Five garden jobs you can do this spring

How's that gardening motivation level going? Out of 10? Locked down by covid and nothing to do, lovely garden out there and you're still a motivational "1" out of 10?

If you can get yourself all the way up to a "3" or better, doing that first gardening job might just propel you to the dizzy heights of 5s or 6s. So here's a short "to-do" list just in case the spring weather starts getting to the gardener in you.

Plant some spuds

Spring is the ideal time to get some spuds planted. The good thing is that specialist spud suppliers have been taking orders online for many years, so that's how to get started.

You can of course grow spuds in the ground, but a big pot works fine, so does a large "grow bag" that has holes included to help water drain away.

To get started on your 2021 Spud Mania, try these links to well known suppliers:

Garden Express:  https://www.gardenexpress.com.au/shop/edible-produce/certified-seed-potatoes/

The Diggers Club:  https://www.diggers.com.au/shop/vegetables/potatoes-and-other-tubers/

Green Harvest:  https://greenharvest.com.au/Plants/Potatoes.html

Goodmans:  https://www.goodmanseeds.com.au/shop/certified-seed-potatoes

Sow some seeds

Spring is the ideal time to sow seeds of so many delicious crops, such as all salad greens, tomatoes, shallots, basil, silver beet, carrots, eggplant, cucumbers, zucchini — there are countless others — and the good news if you are locked down is that major supermarkets often stock the seeds you are looking for. I bought my Yates seeds for these babies pictured below at my local Woolies supermarket. 

On the left are some shallot seedlings enjoying the morning sun, while on the right are seedlings of "mesclun" salad greens, which is a mixture of different greens. After sowing the seeds the fastest ones – the rocket (or arugula) – came up in just four days. The slowies took two weeks. The shallot seedlings came up in 7 days, so on each and every morning I was out there misting the seedling trays with water, there was something new coming up.

After about three weeks the seedlings are ready for more sunshine, so in my garden a lovely half-way house is under the dappled shade of my potted Thai lime tree. The seedlings get a bit of direct sun on them during the day but big brother lime tree shades them most of the time. In two weeks from now, they'll all be much bigger and potted up in their troughs in full sun, ready to roar away as spring warms up.

Sowing seeds is a bit hit and miss sometimes, but I find I get 10 hits to every miss, so give it a go, the odds of succeeding are really good.

Salad greens like mesclun, rocket, lettuce etc are very reliable and worth a try.

Basil is a good bet once the weather becomes truly warm.

If you're nervous about tomatoes give cherry tomatoes a try.

And if you want to fire up your lifestyle, chillies are so much fun to grow from seed. So many types and, given you probably only need one or two plants of each variety to knock your socks off, you're bound to have lots of success.

Go potty

Spring is a good time to do a bit of repotting. Here's one simple job I did this week, part of my succulent and cactus patch renovation.

God knows how many years ago, these three were tiny, cute midgets in baby pots that could sit on a windowsill. So I put all three in the one pot, put it out in the garden and forgot about them – and my, haven't they grown. Time for an upgrade in accommodation. 

Half an hour later each plant has its own home, and if I manage to neglect them for the next decade they'll probably need an upgrade in size by then. Without repotting, each plant would have crowded the other and all three would have suffered and probably died in the end.
This way, all three will just keep on growing.

So if you have a single plant that has grown too big for its pot, or you have too many plants in the one container, do everyone a favour and remove all the plants from the pots, upgrade their accommodation, and they'll be with you for many years to come.

Renovate your compost bin

Smelly compost? Open the lid and a cloud of little flies swarms out? Chances are your compost is too wet. What it needs is more dry matter to balance things out. And for me, the easiest source of dry matter is my big bag of sugar cane mulch. 

So I've been adding a few generous handfuls of mulch to my tumbler compost bin, giving the lot a twirl so it all mixes up nicely, then adding some more mulch a few days later. 

If, like me, your kitchen fruit and vegie scraps bin is the main source of new materials for your compost bin, your compost bin is in danger of being too wet. When that happens composting slows down and things can get smelly. Add some dry matter (raked up autumn leaves if you have any), but if you have a bag of mulch, it's the easiest and quickest way to get your compost bin back in business. 

Feed everything!

Spring is fertilising time, so get out there and do it. Doesn't matter what you use, usually, but there are so many specialist types of fertiliser to choose from it's easy to become overwhelmed with choice. 

The only plants you need to be extra-careful with are natives, and they definitely need specialist native-friendly food that won't harm them but will feed them. The good news is there are many native friendly plant foods around now.

The best rule to follow, apart from reading the instructions on the packs, is that it is much much better to under-fertilise than overdo it. More is not better with fertiliser. So treat the maker's recommended dosages as the "maximum" dose at all times, and there's nothing wrong with lighter, half-dosage feeds, either.

To keep things simple I mostly just use a liquid food (mixed up in a watering can) for all my edibles. Leading brands such as Dynamic Lifter, PowerFeed, Charlie Carp all do the same kind of job, and there are several others in the same category. In the growing season (ie, now) I liquid feed crops once a fortnight.

For most of my potted plants I use slow-release fertilisers, brands such as Osmocote and PowerFeed leading the field. These are almost "set-and-forget" in that you apply the little pellets, then you don't need to re-apply for months after that. Read the instructions and you'll see that some last 3 months, others 6 months. That's about it.

And for general garden use and feeding citrus trees I use organic-based pellets such as Dynamic Lifter. The good thing about chicken poo style fertilisers and other organic-based products is that they also feed everything that lives in the soil, not just the plants.

Compost is a fabulous fertiliser for feeding the whole of the soil, so is blood and bone. Seaweed is a superb soil health tonic too. 

All the pure organic, or organic-based fertilisers are the best long-term option for improving the overall health of your garden soil. The benefits don't happen overnight, but over the years they are the outstanding option.

So get out in the spring sunshine, plant some crops, visit your growing babies each day to care for them, then start harvesting the organic home-grown goodness that you've raised yourself. It's a satisfying feeling in a trying time. Give it a try.

It was a dirty job, and I did it ...

And now, for my most irrelevant and deceptive opening photo to a gardening blog ...

Isn't this helleborus flower nice? It's a bit floppy eared and misshapen, but it is a new addition to our garden, springing into showbiz mode from a helleborus plant which just self-seeded into life in a new spot a year or so ago. Hellebores like to do this "traaa-daaa" stuff, and they are well-known for producing new, sometimes-wonderful and sometimes-weird, flowers from random seedlings.

Why is this irrelevant and deceptive? Well, it has nothing to do with compost, and that's what this blog post is actually all about. 

Last Saturday I spent more than an hour shovelling compost — lots of compost — from one bin to another. It was a dirty job, I was the only one prepared to do it, and it was all very worthwhile. Its main drawback as a blog topic is extremely ugly and dull photographs ... hence the helleborus to start ...

Pictured below is my ancient black "Dalek" compost bin now filled to the brim with beautiful, ready-to-use compost, which I made in my much more efficient tumbler compost bin.

Because you can spin it to aerate the compost, the tumbler bin breaks down the organic matter fairly quickly, but it's a devil of a job getting to the made compost inside the tumbler. So, once every 18 months or so, I do the "Big Transfer" job using a shovel and trug — and garden gloves — and all the made compost is moved over from the tumbler to the Dalek, where it is easy-peasy to scoop into a bucket and add to my vegie beds.

And now for an even more boring photo!

Here's the almost-empty tumbler bin, ready for me to add loads and loads and loads of clippings from the garden and vegie and fruit peelings from the kitchen. I always leave a small amount of made compost in the bottom of the tumbler as a "starter culture", as it has worms and all kinds of helpful bacteria down there that will multiply like crazy and get the composting process roaring along again.

And so that's what I did on Saturday. Nobody noticed, not even Pam, and when I pointed out to her what a useful job it was, she still wasn't especially impressed. Just another one of my peculiar enthusiasms.

I don't blame her. Compost is pretty boring, even if it is one of the most essential jobs you can do to improve your soil in the long run (not to mention earning brownie points for recycling, which I hope are eventually redeemable at Heaven's Pearly Gates).

Maybe I should see if there is a special society of unheralded compost makers that I could join? No, I'm sure they'd be really boring and would only want to talk about compost, which is too much for even me. I'm happy to talk compost once every 18 months. That's enough.

Next posting, I promise will have nicer photos and be about vegies and flowers, probably ... although I do have some thoughts on mulch I could share ...

Getting a wriggle on

This morning, after feeding my little goldfish, Paul, I popped down to the rear of the garden and opened the lid of my compost bin to feed it yet another batch of kitchen scraps. As soon as I opened the bin I could see dozens of little worms greedily, happily wriggling their way through what must seem to them an endless supply of yummy food. "Oh good, we love soybean pods!"

Having just fed Paul, at that moment I wondered whether I also have pet worms? Probably not (calm down!). But I do like and care for the worms with the same enthusiasm that I look after little Paul. 

After I settled down from that little buzz of wormth, it did occur to me that my compost bin is half-way between a compost bin and a worm farm. And my secret ingredient is mulch. I think it's time I did some explaining, with pictures to help.

No, this person doesn't have a name, but all
 I know that s/he has hundreds of relatives
cohabiting in my tumbler compost bin.

I bought this many years ago, and it is still
working fine. They're not cheap, I think
somewhere around the $175-$200 mark.

There's a lid at both ends, so however many times you spin
it, access is easy enough.

This morning's kitchen scraps includes soybean pods, potato
peelings, orchid flowers, spinach and other salad leftovers.
What's wrong with this is that on its own, this stuff is too 'wet'.

Here's my secret ingredient, the bag of sugar
cane mulch in my shed, 10 feet away from the
compost tumbler bin. I use this because it is
plentiful and relatively cheap.

I grab a good-sized fistful of mulch....

... and sprinkle it over the scraps after I add them. Lid back
on, a couple of tumbles (hopefully spun so that this top end of
the bin ends up down at the bottom afterwards). And spinning
the bin is essential, every time you add scraps, and for us that
means at least three or four times a week. The spinning adds
air to the compost, which speeds up the composting process.

I'm not totally fanatical about adding the
handful of mulch every single time I add the
kitchen scraps, but I do add that handful of mulch
a good majority of the time. The worms love it.

You could add dry leaves instead of mulch, but I don't have a big enough supply of them. And you could add shredded paper, but it doesn't break down as quickly or as nicely as mulch does, and shredding all that paper is a remarkably boring chore over the course of several months. I tried that and gave up, and switched to my bag of mulch, and it suits me a lot better.

The final thing I should mention about my tumbler bin is that it does have one fairly important drawback to be aware of. It never gets 'hot' like a proper compost heap is meant to – and that means worms thrive but seeds from kitchen scraps such as tomatoes, cucumbers, capsicums etc never cook down. So, the important thing to do with this type of bin is to separate the seeds from the scraps back in the kitchen. We've got into this routine and so it's easy to do. If you don't exclude the seeds, when you spread the mulch you'll get far too many 'volunteer' tomatoes, cucumbers etc sprouting everywhere, and that's more of another weedy pain to remove than anything else.

True compost heaps work on heat to rapidly break down organic matter (and cook all seeds thoroughly). They need to be quite big to do that heat thing properly, about a cubic metre in size – and that's a whopper of a pile of stuff when you think about it.

Here in our small backyard with just the two of us churning out little buckets of scraps daily we're never going to create a cubic metre of stuff to compost down in one go. Very few average backyard gardeners do this. We just add our scraps in dribs and drabs as daily domestic life goes on.

And so our cool little compost tumbler creates beautiful compost, thanks to all that spinning of the bin, plus a mountain of chomping from thousands of worms, but without the dry stuff, the mulch, to balance out the wet scraps, our bin would be an uninhabitable swamp in which few worms could live. With the dry mulch there to balance things out, these worms are like contented cows munching grass in a lush paddock.

Finally, where do the worms come from? The garden. I occasionally add a small spadeful of garden soil to the compost bin. Real garden soil is not just full of worms, it's a whole community of beneficial micro-organisms, and it's a free and fabulous 'compost booster' that is well worth adding to your bin, to get it going well.