Surely next season HAS to be better!

We’ve just had the worst vegetable season since our move to the country almost five years ago. It’s the first time we haven’t needed to give away a surplus of zucchinis. We’ve barely had enough to keep ourselves going, even with the addition of three plants of button squash filling the shortfall.

Our butternut pumpkins have also been very disappointing. We’ll be lucky to get 10 pumpkins this year. In previous years we’ve always exceeded 50.

Tomatoes have never been much of a success at our place, so even the poor crop we got was a slight improvement, but it ought to have been much better. Gloria pulled up the last couple of plants yesterday.
And our corn was possibly left too late before being picked – it was very dry despite having more than ample water with the record summer rains.

Our main successes have been onions (even though they were down on previous years), garlic, beans (lazy housewife and purple king are still pickable) and several cucumbers (the most we’ve grown so far).

I now have three empty veggie beds. One has been enriched with homemade compost and several bags of cow manure. On another I’ve been throwing prunings and grass clippings. I’ll top that with straw when I get around to buying a bale or two and hopefully will make it into a decent no-dig garden. The future of the third bed is still to be decided.
The only bed still in use has the last of the zucchini, squash and pumpkins. With frosts not too far away the productivity of that bed is also close to an end. So soon I’ll have a totally blank canvas to start all over again.

The Alternative Kitchen Garden an A-Z

I’ve tried a few times to start this review but haven’t been happy with any of my attempts so far. So I decided to stop trying any “cleverness” and to come to the point. The Alternative Kitchen Garden an A-Z is an excellent book.

It is a joy to read, it is informative, encouraging and entertaining. It can be read one topic per sitting if time is short, or if circumstances and several free hours permit it could easily be read from cover to cover with barely a break.

Emma Cooper is an enthusiastic amateur gardener sharing her experiences and discoveries. Many gardening books have left me discouraged, making the garden seem like an alien environment needing detailed technical knowhow and abundant finances to maintain. This book helps make a successful garden seem more attainable.

There are sections covering many gardening related topics arranged in alphabetical order. A quick count reveals around 150 separate topics are covered. Different kinds of vegetables, garden pests, soil conditions, gardening practices, environmental issues and helpful resources are all touched upon in sufficient, but not overwhelming detail, most of them across two pages.

Cooper seems to have a particular interest in trying the unusual, from exotic fruit and veggies to using a Grow Dome instead of a traditional green house, but this does not distract from more common and widely familiar plants and gardening experiences.

While many readers wouldn’t see the need to grow Quamash (”an edible bulb, a staple food of native Americans”) or Tiger Nuts (an edible tuber related to papyrus), Cooper still makes them interesting topics to show we don’t need to stick to the common and predictable within the garden. Experimentation and discovery can add a new dimension of interest and maybe extend our diet beyond the handful of familiar veggies we tend to stick with.

The Alternative Kitchen Garden is a very personal account of gardening, and as the title indicates it relates mainly to the growing of edibles. I’ve wanted to increase the productiveness of my own garden by incorporating more food producing plants and I appreciate the help and inspiration this book provides.

For a very good idea of what the book’s content I recommend a listen to some of the Alternative Kitchen Garden (AKG) podcasts. The link will be provided below.
The podcast was my introduction to Emma Cooper. Her short broadcasts, and now her book, have been very helpful for my own gardening journey. Somehow she manages to discover and share basic information that the gardening “experts” somehow forget to tell us.
Before I discovered AKG I had been puzzled by the round garlic-lie balls that had grown in my garden. These I found are the product of bulbils, tiny cloves that grow on soft-neck garlic. If left in soil they grow into the single balls of garlic that I had found. When these balls are left a further year (or when replanted) they form into the more familiar segmented heads of garlic cloves.


Link to The Alternative Kitchen Garden Podcast:
http://coopette.com/akg

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End of Neglect?

Over winter the garden has been a little neglected. This has been reflected in the lack of gardening content on this blog. Now winter is coming to a close but its last effects remain.

We’ve had only five rain free days this month (and eight last month) and our water tank has been continually full and overflowing. If only that overflow water could be saved until it could be put to good use in summer!

A 10,000 litre tank seemed to be a good size but it fills quickly with steady rain and empties equally quickly during dry spells. But what more can be done on land in town? Even if we could afford more tanks where would we put them?

I can only wonder what can be expected in summer. How quickly will the garden dry out again once the temperatures start rising? Will we go from one extreme to the other?

At the moment the veggie garden is starting to show a little promise. A bed of onions is coming along nicely, and for once my brassicas aren’t looking too bad. I’ve been growing most of my cabbages and broccoli under bird netting to prevent access by butterflies. Last year we had a lot of trouble with caterpillars. I’m confident that the netting will keep the butterflies out. The holes in the mesh are about 1cm in diameter.

I also have another bed with Kale, lettuces and more cabbage which will need to be netted soon. So far it’s been too cold for butterflies to cause a problem with more newly planted seedlings. The covered bed with more mature plants was established earlier while there were still a few butterflies around before the real cold of winter hit.

This year’s crop of garlic is showing mixed results. I have Russian garlic going well and I also have Silverskins and Australian Whites. One of the latter two has been growing quite strangely (I don’t recall which one at the moment). It has sent up leaves like clumps of thick grass. Gloria told me that when she used that type of garlic in her cooking, each individual clove tended to disintegrate further into separate, thin little bulbs. I also found the same thing when I planted some of them. I’m not sure that I’ll grow that type again – even though they didn’t show that characteristic last year.

Another plant that is causing me some concern is the raspberry. I planted it last year and had no fruit at all over summer (which would probably be normal) but now it is sending suckers everywhere and little shoots are springing up a metre and a half away from the parent plant, even in my garlic bed having tunnelled under a small brick retaining wall.
I’ve decided to leave it alone for the next growing season, hoping to get enough fruit for it to repay the cost of purchase. Then after fruiting I’ll rip it out. Even so I’m sure it will be quite some time before we no longer have to deal with its offspring.

Earlier today I received an email to let me know two apple trees I’ve purchased have been mailed. I ordered a Fuji and a type I’d not previously heard of, a Winchester Pearmain. They are only small trees so will take a few years until they fruit. Hopefully they will eventually be productive enough to give us a decent crop of apples each year.

Last Post for 2009

Almost Christmas again and I’ll be away from my computer until after the New Year holiday. I haven’t contributed much here in recent weeks because I’ve been concentrating on my newest blog which is devoted to books. One of my recent entries on that blog is a review of Linda Cockburn’s new novel Who Killed Dave which many will find to be an entertaining read but overall was not to my taste. Some will know Linda through her blog, her articles in Organic Gardening, or her previous book Living the Good Life.



According to recent weather reports we can expect some heavy rainfalls over the Christmas break as the remains of tropical Cyclone Laurence head into NSW. A decent downpour would be very welcome to top up my water tank. It is now down to half full, the lowest it’s been since it was full to overflowing a few months ago.

The most productive things in the garden at the moment are the yellow button squash. We have three plants that are bearing more than enough fruit every day. We are also getting a good supply of zucchini, but they have not yet reached the fruitfulness of previous years.

This year I have tried a new type of bean. It has purple pods that are supposed to turn green when cooked. We have now begun to pick the first of these, but so far haven’t had the opportunity to try them. We also have our usual “lazy housewife” that is beginning to provide a promising number of beans. Its still early days, and I sowed fewer seeds this year, but we will hopefully get enough from the plants to meet our needs.

Last week I harvested all of my garlic. It is now hanging in the garage to dry. Likewise my Barletta onions were ready and are also drying out a little more under cover. The rest of my onion crop has also done very well but needs more time in the ground.

We had expected to get our first reasonable sized blueberries this year, but we were too slow in netting them and every bit of fruit disappeared thanks to the birds. Fortunately there weren’t many on the bush so there weren’t many to lose – but it would have been nice to at least get a taste.

At the back of the garden I have two Goji Berry bushes. Be warned – if you are thinking of growing them they send out vigorous suckers. That’s not the kind of thing they list on the label when you buy them. Ours are now entering their second year. I’m not sure when they are supposed to fruit but we’ve had no sign of anything yet.

Our Raspberry is also looking very vigorous, but again no hint of it fruiting. It also has new growth springing up everywhere in its immediate vicinity; but at least I was aware that it would send out suckers and the many new shoots were no surprise.

I now realise that I’ve overplanted my tomato patch. It is very congested and hard to see the fruit. Most of them were from seeds that were free with Burkes Backyard magazine but I did buy one Black Russian plant from Big W. That plant is doing very well and being on the edge of the garden I can a lot of good sized fruit waiting to ripen. Hopefully we can avoid fruit fly this year. It’s been three years since I last tried tomatoes, hoping the break might help us to avoid the problem when we tried again. The first tomato crop we grew wasn’t helped by the fact that a peach tree had been neglected in the garden prior to our move into the house. The peaches became infested with fruit fly so we decided to cut it down and to rely on the many nearby stone fruit orchards for our summer fruits.

Fruit & Veg

Beetroot

This is the first time I’ve grown beetroot in a properly prepared bed and the difference is clear. It’s taken me a couple of years to give up trying to improve the soil (clay!) in the garden by digging in organic material. I realised that it would take far more compost than I could produce from my inadequate compost bins. So now I have built some borders with concrete blocks to create raised beds.

The beetroot is in the first of these beds and their leaves look much more lush and healthy than in the last two years. I suppose this could have meant that all of the plants growth was in the foliage with nothing of value happening under the ground, but a recent inspection showed that the roots themselves are also growing quite well. After only a month and a half they are already as big as those several months old in previous crops.

Our beetroots are one of the essential vegetables we grow – without them it’s impossible to bake the chocolate beetroot cake that is one of my wife’s favourite cakes to make (and one of my favourites to eat). I’ll try to post the recipe at a later date.

Australian Garlic


I am growing three different known types of garlic. This is the third year that I’ve grown Russian (or Elephant) garlic after buying one head from the diggers club two years ago. From the original crop I saved two of the five heads for replanting and this year and I planted around twelve cloves saved from last years crop. This is one of the milder varieties and is actually a type of leek with very large cloves.
I also bought two heads each of Australian White and Silverskin, both of which have are now displaying short shoots. The Silverskins have only just broken the soil surface but are showing a lot of promise.
We use garlic regularly and have recently used the last of our home grown cloves and had to buy some from the supermarket. Fortunately they had some local garlic for sale for a reasonable price. I intend to use some of that to supplement the named varieties that I’ve already planted and maybe next year home grown garlic may last longer.

For the last two weeks I’ve been listening to The Alternative Kitchen Garden, a very informative gardening podcast from England. One episode helped to clear up a mystery that’s had me puzzled for a while. We found that some of the garlic last year failed to form into individual cloves and grew as a solitary ball and we didn’t know why.
This year when I harvested my Russian garlic I noticed some small growths on the side of the cloves. With a little pressure these broke off reasonably easily. Through The Alternative Kitchen Garden I learned that these are bulbils, and if left in the ground they will develop into the individual garlic balls. These balls, which can still be used as normal garlic, will develop into fully formed garlic cloves if replanted and left for another year.

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Broccoli - first sign

This week I saw that the broccoli is developing well with the first tiny head starting to develop. I have two different types planted out. The most developed is one I bought from the nursery as seedlings. The other I grew myself from seed and planted out a couple of weeks later.
Last year it was hard to keep up with the heavy cropping plants. Eventually we ended up blanching and freezing the excess. For some reason broccoli is not as easy to give away to friends as zucchini are.

Vegetable Beds.

Snow peas, beetroot and Russian Garlic to the left.

Broccoli and Mini Turnips in the centre bed.

5 types of onions to the right.


I’m not sure how my bed of onions will develop. I sowed some into punnets in early autumn and planted it out two weeks ago. According to the seed packet they should have been sown in winter. Some of the seedlings didn’t survive after we had a few hot days but I still had enough to plant out a couple of rows. There were two varieties in this planting, both of them red onions, but one was a longer “Florence Red”. I’ve seen something similar in the supermarket that is being sold as “Tuscan Red”. I’m guessing that they are the same thing considering Florence is in Tuscany.

After planting these two rows I decided to take a gamble and I sowed the rest of the bed with a few different onion varieties instead of firstly sowing them into punnets. I still don’t know whether this will work out okay. After a week there is no sign of anything, so patience is required. I did sow them into furrows of seed-raising mix, so I can’t see that the conditions are too much different to being sown into punnets. I’ll probably just have more work to do transplanting a few of those growing too close together when they mature enough to be moved.

Those additional varieties include a brown onion (cream gold I think it was called), spring onions and barletta, which appears to be the same as those the supermarket sells as “salad onions”. They are white and flatter than the commoner round onions. I grew a lot of them last year and they are quite mild.





Tahitian Limes

The limes in the photo are most of this years crop from a dwarf Tahitian lime. After the photo was taken they were all zested and juiced, producing about 2 litres of lime juice and a good amount of zest.
The juice was frozen in ice cube moulds and later bagged, ready for future use in cakes and deserts. Our lemon tree of a similar size is loaded with fruit.

Both the lemons and limes are extremely juicy, have very thin skins and very little pith.