In the garden: June and July

Winter prep – planting now

Winter edible gardening can be slower and more considered but there is still plenty to keep you outside on clear days. This is the time to plant garlic. Once you have grown your own sweet pungent garlic you will never want to buy the supermarket kind again. To grow, buy some New Zealand-grown garlic from your local farmer’s market and remove the biggest cloves. These will be your ‘seeds’. The smaller ones can go in the spag bol. Prepare the soil with lots of compost, blood and bone or sheep pellets. Plant each clove pointy end up, around 5cm deep. Mulch the area well with straw or leaves as garlic does not like competition from surrounding weeds. In a few weeks you will start to see the green shoots of the garlic plant.

You can keep planting broad beans, peas, the brassicas, such as broccoli, cabbage, kale or cauliflower and spring onions. Any autumn-planted brassicas should be ready to be harvested. If you have a warm spot in your garden and would like a quick crop, scatter some bok choy seeds around any bare soil. You could be enjoying them in a stir fry within six weeks. Winter lettuces such as Cos and Winter Triumph will still grow, though slowly, in even the coldest winter garden. Plant peas and snow peas. Snow peas will need something to climb up.  A tripod of bamboo stakes is often the quickest and easiest. If you have any bare patches sow some leek or spring onion seedlings. They grow vertically so don’t need much room.

Pimp your soil

Winter is a great time to pimp your soil and get it oozing with microbes and nutrients in preparation for spring planting. Any mature green manure crops can be slashed off at their knees and allowed to settle on the garden to decompose and return nutrients to the soil. If you missed the boat on this idea you still could have time to plant a crop in August, when the weather is starting to warm again. A green manure crop is a living plant which, when mature, is cut and used as a mulch to revitalise the soil. Species which are generally used include mustard, lupins, phacelia, oats or buckwheat. You can normally find these seeds in bags at your local garden centre.

Another green way to feed your soil involves beachcombing with the family. After a storm is the best time. Collect seaweed that has been blown ashore. Bring it home and wash it in fresh water and spread thickly on your garden. Anywhere you grow beetroot or asparagus especially likes this treat. Seaweed is believed to deter slugs and snails as they don’t like the salt and it also contains many important trace elements which plants need.

If you know anyone with a pony, collect the poo and add to your compost. Come spring it will have broken down enough to be perfect to spread on your garden.

If you keep rabbits, collect their little “marbles of magnificence” and scatter directly on to your garden and around any growing plants for an extra boost. Rabbit droppings are the one type of manure that can be safely applied directly from rabbit bottom to garden bed! I keep rabbits and I love the packaging, small, dry and round, very easy to scoop up and spread!

Irrigation ideas

Let’s hope that next summer will not be a repeat of the last with a parched landscape. Winter is a good time to sort out your irrigation. It is nice to stand with the hose in the evening and a glass of wine in the other hand but some of us can find ourselves a little time poor and need some other methods of irrigation. Here are a few ideas.

Soak hoses

These hoses are made from recycled car tyres so tick lots of green boxes. They can be run from water butts with low pressure and linked together. They sweat the water from the tiny holes in the rubber. They are great if they are buried under the layer of mulch as they deliver water straight to the roots. As water is not sprayed around there is no wastage and this also helps prevent fungal diseases on plants in the height of summer.

Swales

This is a great permaculture idea. Between your rows of plants dig a shallow trench at least 15cm deep. Excess water will drain into these swales and be made available for thirsty plants. This works especially well on any sort of slope as swales slow the runoff of water.

Top tip! Buried terracotta pots

I use this method around all my thirsty lettuces and celery during summer. I borrowed this idea from African farmers who have been using this method for centuries. Find a medium-sized unglazed terracotta pot. If it has drainage holes bung those up with wine corks. You will have to drink the bottle of wine first! Bury the pot in your garden bed so that only 2cm of the rim of the pot is showing. Back fill with your garden soil so it is firmly in place. Fill the pot with water and place a saucer over the top. Plant vegetables that require constant moisture around the pot. Plants up to 30cm away from the pot will be able to draw water directly to their roots. Have you ever tasted a lettuce and found it bitter? Well that is because it has been starved of water while it is actively growing. Plant them this way for crunchy sweet leaves.

Watch a video of how I do it here: www.tinyurl.com/cnrhwoo.

Automatic pot waterers

For thirsty pot plants and troughs, a simple way to water them is to use an empty plastic milk bottle. Using a screwdriver, stab one small hole in the bottom of a large two litre milk bottle. Place a handful of pebbles or small stones in the base of the bottle and place around your pot plants. The stones help to stop the bottle falling over. Fill with water and replace the top loosely. The water will drip out slowly around the plants’ roots.

Too wet or too dry?

With any sort of irrigation it is important to know when it is actually required. Overwatering is just as harmful as under watering as can lead to fungal spores multiplying, plants rotting and earthworms making for deeper ground to get away from sodden earth. If your garden is mulched remove the layer of mulch and then pick up a handful of soil. The soil should feel like a kitchen sponge that has been wrung out. It should feel damp but not wet. If the ground is hard and crumbly it is too dry but if the soil sticks to your hand and can’t be dusted off it is too wet. Conserve our precious natural resource and only water when necessary.

Fun for the kids: How to build a ‘bug Hilton’

During the winter quiet time there are some good opportunities to get stuck into some gardening projects. Well, here is an idea you can involve the kids with as it requires some beach- and forest-combing.

Insects play an incredibly important role in any organic garden and by providing the right sort of habitat you can hopefully attract them into your garden as long-term tenants. Beneficial insects include many wasps, ladybirds, lacewings, damselflies, hover flies and different types of bees. Unfortunately like many organisms beneficial insects are under threat from pesticides, spreading suburbia and agriculture. Providing a secure haven in your garden allows these good guys an excuse to make your garden their permanent home. These sorts of insects seem to prefer individual tunnels to either lay eggs or hibernate in during the winter months. Remember you also need to provide a food source of flowers, shrubs and pests.

I like to think of a ‘bug Hilton’ as garden art with a purpose. It can be made out of any recycled material, including bamboo, timber, straw, staked branches and tiles. An ideal apartment should be at least 15cm in diameter and around 50cm high off the ground.

A bug Hilton is a structure full of lots of different sized nooks and crannies that hopefully will attract particular insects to hibernate in and lay their eggs.  I made mine out of a wooden pallet which I cut into sections with a hand saw and stacked. After a beach and forest combing session with the kids we filled the spaces with shells, bunches of twigs, pine cones, bamboo canes, large seed pods, pumice with holes drilled in it and blocks of firewood.  I drilled these holes with a slight incline to avoid them filling with rainwater.

Place your bug Hilton in a sunny spot protected from wind and wait for all those good guys to take up residence. Many people ask how I keep the cockroaches and white-tailed spiders out but the thing is you can’t. They do have some benefit in the garden but there is some method to my madness. Studies have found that most of the beneficial insects prefer holes of a certain diameter.  The most preferred tunnel sizes seem to be 4mm or 9mm in diameter and 8-10mm deep.