I used to pass snake beans by in the green grocer, mainly because they weren’t a familiar vegetable, but also because I didn’t imagine that the long floppy ropes of bean could be as tasty as the standard round and flat green beans. I was wrong, and they are a great crop for humid summers.
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Zucchini flowers seem like an extravagance, using flowers now that you could pick as fruit later. This year though I have watched dozens of zucchini flowers open and fade without any fruit production at all. So I have realised that picking the flowers is actually a good use of the crop, giving possibly as much yield as waiting for the fruit.
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Sweetcorn can be grown in a marvellously wide range of climates, even far northern parts of the globe where the Summers are short but the days are long. Here in the Southern Subtropics we don’t have those very long summer days, but our climate is also good for growing sweetcorn; it can be started early in Spring and grown till late. This year I am testing the window. At the end of Spring I have already put in several sowings with the aim of having corn to pick right through the warm months.
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Growing onions can be tricky in the subtropics, as the standard varieties need a cold period to form bulbs, but here my bunching onions have been a success. They are like green onions (which are usually immature bulbing onions) and I think they are particularly suited to the sort of risotto / stirfry / ratatouille dishes that we tend to make, with their mild flavour. For stews and roasts I still use brown onions.
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As my rows of carrots grow I occasionally remember to thin some out to make room for the main crop. The thinnings make a handy baby carrot crop for the kitchen.
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You can probably never have too much thyme. Part of the plan for my herb garden was to have a section of low growing and fragrant herbs like thyme under the clothes hoist. With our second Spring finishing after sowing it the first Winter, it’s almost what I envisaged and filling in nicely.
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We have an old shade house that had been overgrown by a mulberry tree in the old food forest. It was too shaded for even weeds to grow, but fortunately easy to deconstruct and move. Now the the ‘Midlevels’ garden has become the main kitchen garden, we have been busy moving the shade house for the second time to what I hope is its permanent position. Why have a shade house? You probably can’t have too many ‘houses’ in the garden, each with a special microclimate. A shade house is best for…
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It’s a year since we got water to a cleared paddock half way down the hill and the ‘Mid-levels’ garden was begun. After fencing (about 230 square metres) and lot of digging it has become our main kitchen garden. The garden area keeps expanding beyond the original fenced patch, including the addition of two greenhouses and an aquaponics system. Along the way I’ve learned a lot as the seasons made a full turn.
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It’s a warm climate for cabbages here, and I thought my first Winter crop had failed, but they’ve come good with the Spring sunshine. I’m in the early phase here of trying out what will grow and learning what each crop needs in our conditions. This Winter I added cabbage to the mix. The cultivar I tried was ‘Early Jersey Wakefield’, an early maturing sugarloaf type.
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We have had our usual dry Spring. Put in the perspective of places across the world and closer to home that really suffer from droughts, our little dry season is nothing to complain about, and in fact it gives us a welcome break from mowing, but it does make seed raising in the garden an endeavour unlikely to succeed. No matter if they get daily watering, seeds sown outdoors in beds just aren’t going to try to germinate under the combination of dry air and baking sun. This year hasn’t been nearly…
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