Feb 2021 Kitchen Garden Guide

 

I have been gardening all summer. In fact, I have been gardening solidly for a whole year, without going away anywhere at all. Such was 2020! But, last weekend I stayed at Triabunna and went to the Spring Bay Mill Sunflower Festival. Marcus Ragus, who I would claim to be Tasmania’s leading horticulturalist, has been in charge of creating a 4 hectare food garden down by the sea, on part of the old Triabunna Wood Mill site, which is 42 hectares in total. He will also be creating more gardens and doing bush rehabilitation on another 30 hectares or so.

It was from Marcus that I first learnt about the deep hay method of gardening, as a means of raising fertility, getting rid of twitch etc, improving biodiversity and feeding the microbes. The Spring Bay food garden is run totally on this method and you ought to see the results, in just 2 years! I came away re-inspired to follow my passion for the largely self-sown, mostly deep hay, biodiverse, food gardening system. It was truly wonderful to spend all day wandering the gardens and listening to Marcus Ragus, Tino Carnevale and Angus Stewart filling the heads and hearts of a few hundred gardeners with their knowledge. There were also walks and talks and demonstrations of making fermented compost, gardening with all sorts of bees and hives, and plenty more.

Roots, Weeds and Paths

Roots are doing amazing things down under the surface; even more than I realised. Roots are dealing with all the microbes, worms, fungi, bacteria and air while growing through the soil. Some roots are actually benefitting all the other plants in their vicinity too. Mulberries and sunflowers are two such plants. That was part of the reason for a sunflower festival; to highlight not just their beauty but their usefulness growing amongst the vegetables and herbs. Plants that grow near sunflowers and mulberries benefit from this association. I have noticed that everything growing near and under my mulberry tree is so healthy and lush and now I know why. At Spring Bay, sunflowers are everywhere and they have planted a whole semi-circle of mulberries on the edge of a large, curved bed.

When most annual vegetables and herbs finish producing, I just cut them at ground level and leaves the roots to dissolve back into the ground. For sunflowers you can leave the strong stem in the ground and, if you have a clump of them, they can be used in-situ as next spring’s pea poles. Planting brassicas amongst the sunflowers in late summer, as they begin to die back, can help confuse the cabbage moths….. perfect!

In spring and summer the paths in the vegetable garden are where I toss most of the weeds and finishing vegetable debris, including old sunflower leaves. (Or I just lay some on the garden surface, if the weeds don’t have seeds.) As I tread it all down on the paths, it all goes back into the soil. Eventually, during winter and early spring, I scoop up all the resulting compost with my spade and put it back on the garden, ready to start again. Thick stems on the paths can get be treacherous so they get tossed amongst the shrubbery and trees, to rot away slowly.

Biodiversity

If you go into a forest or walk by the sea or a river, or, in fact, anywhere in its natural habitat, you will see that plants live together; you won’t see one plant here, one plant there, with space and bare soil all around, so I am not sure why people plant vegetables like this! The Spring Bay garden and my garden are packed with plants; tall ones, young ones, flowering ones, old ones, climbing ones and creeping ones all together. There are bees and insects doing all the work, so we never have problems to deal with. Marcus even plants grasses, especially barley, in clumps in the vegetable garden beds because grasses do such good….. but I tell you now, I have grasses in my garden that I would LOVE to get rid of. Some grasses are definitely better than others!

If you want to improve your gut health, you need to eat as much variety of food plants as you can. Having a biodiverse garden is a great way to ensure you and your environment are healthy. Your garden becomes a place to forage and nibble.

Cygnet Seed Library launch party

The Cygnet Seed Library will be set up on the verandah of Oura Oura House and will contain locally saved seeds for you, the community, for free. To find out more, please do come to our launch party at Oura Oura House from 6pm – 9pm, this Friday, Feb. 5^th. There will be seed saving demos, chats about seeds and some lawn games!

Side dressing time

Side dressing means a supplementary feed once the plants are well established. A good thing to do for hungry plants in our short summer season to keep them powering along before the weather changes.  Now is a good time to side dress fruit producing vegetables, such as tomatoes, zucchinis, pumpkins, capsicums and eggplants (if you are clever enough to grow them here). A dose of potash, well watered-in with a watering can of fish fertiliser (preferably the one that uses carp, which is a pest fish in the Murray River) and seaweed extract is my recommendation.

Early February is the last chance to feed your citrus because new growth stimulated to grow later, when autumn is approaching, will result in the tips being burnt off, even if the plants are in a sheltered place, simply because of the cold on tender citrus shoots. I use the carp fish fertiliser.

Seeds to sow in Feb. Broccoli raab Kale Beetroot Shungiku Lettuce Asian greens (late Feb.) Carrots Spinach & silver beet Spring onions Leeks Hakurei turnips Tas. swedes Parsnips Radishes Seeds to save in Feb Lettuce Shungiku Calendular marigolds Tomatoes

Plant out /pot up now, yes now Brussel sprouts Cauliflower Broccoli – regular, sprouting and raab Salad vegetables Leeks   Jobs for February Plant, feed or move citrus Summer prune stone fruits Prepare beds for autumn plantings Save seeds for next spring Mulch with wet straw/silage Give flowering veg a dose of potash   Preserve, cook, nourish

September 2017 Kitchen Garden Guide

Rain, cold and sun…. and roots

After one of the driest winters for decades, south eastern Tasmanian is now well and truly wet. But dig down beyond a spade’s depth and, here and there, the soil is still dry so let’s hope it keeps raining for a while yet. While the garden is coping with very dry then wet conditions, it is also having to cope with regularly very cold nights plus frost and snow. On top of that, warm spring air is arriving in fits and starts and the notorious, spring winds are picking up. Despite all this, fruit trees are blossoming and we are all hoping for good fruit set. How does nature cope with all this and how can we help?

Latest research is showing that the brain of plants may well be in the roots. Below our feet is more life than above and, as well as roots of plants, this life primarily consists of the first inhabitants of the earth, microbes. The roots of plants, in particular the root tips, are the interface that can sense roots of other plants (and even know if they are related!) as well as work with the rest of the soil life to extract minerals to feed to the plant parts that are above the ground. I went to a fabulous talk about this last weekend at the Botanic Gardens. So extensive and complex is soil life that one theory is that, as with mushrooms, the above ground plant parts are simply the fruiting body for the “real” plant below the surface and all this is controlled by millions of tiny root tips!

What does this mean for our food gardens? It means that keeping the microbes in the soil happy is the primary thing to do in order to develop delicious, nutritious, healthy fruit and vegetables, able to ward off disease. During this burst of every-weather-in-a-day, the soil needs deep mulch to regulate temperature and stop heavy rain pounding the surface (microbes are fussy about getting hot and cold, dry and wet). Have a look at a forest floor; mulch covers everything and no-one fertilises it.

Onto vegetable beds, sprinkle a thin layer of compost, then 10cms of fluffed up, soaked hay, then another thin layer of compost then another 10cms of soaked hay. Check every week and keep this rhythm going right through summer. Keep some large tubs scattered through the garden to make it easy to throw half or more of a bale of hay in and fill with water, to soak for at least an hour before topping up the hay bed.

To plant seedlings, make a hole in the hay, add a good handful of compost and plant into that. The hole does not need to go all the way down to the soil. Water in.

For trees, use the same method but use mixed bark at half the depth (or rain may not penetrate at all). Wetting as you go is important. If you have a grass problem, lay wet newspaper or thin cardboard and extra compost before the bark chips. Sticks and leaves and branches can also be added on top. Woody material encourages fungi and, in a forest, fallen branches and trees are everywhere, rotting back into the soil and encouraging more life.

Pumpkins in every garden

Soon everyone will be thinking about growing pumpkins. Our local gardening groups, collectively known as Gumboot Gardeners, want to encourage as many people as possible to grow pumpkins this year. We will be having a community stall at the Cygnet Market on October 15^th where we will be distributing seeds of as many different pumpkins as we can muster as well as giving pumpkin growing advice. The idea is that then, in autumn, when pumpkins are ready to harvest, we will have another stall, with competitions for size, shape, creative dressing and decorating and cooking! Individuals, families, schools and groups are all invited to join in. Maybe the police station, fire station, medical centres, community garden and council parks will grow pumpkins too, as they do in Incredible, Edible Todmorden, England!

If you have pumpkin seeds to share please would you contact me asap so we can build up a great seed bank for our project. katevag@gmail.com

War and seeds

Have you ever thought about what happens to the heirloom seeds saved for generations by traditional farmers when they become caught in war zones and their crops destroyed or abandoned? The rich diversity of crops can sometimes be lost forever and a community devastated by fighting may never regain the foods that had graced the tables of the community for thousands of years. Spare a thought for the chaos around the world and the seeds being lost, along with the lives.

How lucky we are to live in peaceful, beautiful Tasmania.

Indoors to transplant later	Outside (late Sept if very cold)
Tomatoes,	Celery, celeriac (love it wet, lime)
Capsicums, chillis	Carrots
Corn	Parsnips
Asparagus	Onions, long keeping (lime well)
Leeks	Kales, especially Squire and Blue Curled
Peas	Spinach
Herbs (NOT basil yet!)	Brassicas (if you are prepared with netting to keep the cabbage moths off)
Lettuce + other salad greens	Beetroot
Still a bit early for cucumbers and pumpkins if you have late frosts.
Chit or Plant out	Divide and plant out
Potatoes (leave to chit or sprout if frosty where you live. Plant out later)	Globe artichokes Rhubarb Sunchokes