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!

It's happening, just slowly

Winter gardens seem to be on Valium at times. Everything happens slowly. It's all quite calm, there's not the frenetic buzz of insects and birds like you get in spring and summer. It's all a bit slow. Suddenly my action-packed inner-city garden feels like it's a country town set to 'snooze' mode. But there are signs that things are finally happening, just slowly.

The Iceland cometh. Poppy, that is. There's a couple of dozen of these people lifting their heads at the moment, the start of another winter flowering season that I hope lasts for months.

These parsnips live life at a leisurely pace. It takes anywhere between three and four weeks for the seed to germinate, and now they are plodding along nicely, but harvest time is months away. The good thing is at least they don't need much care.

Next door the English spinach is stirring into action, after a slow start from seed. Crops will be a few more weeks away, but pickings of baby leaves for salads are getting close.

Next door to the English spinach a row of recently thinned-out carrot seedlings is finally getting down to business, but these too are several weeks away from harvest.

Last year I planted brodiaea bulbs at the recommended spacing of 10cm and the effect was hopeless. Easily the biggest disappointment in the garden last year. These flowering bulbs from South Africa were meant to produce pretty blue-star flowers, and they did, but each small bloom was so far apart from its neighbour that you barely noticed them. Nevertheless I saved the bulbs and this year I have jammed them into a pot like commuters on a Tokyo subway train. My only problem with this experiment is that I might be overseas when they bloom! Rats!

I reckon it's only a few more sleeps before these cinerarias begin their lurid winter colour show. These are growing in almost full shade, but they're one of those "will flower in shade in winter" kind of annuals, with the proviso that the colours aren't necessarily in the best taste. I don't mind, I just want some action here in Quiet Town!

Speaking of action, here some real excitement. When I went outdoors with my camera this afternoon I had already made up my mind that I was going to do a blog about how nothing is happening yet, and yet here's the first of the Iceland poppies cheekily saying "nyah nyah" to my theme while flashing a pure white smile.

OK, poppy, I stand corrected. There is stuff happening here. Just not much. Not yet. Patience is a virtue, but waiting is still a bore.

Carrot lucky dip

If your carrots come up looking like normal, perfectly formed carrots, then you can afford to say: "I love the way harvesting carrots is like a lucky dip - each time you don't know what you're going to get." But if your carrots come up misshapen, forked, weirdo, then you're probably a lot less delighted by the lucky dip analogy. My most recent mini carrot harvest for dinner had a bit of both, but mostly I got lucky...

For starters, let's be positive and say that almost all of the carrots yanked from their bed turned out like these guys.

My carrot patch is very small, and not in the best vegie-growing spot in the garden, either. But I was determined to improve on my last attempt, which consisted mostly of misshapen weirdos.

The problem is that the little bit of carrot poking above the soil gives you no clue as to what lies beneath. If all goes well the delicious orange root pokes down several more inches and tapers to a lovely point. But if fate in the guise of several possible problems/mistakes intervenes, then you end up with a weirdo.

Hooray! Another completely normal one. I think the secret this year was even better soil preparation than last year (ie, deeper digging and getting a finer tilth to the soil), plus sowing seed directly where the crop is to grow. Last year I used seedlings, and it was only later that I read that carrots don't like being transplanted. And yep, they don't like fresh fertiliser near their forming roots, either.

As pictured earlier, most of the carrots harvested last night were delightfully normal. Well, almost all of them were...

But there had to be one weirdo, didn't there?

However, I can live with this one oddball, as compared with last year's misshapen efforts, this year's are much better. I think the key was sowing seed directly, plus the better soil preparation. Carrots are related to parsnips and also parsley, and all of these plants do much better when grown from seed sown straight into the bed. As my carrot patch didn't enjoy an ideal amount of vegie-growing sunshine (what I might call one of my 'B-grade' patches, OK but not textbook sunny) it's not a bad result.

They'll be turned into a Moroccan-style carrot salad. This one, by Sydney cookery writer Maureen Simpson.

750g carrots, peeled and steamed or boiled until tender

1 small clove garlic, crushed

1/2 teaspoon sweet paprika

1/2 teaspoon ground cumin

1/2 teaspoon finely chopped fresh chilli

2 tablespoons lemon juice

2 tablespoons olive oil

pinch of sugar

salt and pepper to taste

2 tablespoons chopped coriander (cilantro) leaves

6 fresh dates, finely sliced

You can leave small carrots whole, or cut larger ones into chunks. Steam or boil until tender.

To make the dressing, combine the garlic, paprika, cumin, chilli, lemon juice olive oil, sugar, salt and pepper in a screw-topped jar and shake. Pour over the drained, cooked carrots while they're still warm.

Garnish with the coriander leaves and sliced dates. Serve warm or cold as a side dish.

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!