Veggie Patch Basics - 3 (Jun-Jul)

June and July are often cold, damp and frosty in Tasmania, and many people do little or nothing in their food garden. But it is the best time of the year to organise yourself and your food garden, and to set everything up for a really successful food gardening season. This blog post suggests how.

Brussels Sprouts on the way!

This Veggie Patch Basics series assumes that the reader is a novice vegetable gardener, but the series may also be of interest to those with more experience. It describes how to set up a veggie garden and what to do during the first year.  The series does not cover permanent food plants such as berries and fruit because they are covered in many other posts on this Food Garden Group blog.

Vegie Patch Basics-1 (Starting Out) and Vegie Patch Basics-2 (April - May) covered where to put your vegie garden and compost area, establishing four areas in your vegie garden (for Legumes, Big Eaters, Roots and Solanums), and what to sow and plant in them in April and May.

Part 3: June - July

We are now in June and July, and it is well and truly winter. Radishes that took just three days to emerge above ground in summer, take a full fortnight to show any activity above ground. With everything growing slowly, and little need for watering because of low evaporation rates, you now have time for other things such as creating new beds, creating raised beds, making pathways, and taking care of irrigation.

Irrigation

Why worry about irrigation now? you might say. You may also say I love watering with a watering can or hose and meeting every plant in my garden a few times per week in person, so I don't need anything special to irrigate.

  

Last season was very dry.  Watering by hand can be enjoyable, but not if it takes 45 minutes every time, for nearly the whole season.  Think how much more productive you can make those hours if you don't water by hand, but use that time to sow, plant, fertilise and harvest.

Last summer I realised I needed more hoses to more beds and more irrigation on beds. And then I realised that I could not add them at that time, because there were too many plants in the way. I would do too much damage to growing crops if I wanted to improve my irrigation there and then.

Food Garden Group blog post Improving Your Irrigation discusses six irrigation methods.  They can help you determine how you want to water your food garden this summer. The June-July period is the perfect time to put in place whatever irrigation-method you choose because, compared to summer, there is plenty of room to install hoses or pipes or whatever you decide to use, and more time available to do so. 

soaker hose at work

Now let's make a plan!

Imagine it is a sunny day in late October. You suddenly realise that you may like to grow pumpkins. You go to the shop or nursery where you normally buy your seeds, but, lo and behold, everyone else had the same idea, and there are no pumpkin seeds; all sold out! You scan the shelves with seedling punnets, and there are no pumpkins there either. 

July is a quiet time in the garden, so how about you spend a few pleasant hours imagining what you would like to grow in your food garden this season. Discuss it with the members in your household.  What do we like? What don't we like? When your plan is ready, seed companies will have all their seeds ready for sale in their catalogues, and, because you are way ahead of everyone else, you will have all the choice in the world!

But hold on! - you may think I won't need any seeds. I will only buy seedlings. Much easier. Yep, easier, but some crops can only be grown from seed.  Most root vegetables for instance (carrots, parsnips, beetroot), but also peas and beans, do not take kindly to being transplanted from punnets. Most of them will simply die, or never amount to much!  Some vegetables need to be sown where you will grow them to maturity, so you will need seed for them.

Other vegetables, for instance lettuces, tomatoes and broccoli, can be transplanted without a problem, and so, to get your first food garden season off to a good start, let's make a rough plan what to grow, and then it will be clear what we need to buy as seeds and what as seedlings.

In the first season in your food garden you may like to grow some of the following:

Legume area:

Peas, broad beans until mid November, then beans for the second part of the season

Big Eater area:

Broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, spinach and Asian Greens over winter, followed by, for instance, pumpkins, silverbeet, corn, lettuce, radish, zucchini and cucumber over summer.

A pest-free cabbage seedling

Roots area:

Leek, garlic, spring onions and green manure over winter, followed by carrots, parsnips, beetroot, swedes over summer.

Solanums area:

Potatoes and tomatoes

The crops shown above in italics are ones that you will have to sow where they mature. For them you will definitely need seed (not seedlings), and ideally you get those seeds in the next few months, either from a shop or online.

What you actually will grow, will depend on your and your household's preferences, how much space you have in your food garden beds, and the amount of time you have available to look after your vegie patch.

Let's now talk about the word heirloom. With crops like pumpkins and tomatoes it is really easy to collect seeds from your own plants in Autumn. Ideally you buy seeds or seedlings once, and then use the seeds you harvest in your own garden in subsequent seasons. 

That is cheap and convenient, but you can only do this if the varieties you initially bought are heirloom. Many seedlings in nurseries and hardware stores are not heirloom. They are "hybrids" created by plant professionals who aim to improve the plant in one way or another. It can sometimes be a good idea to buy hybrid seedlings because of their 'new improved' characteristics. However, if you save seed from hybrid varieties, it is unlikely that you will get plants with the same characteristics the following season.

In a later post in this series we will talk about when and how to collect seed for next season. If you think you will be interested in doing this, don't buy hybrid plants or seeds, but look for the word heirloom. If you would like to know more about this subject, please read Heirlooms and Hybrids on the Food Garden Group blog.

If you choose to grow crops that take up a lot of space, such as pumpkins, and if your food garden is small, there will be no room to grow everything in the list above. In that case, you could add more beds next winter, so you can grow more in your second food garden season. If you decide to buy pumpkin seed rather than pumpkin seedlings you will find that there is a much bigger choice in seed-varieties than there is in seedling-varieties in the nursery. If your food garden is small, it is best to choose seeds of a pumpkin variety that does not take over your whole garden bed.

In your first food garden season a mix of seeds and seedlings will be the best way to go.

The Tasmanian seed companies below sell seeds that will work in Tasmania's climate: 

• Southern Harvest at https://www.southernharvest.com.au 
• Inspirations Vegetable Seeds at https://vegetableseeds.net.au/shop

Tasmania is lucky not to have some of the plant diseases that devastate crops on the mainland. Mainland seed companies will not in all cases be allowed to send the seeds to Tasmania because of quarantine restrictions.

When buying seeds always examine the expiry dates on seed packets, and buy seeds with the longest expiry date. Some seeds remain viable for a long time (eg. lettuce). Others don't even last a year (parsnip). If you would like to know more about the life expectancy of seeds there is an interesting article at The Life Expectancy of Seeds.

Record what happens in your food garden

Just for a moment, let's think about your second year of growing your own food. You will have learnt a lot, avoid mistakes you made the first year, build on successes, and improve further.  

Okay, so that corn I sowed last year and that did so brilliantly, what a pity that I have forgotten what variety it was and where I bought it.

A great way to set yourself up for future successes is to start a food garden diary. Below is an example of the sorts of things I record in my food garden diary:

My diary is a spreadsheet, and it is in order of Variety. To add a second line for brassicas I insert a line above potato and type the info on that line. I can sort all entries in order of Type or Date.  I find a spreadsheet a handy way to keep track of things, but I realise that a hand-written exercise book, perhaps  with one page per variety, also does the trick. 

To find out what variety of corn was so successful last season and where you bought it, you would only have to open the spreadsheet and look under corn. 

You can use the diary to record when you added manure or lime, when first and last frosts took place, and whatever else is worth recording. Handy stuff for future reference! You just have to get into the habit of recording what you do, just after you have done it. 

If you would like to read more about keeping a food garden diary, there is a Food Garden Group blog post at food garden diary.

Complete Organic Fertiliser

If your soil and the soils in your region are lacking in certain minerals (and most Australian soils do because they are old soils), then you can compost and mulch until the cows come home, but you will never add to your soil the minerals that are lacking, simply because they are not there in the first place.

They won't be in any of the plant material that comes from your garden. If all soils in your region are lacking in them, they won't be in any mulches or manures you buy and that come from your region.  The only way you can add the element is in the form of fertilisers that come from elsewhere and that contain the element.

Complete Organic Fertiliser (COF) is the term used by Steve Solomon for a fertiliser-mix that he recommends to people for use in their food gardens. Steve, who used to be a seed farmer in the United States, migrated to Northern Tasmania a number of decades ago and continued food gardening here. Over time he began to realise that the organic way of only using compost, mulch, blood and bone and lime or dolomite, and nothing else, left his soil deficient of certain minerals.

Steve's thinking was straightforward, but not always accepted wisdom at the time, or even now. I use COF in my food garden, and find that it very much contributes to successful crops if used in the right spots, at the right times.

I buy ingredients and mix them together myself. Here is the recipe of my version of COF:

The ingredients marked * are available at Hollander Imports and other farming sector suppliers. The other ingredients are available at most hardware stores and nurseries. Some of the ingredients are not cheap because they come in larger quantities. I justify buying them because they really make a difference, and because I will use COF year after year.

You could consider buying ingredients with a number of people that you find through the Food Garden Group's Food Gardeners Tasmania Facebook page. However, ready-made COF may be the best way to start. Ready-made COF can be purchased from various Tasmanian suppliers. See blog post Complete Organic Fertiliser - Suppliers on this blog.

There are other organic products available that aim to do the same. Good nurseries and rural hardware stores are the best places to look for them. Make sure not to buy a product that contains chemicals because that would undo some of the very reasons why we grow our own.

Your crops will thank you if you decide to buy or make COF.  Blood and bone is part of COF,  but if you only use blood and bone on your food garden, it will miss out on the elements that the other COF ingredients provide.

If you would like to know more about COF read blog post Complete Organic Fertiliser on this blog.

Our four beds and COF

In Vegie Patch Basics - 1, the first post in this series, I suggested that you have four (almost) equal areas in your food garden, one for Legumes, one for Big Eaters, one for Roots and one for Solanums. As the season progresses it will become clearer that we fertilise and treat the four areas in different ways.

I use COF liberally, but only on the Big Eater bed. At the end of this first season we will talk about why the term crop rotation is used to describe this system. As a result of crop rotation with four beds, an area receives a generous helping of COF only once every four years. In the other three years it receives no COF at all!

Your food garden in June - July

Taking care of irrigation, getting seeds and seedlings, getting ready to record what happens in your food garden, and organising COF are all things that will help you make the most of your first food garden season. Let's now have a look at what can be done in your food garden in June and July.

First a few general things:

Add what you did in your food garden in April and May to your newly created diary. 

Aerate your soil and lime your soil if not already done (for both see Vegie Patch Basics - 2). 

Weed regularly! Small weeds coming up at this time of year are easily removed, and help you prevent those weeds from becoming a more persistent problem later in the season.

Feed the crops you have in your food garden seaweed solution mixed in water once every fortnight. This is called foliar feeding. 

If you sowed Green Manure anywhere in your food garden in spots where you had nothing else growing you can cut that down and dig it in any time you need the space for something else.

Leftover old seeds used as green manure

Legume area

The plan is:
Peas, broad beans until mid-November, then beans for the second part of the season

Where are we at?

• You may have sown broad beans and peas during April and May. It can take a fortnight for them to emerge above ground. If you have not sown broad beans and peas yet, no problem. If you want them this season please sow them before the end of August.

• One year long ago I sowed my peas in September, and sowed again because nothing came up, and again, and nothing came up. I was wrong. Every time I sowed more peas they all came up, and provided a wonderful meal to many snails and slugs. I only found this out when I went out with a torch one night. It is best to sow broad beans and peas before the end of August because most winters it is too cold for snails and slugs. When snails and slugs become active in September your broad beans and peas will be too developed to be threatened by them. Find out whether you have a slug and snail problem by going out with a torch at night. Snail traps and catching them in the act at night are two ways to respond if there are slugs or snails active.

• I sow broad beans in blocks and peas in rows.  Sowing broad beans and peas is discussed in Vegie Patch Basics - 2.

• Remember, these crops are there for two reasons: to feed you and to feed the soil.  You don't have to wait until the beans are large.  You can pick young leaves for salads or stir-fries and eat young bean pods whole.

Big Eater area

The plan is:

Broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, spinach and Asian Greens over winter, followed by, for instance, pumpkins, silverbeet, corn, lettuce, radish, zucchini, corn and cucumber over summer

Where are we at?

• In this bed you may have Broccoli, Cauliflower and Cabbage seedlings.  They are all part of the Brassica family. Following mild weather in April and May they may be developing well. If you did not plant Brassicas then, it is probably too late now, because night temperatures are now often single-digit.

• Once-a-fortnight foliar feeding will make these seedlings very happy and they will respond with good growth.

• In April - May, before planting anything in this bed, you may have given it a sprinkling of blood and bone. If you bought some COF, you can use that now: give every plant in this bed a bit of COF around the base, mix it into the soil, and water it in.

• I don't plant my Brassica seedlings really early (March) because I don't like aphids in them. Growing Brassicas over winter, instead of over summer, means slower growth, but, if you don't plant them too early, you end up with completely pest-free plants. No caterpillars, no aphids, no holes in leaves, perfect!

• If you planted your Brassica seedlings in March you may have your first Broccoli heads by now. Cut the heads, but not too low down their stem. New smaller heads will develop. With most Broccoli varieties you can keep picking for quite a while.

• In Vegie Patch Basics-2 I suggested that you sow English Spinach. If you did that, you could now sow a second lot. In fact, you could sow English Spinach every four weeks, and harvest spinach over a period of time. Add a bit of COF or blood and bone to the soil before sowing, and your spinach will love you for it.

Roots area

The plan is:

Leek, garlic, spring onions and green manure over winter, followed by carrots, parsnips, beetroot, swedes, radish, turnips over summer.

Where are we at?

• At the moment you may have Leek, Garlic and Spring Onions in the Roots bed. They will be growing slowly and will need more time before they are ready for harvest. Foliar feed them once a fortnight.

• The plan is to sow carrots, parsnips and beet root in this area in September.  It is too early for them now, so cover areas that are not used with mulch to keep soils moist and microbes in the soil happy.

Solanums area

The plan is:

potatoes and tomatoes

Where are we at?

• Nurseries and hardware stores sell seed potatoes from really early in the season. I recommend that you don't buy them yet because, if we are going to have a wet winter, tubers may rot in the ground. If we are going to have a cold winter with occasional frosts potato leaves will go brown and die. Brassicas (photo below) have no problem with frost, but potatoes end up with dead leaves in frosty conditions.  If you decide to buy seed potatoes now, store them in a cold, dark place with plenty of ventilation, and plant them when frost is no longer likely.

early morning frost!

• If you observe your garden over the seasons you will become the expert on the micro-climate in your garden. If you know that you have a nice moderate climate in your garden, are certain that you are not going to have any frosts in your veggie-patch, and you have well-draining soil, then you can plant seed potatoes now. 

• I won't plant my potatoes until the end of August, and will discuss planting them in the next blog post in this series.  If you want to know how to plant potatoes now, read Growing Potatoes on the Food Garden Group blog.

• There is a rule that applies to all vegetable garden crops: sowing earlier does not necessarily mean an earlier crop. Sowing tomatoes too early often results in thin lanky seedlings that in the end amount to nothing, because it is too cold and the days are not long enough.  Sowing tomatoes will also be discussed in the next blog post in this series.

This series of blog posts continues with Vegie Patch Basics - 4