Our garden has been looking like a wasteland with the pumpkins matured and ready for harvesting and the tomatoes at their end. So, time for some action – clearing it all up and preparing our beds for winter crops.
Firstly, the pumpkins.
Make sure you include a good-sized stalk when cutting them off their vines. This is essential for good storage. This is from three pumpkin plants and is not too bad an offering.
Rob tells me that more rewarding in the long-storing category than Whangaparaoa Crown (the grey-skinned ones) are the varieties Ironbark and Jarrahdale. These ones have a much tougher skin than Crown varieties but are tastier. Will store that away for next year.
So to prepare for storage, I make up a solution of a loose cupful of baking soda in a bucket of water and douse each pumpkin in this alkaline mix. Then pop each one in a slightly slanting position (so if it rains, the water will run off) for around 10 days to harden the skins.
Rob puts his on the slanting roof of his shed, but we don’t have such a spot. When you come to storing them, ideally you put them on a bed of straw or something similarly soft, so there’s no point of contact with anything as that’s where rot will set in.
It takes a bit of clearing out of the vines of the pumpkins and tomatoes and getting rid of weeds, but look at all the good biomass you have to eventually make a hot compost.
Here’s the result of our last hot compost heap which we’re about to use.
I’ve ended up with two big empty beds (where the tomatoes were) and three half-sized empty beds. The winter crops are just sown and about four weeks away from planting out, so we take the opportunity to top up these spaces and cover them to let the worms and other soil microbes have a party. When we lift the covers, the beds will be fizzing with goodness and all ready to plant in.
I’m putting this winter’s onions in the lower old tomato bed, so an application of our multi-mineral Morganics fertiliser and some of our own homemade hot compost is all that goes in here (no nitrogenous fertilisers like chicken manure since we want the focus to be on root growth).
I have leafy greens planned for the half-sized beds, so in goes chicken manure, our multi-mineral fertiliser and our hot compost. Use more compost than this if you have it.
I cover these beds with cardboard and weigh it down with bricks.
In this top bed, I use the vermicast from our Hungry Bin worm farm as the compost. I always trench the vermicast (even though in this case it’ll be covered, but old habits die hard) due to the birds going crazy for it. Then on goes chicken manure, multi-mineral fertiliser and it gets the little bit of weed matting we have as cover. We’re keeping the flowers and basil round the edges while they last.
Our climbing sugar snap peas are ready for planting out and they’re going in where the sunflowers were. They’re not particularly hungry plants, so just a little dollop of compost and a handful of Morganics and in they go.
As mentioned, I’ve sown the good old staple winter brassicas – red cabbage, green cabbage, broccoli (heading and sprouting), and cauliflower. (Remember in warmer climates Broccoli ‘Marathon’ and Cauliflower ‘All Year Round’ are the reliable varieties). And another batch of lettuces, rocket and bok choy. Remember to wash your old punnets out in white vinegar to sterilise them before re-using and write the date you sow your seeds on the back of the marker, so you know when to give up and start again if seeds don’t germinate. And make sure your seed-raising mix (we just sieve potting mix) is damp but not too damp.
Speaking of bok choy, they are a magnificent-looking plant when slugs and snails and birds don’t get to them first. Traditionally they’re eaten lightly steamed, but Nadia Lim chops them up raw as part of a salad and that’s how we prefer to eat them now.
Harvesting at the right time is an art in itself. You can see how our rock melons tell us when they’re ready!
And here’s a little home video of Rob pruning my plum tree (if you missed it on social media). Sound is pretty bad, but the pictures tell the story!
Happy autumn gardening from
Jan and Rob
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One Response
Thankyou for the plum tree pruning. Very clear and straight forward.