The week of farm work was dominated by compost again. It began with a trip to a local landscape supply store for ingredients for our new seed propagation mix, continued with Alex making another compost heap and five compost teas, and ended with me signing up to a 4-part workshop series on making compost. The jury is still out on our seed propagation mix – Alex likened it to cement at one point! The new compost heap “should” be ready in 2-3 weeks according to the source website. But it also “should” reach 50 degrees by tomorrow and it was only 22 today. Our compost teas are from another permaculture-style website and are made from water, molasses and a special ingredient: borage, coffee, cow manure, potatoes and legumes (the recipe called for bananas but that’s not a very local ingredient in Tasmania!) … and wee. Let’s see. They all should have slightly different benefits but the main aim is to introduce beneficial microbes into our soil and compost. At a minimum by the time all of this experimenting is done our original compost will have decomposed properly!

The weekend brought the much-anticipated Seedfreaks tomato seedling sale, an unmissable event in any Huon Valley gardener’s calendar. For us it was a chance to course-correct: our tallest seedling is 4.5cm high, whereas these are 15-25cm high after planting them deep into vine pots (tomatoes grow roots out of their stems so you can let them be leggy, then plant them quite deeply and they become stronger). Alex had agreed that I could buy 40 vine tomatoes for the tunnel (so I only bought 42). Dazzled by the enormous choice – there were 202 varieties – I accidentally forgot my instructions and bought six bush tomatoes but that leaves some space in the tunnel for our baby seedlings that will eventually, surely, grow tall.

In amongst all of this, we had over 70mm of rain, which made it a great week for me to be doing office work and for Alex to propagate seeds in the shed. There were some bursts of sunshine for sowing seeds (more carrots and radish), transplanting some seedlings into the garden and doing more pH tests, which I’m getting better at. We also saw the power of fertiliser: the euphemistically-named “liquid fish emulsion” seems to have already visibly changed some of the seedlings, turning yellowing coriander and parsley green again. The fertiliser is made from carp, which is a noxious pest in Australian waterways, and is allowed under organic guidelines, which soothes my conscience somewhat. This experience hasn’t changed our minds about how we want to be growing vegetables but it certainly demonstrated why so many professional growers buy fertiliser!