Michael Pollan on organic food…

Michael Pollan, renowned author of in Defense of Food, interviewed in Rodale Publishing’s Organic Gardening magazine speaks out on how the term “organic” is being hijacked.

“Organic is in danger of being co-opted. I’ve been on organic factory farms, and if most organic consumers went to those places, they would feel they were getting ripped off. I think organic risks a real crisis of perception if the values that they’re selling don’t accurately reflect the practices they’re engaging in. They’re organic by the letter, not organic in spirit.”

Read more here.

Forest floor compost inspired by birds

My big bird nest style compost heap

The many miles of southern ocean provide no resistance to late spring’s fierce gales that we at 42 degrees south call ‘The Roaring Forties’. After particularly bad blows I often find old birds nests of different shapes and colours to admire. The bottom line is that they eventually make great additions to the compost heap, being miniature, albeit elegant, compost heaps in themselves: grass, twigs straw, manure … just add water.

Inspired by the art of tiny beaks, as well as by the irrevocable production of natural forest floor composts, I started building ‘slow’ compost heaps. You do need plenty of room and to be prepared for a two to three year installation period. There is no need to turn because the air filters through naturally. A  few shovels of active soil will add microrganisms, and some lawn clippings, urine or manure will provide the nitrogen required for decomposition of woody waste and newspaper shreds. I sometimes cover the tops with hessian or carpet underlay. I wet the heaps through dry periods and they always attract an army of worms.

When you eventually disassemble the heap the top of the structure will yield  lots of weathered twigs and branches, aged and ready for the next ‘nest’. Underneath you will find the worm-filled, black and fluffy earth that gardeners dream about. If you haven’t added dolomite lime, the compost will tend towards being acid and will have a decent amount of potassium originating from the twiggy bark. You will probably want to spread the ‘black gold’ around, but over the years I have noticed that the sites of the original heaps retain their amazing health – a good reason for playing musical compost heaps. Siting them where you have the garden refuse and where you want to use the compost is a great way to save carting time. Oh, and it saves on those big, ugly, plastic receptacles!

Tomato transplanting trick

Tomato seedling transplanted into a recycled toilet roll tube

It can be tricky to raise tomato seedlings in a cold climate without a hot-house. This year I’ve come up with the idea of using a temporary tomato seedling bed in a bright but very protected spot until some full-throated sunny days come our way, hopefully in a  few weeks. To lessen the shock I’ve had everyone saving toilet rolls to use as bio-degradable ‘pots’.  I trialled them with sugar-snap peas and broad beans in winter with huge success – no losses, strong, healthy growth (started in a protected microclimate) and best of all, no transplant shock.

When seedlings are at the true two-leaf stage, potting them into the cardboard rolls is easy and fun and it’s possible to adjust the position within the tube by adding or removing some soil at the base. Covering the stem just a tad can solve any legginess problem as the tomatoes are able to develop new roots further up the stem for greater vigour, and before you know it, you’ll have a bunch of husky-looking seedlings.

Another advantage of the seedling bed is that it can buy you a little extra time for permanent bed preparation, which is welcome respite for the busy gardener in spring.

Planting the seed…

Collecting my first seeds © Photo by Rob Walls

Forebears on both the Italian and the Chinese sides of my family were for generations poor rural farmers who grew their own food. It was no wonder then, that despite being severed from their origins by circumstance and distance, and in an alien Australia, they were drawn to working the soil, to cultivating vegetables, fruit, and even the frivolous joy of growing flowers.

The mystery and the wonder of growing things must have passed to my five siblings through osmosis. As ‘number one daughter’ I spent countless hours as a five-year-old dancing under a clothesline engaging my tired mother in conversation as she hung endless baskets of flapping baby clothes and nappies. There were two regular themes: “What comes after 19, …29…39…” and, “But where did the first seeds come from?”

Today, seeds are on my list of top ten favourite things ever. Actually expressing this feels so moving and so fundamental to my being it’s made me cry. Something about having a place to talk about these passions which are inextricably linked to my heritage has finally, at the age of 54, helped me to make sense of my life after feeling at sea for much of it. The germ has been there all along.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, how I love to grow things from seed, rather than from bought seedlings. And the satisfaction I have felt from maturing and sowing my own seed is indescribable. Each time I see germinating tips unfurling from their slumber is an affirmation that life is for living, not to mention that something delicious is on its way. Following my passions, like a child learning to walk, I have learned to grow all my annual vegetables from seed. At the moment dotted throughout the garden are swathes of 2cm high Italian-parsley and spinach seedlings that I scattered in the depths of a soggy winter (the wettest on record) just begging to be transplanted and were it not for equally soggy spring days I’d be out there doing just that. Oh well, that gives me time to learn about blogging!

Among my adventures has been growing asparagus (Mary Washington, UC157, and this year, Brock Imperial) from seed. More about this another day. I have recently pulped, separated, washed and dried the seed of a yellow, kiwi-fruit that tastes of tropical fruit salad. I am waiting for that sweet spot in spring, just days away, when seeds safely race forward in a germinating frenzy making the most of delicately balanced damp, warm earth and assured longer sunny days. Those are the days when you trust your long-coddled indoor early tomatoes, eggplant, capsicum, eggplants and basil to the great outdoors. First, just as daytime visitors to ‘harden off’ against the intensity of direct sunlight and wind for a week, and then as transplants to their final destination.

At the moment, as is my annual habit, I have arranged a clutter of Styrofoam boxes in my living-room in a line along the floor at the base of full-length windows, except where they compete for space with my husband’s bonsai pots. They are mostly full of deadly-nightshade seedlings (varieties of tomatoes and eggplant carefully selected for a cool-temperate climate) at various stages, a box of advanced, potted scarlet-runner beans and a potted kaffir lime, all awaiting confirmation that there’ll be no frosty surprises to come (unlikely now), and, even more importantly, that the heavy clay-content, that is my garden’s curse as well as it’s blessing, gets respite enough from months of constant rain to dry sufficiently for me to plant these babies without totally destroying the structure of their new homes.

And the last word is from a gardener called Muriel Stuart who wrote this poem many years ago. I’ve kept it with the view to one day carving or painting it somewhere in my garden:

The Seed Shop

Here in a quiet and dusty room they lie,

faded as crumbling stone or shifting sand,

forlorn as ashes, shrivelled, scentless, dry,

meadows and gardens running though my hand.

In this brown husk a dale of hawthorn dreams.

A cedar in this narrow cell is thrust

that will drink deeply of a century’s streams.

These lilies will make summer on my dust.

Here in their safe and simple house of death,

sealed in their shells, a million roses leap;

here I can blow a garden with my breath,

and in my hand a forest lies asleep.

Hello fellow gardeners…

“Salad days” is an expression, referring to a youthful time, accompanied by the inexperience, enthusiasm, idealism, innocence. It can also refer to a person’s heyday; when somebody is at the peak of their ability…not necessarily in that person’s youth. I’m not young, but I am in my “salad days”. I’ve called this blog Salad Days because this is the crop that my garden gives me all year round.

This blog is going to be an occasional diary of my days in that garden. I guess, I should describe it, It’s about three quarters of a sloping acre about ten minutes from the centre of Hobart in Tasmania, Australia’s island state. Most of it is given over to vegetable production, but there is also a small orchard with cherries, apricots, apples, figs and olives. The Tasmanian climate is temperate, ranging from light frosts in the winter to hot summers, ideally suited to apples and stone-fruits.

It is now just the beginning of spring and I’m busy preparing and planting for my summer harvests.

By way of introduction, this is me, with today’s crop of salad greens which I’ve harvestd for my friends.

A selection of salad greens from my garden today

That’s it for now, as I travel the learning curve of blogging. I hope you will enjoy reading my blog as much as I am going to enjoy writing it…