The big picture
Who knew the vegie garden would get top billing this season? MICHAEL McCOY rehearses the playlist with his accidental stars
My vegie garden is experiencing new levels of performance anxiety. We’ve just installed massive windows in the north-facing house wall that overlooks it, and it’s like someone has switched on the full stage lights to find the performers snoozing, half-dressed and under-made-up.
It’s arguable whether the performance of this garden will ever be able to live up to its new level of prominence. My water situation (tanks only, and a house of four adults) is such that I can’t grow vegetables over summer, and last summer’s drought broke so late for us that I wasn’t able to plant any winter vegies before it grew too cold. Knowing this would regularly be the case, I designed the garden to cope with long downtimes, having round raised beds partially surrounded by arcs of box hedge, and plenty of other plantings in the gravel paths, making it ‘interesting’ to look at all year. But it was never the plan to have it on permanent and prominent show.
We’re just on the threshold of the narrow shoulder season, when there’s sufficient warmth and moisture to get a few crops in – and harvested – before the onset of the dry. Carrots sown now will grow like the clappers, and we’ll pick the last of them for Christmas dinner. Same goes for beetroot. I don’t know how I was under the impression for so many years that root vegies are slow. They’re so not!
I’ll also get a crop or two of lettuce in, grown and eaten before I have to do any watering.
I’ll kickstart the process by planting seedlings and seed at the same time, separating the first two crops by a few weeks. Then (if I remember, and if we don’t have too many warm, windy spells, which can start for us this month) I’ll sow every few weeks until summer.
I didn’t get any coriander or chervil planted in autumn, so I’ll chuck some in the ground now, from seed. The rapidly lengthening days send messages to these plants to bolt to flower and seed all too soon, but I’d rather have them for a few weeks than not at all.
There’s loads of time, even in my small window of opportunity, to sow a row or two of radish plants. We’re not very enthusiastic consumers of the roots, and the downside of their phenomenal speed of growth is the equal rate at which they mature past their best.
But having missed the moment of optimal harvest with our radishes a few years back, I discovered that their long, stork’s-beak seed pods are crisp, crunchy and tasty – like a tiny sugar snap pea. We ate heaps of them, and stumped the local restaurateurs, who hadn’t a clue what they were.
So if ever the vegie garden was going to prove itself worthy of its top-rung position, it’s in the next couple of months. As stage manager and director of this particular seasonal, edible and now highly visible show, I’ll give it my best shot. But the moment of reckoning is coming. I’ll keep you posted.
Michael blogs at thegardenist.com.au