Planting time in the kitchen garden

Loving this rain.
So do the damn Portuguese millipedes, though, and it's Thermopylae out there in the veggie patch each morning: one seedling to 3000 millipedes. Nothing kills them except Baysol and it's really too risky with wildlife and pets around. So I swear a lot instead and jump up and down on them. Not very Buddhist, I know. Not even very Spartan.
But with the summer harvest nearly all disposed of - in freezers and jars and fondly-remembered meals - now it's time to get the garden back in some kind of order after a silly summer of head-high weeds and feral fruits.
So what to do next?

With the weather a little cooler, you can get out there and dig over the patch, yank out any summer plants that are really only hanging on by a thread, and cut back things like summer raspberries and artichokes. Clear up rotting mulch and compost it properly - the slaters and millipedes are just a little too fond of it and don't discriminate between mulch and small lettuces. It's a good time to compost - give a little back to the soil after a hard summer, especially where the rain might have carried off the nutrients with the topsoil. Chuck a bit of lime about, if it needs it.

I've put in rainbow chard (silver beet, except it isn't silver) and Tuscan kale. The beetroot seeds I sowed a few weeks ago have come up nicely.
You can plant spinach around now, peas if you don't get any frost, and even broad beans. Lettuce can go in and it won't bolt straightaway as it has over summer. Carrots, cabbages and broccoli should get going (sooner the better). If you let coriander, rocket and parsley self-seed, they will start to sprout everywhere shortly.
I had a ton of garlic last year (that's a slight exaggeration) and now's the time to get some more into the ground. Well worth it.
We're still harvesting beans, tomatoes, eggplants and potatoes, and when they're finished (which won't be long) I'll get the next season ready: broccolini, I think. Another round of beetroot and lettuces. A million onions (I never grow enough).

Never ends.
But isn't it fun?

Jackie Brown is in the house

The chook house, that is.

New arrival is settling in rather slowly. She's a few weeks off laying yet.

You are supposed to introduce a new chook by putting her in a cage in the run so her new best friends can get used to the situation without feeling threatened. We put Jackie Brown in the tractor inside the run and when I checked five minutes later she had wriggled underneath and was running around her new home. She then took up her perch on top of the tractor and there was hell to pay the next day when we removed it.

Jackie Brown, with Joan Collins at rear -

Everyone very happy sitting on top of the tractor

The next trick with new chooks is, theoretically, to place them gently onto the roost at night once the pecking order is established, so you don't disturb anyone else.

Well, we now have a pecking order of one, and a new chook who prefers to roost on the chookhouse roof. This means I have to get up on the stepladder and drag the wretched thing down, with much protesting, and piff her in the chookhouse so I can lock them up for the night.

At least it's better than introducing two cats, a few years ago, who hated each other on sight, underwent dramatic personality changes and attacked each other at every opportunity - for six years.

Ear, ear

You wouldn't think that the ear is one of the more vulnerable areas of the gardener's body, but I'm thinking I might have to wear ear muffs from now on.
One ear still bears the scar of having the back of the lobe ripped off by an old rose bush I was transplanting (I did indeed look like I'd been through the Wars of the Roses).
Now the other ear looks like it has some kind of revolting medieval plague due - I think - to a spider bite.
It seems to be spider heaven at present, which is unfortunate since I live with arachnophobe, and I am constantly walking face first into intricate webs that are about as strong as Spiderman's and often still inhabited.
The other night I felt something bang me in the side of the head as I floundered around in the web like a hobbit. Next thing you know: a brand new condition in medical history known as Bubonic Ear.
Not pretty.

Tropical paradise

Ten years of drought and suddenly Melbourne is a tropical wonderland. Kangaroo paws that had looked like couch grass for three years stand erect and bloom profusely. Poas wave in the sky above my head. Everything's exploding. Don't remember seeing so much green since I lived in New Zealand. It seems, sometimes, like a different country to the scorched brown earth we're used to.
It buckets down. Floods. Then the sun comes out hot and strong. Then it buckets again.
It's not all good news. The onions hate it. They have got far too much water and have grown thick necks, like rugby front rowers. Not a good look in an onion. The early summer blossoms are regularly pounded into the ground by torrential downpours, just as everything looks lovely.
The snails love it, but they are more than outweighed by the frogs pobblebonking through the evenings. The weeds love it, but we can't complain about green growth when it's what we've wanted for years.
And we - well, we just can't get used to it.

... and back again

A few weeks ago I wrote:
One minute I was hiding the citrus pots from frost. The next, I'm out in the garden in a t-shirt, watering the bloody things.

But yesterday I had to run outside IN THE SNOW (and in pyjamas and gum boots) and drag the citrus pots back under the eaves. We've never had actual snow here before. Not much but enough to feel special

Then there was hail. There was torrential rain.

The spring blossom took a pounding so I fear for this year's crops of pears and cherries.  The new acres of mulch are nicely watered in. I can't finish the whipper-snipping, because I'll just make grass pesto.

So that's why we don't plant tomatoes until after Cup Day. That, and because my Uncle Phil always said so. And he was right.

Spring, spring, spring

Oh, the farmyard is busy
In a regular tizzy
And the obvious reason
Is because of the season.
Ma Nature's lyrical
in her yearly miracle -
spring, spring, spring.

Tragic as it is that I remember the words to every song in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, they are appropriate. One minute I was hiding the citrus pots from frost. The next, I'm out in the garden in a t-shirt, watering the bloody things.

Spring's busting out all around - we have our first bluebells, freesias, sheets of forget-me-nots, Mexican orange blossom, actual orange blossom, banksia roses, cherry and apricot blossom, and late wattles. The first pale red leaves are emerging on the maple tree (formerly known as a stick). The first rose buds.

We also, of course, have had our first aphids, first blowfly, no doubt the first snakes stirring, and the first locusts are hatching up north.

Then there is the start of bushfire clearing season, and the thigh-high weeds which - at least momentarily - make one long for the good old days when rain didn't ever fall.

It's kinda daunting from this end. But at least it's warm.

Winter? Dull? Where?

It's a myth that winter is a tedious time in the garden.
OK, you aren't out sunning yourselves on the grass, eating tomatoes warm off the vine, or surrounded by fragrant rose petals, but it doesn't have to be a time of boredom and gloom.

First, if you have deciduous trees, you get to see the structure of your garden: the architecture of the treetops; the bark and buds and sky beyond.

Then there are the many flowers - some subtle, like hellebores, some party animals such as narcissus - that take the opportunity to shine when the sun's behind the clouds and you really need a spot of brightness.



If your garden's feeling a bit dull, take a walk around the neighbourhood and see what's in flower so you can plan for next year and the years ahead. This is what I found in bloom this morning on my walk.

In my garden:
White hardenbergia
Daffodils, Earlicheer jonquils, and miniature daffs
Hellebores (Soft pinks, greens and cream)
Grevilleas (red)
Wattle
Hyacinths (blue and pink)
Muscari (grape hyacinths in a deep blue)
Maleleuca
Correa (white, cream and pinky green)
Light mauve miniature (Algerian) iris
Euphorbia
Borage
That bright yellow daisy thing whose name I can never remember
Emu bushes (red and yellow)
Swan River pea.
I also had some lovely red beetroot and rainbow chard in the veggie patch, along with bright yellow flowers on the rapini (but only because I forgot to pick it). And cymbidium orchids in various stages of spiking or fading.



There are things that are more or less always in flower. Here, that includes:
Penstemons (red)
Rosemary
Westringia (purple is year-round, white not quite so)
Daisies of various sorts
Dark purple bearded iris

In other people's gardens I saw:
Purple hardenbergia
Violets galore (mine aren't out yet)
Kangaroo paws in various shades of red
Native hibiscus
Camellia (mostly in nasty pinks, but also some nice ones)
Early flowering cherries
Flowering quince
That horrible South African purple pea thing
And lots of magnolias only a week or so away from opening.

See? Virtually spring already.