May 2016 Kitchen Garden Guide

 

Land weeds

Hooray, hooray, at my place there have been more than 30mm of rain this week. It is just a little of what we need but it means our winter kitchen gardens can now start to grow, and that means the weeds too! Many of the weeds make excellent winter greens, especially when young. After all, they are here in Tasmania because someone brought them here, to eat, in the first place, then they got away.

Many people in Europe still forage, not just for mushrooms, but for winter herbs and greens and roots which are native to their lands. Many of them grow wild in our gardens but we silly Australians pull them out, calling them weeds and give them to the chooks, who happily devour them because they are not so prejudiced! There is an excellent Australian book called The Weed Foragers’ Handbook, which I highly recommend. Soon, you will be eating from the garden without planting anything at all!

Luckily, the cooler weather also heralds the end of the cabbage moth laying eggs on our brassicas. If you have not planted brassicas yet, it is now too late as the plants will not have big enough leaves to grow through winter. When spring comes, they will bolt to seed and you won’t get a crop.

Autumn is a wonderful time for harvesting mushrooms, kale, French sorrel, salad leaves, early broccoli, rainbow chard, the last of our summer vegetables, the first of the winter weeds and a myriad of fabulous apples, pears and quinces. Many kitchens are bulging at the seams with preserves. Bring on winter and cosy nights by the fire with some home-made cassis and quince paste served with a delicious, local cheese! I will be using my bottled tomatoes all year and smiling every time.

Seaweeds

Tasmania is surrounded by sea and yet we tend not to forage the shores and shallows for food. Did you know that our soils are low in magnesium and that this means your vegetables are too (unless care has been taken to add magnesium to the soil, usually by using dolomite lime or Epsom salts)? Magnesium is vitally important for our health. Magnesium can also be added to the soil simply by adding seaweeds to your compost or liquid feed. Magnesium can be added to your diet more directly by eating the seaweed yourself. All of the longest lived peoples of the world eat many different sea plants; think Okinawa (Japan) and Sicily.

Wakame (Undaria pinnatifida) is a common seaweed in Tasmanian waters but it is an introduced weed, probably arriving on the bottom of Asian ships and making a home from St. Helens to Dover. You can harvest it (or buy it) to your heart’s content because you are helping to control its spread. Red Lettuce or Grateloupia turuturu  is another introduced seaweed to the Tasmanian coast. This one is nutritious and a colourful addition to your meal. Search the internet for photos so you can identify them. I don’t know of any plants in our seas that are toxic but, the sad thing is, some of our coastline has been raped by industry plus land and sea farming which has left toxic residues in our once pristine waters.

Making the most of chook yard design

You can harvest many products and gain many services from a well thought out chook yard, besides the obvious eggs. My chooks range under half a dozen fruit trees. Their kind services here include constant vigilance for coddlin moth and other pests that overwinter at the base of trees, everyday manuring, turning of the mulch and eradicating of weeds and grass that germinates there as well as cleaning up some (but not all) fallen fruit.

The product I appreciate most is their production of the most beautiful leaf soil from the fallen leaves of two large oak trees that overhang the chook yard. Thousands of oak leaves fall from now into winter and form a very thick layer of gorgeous dry leaves which is the playground for the chooks all winter. They constantly turn it, manure it and crush it, while the rain dampens it, resulting in a very fine, deliciously soft, quite acidic, leaf mould or leaf soil by mid spring. I rake it up and spread it around liberally wherever acid loving plants grow (such as blueberries and strawberries) and where I am going to plant acid loving plants such as tomatoes. Left for another year it can be used with sand as a seed raising mix or added to potting mix, but all this waiting is far too complex for me to organise!

If you don’t have such a luxury, just cover the chook yard in any old hay, raked up autumn leaves, finished tomato plants etc. Peter Cundall recommends you throw around some lime under the hay. If you use dolomite, you will be adding magnesium and it is gentler on chook feet than other lime too, as they scratch about all winter.

In order to have a constant supply of greenery for chooks, it is a great idea to surround the perimeter of their yard with things they like to eat. This is easy to do if you have designed this idea into your food production system in the first place and placed the chook yard within the vegetable garden boundary, like a small box inside a larger box, thus making the outer perimeter of the chook yard, the inner perimeter of the vegetable garden. Plantings right up against the fence will poke leaves through and even over into the chook yard and allow the chooks a constant supply of your favourite vegetables without you having to do anything! Leaving some things to go to seed and fall into the chook yard will give them a good addition to their seed intake.

This design also allows you to let them range, from time to time, in a temporarily fenced section of the vegetable garden simply by opening one of a serious of gate options. They will eat the grass, remove weed seeds, manure it and turn it to a fine tilth. Then you simply close the gate, rake it over and start sowing or planting!

Sow in the garden now	Plant Now
Broad beans Bok Choy Mustard greens esp. frilly Miners’ lettuce Corn salad (mache) Shungiku (edible, Japanese Chrysanthemum) Radishes Salad and spring onions Coriander Chervil Sow in the hothouse to plant out: Lettuces Kales Broccoli raab Sow to stay in the hothouse or frost-free area: Sugar snap peas	Leek bulbils Garlic cloves Large seedlings of Asian veg. Flower bulbs Plant and grow in the hothouse: Celery (loves it there over winter), 1 or 2 of lots of things, so you can pick a few things when it is raining in the garden…. lettuce, parsley, viet. mint, lemon grass, chervil, frilly kale (small variety) for salads, shungiku, sugar snap peas….