Recent Harvests, for Staycalm

Staycalm asked "What's producing up there at the moment? " on February 2.

I think my vegies have been as hit-and-miss as yours have! My suspicion is that the shift to La Nina in November, when summer plantings were adjusting to the previous El Nino conditions, might have caused poor growth.

Successes

• The French Beans: 'Stringless Dwarf' and 'Italian Romano'.
• 'Spacemaster' cucumbers and the 'Golden Bantam' Corn above it
• Jalapeno chillies
• self-sown oakleaf lettuces
• Welsh onions
• sorrel (pity the culinary uses are a bit limited)
• perilla
• Lemons. Millions of 'em.
  

Disappointments

• The tomatoes. Poor plants and yields, and my Tommy Toes (if that's what they are) don't taste too good. The second they ripen, they rot.
• The 'Mini White' cucumbers -- nice, but we've only had two so far.
• Chervil from seed. Can't see any!
• The quinces have all fallen off the tree.
• I think the chooks ate the strawberries.
  

Verdict Still Out

• A floriferous Scarlet Runner bean has reappeared.
• The eggplants have started to flower.
• Self-sown pumpkins -- they're probably Up To Something!
• I pulled out the early squashes but am waiting for later ones.

P.S. My brassica seeds are up: pak choy, kale and cabbage in the punnets, and the radishes in the garden.

Hue -- and Cry!

This month's Garden Bloggers' Design Workshop, hosted by Gardening Gone Wild, is about Colour in the Garden. That's the Hue. The Cry part is from me. Where can I go to learn about and apply this stuff?

I remember the colour wheel from Year 7 Art. You use the three primaries to make the three secondaries. Except that it didn't work properly. A dob of red and a dob of yellow made a weird red, not orange; you get orange from a lot of yellow and very little red. That is, it didn't tell you anything about how to make the colours you actually wanted. The colour wheel seemed to be one of those odd little things you were supposed to learn, but which never connected to anything.

I was looking up information about colour schemes a few weeks ago on the Web. Simple descriptions of the most commonly-used schemes are here. But this is where my understanding stops, and my questions begin. First one: Where do black, grey, white and brown fit in?

I can't seem to relate colour theory to the world I live in. Take my Plectranthus argentatus, for example. Is it grey, or green? What about the rhubarb-pink flower-stems?

Steve Silk has given us a beautiful picture and a great explanation of what is going on in it. Yet I am still not sure what to think. Is it still complementary when the yellow is actually a yellow-green, and the purple a very clear pinkish-purple? Are you supposed to reduce whatever lovely colour you have to the nearest primary or secondary to work out a colour scheme? I have a funny feeling that an underplanting of sulphur-yellow marigolds wouldn't have the same effect as the plants used in the picture. How does knowing complementary colours help with plant selection, then?

And why is it counted as a complementary scheme when another colour, green, actually fills most of the picture? Doesn't green count?

Don't mind my whingeing too much. Instead, just look at all those fantastic photos in blog posts, like this one at Digging. It's a wonderful topic, even if I Don't Know How They Do It!

Starting Afresh with Vegie Guilds

Off and on, I keep trying to plant vegetables in guilds as recommended in Linda Woodrow's The Permaculture Home Garden. At some point, I'll review this book: it is actually practicable for urban permies in the temperate zone. Just to explain briefly: a guild is a planned mixture of plants in a single garden bed, organised so that harvest occurs within three months. The advantages include lower losses from pests and diseases, and continuous harvest of a variety of vegetables. Woodrow's system forms six guilds into a sophisticated "mandala", including use of a chook dome to lower pest numbers and fertilise, weed and till the soil.

Because I'm a SHE, my guild system usually amounts to trying to avoid planting the same kinds of vegies right next to each other (apart from sweet corn, which needs to be planted in groups for pollination, and which I underplant with cucumbers). It works reasonably well, except that I sometimes find that it's time for the chook dome to go on an area before the later crops have finished. Also, I'm not too good at having something ready to fill in spaces as they arise, and that means weeds elbow their way in until the chooks get them.

Time to give it another go. With this blog providing some structure, perhaps I'll be able to manage a bit better. So here is my planting list for the first fortnight in February:

Direct (done last Saturday):
10 French beans
1m row purple carrots
1m row Florence fennel
Parsnips (not by me; I just wait to see where they come up!)
1m row dwarf snow peas (I think it's too early, really, but have given it a go)
Radishes "French Breakfast"
3 silver beet "Five Colours"
1m row Welsh onions

In punnets, for later guilds (seeds planted yesterday):
5 beetroot (mixed heirlooms)
3 broccoli "Romanesco" (which, admittedly, I've never had any luck with)
3 cabbage "Mini"
3 kale "Tuscan Black"
1m row leeks "Jaune de Poitou" (these are whopper leeks that need ages to grow)
10 lettuce, plain Cos and "Rouge d'Hiver"
10 pak choy

Oops. I should also have had a few seedlings ready to go in with the seeds, but I hadn't many -- a punnet of leeks, and some crook tomatoes -- but I popped them in too.

Later in the evening, the rain started again. It has rained all day today and everything is drenched, to the point that I now worry my freshly-planted seeds might fall prey to damping-off disease!

A Mishap -- To Me!

I was driving home from work on Tuesday when I was involved in an accident. I stopped at a roundabout, but unfortunately, the woman behind me didn't. There was a nasty noise from the boot, I said "Whoo!" as the air rushed out of my lungs, and then I sat up to find that I was out at least half a car-length into the roundabout. I suspect that she either didn't hit the brake at all or she hit the accelerator instead -- none of the cars with right of way had moved, so they must have seen it coming.

I am not seriously injured. I have sore neck and back muscles and am having physiotherapy, but as my head didn't snap back, I have escaped true whiplash. Nonetheless, a plethora of doctor's and physiotherapist's appointments has cut heavily into my gardening time this week, as has the increased need for rest and the absence of the family car.

It's been a bit hot to garden much this week, anyway. Our tops have been around 30-32 C but the humidity has been at the streaming-with-perspiration level; most unpleasant. After a huge thunderstorm on Thursday evening, it's been a lot cooler and cloudier. I've now hit the stage where I can think about gardening again, but I will have to be careful not to overdo it as my muscles return to normal.

I hope that you've had a better week than I've had!

A Study in Bronze and Green

There is a little green house not far from mine. It's a typical Sydney double-fronted weatherboard, with the main bedroom at the front (under a gable) and a small bullnose verandah, and small coloured glass panels in the front windows. Such small late-Federation weatherboard houses can be found all across Sydney.

The roof is corrugated Colorbond -- no doubt replacing the original corrugated iron -- in Woodland Grey (a green with a bronze undertone). On the verandah, the sheets are alternated with a paler green that is very similar to the external wall colour. This is a pale green, but not the usual apple green: more like a sage, with a faintly gold undertone.

I don't like yellow-greens, in general. It took me quite a long time to truly see the house and its gardens, and recognise the restful colour scheme. Here are some of the plantings in the small front yard:

• Wisteria up the verandah post
• Heavenly bamboo
• Creamy-white roses (not Icebergs, which are a clear white)
• Peace rose
• Diosma
• Variegated ivy 'Glacier'

Bronze-greens, sage-greens, cream, maroon, and a little peach, pink and lilac. Just delightful.

Unfortunately, I can't give you a photo. The new owners didn't see what the previous owner saw, and the cream and Peace roses have been replaced with Icebergs (still with tags). They tried poisoning the wisteria, too, but that had the usual success of such attempts. I wish them joy of all the suckers it's producing.

Garden Design Programs

I've just been mucking around with the Virtual Garden at the BBC website. The whole gardening site is a lot of fun and quite informative, and you can make your own garden and see it in 3D! Amazing what you can get for free these days. It does, however, remind me why I have never bought such a program for myself. And I would love one.

Incompatibility. Even with this one, I'm having to use The Geek's computer because there is no Shockwave port to mine yet. When I was last looking, most programs were not Mac-compatible. The Mac programs were for professional garden designers, and prohibitively expensive as a consequence.

Limited species. I never see the plants I want in these things, because the lists are never created by Sydney gardeners. The Beeb program is, understandably, extremely limited in the plant range available. That should be less the case with commercial programs, one would hope. If you want to sell a program outside your local area, you need to supply an enormous plant list. I'm still betting I'd never see Acacia parramattensis on one of those lists!

Species at all. These programs produce a simplified result, so it's silly to specify the kinds of plants used. The rendering isn't adequate for it. What I really want is the ability to specify that a particular area is a "Shrubbery to 2m" or "Tree to 10m" or similar. The general sizes and shapes are the chief thing that a garden design program should show us, and they are the hardest to get right.

I find the real design stuff -- rhythm, masses, voids and so on -- much more difficult to grasp than What To Plant Where. I have an extensive mental list of plants I can use, but a very poor understanding of design principles. As I investigate this site, I hope to learn a bit more. Stay tuned -- or play with the site yourself!

Holiday Roundup

Welcome back for 2008 and may it be a year of blessings for us all!

I've been having a pleasant holiday visiting relatives and friends, helping The Twig learn to swim, doing a bit of gardening (and garden eating -- hooray!). It has been a good holiday, but it's back to work for me on Tuesday.

Why Tuesday and not Monday? Because on Monday, The Twig is going to vacation care and The Sprig back to day care. I am having Mother's Day Off! I just hope I can figure out something nice to do with it. I suspect it will involve a Festival of Sydney event, or a visit to one of Sydney's cultural institutions, but we will see.

But what, you say, of Chookie's Back Yard?

• The kikuyu invasion in the vegie patch became so bad that I sheet-mulched 4 square metres with newspaper, moo poo and lawn clippings. It has been planted with sweet corn, cucumber and watermelon seeds, which are not yet up. I have again attempted a perimeter planting of lemon grass, and some of them appear to have struck. Roundup has also been sprayed about with abandon so that I had somewhere to put the aforementioned lemongrass divisions.
• Yesterday, the kids and I planted a small bed near the house with 'Teddy Bear' sunflower seeds and 'Cream' Californian poppies. We have fenced it to keep the chooks out; I Can guess how many sunflower seeds we'd have left if we didn't!
• We have eaten our first tomatoes; I'm pretty certain some were 'Jaune Flammee'. The others were cherry-sized, but didn't look like the pictures of 'Tommy Toe'. The chooks got in and ate my first truss of 'Broad Ripple Yellow Currant'.
• Other harvests have included 'Stringless Dwarf' and 'Italian Romano' beans, 'Spacemaster' and 'Mini White' cucumbers, and 'Golden Bantam' sweet corn. It has been a long time since I felt up sweet corn to determine its ripeness, and I've lost the knack -- three of the cobs were immature, but eaten by The Sprig nonetheless.
• I have seen green chillies.
• What can I do with perilla aside from making Asian-style salads? The plants are 60cm high!