
Red Orach (a beautiful and delicious salad green)
Tampala Amaranth (also very ornamental, and a welcome addition to salads and stir-fry dishes)
Bull’s Blood Beet (beautiful, burgundy-coloured foliage on top of sweet beetroots)

Some new varieties that we are trying this year include:
Purple-Flowered Snow Peas
Marrowfat Peas
Corn Salad, Dutch Large Seeded

I guess we will be writing more about the different veges in the garden as the season progresses.

Harvest-wise, our garden is not very abundant at the moment, so we are pleased still to be eating last season’s potatoes, and tomatoes in the form of bottled tomato puree. We are also picking all the greens we can eat (garden cress, collards, squire kale, mustard lettuce, swiss chard, and some broccoli), as well as green onions, leeks, turnips, beets, cilantro and pot celery. We certainly can’t complain, with this selection of vegetables on our table! We are also enjoying the fruit of the meyer lemon tree that grows in the house paddock between the vegetable beds, as well as the scent of its blossoms.

And the garden already promises more treats to come: The broad beans are flowering, little rosettes of corn salad are emerging, “red drumhead” cabbages are starting to form heads, and the garlic (planted about a month ago now) is really taking off!