Spring in the garden

Spring is ramping up into summer now. The days are long, the evenings warm and I’m thinking I’ll need to take a hat on my walk to work from now on. With the return of the sun the garden has roused itself and the food growing has begun in earnest.

I’m spending more and more time out there, planting out seedlings, picking things to put on my plate and aiming to keep the mulch in the garden beds and the grass in the lawn. My resident blackbird family disagree with my philosophy of mulching the veggies, preferring instead to spread the stuff over the pavers and lawn, uprooting the occasional seedling in the process. Still, they’ve developed a taste for snails and for that I am grateful: as much as I’d prefer a few native blue-tongue lizards to do the job I’m in the middle of suburbia and can’t provide good lizard habitat.

The garden here is the biggest one I’ve ever taken on, and I’ve surprised myself by already filling up all the existing garden beds and the new one I dug at the bottom of the yard. I’ve planted potatoes and oca, and they take up quite a bit of space! Also in are peas and beans (the peas self-sowed, as did one type of bean, so I’m not sure what I’ve got yet), beetroot (doing well), carrots (doing badly), lettuce (another self-sower) rocket, rainbow chard and the first lot of tomatoes. 

Meanwhile, the late seedlings (mostly replacements for what the snails ate the first time) are sitting in an old fish tank on my dining table, waiting to be planted out this weekend. There’s a load more tomatoes, sprouting broccoli, dill, parsley, sunflowers and my coddled tiny eggplants that will go into pots in the greenhouse though I doubt I’ll manage to get fruit of them. Since I’m all out of garden space already I guess I’m going to be digging up more lawn. Luckily my landlord doesn’t seem to mind and lets me do my garden thing (at least so far).

Some things do incredibly well here. Red winter kale continues to come up everywhere, as do borage and calendula. The spuds are thriving and the beans are shooting up quickly. Other things aren’t doing so well, like the strawberries that put out lots of leaf growth but aren’t quite getting enough sun to flower well. The lack of sun has also set some plants back a little: my pea plants are tall and strong but are only now really getting going on flowering, while friends are already harvesting theirs.

Still, it’s beginning looking like a real garden out there. The neighbour’s house might shade it more than I’d like, the soil is still lacking in organic matter and the blackbirds may frustrate my efforts at keeping everything neat and tidy, but it feeds me, both literally and metaphorically. Time in the garden helps to ground me, and the physical work with obvious results is a powerful antidote to the day job, spent sitting behind a computer for far too many hours. Tending the earth has helped to keep me sane while a nasty knee injury has preventing me from hiking and motivated me to get outside and active through stressful times. It’s a very good thing I’m enjoying it, as there’s plenty more work to be done.

Spring has been beautiful in my garden, and now the summer has begun.

What’s growing in my garden this summer? Plants marked * are self-sown or were here when I got here:

• Apples*
• Beans (mix of fresh eating & drying varieties)
• Beetroot
• Bok Choi
• Broccoli, sprouting* (also seedlings I’ve grown myself)
• Carrots (barely!)
• Calendula*
• Celery*
• Chard, rainbow
• Eggplant, casper
• Kale, curly*
• Kale, red winter*
• Leeks*
• Lettuce* (read & green oak & two other mystery non-heading varieties)
• Strawberries*
• Oca
• Peas* (mystery varieties)
• Potatoes (blue sapphire, pink fir apple, cranberry red & banana that I put in, plus a white variety* that self-sowed)
• Raspberries* (one here, one I’ve planted)
• Rocket
• Rhubarb
• Purslaine
• Salad burnett
• Sunflowers
• Tomatoes
• Wide assortment of herbs (mixed origins)

Tell me, what have you got growing?

November 27, 2012 | Categories: Gardening, Health & wellbeing, Lifestyle, nature photography, Photography | Tags: compulsive gardening, crop diversity, food, garden planning, garden zen, Gardening, growing things, heirloom vegetables, in my garden, mental-health, plants, seasonal eating, seedlings, sustainability, vegetables | 6 Comments »