Three weeks have flown by since the last post and it feels like winter is running out (when sitting in a heated room looking at a calendar!). The first week of July included four days of frosty, below-zero mornings that lent themselves to planning sessions but there is still a lot to finish and we still don’t have a planting and harvest plan for this season. Last year we started our plantings – including tomatoes – in July. So in the absence of  a plan we’ve pressed repeat on 2020. Lettuce, beetroot and silverbeet are all in various stages of germination, with September’s lettuce already becoming a little root and two leaves. We also added parsley, mizuna and mache to the mix in the hope of some restaurant sales (which also need planning…).

We almost started the greenhouse, which would have been huge news. Trench digging and concrete delivery were booked for last week but the truck that transports the trench digger broke so it was all cancelled. And then it started raining again! We also almost got chickens! But after spending a day designing a movable coop we stumbled over how many Alex would be allowed to eat. But we did progress the windbreaks. We wanted to avoid buying plastic to use as a temporary windbreak while we waited for bushes and shrubs to grow. Thanks to suggestions from the irresistibly named “Australian Market Gardening Success” Facebook group, we will use hessian and compost it afterwards. The same Facebook group suggested some fast-growing plants like saltbush, which is also edible. In the next fortnight we will hopefully manage to source the hessian and plants and build the compulsory wallaby fencing.

We also built our biggest compost heap so far, prompted by the cold weather. The basic idea was that with greater thermal mass it would stay warm. It’s working! It was originally as tall as Christie but has reached 60 degrees and shrunk considerably. We’ve also been weeding to prepare the beds for the season and admiring the sun as its path rises in the sky, shining more light over more of the garden each week. An unwelcome repeat from 2020 is the return of the small visitors that raid our broad bean seedlings for the large seed underneath, spreading soil everywhere in the process.  And slug patrols have restarted after finding many babies in the tunnel. It’s time to get our 2021-22 routine on track!