Marlborough Express - Weekend Express
Why we’re planting winter crops now
The summer glut of vegetables is in full swing in our Karamea (96km north of Westport) food forest garden, with cucumbers and zucchini overflowing in bowls on the kitchen bench, plaits of onions and garlic hanging in the larder, and freshly dug potatoes making a regular appearance, too.
Despite record temperatures, this season has been slower than normal. By this time last year, we had been eating tomatoes for a month and I was roasting trays of them almost daily to blend and then freeze for passata, but to date this summer I’ve picked only three.
However, there are loads coming on, so I’m hopeful that it will be a long season at the other end – fingers crossed.
With all this summer excitement. it’s easy to forget about winter crops, but in fact that is exactly what we should be thinking about.
I’m preparing to get the leeks in the ground that I sowed in November, because in our climate planting leeks any later than early February doesn’t allow enough winter chilling to fatten them up.
If you didn’t have the foresight to plant seeds, leek seedlings are readily available right now in garden centres.
I have also been staggering brassica sowings since December, planting more seed into trays every time I prick out the lot before.
I have just planted the first broccoli and cauliflower seedlings out in
the garden, dotting them next to the chillies and under the tomatoes in the seedling house, and placing them here and there in our newly constructed potager gardens.
Potager gardens are basically just kitchen gardens, but being from the French word potage (meaning a thick vegetable soup), they traditionally had the required herbs and vegetables growing in them to make soup.
Flowers would also be intermingled throughout, meaning potagers were one of the first types of gardens to feature permaculture principles.
Ours have tomatoes, carrots, strawberries, dahlias, cornflowers, calendula, lettuce, basil, zucchini, okra, heliotrope and dill all happily growing together in small 1m x 1.5m raised beds.
Even though we have a large plot with numerous gardens, it is these quaint potagers that I find myself drawn to each evening as I stroll around the section, and I’m always amazed at just how abundant they are for such a small space.
I have no pumpkins growing this year, just butternuts, and to be honest it is a bit of a sore spot. I had three attempts at planting them in a new garden, adjacent to the potagers, and there were plans to train them up and over an archway, so you would walk under them on your way to the seedling house beyond.
However, each time I planted them out, weka would dig them up.
By my third attempt I was adamant that this wouldn’t happen again, so I made a cover for the garden with bird netting and didn’t uncover the plants until each vine was a good metre long.
I thought they would be safe – and they may have been - but I decided to mulch them with a good dose of broken-down chicken poo, which in hindsight was a bad idea as I’m sure it encouraged the weka to dig even more than normal around the plants.
Within a day they were decimated, with the roots all but ripped from the plants. My spring potatoes suffered the same fate, as you can see from the grand harvest from my large 3m x 4m bed.
I had rigged a fence up around the garden but by the time I had done this the weka had caused so much persistent stress to the growing plants that they died. The problem is not usually this bad, but this season we seem to have a new cunning weka on the block.
This garden now has a late planting of sweetcorn in it, which bears its gifts high up enough to be of no interest to the large flightless birds, and I’m happy to report the plants are looking great.