It’s one week after the solstice and our days have gained a full minute! Still, the soil will keep cooling down. It will be interesting to see how much the coverings that we’re using limit the drop in temperature in coming weeks. We are optimistic about one corner of the garden that gets the most winter sunshine (the beautifully tall eucalypts block the sun when its path is so low) and has fleece on it. We’ll see how the pak choi and lettuce do. It’s been fairly wet, which is a challenge for drainage but we have avoided damaging frosts. Instead, we’ve woken to fog covering the valley most mornings, which is quite beautiful to look at, particularly from inside the house. Last week it hung around for most of the day and we only saw the other side of the river for a couple of hours. We have to make an effort to remember to water inside the tunnel in this type of weather!

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Our decision to pause sales at the little shop in Geeveston has freed up (Christie’s) Sunday afternoons for the seed library across the river. It’s a fantastic local initiative that encourages seed saving and makes seeds freely available to anyone and a great learning opportunity for us. Today was a seed processing day. Two weeks ago was a fantastic workshop on how to plan a garden to save seeds reliably. We had originally thought that it was better to buy seed and focus on growing vegetables. But the seed shortages of 2020 shook this assumption. And now it seems that we might not be able to source any of the colourful gourmet potatoes we planted last season (and because of the compost problems we only have a couple of potatoes). We’ll begin by saving seed from plant families that don’t cross-pollinate but that’s ok. Planning is also important because past over-excitement has led to us having 18 varieties of tomato seed, which was discovered today just before placing an order with our favourite tomato seed seller who’s released even more varieties. Next year…

There’s not much we can reliably sow or propagate in June – even plants that germinate will be so slow that it seems that we may as well wait a few more weeks. But we have kept sowing broad beans and garlic and some radish in the tunnel are also shooting up. Sadly the first batch of broad beans (sown early before mice became hungry) is developing rust so we will have to look into that. That said, little holes where we planted snow pea seeds in the tunnel suggest that the mice are already hungry and anything we do in the next two months might be in vain.

Meanwhile we are yet to begin the greenhouse. Our latest excuse is that we’re waiting for the ground to be dry enough for the cement truck. Hopefully the rain is light for the next fortnight, when we’ve tentatively lined up the digger for. In the meantime we’ll get on with organising our wind breaks and planning the next season to get our seed orders in before our favourite varieties run out.

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