There are so many parts of (all) our lives which are stressful.
The one area that we refuse to allow ourselves to become angst-ridden about is the garden. We spent considerable time and money getting it properly built and established a few years ago, and now it just co-exists happily with us – getting by on whatever attention we can afford to give it.
In the beginning, we had ambitious goals – we wanted to grow a huge variety of plants, establish an orchard of fruit trees, and be virtually self-sufficient in vegetables. Several years on, and the reality has been quite different. We’ve discovered that some things won’t grow well here, while others don’t fit in with our lifestyle.
We have had to adapt.
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Adaptation #1: we buy more garden products than originally planned.
We haven’t had nearly as much time or energy to invest into the garden as we’d hoped (only a couple of hours a week, if that), so we supplement with purchased garden products. We buy organic sugarcane straw to top up the mulch we occasionally make with our chipper, we buy compost to boost the chook droppings and worm castings, and we buy layer mash to feed the chickens. (As an aside, my Time=Money post seems relevant here.)
Our most recently planted bed is a good example. When we went to plant it out, we didn’t have enough seedlings ready (a common problem for us, despite our best intentions), so we went to Enfield Produce and purchased four punnets. Buying seedlings is certainly not the most economical method of gardening, but that’s okay. And for $12, we were able to fill our bed with sweetheart cabbages, Green Dragon broccoli, mixed Asian greens and rainbow chard. We also planted perennial leeks, cos lettuce and garlic…
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Adaptation #2: we have refined our plant selection.
After a few years of trial and error, we’ve determined which plants will and won’t grow in our garden. Overlaid on top of that has been figuring out what our family will and won’t eat. For example, Brussels sprouts will grow, but not even the chooks will go near them.
We now no longer grow spinach, which was fiddly to harvest and would invariably turn my soups green, and have opted instead for rainbow chard. Interestingly, no-one likes traditional silverbeet, but they’ll all happily eat the chard…
Chard grows brilliantly in our garden all through the colder months. During this time, it’s relatively bug-free. This batch were grown from last year’s saved seed, and have come up in an array of colours…
We now plant just one type of shelling pea – Willow (known commercially as Sommerwood). This variety produces fat, relatively mildew-free pods with up to ten peas in each.
There’s a wonderful story behind these – we were constantly losing plants to mildew, so I rang a commercial grower and asked if I could buy peas from them. The lovely lady who answered the phone (her name was Lyn) told me their minimum sale was several kilos worth of seed peas, which seemed a little excessive for our backyard garden. Lyn laughed and then very kindly sent me – gratis – a handful of their experimental Willow peas.
We’ve grown them ever since…
We’ve narrowed our kale plantings to just Tuscan kale (Cavolo Nero), as the curly varieties proved too tough for all of us (chooks included). They did look nice though!
We are attempting garlic once again with a short day variety that lovely Linda has sent us…
We grow tromboncinos. I might have mentioned this before (so I won’t rabbit on about them again)…
Mint is grown in a small patch of dirt in the bricks, to ensure it doesn’t take over the garden beds. We grow spearmint around the old laundry tub, and old fashioned mint in a large pot near the tap. Fancier versions have been tested and rejected…
The orchard has come and gone, and we’ve had to accept that growing organic dwarf apple trees in Sydney’s moderate clime is just too difficult. The fruit was always stunted and badly attacked by sucking bugs. We’re attempting lime trees, but they’re struggling as well – we really haven’t had a great deal of luck with dwarf varieties!
However, our bush lemon, with its thick-skinned but juicy fruit, is finally coming into its own…
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Adaptation #3: we have stocked our garden with volunteer plants.
The term “volunteer plants” (coined by the brilliant Jerry Coleby-Williams from Gardening Australia) is the perfect description for many of the plants in our garden. Following the advice in Linda’s book, we allow the plants we like to go to seed, and then judiciously transplant the self-sown seedlings into the garden beds.
The ultimate volunteer plants in our garden are, without doubt, the perennial leeks. This is our nursery bed, where the plants seem to enjoy producing babies…
We will routinely transplant these into the garden beds to fatten up. They more than make up for the fact that we can’t seem to grow onions or regular leeks…
Pete refers to the management of self-sown plants in our garden as “selective weeding”. He suggested I show you this front bed as an example. It was ready to plant out a couple of months ago – but we weren’t. So it’s stocked almost entirely with volunteer plants, all of which are thriving…
We never plant tomatoes, but in winter we’ll often let the self-sown hybrids grow – there are less bugs at this time of year, and we end up with a different variety each time. The hybrids are also more resistant to wilt, which is a problem in our garden. This year’s offerings appear to be a cross between cherries and Romas, and the first few fruits have been delicious…
The Green Dragon broccoli plants in this bed are all self-sown…
We have a couple of healthy coriander plants growing…
…although they don’t always germinate in the beds…
Some years, continental parsley grows rampantly in everyone’s gardens, and all the neighbours try to feed it to our chooks (who sadly won’t go near it). This season is promising to be a bumper one, if our self-sown plants are any indication. Note the volunteer lettuce growing in the middle of the parsley plant…
The cos lettuces in our garden are now second generation self-sown plants – the first ones we planted from seed were Little Gems, but their offspring were closer to a true cos. We’re now eating the offspring of those plants, and they’re extremely sweet and tender…
Lettuce is closely related to dandelion, as evidenced by their seed heads…
We grow at least one edible weed each season – in the colder months it’s chickweed (photo below), and in the warmer half of the year, it’s purslane. This works well for us – both plants grow prolifically, we love eating them (as do the chooks), and they help keep the less desirable weeds under control…
Finally, we always let our rapini (broccoli raab) go to seed, because it feeds us so well. As Pete pointed out, if it had been left up to us, we wouldn’t have any rapini in the garden right now, because we were well behind schedule. But the little self-sown seedlings popped up in amongst the pebbles, and we happily transplanted them into the beds…
We’ve already eaten three dinners based entirely around this delicious green. Our pasta con cime di rapa comes together in just ten minutes, and tastes all the better for being almost free…
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If you’ve ever considered growing your own vegetables, we would encourage you to give it a go. Your circumstances will be different from ours, but if you can approach the whole process with the right mindset, gardening can be a relaxing and extremely rewarding activity, and not the least bit stressful at all!
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