The pumpkin vines are sulking - they needed more days of sunlight for the bees to pollinate their flowers. But the green veg are growing almost as fast as the weeds.
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This season has been glorious for green veg. Greens do best with lots of water. They even do well under grey skies, growing tall to try to find some sunlight. Those of us who don't like bitterness or sulphur with our green veg find the sweetest meals in a damp season, where the veg get plenty of "lush" but not quite so much taste.
Absence of flavour is a drawback for an apple or a tomato, but it's an excellent thing in a lettuce, which should taste vaguely green at most, or for broccoli. Broccoli is at its best when it doesn't taste of broccoli, but of olive oil, lemon juice and garlic.
This is possibly the year's best time for planting - best for gardeners, as well as plants. The sun doesn't fry you, the flies don't cluster in your eyes, the rain has temporarily washed much of the pollen from the air, and we are still a long way from the annual Canberra midwinter necessities of six layers, good boots and a balaclava.
Every veg has it's "perfect planting" time. The next few weeks should be dedicated to planting greens to eat from late autumn all through winter and into spring.
Autumn-planted lettuce is luscious. Summer lettuce bolts or turns bitter in a single hot, dry day. Stick to the small tender-hearted ones to make sure they mature before winter, and treat yourself to the best.
The "salad bowl green" and "salad bowl red" varieties are fast growers, and don't quite heart. Instead they have masses of deeply notched leaves all bunched together. You get the softness of a hearted lettuce with the prolific leafiness of an oakleaf lettuce. Both "salad bowls" make totally gorgeous-looking plants, the kind you'd grow in your front garden border just for their beauty.
The "butterhead" lettuces like red and green mignonette are small, and equally fast-growing. They don't heart, and can sometimes be slightly tough-leafed, but not in this weather. "Buttercrunch" is even better than red and green mignonette, with sweet tender hearts. The absolute best cool-season lettuce, though, is the "Marvel of Four Seasons", or "Merville de Quatre Saison", or "Continuity" - different names for the same heritage lettuce. The Marvel of Four Seasons is a true beauty, red-leafed, extraordinarily tender and arguably the sweetest leaf of all.
One Marvel of Four Seasons or Buttercrunch lettuce is the perfect amount for one greedy person per meal, so plant lots. They shouldn't bolt to seed until mid spring. At four lettuces a week that makes ... sorry, I ran out of fingers to count. LOTS of lettuce. Plant them in any spare spot about the garden, including between the pansies or under the clothes line.
Other quick-growing greens to bung in fast include all the kinds of pak choi. The most delicious is possibly chokito, but any pak choi you plant this season will be superb, mild and crunchy and tender.
Try to get hold of the relatively new arrival in our gardens, the Japanese cabbage "Tokyo Bekana". It's the Japanese version of Chinese cabbage - fast-growing like a loose-leaf cabbage, but with more tender leaves and crunchy white stems. You'll get young leaves to use in salads after about three weeks from planting the seed, as long as it gets water and sunlight. The plant reaches maturity at about 40 days, perfect for stir-frying. Pick the whole bunch or a few leaves at a time to tempt more to grow. A well-tended plant will put out leaves until it goes to seed in spring. The colder the weather becomes, the slower the growth. Again, plant lots now.
Also plant English spinach, parsley, broccolini, Savoy cabbages, pansies ... whatever seed you have that is marked "plant in autumn for cold climates" or whatever punnets you find in the nursery.
This is an autumn season when new leaves grow. Make the most of it. We don't get them often.
This week I'm:
- Finally planting out the next lot of parsley seedlings and the snow pea seeds. I don't like snow peas much, possibly because I keep fantasising about the full pod of delicious pea seeds that we might be eating instead. Just-picked peas are one of my favourite foods, but every kid I know adores picking snow peas straight from the vine and crunching them;
- Planning the perfect ground cover for a bare bank. This will take some time, as there are so many contenders, and I can only choose one for the best effect. So far hardenbergia is leading the field, but should they be white, or purple, or mauve, or deep blue? Would mixed purple and white look too gaudy? And will the wallabies decide that while they don't like the hardenbergia that are native to our valley, cultivated larger-bloomed hardenbergia is just what wallabies fancy for a midwinter snack?
- Planting pansies for winter and spring flowers. Or for the autumn snails or the winter wallabies or spring possums, but the pansy seedlings only took two minutes to put in, so not much is lost if they end up as breakfast instead of beauty;
- Hauling out my annual "20 delicious things to do with all this pumpkin" recipes, because even though we only have a few, once one pumpkin is cut it needs to be used. Ever since I wrote a book about pumpkin decades ago, and spent months finding the best pumpkin soup recipes, I shudder at even the thought of another bowl of it. But baked pumpkin with cumin and coriander, olive oil and garlic is wonderful; so is a pumpkin curry if well-spiced, and even pumpkin kasundi is very good indeed, as long as the pumpkin is disguised. This is also the perfect weather for pumpkin scones, or adding pumpkin instead of water to your bread dough for a richly coloured moist bread that luckily does not taste of pumpkin, and makes magic toast;
- Still picking and eating the "mystery apples" from the tree that keeps giving an apple or two each day. The new ones hidden among the leaves swell from tiny to fist-sized in a week;
- Glorying in many shades of crab apple, from medieval red and gold and glossy to tiny and deep yellow, bright red, pale pink and orange.