While I was harvesting the broccoli

Broccoli is one of those vegetables that I have to admit I cannot ever get all that excited about. I don't mind eating it; in fact we eat broccoli at least once every week, it's a routine part of our diet. As for growing it, it's similarly honest and reliable, not hard to grow, but while I was harvesting another head to take back to the kitchen, I finally found something to admire about broccoli: it's good value for money.

Now, this time I am only growing my own broccoli because I had bought a punnet of six seedlings for my mother-in-law Val's garden, but she had room only for three ... and so I had three left over. So "waste-not, want-not" came into operation and I planted the three remaining seedlings here in our garden a few months ago, and over the last week or two have begun harvesting some.

Exhibit A: a completely ordinary head of broccoli, not quite at full harvestable size, but no doubt ready to go by the next weekend.

Exhibit B: sprouting from the lower levels of an already-harvested broccoli plant, side shoots forming smaller broccoli heads. That's my excitement, folks. It ain't all over when you cut off the mega-head of broccoli at the top of the plant. Give your broccoli a week or two more, another liquid feed, and production resumes, albeit on a smaller scale. Still delicious.

The one thing about this variety of broccoli that I planted is that it was labelled "mini broccoli". Now that it's producing heads it looks like a completely normal broccoli plant to me, there's nothing mini about it. 

But that happened a few years ago when I planted supposed "mini" cauliflower, and it produced completely normal cauliflowers for me on gorgeous but large plants. So, provided you're not fooled by the misleading plant label, these minis are still a very good backyard vegie to grow, but they do need a fair bit of space. 

Broccoli loves sunshine, the cooler months, liquid feeds, and a soil rich in compost and organic manure. Just remember to leave the plants alone after the initial harvest, and it will give you more in due course.

Lebanese flavour

Here in Australia, and in my part of Sydney in particular, we have a sizeable Lebanese community, and they're wonderful, hard-working people. As is the case with many established Anglo Aussies (like myself) and migrant communities (such as the Lebanese) where we first get to know a bit about each other is in our shops and restaurants. 

Pam and I love Lebanese cuisine. As well as their famous kebabs and koftas, their many vegetable dishes are superb. Our supermarkets always have in stock big piles of Lebanese cucumbers, Lebanese eggplant and Lebanese zucchini. These vegies aren't just sold to people whose family's roots are in Lebanon. Everybody buys them, and that's because the Lebanese people have bred over the centuries a wide range of vegetables that presumably suit both their climate and their palates. 

And so this year I'm having a go at growing the little pale green Lebanese zucchini, and so far the results have been delicious. I prefer them to the prolific, larger, dark green 'Blackjack' zucchini which I have grown here in previous years.

Here's two zucchinis with the flowers attached
picked this morning. These aren't as prolific
in production as Blackjacks, but they keep
well. So, after washing and drying, I pop them
in a plastic container. After a few days we
have enough for a delicious side dish.

Here's the plants in the garden, with the mirror
on the shed wall making the plot look a bit
bigger. And no, they are not a special variety
with variegated foliage! Sad to say, they have
powdery mildew on the leaves, and nothing I
am doing is really helping much at all.

The powdery mildew is quite aggressive, and though I am
regularly spraying plants with an organic treatment, it doesn't
seem to get rid of existing mildew. All it does is slow its spread
to other zucchini foliage. I'm also careful when watering to
keep water off the foliage and direct it to the roots, so I can't
think of anything else I can do.

This is the product I am using. eco-fungicide.
It's organic, a powder that you mix up in a
spray bottle and spray all over the foliage, on
top and on the underside. It's based on
potassium bicarbonate.

In previous years I've tried the other well-known organic treatment of milk sprays, and they were even poorer in performance than the eco-fungicide. Pictured below is the healthy foliage of the other Lebanese zucchini plants which haven't yet succumbed to the powdery mildew. This is a much better result with the eco-fungicide than anything I ever achieved with milk sprays, so I am sticking to the eco-fungicide.

There's one or two faint spots of mildew on the
leaf on the right, but the foliage still looks good.

The good news is that the powdery mildew, while it slowly harms the foliage and the plant, isn't instant death or anything like that. The foliage on one plant has looked crappy for a few weeks now and the plant is cropping away happily. So mostly the powdery mildew weakens the plants, probably brings the cropping to an early end, and certainly looks very dodgy!

I've always said that the baby little zucchinis you get attached
to zucchini flowers in restaurants and supermarkets have a
much better flavour than the fully grown zucchinis that are
sold without (the short-lived) flowers. Well, it's the same with
the small Lebanese zucchinis. These never grow to any great
size anyway, and they are best harvested when only 3-4 inches
(75-100mm) long, and they taste great, whether you steam
them, fry them or cook them any which way. 

Bagging up spuds

I cheerfully admit that I'm guilty of various forms of gluttony, and in growing potatoes I've found the perfect blend – gluttony for eating spuds and gluttony for punishment. Here I go again – spud growing time!

This year I'm taking a different tack – I'm growing potatoes in a bag. I'll explain why a bit later on, but one reason for growing spuds in a bag is the familiar one here in my small backyard – lack of space. Here's a photo taken this afternoon of Spudland. Just two bags. Not the prettiest bags either, so I set them amidst the pleasing greenery of spinach world and the cheery colour of some calendulas, violas and a dazzling potted succulent, Crassula 'Campfire'. Once the potato plants start growing you'll see less of the bags, anyway.

When I say 'not the prettiest bags' I suppose I should say 'downright ugly bags', but these are, at least, very practical bags. They're horticultural planter bags of very tough black plastic with drainage holes all over the place. Other friends are using car tyres for growing their spuds, but that would be one aesthetically dodgy garden project too far for Pammy, I suspect. She's hardly thrilled about the bags as it is. By the way, I sourced these bags by mail order from Botany Horticultural, at www.botanyplastics.com.au

So, here's the steps. The bottom layer is a 10cm thick layer of mulch or straw. I used sugar cane mulch because I already had some. I've rolled the sides of the bag down, to allow sunlight to hit the soil once I've done these basic first steps of making up various layers.

Then I scattered a good handful or two of pelletised chicken poo (ie, Dynamic Lifter) over the straw. Any balanced fertiliser will do, but the chicken poo is a good organic choice.

Then I covered that layer with a 5-10cm thick layer of home-made compost, of which I have a goodly supply on hand, being a keen composter! If you don't have compost you could use potting mix or very well crumbled soil, or even more straw if that's all you have. The idea here is that the spuds shouldn't come into direct contact with the chicken poo.

Then I added another 5cm layer of straw on top of my compost layer, and set the spuds on that.

Make sure the sprouted eyes of the spuds are facing upwards. (I was almost not going to grow spuds this year, but my good friend Fenella bought too many seed potatoes while on a garden shopping spree on holidays in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. So faced with a lovely array of Spuntas, Pink Fir Apples, Saphire (which are purple) and Kipflers, I was spurred into action by Fen's spree, and generosity – thanks Fen!)

Cover the spuds with another 10cm deep layer of compost (or straw/soil/potting mix/a blend of these, or whatever you have). Then, water the lot fairly well, but not too much, not so it's muddy – more like thoroughly moistened. We've been having quite a dry, warm spell here in Sydney lately, so I've been watering the bag about every third day. All this was done about two weeks ago (August 25) and today (Sept 8) the first buds have appeared. I'll finish off the blog with 'what I plan to do next', but as an aside, here's why I'm growing spuds in bags, and not in the ground, this year...

This is last year's happy, healthy, productive potato patch in late October, centre-stage in my little backyard, in the sunniest bed I have.

And here's the potato patch a few weeks later, in late November, doing what potato patches must do in order to produce spuds – ie, die back horribly. And that's a downright awful look for a small, pretty garden!

The harvest was both delicious and lovely to behold (these are King Edward potatoes, and a mighty fine-tasting home-grown potato they are too). But after that first go at growing spuds, I knew that I wasn't going to devote my central, bestest bed to that ugly show again!

And so here we are back at bagged Spudland, today. The first green shoots are up, and the spuds are underway. While I plan to do an update a bit later on, showing the progress and other steps, to finish things off I might as well go through what I intend to do next.

It's the same as in-ground spud growing really. Potato plants like lots of sunshine and a steady supply of water, so they'll get that, but no more feeding is needed. Pests weren't a problem here last year, but there is a caterpillar which can munch on them, so I might use a spray of an organic product (either Dipel or Success) to control these, if I notice any flitting about.

I'll just let the shoots grow on until they are about 20cm tall, then I'll add another 10cm layer of compost and straw to cover up the bottom half of the plants (and I'll unroll the sides of the bag at the same time, to hold in that new layer of compost and straw).

I'll repeat this process one or two more times (but I won't fanatically keep on hilling soil like I did last year. Once the hills are about 30-40cm tall that's more than enough, judging from what happened here last year). Hopefully by then the bags will be fully unfurled and the only job after that is watering.

Then I'll let the plants grow and flower on, which should happen some time in November, I suspect. A few weeks after flowering finishes the plants will start to die off, and the longer I leave the plants the better my harvest will be. Last year I harvested earlier than I should have, and still managed to get lots and lots of spuds. So the best idea is to just harvest a few at a time, taking just as many as you need each time, and let the other spuds keep on developing under the soil.

Purple patch

We're having a purple patch of lovely weather here in Sydney right now, a wonderful line-up of sunny, fine days. Last week we fell just short of the record for our warmest July day on record – that's a bit over 25°C (77°F) – but these last few days have all hovered around 19 or 20. With the sun on your back it's almost perfect gardening weather, so instead of dutifully heading inside to slave over a work-from-home computer keyboard, I decided to potter about and tend to a few plants while I also took a few snaps of how things are going here in Amateur Land.

I usually stand just outside the back door to take my snaps of the whole garden, but with the morning sun low in the sky making that shot impossible, I ventured all nine metres to way up the other end of Amateur Land to look back to the house, for a change. Lots happening, as usual. Here's a few close ups of what's going on.

While there aren't a lot of flowers in bloom now in the garden, the rosemary has just started producing its pretty mauve flowers. This is such a nice plant just to be near, thanks to those fragrant green leaves.

The poppy patch carries on prettily, but it has such a casual approach to the business of blooming. Though there might be 20 plants in the little patch, each sending up half a dozen droopy-headed stems at a go, you never really see much more than 10-20 blooms fully open at any one time in the little patch. That's plenty to pick in the morning to fill a vase (as Pammy does regularly) but you never get the razzamatazz of the whole patch in bloom all at once. That never happens. Instead, the patch just pops out its pretty blooms a few at a time, never trying to seem all that showy, but it does it so well for several months each year (from early June to early October).

The shallots in the foreground have been like this for weeks, and that's the wonderful thing about them. You can leave them there and just pick one or two when you need them, and leave the rest behind for another day. They do get a bit stronger in flavour as they age, but they're fine in cooking. Behind the shallots is a pot of rocket, and behind that a mixed planting of a couple plants each of Chinese cabbage, mini cauliflower and lettuce. On the left the tatty sage bush is due for its midwinter pruning. I'll cut off about half the growth and it'll bounce back nicely in spring with a new flush of aromatic, soft grey leaves.

I do like the look of this pot of colourful ornamental kale, but I can't take any credit for growing it. It was left behind by the TV crew who filmed here last Wednesday (see my previous blog entry for the details on that). It's pictured here next to some more baby cauliflower plants, and it always amazes me how incredibly diverse the Brassica group of vegies is. Essentially they're all the same plant, Brassica oleracea, but the huge number of different forms the same plant takes – all sorts of cabbages, ornamental kale, cauliflower, broccoli, kohlrabi, Brussels sprouts – it's just amazing.

Hooray, the eschallots are up! Last year I tried growing these onion-family members in a tub of potting mix and it was a miserable failure. This year I whacked them into the cold arms of wintry Mother Earth and in just four weeks all eight bulbs have sent up optimistic little green shoots.

Nearby, the garlic patch marches on. The central row (sown in May) is currently doing the best, but the other rows (one sown in April, the other in June) are still performing respectably, if not quite as well. I'm feeding them monthly with lines of chicken manure sprinkled between the rows.

At last the dwarf peas are getting a bit more sunshine and have started to gain in height and produce some flowers, but as for ambitions of any bumper crops, to quote a great Australian philosopher, Darryl Kerrigan "tell him he's dreaming".

Final stop on the sunny winter morning ramble is the cumquat tree, laden with fruit. This was actually the reason for the TV crew's visit, to do a segment on potted cumquats. These tart little citrus make wonderful marmalade, and that's what I'll be doing with them very soon.

I'd better get back to work. It was just too nice a morning to leave the garden straight away on such a perfect winter's day!

Morning ramble

November 1 started off cloudy yet warm, the perfect sort of weather for a little morning ramble, a pleasure I'd been denying myself for several days, due to that annoying malady known as work.

Here's Garden Amateur land this mild morning, with everything chugging along nicely. The two pots at the front left are potted cumquats which I've come to call 'The Twins'. One belongs to me, the other to my friend Michelle, who's living in Birdsville, a place where cumquats would not like to live. Michelle's blog mentioned that it got up to 42.8°C there the other day... gets hot in Birdsville, and it isn't even summer yet.

Meanwhile here in Sydney, the Blue Lake beans are casually twining their way up their little willow teepee. They shot out of the ground on 'being born' day, but since then their pace has been merely steady.

I like the way climbers and twiners go about their business. I keep on thinking of doing some time-lapse photography one of these days...

I must admit that I'm finding vegetables a lot more beautiful than I expected them to be. Perhaps it's their radiant good health that appeals, but I love all the details of how they grow, their foliage, their flowers, the forms they take. In the past I restricted myself to growing lots of salad greens, some tomatoes and herbs, but these last two years have seen me trying to grow all sorts of vegetables – and almost all of them have proven to be the most handsome plants. These beans are no exception.

Given that this is such a big, sprawling plant it's amazing that I haven't mentioned its presence in the 9m x 7.5m of my little backyard. It's cardamom, and it's one of the oldest plants that I have growing here. This is about 16-17 years old. I grow it mostly because it provides a good screen for the fence, actually, but its fragrant leaves are nice to be near. Alas, it produces no pods for me at all. Never has! An Indian-born friend, Rema, occasionally takes some cardamom leaves home and then wraps them around little milk-based sweets. She then steams the sweets in the leaves, and the heady cardamom scent goes through them. Delicious!

And while I'm talking culinary matters Indian, my good old curry tree is in bloom, and over the last few weeks since I posted about this plant it has leafed up beautifully. Such a lovely little potted tree, and so useful in the kitchen, too.

For the record, here's the leaves and the flowers of the curry tree this morning. The flowers are small clusters of stars which last a few weeks. Later on in late summer and autumn, berries appear.

Producing a good flush of leaves and flower buds everywhere, our baby frangipani, which we've grown from a cutting taken two years ago and transplanted in early spring, has settled in beautifully to its new, permanent home. The mulch is there to suppress weeds mostly. Frangipanis and Sydney were meant for each other. I'll never worry about watering or feeding it and it will thrive on my benign neglect. Raising it as a baby was all the help it needed from me, and all I need to do now is leave it alone!

Leave it alone I have promised to do, but I still have visiting rights. Here's a flower stalk rising from one of the frangipani branches. Can't wait to enjoy that scent again!

Another backyard baby is this only child, the sole Jalapeno chilli, and the only chilli in fact, that I have growing here this year. I use some chillies in cooking, but not a lot, so one plant is all I really need (given that they are so plentiful in our local Asian shops). I like the Jalapeno because it's mild, rating about 5 on the 10 point heat scale. In previous years I have grown habaneros, serranos, jalapenos, anchos, cayennes and several others, mostly because I love the look of the plants when they're laden with fruit (especially the pretty apricot-coloured habaneros). This year I've scaled back on the chillies to make way for the other vegie crops.

Speaking of making way for space reasons, the potato patch is turning into the real-estate takeover merchant of my backyard. Sprawling everywhere, lush and green, happy and flowering, spuds take on a suburban sprawl like no other.

The packet for these Roma (egg) tomatoes says they're ideal for pots. Every book I have says Romas need staking. We shall see. They have stout stems and do seem to be a bit squat in growth habit so far, but I do have some spare stakes at the ready, just in case.

This gaggle of pots have made their way onto the main path up the middle of the backyard, where the sun is good. The chives in the foreground aren't that flash, as they were a victim of the spreading potato metropolis. As I had been busy with work lately I'd forgotten about the pot of chives around the side. I found them almost completely covered by spud leaves. They'll bounce back. The little pot at the back left is rocket, mixed lettuce on the right, basil in the centre at the back. All happy as can be.

The zucchinis are happy plants, too, their big starry yellow flowers yelling "over here" to all potential harvesters. There are three plants here, and in the previous week we harvested about 6-10 baby zucchinis with their flowers, then cooked them up after stuffing the flowers with a mix of ricotta, goat's cheese and herbs.

Tonight, I'm cooking these guys. The variety is 'Black Beauty', by the way, and it seems to be cropping a little bit better than the 'Blackjack' which I grew last year. I've deliberately harvested these when much smaller than the usual size of zucchini sold in shops, as I think that in general, zucchinis taste better as quite small vegies.

And speaking of cooking zucchinis, that's what I had better get busy doing right now – preparing some lazy, simple food. Roast a chicken, with baked potatoes and baked cauliflower florets (ever tried caulis baked? – heaven, they become sweet, completely different from steamed or boiled caulis) plus the zucchini babies. I might even bake them, too...

Tossed salad

Within the confined spaces of my little garden it's just not possible to put home-grown vegies on the table every meal. But with salads you can get pretty close to that ideal with everything in the salad bowl being home-grown, most of the time. It always feels nice to say "yes, all the greens are from our garden." And with the wonderful variety of salad greens that you can grow here in Sydney virtually all the time, this is one of the best backyard crops we can grow.

Right now it's the delicious "anything grows" spring season. This is just a punnet of mixed lettuce sold as 'Combo', belting along nicely. I like this selection because of the variety of leaves it offers. Every now and then I don't get my act together with the seed-sowing routine, so I play rapid catch-up with a punnet of seedlings. Easy.

And over the other side of the path is an English spinach patch which has astonished me with its speed of growth. I wonder if the secret is that it's not in full sun? The leaves went from the crop of little 'baby' spinach leaves I had planned on adding to salads to rapidly becoming large, adult spinach leaves. Yet such has been the quick growth that the leaves are still soft and tender, and if torn-up a nice addition to a garden salad of mixed greens. The rest I'll harvest and cook soon enough.

And here are 'spillover' pots of spinach and lettuce that I couldn't find spots for anywhere else. I'm plundering these for fillings for sandwiches at lunchtime.

And here's the next generation of green and red lettuce seedlings popping up now. By the time they'll be ready to transplant some of the current crop will be past its best. I often get the timing wrong on these replacement crops, but sowing another batch at around monthly intervals is what works well most of the time.

One of the secrets of an interesting garden salad is a good variety of leaf shape, colour, flavour and texture. I find that a good selection of salad seeds can last a whole season or more, given the small crops that I sow. And the huge selection of seeds available gives you so much more variety than you can buy at the seedling section of the local nursery.

Here's a nifty bit of info I picked up courtesy of the Australian consumer magazine, Choice. They road-tested balsamic vinegars and this was their bargain best buy. It's less than $5 a bottle at our local Woolworths store.

The really valuable info from Choice is that there is an official rating system for balsamic vinegars run by the people in Modena, Italy, where the best balsamics come from. This is the back of the label. It says 'Consorzio Aceto Balsamico di Modena' and that shows that it's authentic Modena balsamic. Apparently, not every Modena balsamic maker is part of this rating organisation, but here in far-off Australia it's a handy thing to know about when you're browsing through a dozen different brands of balsamic vinegar and don't really know what to look for, apart from price.

And this is the all-important 'leaf' rating symbol to also look for. Four leaves is the top rating they give for thick, sweet balsamic suitable for drizzling on strawberries or ice-cream. One leaf is for the thinner stuff that's fine for salad dressings. However, I've tried the different ones on offer and I always buy the four-leaf.

The other thing I have learned recently is that one of the most important things in choosing a nice olive oil for a salad dressing is its freshness. In another recent road-test by Choice magazine, the local Australian olive oils scored very well in a blind taste test by experts, and they say the reason for this is freshness. Many moderately priced olive oils from Europe spend a long time in storage and transport before they ever make it to our supermarket shelves, and their flavour is often poor as a result. By comparison, the fresh local olive oils are often superior to the cheaper European oils because the local crop is this year's, not last year's.

I haven't yet tried the Australian olive oil pictured here. It's a gift from my mother-in-law, after her recent driving holiday through olive oil growing districts of Australia. But mixed with some genuine Modena balsamic vinegar, I am sure it will do my home-grown salad leaves justice.