Growing Challenge Update

This week was full to the brim as it was Roots week on the Moon planting calendar.

As my garden is still quite small and massively under developed at this point the whole summer to winter growing season cross over is an exercise in patience and problem solving. My winter crops need a good warm head start if I am actually going to have any harvest during the colder months so its important that I find room to put them in now rather than wait until March or April when the cold is going to bite too early for them to have put on any growth. To this end I am looking at some of the plants that are looking sick and are being generally unproductive and getting ready to ruthlessly cull. After the cull which will probably happen next week I will feed up the soil, which is what is making these plants under perform and sew new plants in the next fortnight to fill the gaps.

On the exciting front my first lot of drying beans ever are now starting to set pods. Only 1 of 6 borlotti bean plants survived a transplant earlier this year but its just started setting the prettiest little pods with pinky purple stripes. The bean plants that survived the transplant best were the Kidney, Flagelott and Rattlesnake beans as I only lost 1 in 6 of these varieties. The kidney beans have been setting pods for the last fortnight so I am hoping for enough from these plants to actually get a feed. The varieties that haven't faired so well Cherrokee , Yin Yang and Borlotti I will be happy as long as I get enough to save seed for another bash next year.

I am also pretty excited about the fact that the eggplant seedling that I bought is getting ready to flower. We really enjoy eggplant and if we can get some sort of crop out of it it will give us some much needed variety in our diet.

Sowing
As I am just starting my winter plantings I am doing a smattering of sowing into cell trays and direct sewing. Although root vegetables really don't like being transplanted I am still doing some sewing into tray as my previous experiences with direct sowing leave quite a bit to be desired. In reality this is probably the major challenge that I have set myself as part of the growing challenge. I have germinated enough seed in the past to be reasonably confident that as long as the seed is good I will get plants to put in the garden..... direct sowing not so much. I haven't done it very much and when I have my success rate is probably kindly rated at abysmal.

The varieties that I have planted out at this point are a couple of different varieties of beetroot, cylindra & white, Kohl Rabi, Radish, Turnip & Carrot.

Potting Up and Planting Out
The first sowing of root vegetables that I made 4 weeks ago are now in the ground. Although the seedlings were leggy and not of a particularly good quality most of the Kohl Rabi survived. I lost most of the turnips and was having reasonable success with the beetroot until a pigeon, someone it seems has racing pigeons in the area and is letting them free range during the day, decided to bury them in the mulch and it took me a couple of days to find it.

Harvesting
On the harvesting front the zucchini are really starting to kick in. They haven't started overwhelming us yet but I am starting to see the day where the current 3 or so a week are just a lovely dream. This week was mainly zucchini and crookneck squash with at least 500g or more of beans that were used in a pretty but not at all inspired tasting recipe around mid week