Monday Harvest – Sept 24th 2012

Posted on September 24, 2012 by Liz

I love this time of the year.  Not only is it the week before the AFL grandfinal, not only has the weather kind of warmed up (although today was pretty cold), not only is it school holidays meaning I get to spend some time with Miss 6 but its also show time in Melbourne.  I went to the show today.  I love the show despite the rampant commercialism, the showbags (a curiously Australian phenomenon whereby people – me included- buy large quantities of either chocolate or plastic tat at, or above, the prices they would normally pay in the supermarket), the rides and the myriad of ways to waste money.  I love it because its only at the show that you get to say hello to a ridiculously over-sized turkey, watch the big men with big axes chop lumps of wood in seconds flat, and marvel at the thickness of the blue ribbon sponge cake.

On top of all this excitement tonight is the Brownlow medal.  Now to some the Brownlow medal count is a ridiculously tedious event whereby the umpires votes for the best players in each game of the season are red out and at the end of the night a footy player emerges victorious.  But to me it is an exercise in slowly building excitement.  A bit like gardening in that respect.  Which brings me to this weeks harvests which quite frankly have been a little sparse.  I do have other things in the garden like kale and silver beet but I didn’t harvest any this week.  What I did harvest was a lot of herbs, like this parsley, thyme and bay leaf for stock and salads:

Also like these bunches of mint.  Common mint for Lemon & Mint Cordial and basil mint which I tried in some taboulleh but found it a bit too overpowering.  So overpowering in fact that I doubted that it was in fact basil mint and did for a time think I may have poisoned myself.  Funny what a combination of a slightly paranoid nature and over tiredness will produce.

 

My other main harvest for this week (aside from the last Easter egg radish I will have for a while) was lettuce.  I have quite a lot of lettuce growing at the moment, my freckles lettuce in particular is doing well so I’m eating quite a lot of salad.

And that rather meagre collection of photos represents this weeks harvests.  Perhaps next week will be more exciting, although given I’m in between crops at the moment I suspect it will probably be more of the same.  Not such a bad thing as I like green leaves.

To see things other than green leaves then head over to Daphne’s and see what people are harvesting all round the world.

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Posted in Spring Harvesting | Tagged | 26 Comments

Tiny Tim

Posted on September 20, 2012 by Liz

I sowed this Tiny Tim tomato in May and it quietly grew on a window sill until late August when I moved it outside.   Do you think it will set fruit this early?

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Posted in Autumn Planting, Tomatoes | Tagged | 25 Comments

VSR – Winter Crops

Posted on September 18, 2012 by Liz

At the end of both Summer and Autumn I analysed which crops made the best use of space in my garden during that season.  Details on the method I use can be found on the Summer Top 5 post.  This is my list for winter.  There are a couple of things to note here.  A large amount of my winter garden is taken up with plants that wont be ready until later in Spring or early summer – namely broad beans, garlic, shallots and onions.  As a result there were actually only about 10 plants that I grew, harvested from and recorded the weights etc of those harvests.  Of those this is the Top 5:

1. Cavolo Nero  – Won with similar scores to the Summer & Autumn winners.  For me it is worth growing because it takes up comparatively little space, is difficult to find and I love the look and texture of the leaves so it adds to the appeal of the garden generally.  That and that its packed full of nutrients.

2. Parsley – Parsley probably would have won had it not been for the fact that I have so many plants (far more than I need) and so it takes up quite a bit of room.  I could have planted about half as many plants and I still would have more than anyone could possibly use.

3. Tamarillo – Like parsley tamarillo made the top 5 in Autumn as well and this is basically because it is really productive, doesn’t take up too much room, and the fruits are generally hard to find unless you grow them yourself (having said that I have seen them in the supermarket quite a bit lately).  The kids and I ate our way through about 300 tamarillos this year, they went into lunch boxes, they went into salads but mostly they were just eaten whenever someone whinged “I’m hungry”.

4. Silver beet/Chard – Chard also was in the Autumn Top 5, its highly productive, convenient to have always available and most enjoyable when its fresh.  It is also comparatively expensive to buy at the supermarket.  At about $4.50 a bunch its easy save a fair bit of money by growing your own in a comparatively small space.

5. Broccoli – Given the large proportion of my garden given over to brassicas at this time of the year I’m glad that it wasn’t just Kale that made the list.  The big advantage broccoli and kale have over crops like cauliflower and cabbage is that you get more than one harvest from them.  A cauliflower sits in the ground using up about half a square metre, for about 4 months plus to produce one $3.00 head.  Broccoli uses about the same space but over the course of the 4 months it will produce upwards of $10 worth of shoots in that time.

So what didn’t make the Top 5: – Cabbages because the crops failed, Cauliflower because they take up so much room for just one harvest, Potatoes because the size of the crops was ridiculously meagre, and Salad Leaves and Radishes purely because their growth wasn’t quick enough to produce enough volume (I do think both are worth growing though).  It will be interesting to see the VSR figures for the crops I have in the ground at them moment but have yet to harvest – the broad beans, the garlic, the shallots and the onions, hopefully their figures will justify the space they have taken up all winter.

So which crops do you find perform best for you in winter?

For more Top 5 fun head over to see what appeals to The New Good Life this week.

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Posted in Top 5, Winter Harvesting | 35 Comments

Seedlings

Posted on September 15, 2012 by Liz

I’ve gotten a little over excited with my seed sowing this Spring.  I just love growing things from seed – its just so exciting watching plants germinate (yes I know, very plant nerdy statement wasn’t it).  I think that this year I may have overdone the seed sowing a little.

I have filled all four shelves of my mini greenhouse with seed trays and still I am thinking of sowing more.  Now, I should point out that I have a few other bloggers to thank for my seed driven excitement.  I’ve recently swapped seeds with Diana at Kebun Malay-Kadazan  Girls, L at 500m2 in Sydney as well as Bek from Beks Backyard and naturally I wanted to try all their varieties as well as those I’d already bought for myself.

Apart from the tomatoes that I mentioned in an earlier post and which are doing really well,

this is what I have sown:

Herbs:  Sorrel, Marjoram, Basil (a mix, Italian Sweet Leaf and Thai), Dill (although that was direct into the ground), Coriander, & Chives.

Lettuces & Salad Leaves: Salad Bowl Green, Salad Bowl Red, Mix, Freckles, Wild Rocket, Raddichio

Cucurbits: Golden Nugget Pumpkin, Black Zucchini, Lebanese Cucumber, Lemon Cucumber, Summer Dance Cucumber, Catalina Pickling Cucumber

Eggplants: Bonica, Lebanese Bunching, Listada di Gandia, Thai Green

Capsicums/Chillies: Poblano/Ancho, Capsicum Purple Beauty, Pepper Alma Paprika, Tobago Seasoning,  Birds Eye chilli, Capsicum Cherrytime, Mini Mama, Golden California Wonder, Long hot Cayenne, Scotch Bonnet, Cayenne, Capsicum Hungarian Hot Wax, Capsicum Californian Wonder, Capsicum Marconi Red, Mini birds Eye.

Other: Cylindrical Beetroot, Swiss Chard, Rainbow Chard, Celery, Celeriac, Tamarillo, Cape Gooseberry, Spring Onions, Purple King Beans, Majestic Butter Beans, Beanette Beans, Sweet Potatoes.

All this is before I sow the majority of my beans and radishes.

Pretty much everything is up and doing well although I do have a few things yet to germinate.  A couple of the eggplants – Listada di Gandia & Thai Green have yet to appear although they were planted after the others.  I have sown Poblano chillies on two occasions so far and none have germinated.  I will try again but I will wait until the weather warms a bit just in case.  Also yet to appear are the Cape Gooseberries and the tamarillo.  The Cape Gooseberries may never come up as the seed was very old but I am still hopeful of the tamarillo as that was sown with fresh seed.

I did look at it all and wonder where on earth its all going to go, particularly as its still months until the garlic can be harvested and that is using up a fair bit of bed space.  The chillies and capsicums I think will stay in pots but the rest will need space in the ground.  Oh well – it should be fun cramming it all in and in the meantime I will gaze encouragingly at my tomato plants.  I took them out of the green house today as I want to harden them off for a couple of weeks before planting them out in October.  Hope they will be alright on this, their first night without the protection of plastic.

What have you planted recently?  Do you know where it will go when its big enough to plant out?

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Posted in Spring Planting, Winter Planting | 31 Comments

Winter Brassica Round Up

Posted on September 13, 2012 by Liz

I harvested my last remaining cauliflower last week which brought to a close the bulk of my brassica harvesting for this season.  In Melbourne most brassicas are generally grown as winter crops.  There are exceptions: radishes are grown all year, watercress tends to do best in Spring, but the big 3 cabbage, cauliflower and broccoli tend to be grown predominantly in winter by home gardeners.  You can grow all 3 throughout the year if you select the right varieties but due to space considerations and the greater concentration of pests during the warmer months they are generally treated as winter crops.

These are the winter Brassicas I grew this year: broccoli, romanesco broccoli, cauliflower, red cabbage, and kale.  This is how each performed:

Broccoli – This year I grew Calabrese (Green Sprouting Broccoli), I did think I also had some Green Dragon seedlings but they either turned into Calabrese, died or I left them at my fathers, not really sure which.  It didn’t matter much as I was really pleased with the “Calabrese”.  This variety formed a small central head at the same time as a multitude of side shoots, and the side shoots have kept going over a reasonably long period.  The florets are really open as you can see below:

I found them perfect for the sort of things I use broccoli for – stir fries and pasta dishes.  In the main the stalks were tender although those from one plant in particular were a little tough.  Definitely a success and definitely a variety I will grow again.

In direct contrast was my very unfortunate experience with red cabbage.  I completely failed to get a single head.  I do have one plant still in the ground but thus fair it has been a complete disaster.  I sowed Red Express seeds in January – smack bang in the middle òf the sowing period as advised on the seed packet.  Not only did they not mature in the 63 days promised but they sat in the garden looking unhappy for quite some time.  The first few I planted out didn’t get enough sun, the next couple suffered awful aphid attack, the next two looked pretty happy until one started hearting, or so I thought until it bolted instead.

I pulled the one next to it as it too had succumbed to aphids.  So now I have one left and its been growing for closer to 150 days than 63 and frankly is something of a lost cause.  Its a shame because last year my red cabbages did really well (seedlings from the green warehouse outpost of the Wesfarmers empire…).  If I had room I’d sow some seeds now to see if they did better but I don’t so I won’t and I think it will be a new variety for me next year.

My experience with cauliflower feel somewhere between that of broccoli and cabbage, neither the complete success of the broccoli nor the unmitigated disaster of the cabbages.  The earlier cauli’s didn’t do as well as the later ones which Dave at Daves Square Foot Garden suggested may well have been related to their enjoyment of cooler temperatures and I think I’m inclined to agree, at least in part.   The other thing that may well have contributed is greater amounts of food.  After the first few were pretty ordinary (or in some cases downright disappointing) I did make a concerted effort to give them some fish emulsion every two weeks and I do think it helped considerably.  I will grow this variety – Year Round – again remembering to keep the food up to it and see how it does.

To see the difference between early and latter heads compare the below photo with the one at the top of this post:

My kale did well this year.  I had a plant of Red Russian but the majority of kale I grew and harvested was Cavolo Nero (Tuscan Kale).  I was really pleased with it.  The one caveat I would put on that was that the plants that were better established prior to the onset of winter did far, far better than those that were still small when the weather cooled.  My kale has just started to bolt but I’m enjoying eating the flower shoots.  I will definitely grow this again, and plant a few more plants next year as I am always surprised by how little room they actually take up.

The final winter brassica I grew was Romanesco broccoli.  It’s hard to know if this is worth growing or not.  I had a couple of heads growing nicely, looking good, but I think I expected the heads to be bigger, so I missed the harvesting window and it effectively turned into sprouting broccoli.  This is what it looked like at the point I think I should have harvested it:

At the time it did look like the head would fill out a bit more as the buds were very dense and not fully formed.  The problem was that as they filled out each section grew up and away from the head in the manner of sprouting broccoli losing that distinctive Romanesco shape.

They were my Brassicas this winter (except for the radishes and watercress both of which grow are still happily cropping).  I have already acquired some Brussel Sprout, Turnip and Kohlrabi seeds to add to my selection for next winter.  Anything else I should try?

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Posted in Brassicas, Summer Planting, Winter Harvesting | Tagged , , , , | 27 Comments