Preparing the winter garden

At the end of such a long, hot, dry summer, it was hard to imagine that rain would ever come. But time and tide wait for no man… or plant for that matter. The gardener needs to think ahead to get the most out of the change of seasons.

The winter garden

When we imagine a garden (and unless I say otherwise, I mean veggie garden), we mostly think of the ‘hero’ plants. We think of tomatoes, capsicums and chillies. In Perth these are mostly summer veggies that are planted in spring and harvested at the end of summer. The winter veg are not heroes. Generally, the winter veg are leaf and root vegetables along with peas and beans. The main reason for this is that the summer heroes I mentioned above are from the Solanaceae (nightshade) family, whose fruit require heat to ripen. They also suffer pretty badly in frost.

In the winter garden, we have conditions that are not very different from our summer climate:

• The sun is at a lower angle and so provides less heat. It is also more likely to be shaded by the house or fences.
• There is higher humidity, combined with colder temperatures, resulting in low evaporation rates.
• There is rain, even if it is only consistent between July and August.
• There is the chance of frost, which many plants will not survive.

The winter vegetables

This is off the top of my head and is about things that I have grown. I have limited planting space, so I tend to favour plants that have more than one use . I also like to be able to add something from the garden to things that I cook. This makes leafy veggies and ones that can be ‘grazed’ on preferable to ones that are grown to be ripped out. Here are what I consider the highlights of the winter garden:

• 

  Second generation green bean seedling.

  Peas and beans
  Peas and beans are similar, but they are not the same. They are from different families, but they are both legumes. Legumes make seeds in pods, so this includes wattle trees and many other unexpected relatives. Legumes also have a very special property in that they for a mutually beneficial relationship with certain bacteria. The plant feeds sugars to the bacteria in its roots and the bacteria in turn creates nodules of nitrogen. This is essentially free fertiliser that the plant will later use when it is flowering and making seed pods.
  I have had limited success with peas. They seem to suffer from little brown spots of fungus and die. Sometimes they survive long enough to set fruit, and when they do the peas very rarely make it inside. Eating snow peas or sugar snaps off the vine is one of the quintessential joys of gardening.
  I have had more success with beans, but actually don’t have much experience. I think beans are a beautiful plant. They make these deep green, heart shaped leaves and they just seem so eager to climb anything they can find. They remind me of me as a kid. Especially as when they climb something, they don’t really come back down. I really enjoy green beans, too. I remember late last winter, after a week that involved a bit to much drinking, I woke up with a hangover, picked a few handfulls of beans, steamed them and ate them with butter and pepper. For breakfast. It was joy!
  I found a cheeky bean from that same bean plant when I was clearing the garden last week. It had dried on the vine, hidden down the back of the lattice it had climbed. I popped out the dried beans and stuck them straight into the ground. I found them peeping up through the soil last night. That picture to the right is my soon to be majoc bean stalk.

• Silverbeet
  Related to beetroot but cultivated for tasty leaves, silverbeet is just about the most dependable thing you can grow. It is prolific and it is bloody hard to kill. It grows leaves from the centre, which are then pushed outward as the next leaves grow. You harvest the outside leaves and use it as spinach. Better yet, you can harvest it pretty brutally; as long as there is a leaf or two remaining, the plant will keep on truckin’. Four or five silverbeet plants will give you a spinach pie every few weeks. Choose a good place to plant it (and protect your young seedlings from slugs) because your plants will last two years before going to seed.
• Kale
  Kale is a very primitive form of Brassica (the family that broccoli and cabbage belong to). It is unusual and you won’t likely find it at Coles. It grows in a similar way to silverbeet, but has those powdery, bluish, water repellent leaves like broccoli. It is sometimes referred to as ‘tree cabbage’ because you can use the leaves like cabbage and as you harvest the outer leaves, you leave behind a bare ‘trunk’.
  Why did I grow it? It is super nutritious. It is said that a young doctor was looking for a town to settle in. He asked his father (also a doctor) for advice. His father told him to look over the fences of the houses in each town: if they grew kale then they wouldn’t get sick very often. Find another town.
  Why do I still grow it? Because it hasn’t died yet! It is tough, and I respect that in a plant. Maybe it is because it is a primitive plant it hasn’t lost its weedy will to live. The cabbage moths that get into cabbage (duh) and broccoli don’t seem to bother it. I use it mostly in pies along with the silverbeet, but steamed with other veggies is good, too. It needs a bit more cooking than silverbeet (or cabbage) because it is kinda fibrous.
• 

  My veggie patch in early December 2010

  Beetroot
  Related to silverbeet, beetroot is the most recognisable member of the Beta family. You know what it looks like and you most likely know how to cook it. Did you know that those little red-stemmed leaves in your fancy salad mix are baby beetroot greens? So you can eat the root and you can eat the leaves. I’m not aware of anyone eating the flowers, but two out of three aint bad. I have found beetroot to be pretty reliable. I’ve only grown it for one season, but they were tasty and I wished I had grown more. One from last year was lost under a vigorous tomato bush and survived the harvest. I’m going to guess that it’s a bit woody by now, so I’m letting it go to seed to see what happens.
  Root veggies also have the advantage of being starchy. Generally, we eat leafy veggies for their nutrients (vitamins etc.), we eat fruiting veggies for their sugars and we eat root veggies for their starch. So a leaf and a fruit will keep scurvy at bay and prevent rickets, but they don’t have all that much energy in them. The beetroot root is a store of dense starches and sugars to feed the plant in hard times, and it does the same for us. For a gardener looking toward self sufficiency, root crops are going to be the bulk your calories.

• Broccoli
  Why so far down the list? Isn’t broccoli a staple veg? I have to say that broccoli, after asparagus, is one of my favourite veggies. So let me explain.
  At the supermarket you buy a head of broccoli. This is actually a really compact (and delicious) flower head. It takes a whole season to grow the plant up to a point where it flowers. In the meantime, the leaves don’t taste all that good to anyone but the slugs and cabbage moth caterpillars. You tend it, pick the slugs and bugs off it for a whole season and all you get in return is a head of broccoli. Some varieties are meant to sprout new heads after harvesting, but the Walther variety I grew didn’t. I got a nice big head but comparative to the plant, which was about a metre tall and hogging garden space, it was a tad disappointing.
  I haven’t given up on you, broccoli. I would like to try broccolini as I think you’d get more, smaller harvests. I’d also like to try kai-lan, an asian vegetable which incidentally is the ‘other half’ of the broccoli / kai-lan cross pollination that creates broccolini.
• 

  Hangover cure: just add steam, butter and pepper.

  Carrots
  I have to admit that I have had limited success with carrots. I have found that the green heads grow very well, but that the roots are under developed. They can pass as baby carrots, but they seem to get bitter because they have been in the ground so long. I’m told that the problem is due to too much nitrogen, which promotes rapid leaf growth at the expense of developing strong roots.
  I have tried again this year. I planted the seed direct (root veggies resent re-potting or anything that interferes with their roots). I had mixed it with sand because they are so small, and this helps to get more even spacing between seeds. I had also added a few radish seeds to this mixture as radish are famously quick to sprout, grow and harvest. This helps as the radish pop up well before the carrots and help to show you where the carrots are.

• Swede (turnip) and kohl rabi
  I am new to these guys, so I won’t pretend I know how to grow them. What I can tell you is what they are and why I have chosen them for the winter garden. Turnips are those white, beetroot looking things that are usually put in soups or baked. I haven’t really cooked with them and I’m not even sure I know what they taste like. However, they are a root veg, are apparently relatively easy to grow and I am hoping for some success. They are also brassicas, but cultivated for their root.
  Kohl rabi are another brassica. Brassicas are like the dogs of the veggie patch. They seem able to be shaped into anything a gardener wants. Kale and cabbage are grown for their leaves, broccoli for their flowers and turnips for their roots. Were dogs a bad analogy? Maybe playdough. Kohl rabi take it a step further. Maybe a step to far, because they are certainly weird looking. They were cultivated to make an alien looking bulbous stem… thing (tumour? elephantitis?) just above the ground. This is the bit that’s eaten, and it is apparently eaten like a turnip. I thought it was weird enough to give it a red hot go. After all, I really do like the brassica family.

In a later post, I will describe how I prepared and planted my winter patch. I’ll also post on winter garden recipes as I start bringing in my bounty. Perhaps in future I will dedicate whole posts to my favourite veggies, so stay tuned.