Carrots (Photo credit: briannaorg)
The sun is shining, the days are lengthening, my hormones are stirring and its that time of year that K-Mart has its Spring Plant Sale on… so should I succumb to buying a few seedling? Well the answer is no, but the truth is I probably will, just because of those maternal urges…but experience has taught me to keep them inside for a little while longer.
Jackie French writes of an old bit of folklore about not planting tomatoes into the ground (and all sorts of other summer crops) till you can “sit on it with bare buttocks’ or perhaps more wisely she suggests “In suburban areas use the back of your wrist”. I’ve been told this is about 16 °C, I have a soil thermometer and even in areas of my garden with full sunlight it has not yet reached that magical number. Those of you in the lower Blue Mountains will get there about a fortnight earlier than those of us who live above the frost line of Wentworth Falls.
Down in those Temperate lower mountain areas I would be planting root vegetables like potatoes, New Zealand Yams, Peruvian apples and Jerusalem artichoke. These are all long season crops that won’t really be ready to harvest till autumn, so they are best planted in Permaculture Zone 2, further from the house and Zone I where you will want to have access to vegetables that you will harvest more. The best placement of Zones in a property design is one of the first things you learn during a PDC….Start tomatoes and cucumbers off in pots, until the soil gets warmer. Towards the end of the month when you are sure you don’t get frost I would be planting pumpkin, zucchini and squash; they don’t like being disturbed being transplanted from pots seems to knock them back when compared to those grown straight from seeds in the ground.
Up higher in the Cool Mountainous areas I will be a little more circumspect and I will be planting more lettuce, endives, peas and rocket with the root vegetables (as above). By the end of the month or later I’ll plant loads of herbs like chives, coriander, parsley and dill. Also carrots and radish seeds mixed well in sand and then broadcast widely. Carrots seeds are very small and if saved from seed are a lot hairier than packet bought seeds. Either way they tend to cling together in clumps and then don’t have room to expand to their optimum size when growing together. The radish seeds and the sand get in between and separate them when sowing. The radishes mature quickly and will be long picked and eaten before the carrots are ready, giving the carrots space to grow into.
(find organic open pollinated seeds on the rack at the co-op in Ha’penny Lane, Katoomba)
Katoomba Street Permaculture 