It was like a horror film for gardeners...

It was a hot and still night towards the end of February. The kind of evening in which electricity crackles in the humidity and hairs on the back of your neck stand up making you feel like something is about to happen. Something happened to me. Something very, very bad. This is the story of the nightmare on my street:

 

 

Now, this is a nightmare in two parts... so stay with me here! Above is what you call root knot nematode. Try saying that one five times fast! Soil is full of all sorts of nematodes, little microscopic things that live in the soil and generally do good things. This one doesn't do good things. You can see what it did to the roots of my cucumber, it gets inside them, lays eggs and stops the roots from transporting water and nutrients to the plant. Bad. Very bad.

 

So, apart from sinking to my knees in the garden and shaking my fist at these horrid critters, I sent the photo off to the delightful Sabrina Hahn... who came back and confirmed my not-so-delightful suspicions about the RKN (for short). Unfortunately there's not many ways to get rid of the RKN from your soil. In the old days they used to fumigate the soil with some horrendous and dangerous chemical that you probably can't even buy now. So my only options were to plant out a field of marigold or mustard. Here's my mustard patch:

 

 

Not to bore you with details... the mustard exudes a gas from its roots, which drives the nematode away. Sabrina told me to leave it about three months (I was sobbing at this point, because I was just about to plant out all my Autumn vegetables, being one of the most important seasons in the food garden and I was powerless to plant anything!) then slash the mustard plants and dig them into the soil. As the plants break down, they also exude some gas and hopefully drive those little suckers away!

 

But the nightmare didn't end there. I went through the vege garden and pulled up deformed carrots, ripped out the cucumbers, which were still trailing their way up the tree, and all of the other plants in the bed, ready to sow a mass of mustard seed. Then I got an email. It was from the Garden Guru television show. They want to come and do a profile and film my garden. IN TWO WEEKS.

 

I was back to the sobbing stage by then. All I had was a bed of mustard to show! What was I going to do? I can't plant anything and my garden is barren. Still, they insist it will be ok and want to come around.

 

Here's my confession. I have cheated. I like to grow most things from seed. But with two weeks until filming, I don't have time. I went to the nursery and bought punnets of vegetables. I planted them, but I'm still worried about the nematode, so I have planted everything with rows of mustard in between, to help out. See below:

 

 

So I have spent the past week frantically trying to get my barren patch of nematode-ridden soil looking like a vaguely productive garden. I have been feeding it up with worm castings and seaweed solution, I'm trying everything to spur those plants along! (Apart from using synthetic fertilisers, of course!) So there's my dilemma. I will keep you up to date with how things are going in the lead up to my Garden Guru debut. Hopefully it won't include shots of me staring at my soil, quietly sobbing to myself!

Get some Garlic in!

 

It is time to plant some garlic. How do I know that? Because my wonderful Italian neighbour told me so. And she left a container of her very own garlic at my doorstep as a reminder! Last year I planted my garlic too late in the season and you may remember that it didn't grow very well. Although it was delicious and I'm still using the last few bulbs, each bulb was only one clove, not a group of cloves like normal. When we moved into the street less than a year ago, my neighbour promised me she'd tell me when she planted her garlic, so I could follow. I hadn't expected her to give me some of her garlic collection so I'd already been to the markets and picked up a few bulbs of locally-grown varieties. I ended up with this: 

 

 

 

I gave some of the cloves to my colleague to plant in her garden. As I've said before, garlic is the perfect 'vegetable' for the lazy gardener to grow. You buy a bulb or two from your grocery store (make sure it's Australian because the imported ones are bleached and sprayed with horrid chemicals). Break it into cloves, plant each one about 15cm apart, pointy side up about 1cm below the soil surface. Then you wait... you don't have to do look after them, they generally look after themselves. Then later in the year, when the weather starts to warm up again, you can harvest.

 

I recently advised a friend to plant some among his roses. The plants don't look unattractive and might even keep some bugs off his plants.

 

I lost count of how many I planted this year... it could be close to 100. So my friends might be getting some garlicky Christmas gifts again this year if all goes to plan!

 

So go and get yourself some garlic and plant it now and when you taste your home-grown garlic next summer, you'll be glad you did!

A seed of an idea...

About now in the garden, most plants are dying off and it's time to get in and rip them out. I like to leave one or two plants to go to seed so I can collect it for next year. When your coriander bolts in the heat, stake it so it's out of the way and doesn't look too messy, then when the seed heads go dry and brown, collect them into a bowl, dry them out and store them in a jar or an envelope, ready to plant next season.

Here's a jar of seeds I've collected:

 

 

I'm also drying some lettuce seeds, dill, radish, beans and zucchini. As long as you're growing the heritage varieties, most of the vegetables will grow true to type. It's easy, it saves money and you can put some in a pretty envelope and give them to your friends as a little gift for their garden. The coriander above I've been collecting the seeds from for three generations now!

Tidy time

It is time for me to venture out early in the morning, before the heat sets in and tidy up the food garden. The advantage of having the food garden in the front yard is that you feel compelled to keep it looking vaguely neat looking, whereas if it had been in the back yard, it would have become an overgrown mess, not to be touched until Autumn.

Here is the garden before the tidy up:

 

 

It is a bit overgrown and starting to go to seed. It's time to rip out the tomato plants, and cut down all but one lettuce plant (I'll keep one to collect the seed from) The corriander seed heads are browning off, so I will definitely harvest those seeds, the lemon grass mound is so vigorous I found some chilli plants hiding in it. I'll wait until the heat passes to cut it back because it is providing some shade for the herbs underneath it. As I pull the old plants out, it's too hot to replant right now, so I cover the bare soil with another layer of lupin mulch to protect it.

 

I think I might try a late season tomato or two and see how they go. I always feel bad pulling out the spent tomato bushes, mainly because I know I won't have such delicious tasting tomatoes again for another year. On the other hand, I get a lot of space back to start planning my Autumn crops as the weather cools again!