The Scary Gardener - Planting the Seed

Welcome to the second instalment of Scary Gardener.

It is the middle of summer in Queensland, Australia and while I was thinking that there was little I could do to start my garden at this time of year in such a hot climate, it seems I was mistaken.

Firstly my compost heap is not looking too shabby now. I have been feeding it fresh cuttings, fruit and vegetable scraps and much to my disgust, manure. Yucky, yucky, ich, ich. Oh, and some of that blood and bone stuff. Don't forget to use one of those face masks to prevent you from breathing in any small particles, fungus etc, especially when your turning it with your garden folk. Think, Legionnaires’ disease. From experience, I have found that while some manure are not too bad, others are positively rank, adding a few drop of essential oil to your face mask does nothing to improve the smell, it just makes it smell more funky.

Back to my local gardening centre which seems to attract guys in green or kaki wide brimmed hats and oversized, well worn shorts, I searched amongst the seed packets for the types of things I like to eat and hence should plant in my garden. With a household of one human and one bird, I found myself attracted to small vegetables. Mini cauliflowers and broccoli, mini rockmelons, small bushy tomatoes that boast a sweet flavour and bountiful crop. They haven't met me yet, have they. Talk about putting them to the test. Surprisingly I found quite a few of them can be sown in my area now or at any time of year, so I can get started at least with some vegies straight away.

While at the garden centre I also asked them why all these ants were crawling all over my guava tree. He told me these sap suckers were attracting them. The sap suckers were taking sweet stuff from out of the leaves and branches of my guava tree and the ants were getting some too from the sap suckers. The ants would take care of them, even taking them to a new branch when they got tired of the one they were on, just so they can continue to picnic on my guava tree. Co-operative little guys. Anyhow, he showed me some chemical stuff I can spray on them to kill off the sap suckers which will get rid of the ants. Unfortunately, I don't want to spray my fruit tree with chemicals, so if anyone out there can give me a natural remedy for getting rid of these little suckers, just let me know. Send an email by hitting this link, duneenenterprises@iinet.net.au ; I will include the recipes I receive in the next edition along with any results I get from using them.

When you make up your mind that you are going to start a veggie garden, you suddenly find yourself watching a lot of gardening shows on television and taking an unhealthy interests in gardening magazines. In one such magazine I read a tip for raising seedlings. It talks about filling the inside core of your toilet roll with seed raising mix, after you've used all the paper of course, and planting your seeds in that. When the seeds get to the point where you can plant them in your garden, you plant them cardboard core and all, which will break down like compost. Recycling at its best. So I started to collect toilet roll cores, which my Mum calls my cardboard soldiers. With friends and family all helping out it doesn't take long to build up a large collection. Okay guys, you can stop giving them to me now. I said STOP… thank you.

So now I have a whole lot of cardboard soldiers sitting in a plastic box, a bag of seed raising mix, a number of different seed packets, organic garlic cloves given to me by a friend and a black texta pen so I can write on the cardboard soldier what is in it, so I don’t plant a pumpkin in the planter designed for strawberries. Like babies, when they're small, they all look alike.

After labelling and packing each soldier with dirt, sorry seed raising mix, putting the little seed inside, sometimes two for good measure, I put them in the plastic box in which I have drilled out a couple of holes so the water can run out. We don't want the little guys to drown. Then I put them in a shady spot to start growing. It will take about 6 or 8 weeks depending on the seedling before we can do anything but water and feed it, so in the mean time I will take a look at where and how I will do the garden plot.

I have already worked out where I want to put my garden so I head up the back yard with my garden fork to check it out. I am told I may have to do some soil improving because we have a lot of clay in our area, so I will have to dig around to find out the extent of the problem. I lift the garden folk high in the air and slam it down to see how far it will go. The tremor reverberated through the tines like a tuning folk, up the handle and through me with teeth chattering results. When the stars finally cleared I looked down to find the folk had entered the ground a whole centimetre, about half an inch in the old money, if that.

Hmm, this is going to be harder than I thought.

Another trip to my local garden centre and they tell me that I will need some clay breaker and it may take a bit of time for it to work, or I could consider a no-dig-garden or a raised garden bed. A no-dig-garden uses straw, compost, garden soil etc placed on top of the ground in layers until it is built up high enough to plant your crops in. A raised garden bed is where you make a wooden or brick work frame in which you put your garden soil, much like a giant pot plant with no bottom, or you can buy some plastic or corrugated iron models which you just place where you want to put your garden and fill with dirt. The advantage of these, is there is no heavy digging, you know the soil in it is good because you put it in there yourself and if it is built high enough you don't have to bend down so far to tend your garden, therefore kind on your back. Okay, I'm smiling again.

I go home with all the information I need for either one of these options, a bottle of Charlie Carp liquid fertiliser and Neem oil to mix up and spray on my plants. Both in this case are organic, one is to feed my plants and the other helps keep the bugs away. I'm willing to give it a try but if anyone has any better recipes, let me know. Email me here.

In the mean time, I have only just sown my seeds so I have a bit of time to work out how I am going to do my garden and to set myself up, so next edition I will let you know what I decided and how I went. So until next edition, say a little pray for my seedlings, they need all the help they can get.