Seedy habits

The therapists say that the first thing to do with any addiction is to admit you have one. Good advice, but I'm not sure if they know what they're doing after that point is reached. Anyway, here goes: I am tragically addicted to growing plants from seed, and my success rate is OK, not brilliant, but getting better. There, I've said it. I'm feeling better already.

And so at the latter end of this hot, windy and rather unpleasant Sydney Saturday afternoon in January, I've brought out my seed tins, taking stock of the lovely little packets of tragic temptation lurking demurely inside, and I'm planning my autumn seed-raising campaign now. Oh what fun, must put on the kettle to make a calming slug of green tea while I plan out my gardening future.

Here's the hot candidates, all vying for attention. With some,
I'm just waiting for this rolling series of heatwaves to be over
before I get any plants growing again (rocket, lettuce and chervil
all hate the heat and wouldn't be worth bothering with right now).

But there's another category of seeds which is demanding
my attention now: those plants which really only are happy
when sown as seed in the spot where they are going to spend
the rest of their little lives. These are the fuss-pots which don't
like being transplanted as seedlings. Here, there's Florence
fennel, Shirley poppies, carrots, parsley, rocket, beetroot, chervil
and parsnips. I'm already starting to play favourites, though.

While I do of course like to eat parsnips, there
is something extra about them that I like. Being
slow and a bit haphazard in the way they come
up from seed has its 'challenge and reward' buzz
when you see them finally come up, but I just like
watching them grow, and of course harvest
time is lucky dip at the carnival time: you never
know what shapes you'll get (but my second
crop was much better than the first, and my
secret of success is deep, maniacal soil prep).

Call me sick, but I just like parsnip foliage.

If you think having a crush on parsnips is worthy
of referral to a therapist, wait till you hear my
Shirley poppy problem! Total failure last time,
complete duds. I rescued the situation by buying
and planting some Iceland poppies in their place
(and Icelands are easy-peasy, lovely from seedlings).
But here I am planning to have another go. Of
course I don't have a clue where I went wrong.
Tragic fools rarely do. But I'm going to try again.

Florence fennel also needs to be sown direct
into the soil. No transplanting seedlings, please.
As I mentioned a couple of postings ago, I
currently have a little 'test batch' sown and
growing well. Pam and I love to blend sliced 
fennel and potatoes together (more spud than
fennel of course), sprinkle with olive oil, grinds
of salt and pepper then toss, into a covered dish
then bake slowly for as long as you like. The
fennel caramelises and becomes a bit sweet
and the result is utterly delicious.

Oops! A seed spill in the bottom of the tin.
Whose are they? Not the fennel! Yep, the
fennel, recognise those seeds anywhere.
Thank goodness for stocktakes and stickytape
fennel seed packet back in good order now.

Two last little asides. Seed packets give old tins a meaning and
purpose in life. Most of my seeds are in the cricket-crazy-kids'
Weet-Bix tin, but the retro-themed Yates commemorative
125th anniversary tin is doing fine service, too.

Last but never least, I amazed myself by actually checking the
'sow by' dates on the back of all the seed packets before I did
anything else. It is a bit depressing to carefully till the soil,
prepare the seed beds, sow the seeds and water them for days,
then weeks, on end, only to have nothing happen. At that point
 you wonder where could you have possibly gone wrong.
Then you finally, belatedly glance at the seed packet only to
discover it says: "You should have sown them three years ago,
you fool". So take it from a tragic fool, read the packet first!

Red & green

Such a pleasing colour combination, red and green. It's not just the looming festive season which makes me like red and green so much, it's a 24/7/365 thing. Just like the combo, and this morning I pulled out a couple of delicious looking red/green eating teams which have got to that enticing 'eat me now when I'm not so big' stage.

Beetroot and radishes.

Not that I am much of a radish eater, actually,
but free seeds are free seeds, and these came
as part of a lovely Yates 125th Anniversary
tin filled with Heritage Seeds. I was so taken
by the lovely seed packet that I thought: "Better
give them a go." And just a few weeks later,
radishes being radishes, they were ready to eat.

From the same seed tin, I also planted out a
few beetroot seeds. They're definitely not
called "ood red", the hot bet would of course
be "Blood Red" but as a 10-1 outsider maybe
it's actually "Good Red", but as I have lost
the top part of the packet I don't know for sure.

As for what I'll do with my radishes and beetroot, I am afraid that underwhelming boredom is all I have to offer on the radish front: sliced finely into a garden salad.

As for the beetroot, I am rather taken with them as part of a salad, too. First roast or boil, cut into dice, then start the salad making. I'm thinking cubes of real Greek feta cheese in there with the beetroot cubes, a mixture of different salad leaves, simple vinagrette of extra-virgin olive oil and white wine vinegar (3:1), maybe some dried oregano? Search the cupboards... pine nuts.. toast and toss a few. Cracked pepper of course. Something like that is what's in store for them. 

Must delve into that heritage seed tin some more and have some fun. I can see apple shaped cucumbers and stout leeks looking up at me, begging to be planted... maybe they're next? But in the meantime there's space for some more radishes and beetroot, so more of them, too. Must remember to soak the beetroot seeds before sowing, that worked a treat. As for the radishes, just sow them and stand back.

Love growing vegies!

Cheap thrills

Call it 'cheap thrills' but I love growing plants from seed. Now I know that a couple of postings ago I was complaining about my capacity for impatience, but I'm not completely bereft of patient waiting genes, and seed-raising is one of the better uses of patience in this plant filled world where I like to spend so much time. Besides, watching seeds come up provides lots of cheap thrills, especially when they come up overnight and you wander outside and there's a new facing smiling up at you from their pot or patch of ground.

OK, on a 'level of difficulty' scale of 1 to 10, where
1 is a weed and 10 wins a Nobel Prize, raising these
'Tiny Tim' cherry tomato seeds are about a 3, but
they're my little toms and as the plants grow only
50cm tall they're exactly what I want for one spot
in the vegie patch. All I need is four plants.

Not so much seeds sprouted as seeds almost ready to
be harvested. These are the 'Microgreens' which came
as free seeds attached to the cover of 'Burke's Backyard'
magazine. I always like to roadtest the free seeds for
myself, just to make sure readers are getting value.
The idea is that you harvest these mini greens for
salads and sandwiches, and hopefully they will also
regrow for you. So far so good, they look delish.

Beetroot coming up amid a sea of mulch. These things
grow best from seed, hating being transplanted as
seedlings. One good tip I've learned is to soak the
corky-looking beetroot seeds in water for a few hours
prior to planting. I did an experiment, and the soaked
seeds came up days earlier than the unsoaked ones.

Still in the teensy-weensy baby stage, this is a sprouted
oregano seedling. The mustardy coloured 'boulders'
also in the pic are slow-release fertiliser grains. To
think this little baby will one day be a far-spreading
beast of a herb is hard to imagine, but then again
lots of footballers looked harmless and cute as babies.

Looking remarkably like oregano babies at this very
first stage of life, this is corn salad.

Chervil seeds come up thin and spindly, only to turn
into lacy, delicate little things a bit like parsley. The
lesson here is don't let plant babies fool you!

Just for fun, I'm going to collect some
seed from some plants I value and have
a go at raising new plants from them.
This is a wonderful plant called perpetual
spinach, which has provided a constant
supply of leaves from early autumn all
the way through winter until now, when
it has finally decided to go to seed. I'm
keeping a lookout for flowers, then I'll
pop a mesh bag over the flower heads
and hopefully will end up with seeds to
sow later on. Expect a blog on this one!

And speaking of future blogs, here's another seed-
collecting effort about to begin. This is the seed head
of the rapidly fading scadoxus which I have featured
here a few times recently. There are four flower heads
forming stacks of seeds now, and I have bagged up
three of them in the hope of collecting the seeds and
germinating them. This unbagged one is my 'Plan B'
option: no bag, just collect the seeds and sow them
in a tray. If it works, brilliant, and if it doesn't, I am
sure I'll still learn something useful (not sure what
that'll be, and I'd rather succeed, thanks!)

Seeds put you so close to the full cycle of life of plants. I couldn't possibly be a gardener without growing at least some plants from seed. 

Some bloggers have a wonderful, inspiring mastery of seed-sowing and growing, and to point you in an interesting direction, if you haven't visited Michelle's blog called From Seed to Table, that would be an inspirational (and very informative) place to start.

Waiting in line

Haven't I been quiet lately? Well, yes. Two whole weekends in a row without gardening or blogging, and the truth is that I could get away with a third gardening-lite weekend, as everything is in a 'set and forget' mode at the moment. A few weeks ago I had a huge weekend digging, sowing and planting and since then the seeds have slowly gone about their business of germinating and forming roots and leaves. Early morning sprinkles of the hose from me, and that's all I need to do right now. So here's all the chirpy little seedlings, waiting in line for their turn to become dashing herbs, vegies and flowers a month or so from now.

First stop, spinach and calendula land. Spinach the three rows left, calendulas on the right edge.

Trainee spinach.

Calendula wannabees. Just like in reality TV, some of these hopefuls will be voted off over the coming days and weeks, to make room for the remainder. That's show biz!

The next orderly bed (with sugar cane mulch dividers) features coriander, choy sum, celery leaf plants and baby beetroot.

Beetroot rangas.

Coriander kids

Choy sum punks, too many of them

Slow off the mark, these probably are the celery leaf plant seeds. Who has ever heard of weeds growing in orderly rows? No, these must be the seeds I sowed, probably, I guess...

Next bed, poppy seedlings, and the bare earth at the front now has a long line of the tiniest little baby curly parsley seeds coming up. At last!

Across the way, the flat leaf parsley seeds have turned into seedlings, while the shallot seedlings behind, as usual, are just getting on with business.

Let's finish off with some seed-sowing graduates. The chervil loves the semi shade as much as mint does, but is a lot better behaved. Lovely little herb.

And the oak-leaf lettuce looks lovely in the early morning light. And it ain't half bad in sandwiches, either.

Everyone in Sydney agrees this autumn has been something special. It's still sunny and moderately warm, but the heaters are on at night now, and the weather folk say that it should be colder and wetter this week, and there's not a peep of complaint from anyone. We need the rain, as it has been too dry. And we don't begrudge the colder weather finally arriving, as it is overdue.

This loveliest of all our seasons has been such a kind one to all the plants in the garden. The youngsters are all waiting patiently in line, growing every day, while that old gardener doesn't seem to have much to do and just wanders around taking a few photos, pulling up a few weeds here and there, and stopping occcasionally to look up and that clear blue sky, making sure to remember what a fine, glorious autumn this has been.

Not quite a farmer's market

Over at Charlotte's food blog, How to Shuck an Oyster, she had an interesting post yesterday morning on the farmers' markets phenomenon. While I'll let you read for yourself what Charlotte has to say on that topic, I dropped in with a comment that I've never actually been to a farmer's market. And that's true. I haven't. At Charlotte's blog I flippantly said it's because feeling morally inferior is a comfort zone for me, but my real reasons for not bothering were more personal. Though I grow my own organic food, it's nowhere near enough to feed us every day. So that's not it. And while I could go on about elitism (which is rife amongst foodies) and proletarianism (which is rife at supermarkets) they're not it, either.

The simple truth is that I hate being in crowds, of any sort. Can't stand being in a crush of people, amid a busy throng. The various farmers' markets I've seen don't look very inviting at all, even if the produce is lovely and the shopping good. I guess it's some kind of panic attack thing, but whenever I'm in a crowd all I want to do is get out of there, especially the noisy crowds. I've left so many music concerts and other 'events' over the years that Pam and I have a happy agreement that some of the gigs she goes to are 'not suitable for Jamie' but others are.

And when did this simple truth occur to me? It was while peacefully harvesting a bit more home-grown organic produce from my own backyard, all on my own. I do a lot of thinking while I do various bits of basic domestic drudgery, such as weeding or pottering in the garden, or washing up or chopping vegies in the kitchen. Greatly under-estimated thing is a spot of contemplative drudgery. However, back to the harvest itself...

Mini farmer's market harvest number one: ruby chard. It's so pretty I have been putting off harvesting this stuff as I just like the look of it in the garden. It actually does look better than it tastes (ie, 'Sensational' v 'OK'), but it does taste OK, if you mix it with fetta cheese and shallots and nutmeg and turn it into spanakopita.

Mini farmer's market harvest number two: beetroot. Two plants were growing close together and I thought I'd pull out just one, but they came out together, clinging to each other by the roots. They immediately reminded me of two cats a girlfriend and I once bought, many years ago. We went to a house to buy one all-black kitten, and when we picked up the all-black kitten, another one (all-black, but with white feet and white half-moustache) came up attached to the all-black guy. Both were clinging onto each other for dear life. We couldn't bring ourselves to separate them, and so they both came home. But I digress...

Mini farmer's market harvest number three was a successful thinning of slightly overcrowded carrots. Grown from seed they're all doing fine, but most of them need another week or so of growth to get up to a good size.

So here's one of the 'thinnings', a small but perfectly formed short carrot. One thing I like about carrots is not cooking them. Wash, peel, eat straight away. That's my carrot-eating philosophy. I just love the taste of crisp, tender, oh-so-carrotty, freshly-harvested carrot.

Cheaper than a farmer's market, definitely organic and home-grown and, best of all, quieter and much less crowded – my backyard farmer's mini market!