SOW & GROW

Jo McCarroll suggests jobs to do in the edible garden.

Get ready for winter (really)

It’s hard to believe when February is usually the hottest month of the year, but it’s also the key month to get a jump on sowing and planting your winter food crops. Direct sow carrots and parsnips and they’ll be ready for your winter soups and roasts. Plant brassicas and greens for autumn and winter: try silverbeet, perpetual spinach, chicory, kohlrabi, kale, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower and bok choy and all other Asian greens. You can plant leeks now and they should be ready for spring, and in warmer places you can sneak in another round of dwarf beans which should be fruiting by mid-autumn and keep going until winter. Finally, sow radishes and rocket now for a quick salad crops. As you are pulling out summer crops that have done their dash, sow a green crop (phacelia, mustard, buckwheat, broad beans or any other suitable thing) to fill in any gaps. It’s a particularly good idea to sow a green crop of nitrogen-fixing lupins, peas and mustard now in any bed where you plan to plant brassicas in winter. Dig it in at the end of autumn and your winter brassicas are set for success.

How to sow and plant when it’s hot, hot, hot

If you are planting seedlings or pricking on what you have growing in trays, do so in the warm evenings so the plants have a chance to recover from transplant shock before the heat of the next day. Despite your best efforts with mulch and organic matter, water in the soil is likely to be at an annual low point this month, so soak seedlings before you plant them out by dunking the entire pot in a larger container full of water so the soil around the root ball is really soaked through. Water the soil where you plan to plant – both before and after planting. And when you think you have watered enough, push your finger in the soil to make sure the water has soaked in as far as you can reach – if it hasn’t, you’ll need to water again. I won’t really advise planting trees and shrubs right now – it’s better to wait until autumn. But if you have something that really needs to be in the ground, dig a hole twice the width and depth of the root ball, fill the hole with water and wait for it to soak away to saturate the surrounding soil. Then add a layer of moist compost to the bottom of the hole, plant and back fill.

Mythbusting: when to water

You often hear it said that water drops on leaves on a sunny day will act as mini magnifying glasses, so if you water in the middle of the day, you risk the leaves being scorched. It’s so widely accepted I was positively surprised to read about research done by scientists in Hungary and Germany (published in the journal New Phytologist a few years ago) which found that there was no combination of factors under which sun shining through a droplet of water could scorch a smooth leaf, and while it was technically possible for hairy leaves to be lightly scorched by water droplet, it was extremely unlikely to happen under real world conditions. Heat stress causes a lot of problems – that first symptom, wilting, is actually the beginning of cell collapse – so while it might not be the most water-efficient time to water (water will be lost to evaporation), if a plant is wilting or short of water, especially in a pot, you should definitely water in the middle of the day rather than wait.

Gardening by the maramataka

The rākau (trees) play a more subtle part in the garden but they also represent a story on the soil attributes further down than a spade depth. In this, the driest month, we need to observe the longer-lived trees and shrubs to determine the longer term influence of the summer on plants. The raumati (summer) season is a sequence of phases that lead to the harvest of some valuable crops such as kūmara, taewa and kānga (Indian corn), and further to the season, for kākano or seed maturity and collection. The new moon falls on the first day of the month which is intuitive as we can bring the focus on observing all plants following this period for their regenerative qualities as the next maramataka cycle emerges. The best times for mahi aligned to new crop cycles (transplants or seeds) is from the middle of the month. Seed collection can begin in regions where plants show that maturity and the seeds are independent enough to survive off their parent plant. Dr Nick Roskruge