Okay, anyone who wants to have a vegetable garden this summer: grab your garden forks. This is the time to dig, so you can plant as soon as frosts seem to be over. (If you have industriously mulched and weeded your productive vegie garden through winter, you'll only need to pull out the elderly veg and plant with little or no digging required. Sadly, like most gardeners, I failed my winter garden tending regime.)
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A warning though to vegie virgins: keep it simple the first time. A vegie garden with 'lots' is a complex affair, as plants ripen and germinate and grow at different speeds and times. Experienced gardeners will know when it's time to weed the baby carrots before slightly less tiny weeds destroy the crop, or when caterpillars will be invading the cabbages.
If you want to make sure you harvest veg, not weeds, stick to the most temptingly delicious crops of all. If you have something luscious to pick every day, you will notice the odd weed or hungry-looking yellow seedling, and do something about while you're out there.
I abandoned the bok choi to their weed-infested state this winter, because after the 20th or so bok choi, I was sick of them. But the Red Mignonette lettuces in another garden were cossetted, each sweet and tender and just big enough for one greedy person for lunch.
'Deliciousness' is subjective and to choose correctly you'll need to know what 'fresh picked from the garden' and 'the best home-grown variety' actually taste like. Home-grown tomatoes deservedly have the medal in the 'I never knew what a tomato tasted like till I ate one sun-warmed from the garden' competition, but there are many other home-grown veg that are nothing like their supermarket equivalent.
Asparagus: Imported asparagus tastes of nothing much or may even be vaguely unpleasant. It's also possible that fresh asparagus may not be plentiful in the supermarkets this year, as much came from the Americas where the pandemic is at its worst. Asparagus also toughens soon after it's picked. Cook your asparagus the day it's picked and you'll see why it was once the gourmet's choice. Purple asparagus and one of the giant white varieties are possibly the most tempting, but all home-grown is superb.
Basil: Home-grown is actually not much better than 'bought', but buy a pot or two to have at hand so you'll use a lot of it. Your kitchen will also smell better for having basil on the windowsill.
Buttercrunch lettuce: These have tiny soft hearts that make you realise that lettuce should be sweet, and not necessarily as crisp as a cracker. Plant a pinch of lettuce seed once a month. They grow fast. Beware of slugs, which are not delicious.
Corn: Supermarkets tend to cover sweetcorn in plastic, which means the corn tastes of plastic too. Corn's flavour is delicate and easily destroyed. Modern varieties stay sweet longer after picking, but corn should be more than 'sweet' - it should taste like corn.
Plant any variety of sweet corn that boasts 'delicious' on the seed packet. I usually plant an early form that will give us corn in eight weeks or so i.e. just possibly by Christmas, and a taller more productive variety which varies from year to year. Feed corn well for a fast and large crop - it is difficult to overfeed corn, or pumpkins or tomatoes.
Peas: Sigh. Old varieties of fresh peas are one of my favourite foods, and almost unobtainable unless you can access a farmer's market where they'll be sold - and you can be sure the variety sold isn't a modern 'ripens evenly, lasts well and tastes of nothing' kind.
The taste of peas depends more on the variety than the freshness, though freshness counts too. But every crop of peas here has been a failure, or semi failure: the ants carry off the seeds, the wallabies break in, a rabbit appears and eats them before the powerful owls can eat the rabbit, or there is drought, or hail, or both. The number of possible fresh pea-related disasters seems endless.
But if you have a well fenced suburban garden, plant peas now or in the next few weeks, and know I deeply envy you. Grow climbing ones up a trellis or tall stakes for ease of picking, and because with better air flow they'll be less prone to mildew. Non climbing beans also have tendency to fall over in wet weather or if laden with full pea pods, so even they are best staked.
Potatoes: Just try a small patch of any variety of seed potato you come across. Once you've tasted the harvest you'll be converted and grow lots. The potato varieties you are most likely to come across will be all-rounders, good for baking, mashing, chips and salads.
Strawberries: Put in strawberry plants now, and you will get a late spring crop. It will be magic.
And after you've planted? Mulch, feed, water, mulch again, and hoik out any weed or invading grass before it spreads. Growing veg - or flowers - is easy if you do 'little and often'. Leave it till it's a hungry, weed-infested mess and it's hard work.
But even then, the chances are it will be unbeatably delicious.
This week I am:
- Waiting for the second asparagus spear of the season. (The first one was accidentally trodden on). A few warmish days and the 'guzzling asparagus two or even three times a day' season will begin.
- Inspecting the avocado trees and trying to will them into flowering. They had a hard summer and all died back in the fire weather to some extent. I'm hoping they don't need another year to recover enough to fruit.
- Watching the birds gather spiders' webs and bits of hanging basket for their nests weeks before they usually do. Their populations crashed during the fires, so I'm hoping for a year of nectar, the kinds of insects birds like to feed on, and lots of baby birds.
- Picking yellow daffodils and deep red hellebores.
- Planting two purple-leafed smoke bushes and hoping they genuinely do have purple leaves. I've planted several varieties since our first, and only, truly purple-leafed smoke bush, but all of them have given leaves with only a hint of purple at the edges. But that first bush was so glorious all summer, and the leaves so deeply orange in autumn, that it's worth trying yet again to duplicate it.
- Watching things bud. And grow. And the first peach blossom. It truly is almost spring.