Garlic Day

I wasn't even planning to grow garlic this year, but I've just planted some garlic this morning. And it felt good. It felt like I was breaking the law, in fact. Well, sort of.

I had just completed my usual morning rounds of the garden, watering this and that pot, picking a few weeds, checking how things are going. I wandered back into the kitchen to wash a freshly harvested radish or two and I spotted in our wire garlic and onion basket a head of garlic which was sprouting its head off. Why not plant them out and see what happens?

That's the 'law-breaking' bit. Law 1: might be a bit early for garlic, still too warm. Law 2: only plant varieties suited to your climate. Law 3: don't tell me, please don't tell me it's common, vulgar Woolies supermarket garlic? Yep, it's from Woolies, and that means it's probably from Mexico, Chile, Argentina and various other places they get garlic from. Well, at least it isn't the bleached-white, bland, awful Chinese garlic which all the horrified garlic aficionados bang on about (and which is disappearing fairly rapidly from our supermarket shelves, anyway).

Here they are: healthy fat little people just bursting with life.

It was easy enough to find a spot for them, as the curly parsley
was on the way out. So after clearing that space and several
good minutes of digging with my nifty Niwashi digger, I planted
each bulb into a shallow trench, just shallow enough that when
I backfilled with soil, the top tip of the shoot was at soil level.

A side dressing of chicken poo and mulch of sugar cane.

Water in well with a watering can, some
Seasol (seaweed, to stimulate root growth) in a
few days from now, and so my unexpected
little law-breaking Garlic Day patch is born.

I'm increasingly attracted to the idea of growing food plants from the food plants you're already eating. Sometimes it's not a good idea. Supermarket tomatoes, for instance, are mostly what they call 'F1 Hybrids' and their seeds won't produce the same tomatoes you bought. But buying heirloom tomatoes from an organic farmer's market and sowing their seeds should work perfectly well.

Some other foods sold in supermarkets would be worth harvesting seeds from. Chillies are a good example. Seeds of supermarket Habaneros and Jalapeños will produce Habaneros and Jalapenos next season. I must explore this idea further, next spring. In the meantime, today is Garlic Day, and I look forward to watching how things progress over the coming autumn, winter and spring.

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.

Creche expectations

Venturing out into the garden every morning during spring with my little camera in my pocket feels like I am gathering the news, except that I'm mostly a reporter for the new births department of the local Daily Star. And so here's this morning's news from our backyard creche.

The NSW Christmas Bush family are proud to
announce the arrival of their first open bloom, the
first of several hundred to follow. They have every 
expectation that their little pale babies will in due course
turn into many bracts (not brats) in festive pink.
Tip: click on the first photo above and it should 
(hopefully) turn into a clickable slideshow of all the
other photos (although I don't think this will work
in the emailed version of this blog, sorry!).

Our visitors from Louisiana say they just love it here
in Sydney and their new daughter, Iris, promises
to be a resplendent blue Southern Belle very soon. 

This feisty little Australian native orchid, though it's
no bigger than a five-cent piece, would like everyone
to know that it is a fully formed adult, thanks very much. 

Poking its head out amongst the figs and orchids
to see what's happening, this little bromeliad bloom
from the South American rainforests is looking 
forward to the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016. 

And though rather hairy legged and bald at the moment
this baby Roma tomato will soon be growing rapidly 
on a steady diet of water and healthy organic feeding. 

Quite honestly, I simply couldn't decide which photo
of our young Roma tomato I liked the most, so I
decided to include both of them, because I can.   

Spring really is a wonderful time of year to be in a garden with a little camera in your back pocket to capture what's going on. There's lots happening!

Sunday and all the rest

The traditional, indeed biblical idea of Sunday being a day of rest has quite an appealing sound to it. Day of rest... as in, 'doing nothing'. Must try it sometime, but I wonder if I'd get bored in half an hour? Probably.

Anyway there was no danger of doing nothing this morning, and nothing much happening here at Amateur Land. It is spring after all, there's a ripper of a mild sunny day on offer, and a garden barely half-way through the planned renovations.

I think there was a meeting in the shed last night,
where my pot of assorted salad seeds were slowly
winding their way towards germinating. The meeting
went something like this: "OK, it's agreed that we all
pop up, in unison, early Sunday morning. Jamie's
been checking on us daily, been nice with the water
spray, and he's getting a bit impatient (which isn't
the first time). So, when he opens the shed door on
Sunday morning we all yell out "Surprise!" in unison.
And that's exactly what happened, sort of.

Next stop, Marrickville Markets, to pick
up the Tiger Grass plants I ordered two
weeks ago from the nice guy there at
Swane's (yep, he's part of the well-known
gardening family). The terrible winds
of the last week had blown these plants
about a bit, but the soil surface has
plenty of new shoots popping up, and
they should get growing well in spring's
warm weather.

I like the Tiger Grass label. As the label says, it's an
alternative to bamboo, without the bad manners. 

This uninspiring shot represents the next hour or two's
work this Sunday, thoroughly digging over yet another
bed prior to planting being the main job. At the back,
centre, is Tibouchina 'Jules' which should grow to
1m high and wide. Near the front are two little mauve
lavenders, which will reach 60cm high and wide.
And dotted in between them are seedlings of a little
low-growing chrysanthemum with white flowers
which will fill the large gaps while the main players
reach their full size over spring, summer and autumn
(aren't I the optimistic one?). Fingers crossed yet again.

Impatience has few rewards, and so while the potted
Roma tomato is covered in flowers, that's all that is
happening there. Just flowers, but if I was a bee I
would definitely be visiting this guy. 

And while all the gardening was going on within view of her studio which overlooks the garden, Pammy was having her own version of a Sunday without rest. Head down, she's hard at work, doing even more paintings for her second solo art exhibition, which is at the Eden Gardens Garden Centre in October (where she staged her first solo show last year, in September).

In the meantime, Pammy is also part of another art exhibition which is currently showing here in Sydney, at Gallery Red in Glebe. This exhibition is called '31 Days' and it is a group show by several artists, all of whom did 31 paintings in the 31 days of July, to the very broad theme of 'The Space Between'. 

Pam based her 31 pieces on our road trip across the United States in September and October last year, which regular readers of this blog will probably remember. If you're in Sydney and want to check out this great little show, it's on until September 25, and is open Monday to Saturday (check the Gallery Red website for times). I'm floating somewhere between proud and thrilled about Pam doing these exhibitions, hence the shameless promotion on my little blog! Here are three of her pieces from the 31 Days show.

Is that a blush of red I see?

Well, isn't red an exciting colour! Though I have been keeping an eye on my tomatoes, daily, this morning they still caught me by surprise. My 'Alaska' tomatoes are ripening rapidly, and their relatives across the path, the 'Beaver Lodge Slicers' are starting to colour up, too. And it's happening fast now. Yippee!

These are the two most advanced Alaska fruits, but as the plants are big, sprawling bushes covered in developing fruits, these will hopefully be the first of many.

This is what I mean by big sprawling bush. Most of the greenery in the centre foreground of this shot are two Alaska tomato plants, gone berserk while on holidays Down Under in sunny Sydney. They have swamped my parsley border and even monstered my potted mint, which is quite an achievement, and they're giving my sage bush cause to worry, too. The herbs are not amused!

On the other side of the pathway the 'Beaver Lodge Slicer' tomatoes are smaller and better behaved plants overall (but the fruits are bigger than the Alaskas), and they're just starting to colour up, too. Of course the all-important taste test is a few (several?) days away, but I am just hoping that a few Alaskas will be OK to eat by next Saturday, when we have a bunch of friends coming around for lunch.

Finally, I was given a link (by a US tomato grower by the name of Smope - thank you Smope) to a cool blog entry that photographically shows the progress of a tomato from flower bud to ripe fruit, and then beyond, to rotten fruit. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

I give you, the progress of a tomato fruit, from bud to fruit (and beyond).

Nervous waits

Apart from stinging nettles and Triffids, do any plants make you nervous? Tomatoes make me nervous. I think this is the symptom of being a trauma victim, because last year's tomato crop was a sudden, unexpected, dare-I-say-it 'tragic' disaster, and this year's crop is following the same early, worrying pattern. At the moment everything is looking terrific, just like the same time last year. And that's got me nervous. Let me explain.

Here's a totally healthy young 'Alaska' tomato, photo taken this morning. Small-sized but bigger than a cherry tomato, there are plenty of them forming. This is part of my experiment in growing so-called cool climate tomatoes early in the season, hoping for these fast-growers to crop early before the worst of our summer bugs and diseases arrive.

Raised from seed, this is the seedling on the day I planted it out, October 3.

46 days later and fruit is on the way, but not for another two or so weeks, I'd guess.

Alaska is a 'bush' type tomato, which means it spreads sideways like you wouldn't believe and it doesn't need staking. Seemingly, everything is OK with it. But that's how things were at roughly the same time last year...

This is a shot from last year. Mid-December 2008, Tomato Land in full swing. Low-growing bush-type Romas in the foreground, taller-growing 'Grosse Lisse' in the background. Seemingly, everything OK.

Two weeks later, December 31, 2008, and the dreaded mystery disease has struck, the plants yellowed and wilted rapidly, exposing masses of green fruits that were never going to make it to the ripe, red stage. Every day it got more wilted and hopeless, and so I pulled up the lot. Rats! 'But there's always next year', I told myself, and so I'm back in the tomato-growing business again.

As well as planting the cool climate 'Alaska' I also raised from seed some Canadian 'Beaver Lodge Slicer' toms and planted them out on October 3 as well. (And yep, I am growing them in totally different garden beds to last year's disaster crop.)

Also a bush-type tomato, these have grown even better than the Alaskas, but they are in a slightly better spot in the garden, getting perfect sunshine.

Beaver Lodge Slicer fruit are bigger than Alaska's, about 2.5 inches (7cm) across, and there are plenty of them forming. I've used an organic spray called Success to control caterpillars, which have been seen, but I want to grow these guys organically, so no other sprays, dusts etc will be used. They're on their own.

As I dutifully water them every morning I keep on saying to myself "come on guys, ripen up. Go on, you can do it!" Nothing will hurry them along, I suspect. So I'll have to learn the virtues of patience. It will be a nervous wait, I can assure you.

Some like it hot

There's one sure-fire way to turn me into a lazy lay-about on the weekend, and that's heat, and today there's just the right dose of it – 30°C (86°F). I managed to score one garden brownie point this morning before I wilted - I trimmed the hedge which screens the composting area. But then my inbuilt, generations-old Celtic heat sensors went off and said "it's a wee bit tae hot for thee laddie" and so I have downed tools until late afternoon at the earliest, maybe for the day. And with a cup of tea to cool me, the fan on and a bit of blogging to catch up with, I thought I'd admire some of the plants which, unlike me, actually enjoy the heat on a day like today.

In the background is the crisply trimmed hedge with which I earned my brownie point this morning, and in the foreground is our frangipani, which can take any dose of heat Sydney cares to throw at it. Sydney has the ideal climate for frangis, they're everywhere in this town, and the ones doing best are usually the most neglected. I try my best to neglect mine at all times, so the regime here is simple: no fertiliser, no water except rain. Nothing. It's working so far.

I only planted this zucchini seedling two weeks ago and this morning it's having its first babies. Outrageous behaviour! Zucchinis love sun, but not the humidity that comes later on in January and February, so I am going to let this crop like mad from now until New Year then call it quits. Besides, we're 'zucchinied-out' by then.

My Beaver Lodge Slicer tomatoes are belting along in the heat. These are meant to be rapid-cropping 'cool climate' tomatoes suited to Canada (the seedlings were planted on October 3, six weeks ago). I thought I'd try them as a fast-cropper before all the summer bugs arrive to chomp our tomato crops. So far so good, but I was in roughly the same position last year with other varieties, just weeks before most of my crop succumbed to a mystery disease. Boo hoo! Glutton for both punishment and home-grown tomatoes, I am.

My wife Pammy asked me to repot into a much bigger pot this, her favourite pelargonium with the dark leaves and the salmon-pink flowers, as it is rapidly getting bigger in all the heat and sunshine. The trouble is that I repotted it only a month ago, and that was about a week after she first brought it home. This plant really loves the sun, but something tells me I had better keep this plant happy and healthy at all times, as it is her favourite child.

Our New South Wales Christmas Bush is in full sun-loving 'bloom' right now. In the same way that a bougainvillea's colourful 'flowers' aren't really flowers and are in fact coloured bracts, so too the NSW Christmas Bush. Its flowers are white and small, but the bracts are a ruddy pink, lovely and plentiful. It's a bit early for Christmas, but it always colours up at this time of year for us.

If I'm celebrating sun-lovers I have to slip in at least one succulent photo. Needless to say all my potted succulents are thriving in the sunshine.

Finally, I thought I'd finish off with high hopes for my favourite sun-loving flowers, blue salvias. I've just planted a batch of seedlings a few weeks ago and they're all still small but are growing well, loving the heat and sunshine, as salvias do. As this sparse patch of mulch dotted with tiny seedlings is hardly the prettiest way to end a celebration of sun-lovers, I thought I'd dip into the archives and drag out a couple of shots from last year of what I am hoping for again from my beautiful, sunny salvias.

Essentially this: pleasing light green foliage and spires galore of cool blue flowers.

But get up really close and a salvia blue is as cool and refreshing as an ice-cube.

Speaking of ice-cubes, I think I'll tinkle up something cooler to drink now and sit back in my cane armchair in the shade with a book and do very little for the next few hours, apart from looking up occasionally and watching my garden soak up the sunshine. As far as I am concerned, a garden isn't quite complete without a comfy chair.

Crop failure, oh well!

It was only a month ago that I posted about 'fingers crossed in Tomato Land' - cursing my luck with an indiscreet 'so far so good' comment – and now I have to report that the whole crop has failed spectacularly – but I don't mind. Well, I don't mind now, but a week ago I was completely depressed and annoyed about my crop failure. Then, first day back at work and talking to my workmate Geoffrey, an expert gardening writer, I discovered that he, too, had to pull out all his tomatoes due to identical symptoms to mine. Suddenly I didn't take it personally! When he said the gardening radio programs had a lot of people reporting similar problems with their tomatoes, I was positively beaming with relief. It's funny how suffering in a group is completely different from suffering alone.

This is the scene of the disaster, taken on December 31. My tomato plants had, for the last couple of weeks, been showing some yellowing of the lower leaves, but nothing too bad. I just pulled or cut off the affected leaves, as the fruits themselves were developing really well. But then the deterioration in the plants started to speed up. Pam and I went away for a weekend after Christmas, during which Sydney got a good fall of rain. By the time we returned home the plants had deteriorated alarmingly.

This Grosse Lisse plant went from OK to terminal in seven days. I couldn't believe the speed with which it faded away. It was covered in green fruit, lovely big ones, but only one or two fruit were changing colour, showing the first signs of ripening.

It was a similar story with the Roma plants. Covered in green fruit and dying leaves. Hardly any fruit ripening yet. I couldn't see the plants themselves lasting much longer than the next few days, so rather than battling on with this appalling eyesore taking centre stage in my garden, I pulled them all out.

I kept the tomatoes which were partly ripe and let them ripen indoors. The Romas all had a lovely flavour and were in perfect condition, but one of the Grosse Lisses had fruit fly larvae in it (despite all my spraying with the new organic wonder product), and the other, which was at least free of fruit fly larvae, had a bland, watery taste.

The only tomatoes which tasted great, looked fine and had no problems were the cherry tomatoes. My friend Geoffrey also said his cherry tomatoes were fine, so that's what I will be growing next year, and every year thereafter.

I haven't got a clue what the mystery disease is, other than to guess it's some kind of fungal disease brought on by our humid summer. It couldn't be fusarium wilt, which you can get if you don't practise crop rotation and grow tomato-family plants (eg, tomatoes, potatoes, chillies, capsicums, eggplants) in the same spot in successive years. I hadn't grown any of these plants in my tomato patch previously.

The good thing about my crop failure of course is that it doesn't really matter. I'm a dilettante farmer. Pam and I won't starve if we suffer crop failure. We'll simply have to buy our tomatoes and put up with their second-rate flavour.

But I have also learned that the new 'organic' fruit fly sprays are of dubious usefulness. I was so thoroughly diligent in applying, then re-applying them again and again, exactly as per the directions on the pack. And still the fruit were attacked. I found the fruit fly spray was a monumental pain in the neck to constantly re-apply after rain, then again after several days if there hadn't been rain. And it was expensive. At $27 for a 200ml bottle – which wouldn't be enough to last one whole growing season – my tomatoes (had they managed to ripen and survive) would have been a lot more expensive than the ones sold in the shops, especially when you factor in the cost of fertilisers as well.

At least my beans are bouncing along beautifully producing lots of delicious results, the salad greens and silver beet are doing fine and producing more leaves than we can eat, the herbs of course are in their tasty prime, and the lime tree will soon be providing zing for magaritas, Thai salad dressings, sweet tarts and many more delights. So all is well here for the dilettante farmer, even if one of his major crops has failed!