The Patch update - 2 years on

It's been nearly two years now since we started work on the Patch - our 600m2 Landshare garden at Jill's and Mike's. I thought it was time for an update on what we're growing this summer.

The central part of the garden is 8 beds of annual veggies, grown on organic principles. We only have hand watering, so the beds need to be moisture-retentive and well mulched. The perimeter is much more permaculture based, full of diverse perennials, and will continue to evolve and grow in richness and diversity year on year.

Pumpkin bed

The pumpkins (var Anna Swartz) are growing strongly in a deep mulch of seagrass over home-made compost (mostly carpet weed from the Patch with grass mowings and horse manure).

Three Sisters bed

The Three Sisters are maize, a cucurbit and a climbing bean. Growing these crops together is a Native American method of preserving soil fertility and getting three useful crops from one patch of ground.

This year I'm experimenting with growing the maize in 1.5 metre cylinders of rabbit fencing. This provides support for the tall plants on windy days and also a framework for the cucurbits (lemon cucumber and rockmelon) to scramble over.

I've chosen small, less vigorous cucurbits: big bruisers like pumpkin and zucchini tend to go berserk and crowd out the other 'sisters'.

Potato bed

We grew Desiree and Dutch Cream under a deep mulch of pea straw. We're harvesting good crops from this bed. With the weather being so dry (only 50 mm rain since the start of November) we have been able to leave the potatoes in the ground and just harvest what we need. If it ever rains properly again (!), I'll need to dig up the rest pronto before they start to sprout.

Root veg bed

root veg bed in late spring

In this bed we mostly sowed Globe beetroot, Hollow Crown parsnips and a few carrots. There was also a row of long-keeping brown onions - root veg and onions make good companions as they feed from different depths in the soil, are both light feeders and the leafy tops of the root crops provide good shade for the bare soil (I don't mulch onions these days, to avoid problems with onion rot). The beetroot have been huge and sweet enough to eat raw.

Globe beetroot

Onion and carrot bed

You can never have too many carrots. Ours were a French heirloom variety St Valery, deep orange in colour, sweet and often 30 cm long. Yummo!

St Valery carrot

We also harvested a great crop of Early Creamgold long-keeping onions and Barletta salad onions and four varieties of garlic. Half of this bed is now growing Listada di Gandia eggplants and orange capsicums.

Early Creamgold onions

Part of our garlic harvest

I've left a few carrots and onions in the ground to flower. The ladybirds, hoverflies and bees love them and they look great too.

Carrot and onion flowers in the early morning light

Amaranth and cape gooseberry bed

Amaranth produces copious amounts of grain-like seed. The plants grow to two metres and are quite drought tolerant. The flavour is a little like quinoa but the seeds are much smaller. Apparently you can pop them as a breakfast cereal. I must try this.

Amaranth

Cape gooseberries are juicy, vaguely citrus flavoured sweet berries in their own little papery 'Chinese lantern' protective hulls. They're an undemanding crop and the fruit keeps well.

Watermelon bed

This year we're growing Moon and Stars watermelons. So far I've only found a couple of tiny melons, but they tend to hide away under the foliage until they're improbably huge. Last year we ended up with four monster melons with sweet, juicy, dark red flesh.

This bed also has climbing beans but they seem to have been hit by some kind of virus. The leaves are distorted and the affected plants have not flowered. Must get to the bottom of this problem but I frankly haven't had time to investigate further.

Tomato bed

This bed is producing quantities of Tommy Toe, Periforme and Amish Paste tomatoes. Those Amish sure do know a thing or two about tomatoes!

Tomato bed in late December, showing sturdy bamboo frame (2 metres tall)

Permanent plantings

We have perennials all round the perimeter of the annual beds. On the west there's the comfrey bed, which also has globe artichokes, goji and chokeberries, lemon verbena, Queen Anne's Lace, lavender, rosemary and a few tree onions. There are also some borage plants, which I'm hoping will self-seed everywhere, and a couple of echiums. Our Warré beehive is also in this bed and the bees seem pretty happy there.

Bee hive amid the artichokes

On the east is the lucerne bed, which we plan to increase to 60 m2 in the autumn, to provide nitrogen-rich mulch to the annual beds and great long-lasting summer forage to the bees. The lucerne receives only natural rainfall (precious little of that this summer) but keeps going strong through the hot weather. The weeds just can't compete. There's a tricky, sandy patch where even the lucerne hasn't taken, where I'm planning to try the drought-tolerant (and strangely named) barrel medic, a legume related to lucerne but allegedly even tougher.

On the south side there are a few flood- and drought-battered lavender bushes and a fig tree. This area needs improvement and a few creative ideas.

On the north side is our wattle windbreak which is starting to bush up now after a tough start in life. There will also be coastal rosemary and saltbush in the windbreak, and in the lee of that there will be a Hügelkultur mound which will hopefully be home to acid-lovers like blueberries and strawberries next year. A swale should help to hydrate this area and should become home to some of the frogs and lizards which are plentiful in the garden.

I just need the hot, dry weather to break so that digging a 12-metre long, metre-wide and half-metre deep swale by hand is less of a daunting prospect!

The Patch update

It's been a little over six months since Susan and I started work on the Patch - our Landshare garden at Jill's and Mike's place. Here's a pictorial update on how things are going.

June 2011

December 2011

All in all, we're pretty pleased with the transformation from former horse paddock to productive vegie garden. The main problem was that I was away in Europe for the critical period mid-September to end October. Won't do that again.

Potato bed

Potato bed

The potato bed has produced a good crop of Pontiacs and the Dutch Creams are still going strong. This bed hasn't been watered since September and yet it's full of lovely, moist, worm-filled humus made from seagrass, mushroom compost, pea straw and home-made compost.
A second batch of Pontiacs has just been planted out and covered with compost made on site. The pea straw bales are breaking down quite fast (with the help of some hungry mice) - by the end of the summer I think some will just be shapeless mounds of straw.

Grain bed (not!)

Amaranth

The next bed was intended as a grain and pulse bed: amaranth, chia, quinoa, chickpea and linseed were sown in November. This was an experiment as I thought conditions might already be too warm, at least for the quinoa and chia. Looks like I was right: only the amaranth came up in worthwhile numbers, with a few chickpeas. An additional problem was watering: with only one or two visits a week and only hand watering, it was impossible to keep the seed bed moist. Lesson learned: any sowing of fine seed needs to coincide with decent rain. We got a nice crop of self-sown mallow, though!
I'm trying again with sunflowers, having enriched the soil with our home-made compost. Unenriched parts of the bed will be used for buckwheat and another green manure crop.

Watermelon and solanum bed

Eggplants, capsicums and watermelons

I divided this bed in half for ease of access - all watering at the Patch is by hand with a watering can. After a green manure crop, this bed was further enriched by the addition of 1.5 m3 of mushroom compost: I'm aiming for a rich, moisture-retentive soil. I think I walked 20 km with that wheelbarrow, as it's a couple of hundred metres from the driveway to the Patch.
Two rows of eggplants will hopefully provide shade for watermelon foliage and roots in hot weather.
I've never grown watermelons before but thought I would give them a try in this sunny position. I'm fairly sure we won't be short of eggplants come autumn - 16 plants may have been slight overkill. Not sure what else I'm going to put in here, possibly some autumn brassicas or leeks.

Three Sisters bed

Three Sisters: maize, beans, pumpkin

The Three Sisters system of symbiotic cultivation comes from South America: maize, climbing beans and cucurbits (in this case, Anna Schwartz pumpkin) are grown together. The beans enrich the soil with nitrogen and bind together the maize stalks, preventing wind damage; the large cucurbit leaves shade the soil, helping to keep it moist for the maize; the maize provides a frame for the beans to climb up. I've been sowing the maize in 1-metre blocks every 2-3 weeks and 4-5 beans a metre on the south side of the blocks.

Then there's a row of capsicums which were left over seedlings from our other garden. I guess they'll have to be the fourth sister.

Lucerne and wildflower strip

Lucerne and wildflower strip - decorative and useful

This 20 x 1 metre strip of lucerne interspersed with Queen Anne's Lace and California poppies has turned out really well. So much so that I've decided to make it 2 metres wide in the autumn. The flowers attract beneficial insects and the lucerne will provide mulch for the vegie beds. Looks great, too.
This bed hasn't been watered since early September.

Comfrey strip

Comfrey (Bocking 14)

20 comfrey plants were planted in a 20-metre strip back in July. All are doing well. I try to give them some supplementary water in hot weather, but they largely fend for themselves. I chose the non-weedy Bocking 14 variety from Diggers Club.

People have been puzzled why I'm producing semi-industrial quantities of comfrey. It mines the subsoil for minerals, then makes these available as its leaves break down. It's great as a compost activator, as a soil-enriching mulch and as comfrey tea (now brewing) - a nutritious but extremely smelly liquid fertiliser. The flowers will be good for bees (when we get some, but that's another story), and I see ladybirds and assassin bugs hanging out around them too.

Compost bays

Next batch of green stuff ready for composting

The four-bay compost system (such opulence! such luxury!) was built from old timber from Jill's and Mike's woodshed. It's working really well, but had to be lined with heavy-duty weedmat and old carpet, as the thuggish kikuyu grass from the neighbouring school oval was determined to get in on the act.

Lovely compost - once was weeds, cardboard and chook poo

We've just produced and used our first batch of lovely crumbly compost using the cold-composting method. Now the blanket weed I dug up in July is being hot-composted. Despite dire mutterings from locals about the stuff being indestructible, this is going a treat. If it once lived, you can compost it.

That's about it for now. I'm hoping a Permaculture Design Certificate in February will give me some more inspiration. Also we're doing a bee-keeping course in April as we think our Patch is a bit of a bee-desert, being surrounded mostly by acres of well-mown grass. If we want pollination, we'll have to provide the pollinators and plenty of bee tucker.

Happy New Year and happy gardening in 2012!

Growing summer veg from seed

Tomorrow I'm giving an informal workshop on this subject at Harvest Basket. I was dubious about the need for it, but on talking to Jill and other keen gardeners, it seems that this is still regarded as a bit of a 'black art' by some. Actually it's dead easy once you get yourself set up.

I thought it would be good to do a step-by-step description of the process here, with photos.

Now I tend to be quite methodical about my gardening and have been known to spend more than is strictly necessary on getting the 'right' gear, so do bear in mind that you can do this more simply and for virtually no outlay except a bit of potting mix …

Step 1

Assemble the stuff you need. At a minimum: seeds, potting mix, pots, water, a container with a transparent lid to act as a controlled environment. That can be as simple as half a plastic bottle to put over your pot.

I use Jiffy coir peat pots because you just plant them out, pot and all. The seedling roots grow through the pot and there is little or no transplant shock (IF you wait until the garden soil is warm enough; see below).

I also use a few extras: a potting sieve, a propagation thermometer, plant labels, a propagator with a vented lid, a heated propagating tray with a thermostat.

Step 2

Soak your Jiffy pots. You must get them completely wet at the outset.

Step 3

Arrange your wet pots in your tray with no gaps. The square pots are much better for this than the round ones.

Step 4

Fill your pots to the rim with your growing medium. I use a general organic potting mix, as seed raising mix doesn't have enough nutrients to keep the seedlings going for the two months they'll be in pots. Then give the pots a good water; the growing medium will compact slightly, giving you a few millimetres of space to sow and cover your seeds.

Step 5

If you're as forgetful as me, write your plant labels NOW and arrange them in the same order as you're going to sow the seeds in the pots. All the solanaceae (tomatoes, eggplants etc) seeds look very similar.

Step 6

Sow your seeds. I usually sow three per pot. Two of them will be culled later.

Step 7

Cover your seeds with a fine layer of potting mix. I use a sieve for this - seeds won't grow too well if they're weighed down by a big lump of potting mix or bark! Water in gently. I find these little watering can tops for plastic bottles very handy for watering seedlings.

Step 8

Get your plant labels in before you forget what you sowed where. (You may begin to see a pattern emerging here. Yes, I really am that absent-minded.) You'll notice there's also a thermometer in one pot. More about that below.

Step 9

Set up your heated propagator tray if you have one. It wants to be somewhere out of the sun and the rain - this unit is weather-resistant, but not water-tight. Also, your seedlings may dry out or get too hot in direct sunlight. When they get their first true leaves, you can start to put them out in the sun. But I'm getting ahead of myself …

This propagator tray has a felt blanket which must be kept moist, otherwise it will not transmit the heat effectively to the pots.

Step 10

Put your lids on your propagators and close the vents. Put the propagators on the tray and turn it on. You want a soil temperature of about 20C. To achieve that, you'll probably have to turn the thermostat up to about 28C. That's why there's a thermometer in one of the pots: the temperature of the heating unit will be higher than the temperature of the soil, and it's the latter that counts. You can use the thermometer to monitor the soil temperature and adjust the thermostat accordingly.

Step 11

Sit back and wait … and wait …

It can take about 2 weeks for tomatoes to emerge, and the warmth-loving eggplants and capsicums may take up to 4 weeks. In the meantime, the pots shouldn't need watering - unless you let the sun get to them. You will however need to wet the felt blanket every couple of days, more often in hot, dry weather.

What next?

Your seedlings will first put out a pair of cotyledons ('baby leaves'), then a week or two later their first true leaves. At this stage, cull two of the seedlings in each pot, leaving only the sturdiest one. Your pots will need watering regularly now and you can give them a very diluted seaweed solution and/or worm juice. Just a few drops of the concentrated stuff in their watering bottle is sufficient. Make sure they get plenty of sunlight now, but not baking heat. If you have a sheltered spot (such as a cold frame with the lid off), you can take the plastic lid off of the propagator during the day. You don't want too much humidity now or your seedlings could damp off and die.

When the soil temperature in the garden bed is around 18C, it's time to plant out your seedlings. On the Bellarine Peninsula, this will probably be around the second week of November. You can warm up the soil by stripping off any mulch for a couple of weeks beforehand.

Transplanting tomatoes, eggplants and capsicums into cool soil is a waste of time and plants. Your plants will be set back, more vulnerable to pests and diseases, possibly permanently stunted, and you won't get fruit any earlier, so unless you have a hothouse, be patient.

It's all to easy to get 'garden centre-itis' and bring home luxuriant tomato seedlings in mid-September. The poor little buggers will turn up their toes when you stick them in your 10C soil. You have been warned …

A summer of surprises

Well, that wasn't quite the summer I was expecting. No heatwaves to frazzle the foliage; plentiful rain to fill the tanks and swell the tomatoes; below-average temperatures that stubbornly refused to ripen the rockmelons.

Here's my scorecard for my various gardening endeavours this summer, from 0 (complete failure) to 10 (complete success)

Tomatoes: 11
Huge, tasty, prolific. My Amish Paste produced lots of half-kilo monsters like this one and is still going strong.

Eggplants: 0
Nice, healthy plants, no fruit. Not one.

Rockmelons: 1
Plenty of fruit, but not enough heat to ripen them. Most of the fruit were rather tasteless. I think I'm giving up on rockmelons, as they're clearly marginal in my garden.

Onions: 9
Good spring rain produced a nice crop of compact, juicy bulbs. I pulled them just in time to survive the worst of the wet weather in January.

Potatoes: 8
Not a huge number of spuds, but they were of excellent size and great taste. Why is it that I can never, ever find the last potato? Even after a thorough dig over by our chooks, the potato bed produced an unexpected second crop.

Pumpkins: 5
Not what I expected. I was confidently expecting a good crop of 1-2 kg rich orange Potimarron heirlooms like these ones from a couple of years ago.

… instead I got a handful of 5 kg greenish monsters like this one. Obviously someone at Diggers wasn't paying attention.

I could go on, but you get the picture. A decidedly mixed bag. But wouldn't it be boring if everything always turned out as planned? If you aren't reliant on one type of crop, there are always successes to compensate for the failures - and failures to stop you getting too big-headed about your successes.

Veg in a bag

I'm always on the lookout for ways to pack more edible plants into our garden. One of the most successful has been these 45 litre woven plastic bags from Diggers. They last for years, they only cost about $5 each, and they're big enough to grow a range of different veg. Also they can be moved around the garden to make the best use of sun, shade, windbreaks etc, as they have robust handles. Try not to give yourself a hernia, though!

I fill the bags with a mixture of bought-in organic compost and my own home-made compost, which holds a lot more water. I find that the bags benefit from a daily water in hot weather, but otherwise you can go 2-3 days at least between watering, depending on how thirsty the crop is.

I've had great success with the following:

• capsicums (1 plant per bag)
• cucumbers (1 plant per bag)
• peas (4-5 plants per bag, with a wire frame and then a net tied to the balcony when they really went berserk)

I reckon bush/French beans would also go well, eggplants and possibly even a small rockmelon like Eden's Gem. Sprouting broccoli might be worth a go, ditto kale.

Zucchini were a marginal success: they really need more space for their extensive root system and tend to suffer from blossom end rot. Pumpkins proved a waste of space and water: lovely healthy plant, but no fruit! Tomatoes didn't do as well as I hoped, but I used a vigorous, indeterminate variety (Tommy Toe); a bush variety such as Roma might do well.

Diggers advertise them as potato bags, but I've not had much success with that, after two attempts. The rampant top growth tries to climb out of the bag, pushing the sides down so you can't water properly, and the crop in both cases was miserable. Perhaps I just don't have the knack. These days I grow my spuds in the ground and have bucketloads of huge tasty spuds from an area 1 x 1.5 metres.

Several of my bags are in their third year and going strong. I'm fairly confident I won't need replacements for a year or two yet. But maybe I should buy a few more, just in case I find another corner to squeeze them into ...

Where did the time go?

I see with some surprise that it's been nearly four months since my last post. It's not that there has been nothing to write about: I've just been too busy in the garden to write about it ...

What a great spring it's been for veggies. In our garden, particular success stories have been Florence fennel, red cabbages and Barletta early onions. Regular spring rainfall has helped greatly.

I first tried growing Florence fennel a couple of years ago, with disappointing results. The plants bolted to seed as soon as the weather warmed up, and the bulbs were tough and bitter. This year they have been huge, succulent and sweet. I put this down to generous watering as soon as the bulbs started to form (early September onwards) and plenty of balanced fertiliser (chicken manure pellets in this case). The fennel was grown in a no-dig bed which is rich in organic matter and has good moisture retention.

Now of course I'm itching for the spring veggies to be finished so I can get the summer crop started. (The trouble with a small garden.) Tomatoes have already gone in (Tommy Toe and Amish Paste). Capsicum seedlings have gone into 45-litre 'grow bags' from Diggers (1 plant per bag). This worked really well last year, using a 50:50 mix of organic potting mix and my own compost.

My eggplant seedlings are still tiny, at the moment they're still in peat pots in the cold frame, but going on past experience, they'll shoot up as soon as they get in the ground. I just need to harvest those last few leeks first, then I'll have room for them ...

When I first started growing tomatoes, capsicums and eggplant from seed, I had a definite inferiority complex, comparing my puny seedlings to the verdant monsters from Van Loons. Experience has since taught me that my home-grown plants soon catch up, and I get to grow the heirloom varieties I want, not whatever I can get from the nursery.

I also have one unusual eggplant - Louisiana Long Green - that I overwintered. I gave it its own mini-greenhouse made of some Solarweave (tough woven clear plastic) wrapped round a metal frame. Hope it crops as well as last summer.

The wicking bed has performed well. It didn't turn into a bog garden, so I must have got the drainage right, and on the few hot days we've had so far the lettuce and coriander have stayed perky. The only problem - way too many salad greens! They all bolted once the weather started to warm up, so now they've been pulled out and composted.

Wicking bed mid-November

I've filled the gaps with lemon grass, chervil, Vietnamese mint and Thai chilli. So my salad bed is turning into more of a herb bed, oh well.

The in-bed worm farm seems to be working well, and I'm now finding worms wherever I dig in the bed, so they must feel at home.