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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.

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!