The 2015-2016 garden

They chose the right weekend to end daylight saving: second day of the second month of autumn. The weather agrees its time and has spread thick grey clouds across the sky from the east, mingling with the cold front from the west. So glad we managed to stretch that extra month out of summer. Both February and March delivered big-time, each topping world temperature records. Lots of rain to dispel bushfire fears but storms ensured we weren’t short on extreme weather.

Sound like a good gardening season? Let’s take a look.

The season started well. Spring was moist and warm for the most part and I had a new wicking bed in my newly expanded greenhouse/laundry to play around with. Thanks to Matt, Nathan, Julie and Caroline for their part in its creation.

I raised loads of seedlings, all the usual spring/summer stuff – tomatoes, capsicums and peppers, eggplants, everything – but they didn’t thrive under that polycarbonate roof. My guess is that most UV light is excluded by the material. So they spent their last weeks outside and weren’t ready to be planted out till December.

Meanwhile, I’d worked on weed suppression (black plastic) and preparation of beds in my vegetable garden, doubling its size with my new walled garden which began its first season.

Corn, pumpkins and zucchinis, Jo’s tomato seedlings and beans were well advanced when a frost in late November put an end to hopes of tomatoes before Christmas. All foliage burned and shrivelled but the plants themselves lived on in a leafier revival which produced small quantities of late summer fruit.

The garden didn’t need pump-driven watering till December and then it really needed it. When I unearthed and assembled the pump with a new inlet hose, it wouldn’t start. The cord wouldn’t pull. I did everything I had seen others do – checked the oil and cleaned the spark plug – to no avail.

Fortunately my brother Steve visited for a weekend to dig out some of the tea-tree roots still tripping people and thwarting mowing after fire preparation in 2014. He carried the heavy new pump up from the river and I carried the small fire survivor pump down and set it up. The relief of having high pressure water again; with two waterings – usually in the evening – I can cover a radius around my house of about 15 metres. That’s what saved the house on February 9th 2014.

The problem with my new pump I found $78 later, was a mud wasp nest in the exhaust.

Once the pump was going, gardening became easy. Pumpkins were thriving along the garden fence, except when the chooks got in and scratched them up. A few had to be replanted for this reason but the real cucurbit star was the self-sown potimarron in the middle of a new bed in the courtyard. By the end of the season it had produced 8 fruit. No other pumpkin in my garden bettered that, though Jo’s Chinese lantern runs a good second.

Left to right: potimarron (2), green (?), Blue ballet, oversized zucchini and all.

Note the hail stone scars on the pumpkins.

I got one tomato before Christmas and a reasonable flush in February, enough for 15 jars of kasundi and a couple of jars of passata.

The wicking bed grew a rambling grosse lisse tomato plant that may last into winter – time will tell – some basil and a chilli or two. Lots of things stayed dwarf and I will let them stay till spring to see what they’ll do.

My hay bales form an edge around the middle garden and were meant to grow potatoes, cucumbers and some zucchini. One zucchini and a few potatoes have done well. Other seeds started and then died off. I figure that, as the bales have rotted, the roots might have been floating in air. When the plants are finished I’ll do a dissection then add the well-rotted bales to the garden bed they border.

Despite a promising beginning, the end product of all my efforts has been mediocre as larger forces intervened.

Gardening is a gamble. It is possible to control the soil by adding nutrients like manure, dolomite and compost; it is possible to keep down the competition by mulching and weeding; with a good water supply, the moisture can be kept at optimum levels. But the weather, oh the weather, is unpredictable. It cannot be controlled. As noted, average temperatures are rising but that doesn’t mean no out-of-season frosts. Heatwaves can last for days and coincide with the time that the gardener is away, shrivelling plants and causing fruit to fall. Storms bring nitrogen to the plants but they can also hurl great pelting hailstones that rip leaves to shreds and mark and dislodge fruit. Birds are both allies and enemies, with magpies keeping the garden slug free but also, rosellas feasting on raspberries and bower birds stripping the corn and eating beetroot underground.

I harvested and enjoyed for a couple of months raspberries, zucchinis, carrots, beans, tomatoes and endless amounts of kale, a humble but loyal staple. I’ve had a few potatoes, now a perennial in the garden from stray potatoes unseen in the harvest. A few cucumbers for a while. Soon there will be pumpkins and I enjoyed some corn after the bower birds left.

All that happened in my garden this year and now summer is gone and the pumpkins are trying to ripen before the first frost of 2016. Tomorrow the clock will have to be changed giving me an extra hour in the morning and one less in the afternoon. For six months I will look to my wood supply rather than my water supply. For the next nine months I will go to the preserve cupboard more often than the garden.

Jo Simmons’ Japanese Lantern

Like the garden I am at the end of the growing season but I’m trying to bridge the winter-spring gap with lettuce seedlings which are peeping out of the soil. I will plant them here and there to provide fresh greens along with the carrots which will winter in the ground.

Its time to plant again when the sap rises in the plants and in my veins. It’s not the calendar that determines this day, its something in the part of me that goes back to the first cultivators. It is always exciting, this urge to stick my fingers in the dirt. It is both meditation and adventure.