September 2021 Kitchen Garden Guide

 Winter has been a mixture of everything this year, with the frequent, unusually mild nights causing early bud burst and the suggestion that spring is here. But, as we all know, cold, wet and windy weather can still prevail, on and off, until Christmas. Keep your tomato, pumpkin, cucumber etc seedlings under cover until much later in the year!

Coppicing

Hazelnuts can be pruned and turned into a thicket edge. The long prunings are traditionally used for fence weaving and many garden structures. Check out Monty Don online. Here is an excerpt from his book….”To coppice a shrub or tree means regularly cutting it right to the ground. Almost all deciduous trees will take this treatment and regrow perfectly healthily for hundreds, even thousands, of years without any ill effect. Indeed, coppicing a tree is a way of making it live up to twice as long. This provides a harvest of wood for beansticks, thatching spars, fencing posts, firewood, charcoal and, historically at least, a hundred other uses, as well as stimulating the plant to regrow vigorously. The secret is regular dramatic pruning. It looks brutal, but is the key to survival for all these plants. By cutting the understorey to the ground regularly (I cut my hazel every seven years) you not only let in a great flood of light, but also create a very sophisticated, evolving habitat with diminishing light and increasing growth between each cut.”

 

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.

Throughout history there have been many passionate seed collectors who have braved war zones to save seeds. One such was a man who was collecting from farmers in Russia when World War ll caught up with him. Nickolay Vavilov was the world's greatest plant explorer. He collected more seeds, tubers and fruits from around the world than any person in human history. He started out collecting seeds in about 1916 and worked up until his arrest in the early 1940s and imprisonment by Stalin where he died of starvation. The man who taught us the most about where our food comes from and who tried for over 50 years to end famine in the world died of starvation as a prisoner of war.

There was a seed bank down in the basement of an old Russian building that had not only Vavilov's 220,000 seeds, but another 150,000 from other collectors. During the Siege of St. Petersburg in 1941, the staff locked themselves in the building. They didn't know where Vavilov, their leader, was, but they were so dedicated to the mission to collect and conserve the world's food diversity that they locked themselves in to protect the seeds both from the Nazis and from starving people in their own streets who wanted to find grain or potatoes of any kind and eat them.

Over a series of months in 1942 and 1943, a dozen of the scientists starved to death while guarding those seeds. One of them said it was hard to wake up, it was hard to get on your feet and put on your clothes in the morning, but no, it was not hard to protect the seeds once you had your wits about you. Saving those seeds for future generations and helping the world recover after war was more important than a single person's comfort.

Seeds for our foods are our life-line and without their biodiversity there is not the gene pool to adapt to climate change. That is one really good reason for allowing self-sown abundance in our home gardens.

Raising the seeds of your summer harvest

Raising seeds is easy. All the know-how is in the seed. Turning those new seedlings into strong, healthy plants ready to plant out into your garden can be the hardest part of vegetable gardening.

This time of the year, when you have tiny tomato seedlings and you are waiting until November for the frosts to finish; there are some important tips to success.

·         Pot them up gradually, not from seedling tray to large pot in one go. Make them use up the soil they are in. This will ensure you get early flowers and not just masses of leaves. When the roots start coming out the bottom, it is time to pot them up.

·         Do not rely only on bought potting mix. I buy cheap potting mix and mix in ½ to 1/3 of home-made compost, plus a dash of blood and bone. I also water the young seedlings with a seaweed tonic from time to time. In France I learned about stinging nettle tea as a tonic and use this now too, whenever any plants looks a bit off colour. Stinging nettles are a fabulous tool in the garden (and the kitchen!), being packed full of silicon which strengthens cell walls and helps to reduce pest and disease attack on plants and inside you.

·         To keep growth happening through September, while the nights are often still very cold, supply tomato seedlings with warmth. Even a little will help, especially at night.

·         Provide bright light during the day. Weak seedlings often result from not enough hours of strong sunlight.

·         In a sheltered spot, on warm days, put them outside. A perpetually sheltered environment (such as a hot house) is a sure-fire way of producing weak plants. Seedlings need a bit of breeze to strengthen the stems as they grow, but not a gale from the Roaring 40’s!

 

Indoors to transplant later	Outside (late Sept if very cold)
Tomatoes,	Celery, celeriac (love it wet, lime)
Capsicums, chillies	Carrots
Corn	Parsnips
Asparagus	Broad beans
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)
Spring onions	Beetroot
Tomatillos	Turnips
Eggplant	Swedes
Lettuce + other salad greens	Radishes including daikon
Still a bit early for cucumbers and pumpkins if you have late frosts.	Prepare some water tubs for water greens and water chestnuts.
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

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