How (not) to grow a vegetable garden

For weeks I have been watching them grow. Thick. Verdant. Lush. Luxuriant. A carpet of health and vitality.

On rainy days, the green was particularly virulent, soaking in the raindrops, drinking in the vitality. When the sun shone, they seemed to bask, undulating in a light breeze, flexing to their very leaf tips.

Today, I decided, they had to go.

Like most refugees from the city, one of the first things I wanted to do when I got to Fibrotown was to establish my very own vegetable garden. I would be Peter Cundall, only younger and more... female. My backyard would become a Garden of Eden, without the snakes. We would eat our own tomatoes and lettuce and parsley and basil. In winter, we'd reap the bounty of cauliflowers and leeks and celery.

Things haven't turned out exactly as I'd planned.

The scales fell from my eyes early (you can read about the dream vegie garden (and the reality) here).

Then there was the Great Rhubarb Incident. Followed by the Spinach Glut of 2010. And my one and only Vegetable Gardening Success.

Which brings us today. And the enormously successful crop of Weeds that I managed to grow in my vegie patch over summer. The only thing, in fact, that grew at all after that one success with the tomatoes.

I got in there today and pulled them all out. Weed after weed after weed. Dirty patches on my jeans. Mud caked on my boots. RSI in my shoulders. As I pulled and dug and pulled some more, I found myself considering planting some nice shrubs in the space. Low maintenance. Good screening.

But as I pulled out the weeds, revealing the patch in all its glory, I noticed just how good my soil has become. No wonder those weeds flourished. All that compost so carefully dug through has provided the structure for a veritable worm farm in the beds. It is dark, and rich, and just bursting with goodness.

It'd be kind of a waste to put a Murraya in there. Not when it could feed some leeks to make me some soup. Or some parsley to save me buying it every five minutes.

Hmmm. Back to the drawing board.

[image: pictured above are the cumquats from my friend Jamie's wonderful inner-city food garden. He knows what he's talking about, and I should listen to him more often. Go see him at Garden Amateur.]

It's a good life

Sometimes, a picture says a thousand words. Even for me.

These are my tomatoes. My tomatoes.

After a shaky start, my Jack and the Tomato Stalk plants are bearing fruit. Lots and lots of red, ripe, juicy fruit. Ambrosia.

I am in awe.

And delighted.

I love gardening. It makes me smile.*

Are you a gardener? How does your garden grow?


*Feel free to remind me of this post next time I'm complaining about the weeds.

It's not easy being green

It appears that I am experiencing a glut. The Great Silverbeet Glut of 2010. Even after the snails and slugs have been on the rampage, I have enough here to feed a Greek village on spanakopita for months. Trouble is, I tend to treat the garden like a pantry. I leave it out there until I need it. Can't foresee needing that much silverbeet in the near future. My practical friend K suggested I bring it in, wash it, chop it finely and freeze it. It's an excellent idea. If one had the freezer space for that much silverbeet.

I blame Masterchef. Was a time when a vegetable was a Vegetable. Now it's an Ingredient. I've made quiche, spanakopita, pie, lamb/spinach curry. I've added it to pasta sauce, dahl, and salad. At no point have I boiled it up and plonked it on a plate with a sausage, some carrots and mashed potatoes. That's how people used to eat it. As a vegetable.

Then again, those same people also ate a lot of chokoes. Steamed chokoes, boiled chokoes, baked chokoes. Choko chips, choko chutney... Did your parents have a choko vine? Dad's was the wonder of the street. It intertwined along the palings of the back fence, obscene in its fecundity. Obscene to me, anyway. I never liked chokoes. No matter what my parents did with them.

Sisters B and C felt much the same way about silverbeet. No matter what my parents did with it.

Any suggestions on useful things to do with silverbeet will be gratefully accepted. I need to move it along before the rhubarb problem rears its ugly head again.

PS: I, ahem, borrowed the artful silverbeet image, artfully named 'Wet Silverbeet', from Garden Amateur, the fab blog by my friend Jamie, devoted to all things garden. Is well worth a read - he's actually a total pro and would never end up with way too much silverbeet...

Starting afresh

While autumn is not generally a time associated with new life, I’m focussed on green. Leaves from the Liquid Amber next door are falling softly, blanketing the ground in next season’s compost. The Japanese Maple, also next door though I try to pretend it’s on my side of the fence, is a dome of fiery red. My Japanese Maple, about knee-high to a grasshopper and looking as though it wished it lived next door, is shrivelling quietly, the edges of its tiny leaves crisping up to brown.

But I’m not looking at all that show-off stuff.

Mr3 and I spent a day in the garden last week. We ripped out the last of the summer basil, carefully stripping off every useable leaf to make into pesto. We uprooted the capsicum shrubs, so leafy, so green, so fruitless for so long. The two shallots that survived were dispatched to the compost bin. We dug and weeded, weeded and dug.

We had seedlings to plant.

When you’re planting seedlings with a three-year-old you need two things: a good supply of little tools (because he’ll want whatever you’re using) and a sharp eye. Two rows of spinach went in without incident. Two rows of cauliflower – at the other end of the bed – were also planted with no fuss. Once we got to the middle, however…well, that was a different story.

When you’re three, the best place to be when you’re gardening is in the garden bed. And while you’re okay with keeping a weather eye on the plants in front of you, you’re not so on the ball with the ones under your feet. Or your bottom, as the case may be.

A row of lettuces, a row of shallots, a row of celery – all flattened twice by a person who looks small on the outside of the garden bed, and like Ian Thorpe, all size 14 feet, on the inside of it.

But we did it. One garden bed, all neatly planted out. We go out and check them every day, and he’s practising watering them softly – “like rain, Mummy”. He removes the snails, placing them carefully on the other side of the garden (from where I hope it will take them at least a week to return). And we both watch, anxiously, to see if they’ll survive the slug onslaught that’s bound to occur any day now.

If all goes to plan, we have the makings of a fine vegetable soup in that garden. If it doesn’t, there’s always rhubarb.

{image: Burgon and Ball}

The dream vegie garden - and the reality

Part of my new ‘good life’ plan was to have my own vegie garden. I know, just like every other escapee from the city. But I actually did it, rather than just talking about doing it.

Mind you, it took a while. I ‘planned’ for about nine months. Then, last September, I ripped out all the cliveas that were sitting in the sunniest spot in the garden (replanting them in a dead spot under some shady trees, where, I’m pleased to say, they’re thriving). I dug in several types of animal poo and compost (just call me Peter Cundall), mulched it to keep the weeds down and then… nothing.

After six or so weeks, my husband (The Builder) asked me if I was actually planning to grow anything or was I waiting for a miracle. I tried to look wise and Confucian as I answered that I was allowing the soil time to prepare itself. He muttered something under his breath about boy scouts, but left it at that.

Two weeks later he told me that if I didn’t put something in it, he was going to make a claim for land rights and turn it into a Japanese garden. It was the impetus I needed. Leaving land to 'improve' is very tempting – mostly because it’s the easiest part of gardening.

But the concept of having to rake sand around a stone pagoda on a daily basis was enough inspiration to get me out of my lull and off to the nursery. Where I purchased. And purchased.

Three months later, I have a few hard-won pearls of wisdom to share about my first vegie patch. Firstly, chances are you won’t need five tomato plants. No, really. I have just finished making tomato relish with three kilos of roma tomatoes, having given away about the same. I still have three kilos of green tomatoes to bottle, and no sign of a tomato drought yet.

Secondly, read the labels on the seedlings. Also known as – don’t take the kids to the nursery with you. I picked up what I thought were cherry truss tomatoes during a sibling kerfuffle over who got to stand on the end of the trolley and, voila! My cherry tomatoes turned out to be GIANT tomatoes. And it’s not the tomatoes that were huge – it was the bush, which turned into a trifid and took over the entire patch within minutes.

Thirdly, I love spinach. My kids love spinach. We all love spinach. But there are not enough spinach recipes in the world to make use of the amount of spinach that five small plants can produce. Ditto, capsicums.

So I guess my lesson, this time around, is to plant small amounts, often. Otherwise, there’s a major glut in the kitchen – and the birds are having a party in the backyard.