Winter Veggie Gardening

While Spring/Summer is no doubt the most prolific planting season for vegetables, winter does present a good opportunity to experiment with different varieties and build up your soil fertility for when Spring pops around.

A couple of my favourite winter crops are fennel and broad beans and they are both ideal for growing at this late stage of the autumn planting season.

Fennel: Fennel yields both a herb and a spice. All plant parts are edible: roots, stalks and leaves, with the spice coming from the dried seeds. As a herb, fennel leaves are used in French and Italian cuisine’s in sauces for fish and in mayonnaise. It's ideal for seasoning pork roasts and spicy sausages. Fennel leaves are a good substitute for dill, for which it can be cross pollinated with. It is picked as 'baby fennel' in winter because of its propensity to seed. Cooking with the root dilutes its spicy aniseed flavour and, believed to be a carminative (gas-relieving and gastrointestinal tract cramp-relieving agent), is a good swap for an onion in most home cooking.

Broad Beans: Broad beans have a long tradition of cultivation in Old World agriculture, being among the most ancient plants in cultivation and also among the easiest to grow. They are still often grown as a cover crop to prevent erosion over winter and because as a legume, they fix nitrogen in the soil which will help your summer crop of tomatoes that are very nitrogen hungry. They are best eaten young; I suggest fried in olive oil with paprika, garlic and fennel.
Broad beans are rich in L-dopa, a substance used medically in the treatment of Parkinson's disease. L-dopa is also a natriuretic agent, which might help in controlling hypertension. Interestingly, some also cite a link between L-dopa production and the human libido! 

A Mature Veggie Patch

This courtyard was transformed in August last year and has now become a small permaculture garden, incorporating a vegetable garden, fruit trees and a chicken coup.

While the fruit trees are still some seasons away from producing good fruit, the chooks lay eggs daily and the small veggie patch is thriving.

New Posts Coming......

It's been a long time in between posts. After holidays, extreme heat, bushfires and crashed computers we're getting back on track. Watch this space for:

- Photos of our maturing veggie gardens
- Useful growing tips
- Seasonal recipes
- What people enjoy most about their veggie gardens?

Stay tuned.

Learn from experience

The best way to learn about growing vegetables and understand how your garden operates is through your own or others' experiences. Once you have a couple of growing seasons under your belt you will be better able to identify common pests that baffled you last season and the current needs of your plants. You should never pass by the opportunity to learn from the masters, those that have lived and breathed veggie growing for not only seasons, but decades on end.

I recently took the opportunity for my Italian grandma (La Nonna) to puruse my veggie patch in Northcote. Now not only is the garden spotless but she's passed on some useful tips that i'm eager to experiment with and learn for myself. One tip is to tie the garlic foilage in knots near harvest time to increase the size of the bulbs. Garlic is notoriously hard to grow to size so the theory behind tying the foilage is the impede foilage growth which then passes growth to where we desire it - the bulbs. I'll be tying off half, leaving the rest as standards and then reporting the results.

Action Photos

WORK-IN-PROGRESS

We've been busy laying the groundwork for veggie gardens around Melbourne, and now coming into spring we're praying for sunny days and rainy nights so we can get the work done. We'll try as best we can to document some of the work.

Here is one patch that we thought looked great nestled amongst the old garden plants.

In case you're getting bored with displays of veggie gardens, here are some links that make interesting reading. One is to an article re the Kitchen Garden program that Stephaine Alexander champions - teaching kids the processes involved in growing and then eating your own food. A great and much needed initiative considering our obesity crisis and also simply for the enjoyment of good/natural food. www.theage.com.au/news/epicure/sowing-the-seeds/2008/08/24/1219516263720.html


Another worth a look at is http://coolmelbourne.org
As it states, coolmelbourne is "the one-stop info-shop for all things environmental, inpirational, practical and sustainable".

These are from a veggie patch we installed late May. The climbing peas happily making their journey; the beetroot shining with health and check out the monster radish! Trust me, that finger being used as a size comparison is gigantic!