It’s time to cut my asparagus back. The fronds have turned yellow, indicating to me that photosynthesis has ceased and the plants have begun to store starch in their root system to provide energy for what author Barbara Kingsolver calls “a phallic send-up when winter starts to break”.

Canned, supermarket asparagus bears such faint resemblance to the freshly picked version that you could be forgiven for believing that they are completely different vegetables. Come to think of it, they might as well be. The tinned stuff is mushy, high in salt, is usually imported from overseas and tastes horrible. Home grown asparagus, eaten within hours of being picked, is firm, glossy, full of nutrients and has a unique flavour that is both sweet and earthy.

Every food gardener should grow some asparagus, but for some unknown reason, the plant is shrouded in mystery. The industry group Asparagus Australia describes asparagus as a difficult plant to grow. This is complete nonsense. The opposite is true. Asparagus is an easy vegie for the home grower, which makes me wonder whether the reputation for being difficult is a myth propagated by commercial growers keen to protect their own patch.

Like any vegie, you’ll get the best results from asparagus when you make an effort to learn the basic science behind the plant. The very first thing to understand is that asparagus is a perennial. Unlike annual plants, which complete their life cycle in a single growing season or year, and biennials, that complete their life cycle in two years, perennials live for at least two years, often many more. In the case of asparagus, cropping can continue for as much as twenty years.

Drill down a bit further, and you’ll learn that asparagus is a herbaceous perennial. This means that it grows actively though the warmer months of the year, goes dormant as temperatures drop in autumn, and dies back to a permanent root system or “crown”. Being native to Europe, northern Africa and western Asia, asparagus needs a cold winter to to induce dormancy, making it a plant ideal for the coldest areas across Toowoomba and the Downs.

You can grow asparagus from seed, but because the plant is dioecious (produces male and female reproductive organs on separate plants), you’ll end up with about half female seedlings. Male plants produce the best spears, so the traditional way to get started is by purchasing dormant, two-year-old male crowns in winter. The standard variety is Australia is ‘Mary Washington’, which is stocked during winter by most nurseries and mail order suppliers such as the Diggers Club and Green Harvest.

To produce the fattest, most succulent spears, asparagus needs to be given the royal treatment. Bearing in mind that your asparagus bed will produce crops for two decades or more, you should begin preparations at least a month prior to planting. Select a sunny site with good natural drainage, and work the soil over well, incorporating a generous amount of well rotted manure, some compost, and if drainage is likely to be a problem, some coarse sand and gypsum. A double handful per square metre of blood and bone or pelletised poultry manure won’t go astray either. Water the bed, mulch it, then give the soil a few weeks to settle.

When you’re ready to plant, start by digging a trench about twenty centimetres deep. Form a ridge about 15cm tall running down the length of the trench, then drape the asparagus crowns over the ridge so that the roots hang down on either side like inverted mop heads. Space the plants about 30 cm apart. Work quickly to ensure the crowns don’t dry out while exposed to the air, then backfill, making sure there’s good contact between the plant roots and the soil. Water it all in with some seaweed extract.

Problem is, it will feel like a lifetime before you can harvest your first spears. In the first spring after planting, my advice is to leave the spears alone. They will grow on to produce fronds, and in turn, the fronds will collect solar energy during summer which will feed the crown and help it to bulk up. Cut the fronds back to the ground in early winter once they have yellowed. In the second spring after planting, harvest no more than half the spears. In the spring following you’ll be able to cut spears to your heart’s content.

I reckon you’re missing out if you settle for tinned asparagus. It’s about as junky as junk food gets. And besides, if you grow your own, you get to do what garden writer Monty Don suggests – “ spit in the eye of the seasonless food industry and its joyless inducements of year round treats”.

First published in the Toowoomba Chronicle 18 June 2011. Photo by Susy Morris via flickr.com.

If you like your springs cool, wet and lush, then the season just passed was for you. I’ve been in horticultural heaven for 12 beautiful weeks. Every day I look at the garden with disbelief, marvelling at just how well plants can grow when the soil’s moist and temperatures hover in the low 20’s for weeks on end. In our part of the world, spring usually arrives rushed and flustered. But this year, it’s as if spring has been holidaying on a tropical island and is reluctant to get back to everyday life. It’s been relaxed, and that suits me fine.

There are downsides to every season, however. Because this spring has been so cool, many plants have grown slowly. In my garden, I reckon we’re about a month to six weeks behind we’re we usually are at the end of November – I’m starting to wonder whether summer might take the rest of the year off.

In the vegie garden plants that are usually in full production are just getting going. The potatoes are on track for a Christmas harvest, but tomatoes planted after our mid-October frost are still only a couple of feet tall. The corn hasn’t flowered. Climbing beans are still reaching for the top of their trellis. Real heat lovers like capsicums and eggplants are piddling along. On the flip side are peas. They usually stop flowering once temperatures are consistently above 24 degrees or so, but this year they’re still pumping out white blooms and ripening juicy fat pods. There’ll be freshly shelled peas on the table for Christmas lunch.

If your patch is doing something similar to mine, my suggestion is to seize the day by viewing the cooler conditions as the perfect chance to practice succession planting. For those who’ve never heard the term before, it describes the practice of sowing small amounts of the same vegetable in succession throughout the growing season. The aim of succession planting is to provide a continual harvest over an extended period.

One of the mistakes many home growers make is to emulate commercial farmers. It’s understandable, because the sole agricultural model most people have had limited exposure to is the notion that a crop is planted all at once, grown on, and then harvested all at once. This model suits commercial growers. But for backyard food production, imitation of commercial food production means gluts.

In her excellent 2007 book Animal, Vegetable Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver writes amusingly about her family’s annual glut of tomatoes.

“At what point did we realise we were headed for a family tomato harvest of 20 percent of a tonne? We had a clue when they began to occupy every horizontal surface in our kitchen. For a serious gardener, the end of summer is when you walk into the kitchen and see red.”

If it’s not tomatoes, it’s beans or zucchini. “All dinner guests were required to eat squash,” says Kingsolver “and then take some home in plastic sacks.”

To avoid these type of gluts isn’t easy, even for experienced vegie gardeners, but with a bit of discipline and favourable conditions, it’s more than possible. The secret for most crops is to grow from seed, and to sow it at regular intervals in small quantities. A new sowing of fast growers like lettuces, Asian greens and rocket can be made every couple of weeks, so that by the time the first row is harvested, a new row is nearing maturity. Because you’re sowing lots of seed you need access to reliable water or rainfall, and overcast conditions like those we’re set to enjoy over the next few months help ensure even germination.

For slower growing vegies, succession planting might be as simple as making an early sowing, and a late one. I do this with crops like potatoes, corn, and beans with good success. If the weather cooperates, I might even squeeze in a third sowing of a fast maturing variety late in summer, timed to just beat the first frosts of autumn.

Fruit bearing crops such as tomatoes and pumpkins can be induced to bear progressively over a long season through a process similar to deadheading annual flowers or roses. By constantly picking just ripe fruit, you essentially prevent plants from reproducing. They will respond by sending forth new flushes of flowers, and in a matter of weeks, a fresh crop of fruit will be ready to pick.

It might turn out to be a wet Christmas this year, but there’s no point in whinging about it. Every season has its success and failure, its highs and lows. I’m determined to make the most of what’s on offer, and if that means sowing packet after packet of seeds, I say bring it on!

First published in the Toowoomba Chronicle 4th December 2010. Photo by Justin Russell, Thistlebrook veg patch, Nov 2010.

As a dedicated home fruit and vegie grower, there’s one question I get asked more often than any other: when you can buy something for a dollar or two a kilo in the shops, why would you bother growing it at home? Cue the exasperated gardener with a look of shock on his face. Why would you bother! Why wouldn’t you bother is more like it, and I’ll give you one simple reason amongst many – flavour.

Take carrots for example. They seem like such ho-hum things, but they illustrate the basic contrast between home grown and store bought food. A bag of conventionally grown carrots from the supermarket is dirt cheap. A bed of home grown carrots will cost about the same, all told, but there’s one clear point of difference. The shop bought carrots are never going to come close to matching home grown carrots eaten within an hour or two of being pulled.

There’s a simple reason for this difference: Home grown carrots are tastier because they’re genuinely fresh. So I bother growing them. Admittedly, they aren’t the easiest vegie to grow well, but don’t ever fall for the con that they aren’t worth the effort. If you get a few key parts of the process right, you’ll be pulling tapered orange (or purple, yellow or white) roots from the vegie patch quicker than Bugs Bunny can say “What’s up Doc?”.

The first step in growing good carrots is to prepare a loose, deeply dug soil without any added nitrogen-based fertilisers. The chief complaint of home carrot growers is that their roots are forking. The technical term for this is “bifurcating”, and it’s primarily caused by soil that’s too shallow, too hard or too rich in nutrients. I always sow carrot seed after a crop of nitrogen hungry brassicas.

The next step is to sow carrots directly into their final growing position. The big nurseries will be on my case about this, but if you buy carrot seedlings, you’re being ripped off because carrots hate being transplanted. I’ve tried, and it proved an utter waste of money. I should have spent a few dollars on some good heirloom seed and sown it direct in either early spring or late summer, like I do now.

Carrot seed is very fine. It can be hard to get an even sowing, so an effective method is to combine carrot seed with really dry sand in a jar. Make shallow furrows in the soil with a rake handle or garden stake, and sprinkle the seed mix evenly along the row. You’ll get reasonable spacings as a result. Once the seed has been sown, it’s a game of patience. Carrot seed can take up to two weeks to germinate, but while you’re waiting, it’s vital that the seed bed is kept evenly moist. Daily watering is essential, and it can help to cover the bed in 50 percent shadecloth to help keep the ground damp until seedlings appear.

Thinning is the next important step. Leave about five to ten centimetres between each individual plant, and feed the thinnings to your chooks or if they’re big enough, steam them lightly as baby carrots. You don’t have to thin. But by doing so you’ll enjoy bigger roots that mature quicker because of the reduced competition. Speaking of competition, it’s also important to keep carrots weed free.

Finally, there are a couple of tricks to harvesting carrots. The first is to loosen the soil around the root to make it easier to pull, then once the carrot is out of the ground you should immediately snap off the foliage. I know they look pretty in the supermarkets with the leaves still attached, but let me assure you – the supermarkets are slow learners. By snapping the leaves off you stop transpiration, which means that the bit you actually want to eat, the root, retains moisture and stays beautifully crisp.

As for varieties, my favourite is ‘Purple Dragon’, which has fairly large roots with a purple skin and orange, spicy flavoured roots. I’ve also had excellent results with ‘Royal Chantenay’, which gets big and fat, and ‘St Valery’ which is long and slender. Peter Cundall knows his carrots, and swears by ‘Manchester Table’ and the rare Serbian heirloom ‘Lubyana’. These heirloom varieties are all available from the various seed suppliers including Diggers, The Lost Seed, and Eden Seeds.

I love my carrots. They’re satisfying things to grow, and for the price of a packet or two of seed, you’ll be rewarded with carrots that are tastier, healthier, and more interesting than any of the uniform but perfectly bland excuses for a vegetable you’ll find in the shops. Give ‘em a go and reap the benefits.

First published in the Toowoomba Chronicle 18th September 2010. Photo by Mason Masteka via flickr.

More than any other, September is a month brimming with potential. For backyard food enthusiasts the main growing season stretches out ahead like a long untravelled highway, and here, at the start of the road, expectations are high. The Southern Oscillation index is consistently positive, which means that there’s a decent chance of getting above average rainfall during our traditional dry season. Increased cloudiness means the dust storms and heat waves of last spring are less likely. I’m hoping for a bumper end to the year.

To provide the best opportunity of reaping a mighty harvest, there’s one essential September job to do before putting fork to soil, and that’s to plan out my crop rotation for the months ahead. Lots of gardeners see this type of planning as a bit “Type A personality”, a kind of administrative cop out that makes a poor substitute for practical action. Well, contrary to the opinions of some, I’m your classic Type B. I haven’t worn a tie since my wedding day and prefer a relaxed approach to most aspects of life. But if there’s one thing I won’t skimp on in the garden it’s a proper crop rotation.

My underlying reasoning for this otherwise atypical behaviour is simply that the vegie patch is unique in that it’s a hard working garden. It exists to produce abundant crops. Without a planned crop rotation, productivity would gradually decrease, problems with pests and diseases would increase, and the building block of the garden – soil – would eventually be little more than a growing medium dependant on artificial chemicals. By implementing a rotation, I avoid growing the same plant family in the same bed for more than two seasons in a row, depriving pests and diseases of their favourite host plant and preventing long term infestations.

So let’s start with the basics. The simplest crop rotation is legume-brassica-root (I think of it as “LBR”), that is, a crop of leguminous plants such as peas and beans followed by a crop of brassicas such as broccoli and cabbage, followed by a crop of roots such as carrots and parsnips, all moving through a single bed over the course of a year. There’s an important reason for this LBR sequence – it maximises production. Legumes suck nitrogen from the air and fix it in their soil, which helps feed nitrogen hungry brassicas. In turn, brassicas use up most of the nitrogen in the bed, creating perfect conditions for root crops, which need little nitrogen and tend to fork if conditions are too fertile. Crop rotation is a symbiotic, tried and true means of husbanding a productive piece of land.

When I designed my garden, I planned it around the basic legume-brassica-root rotation. There are eight main beds in total, which allows for two LBR sequences to be running at the same time, with extra room for “catch” crops like tomatoes and corn. The central bed in my vegie patch is planted with herbs and three long narrow beds around the outside borders contain perennial crops such as rhubarb, asparagus, grapes, and strawberries.

From a crop rotation point of view, I divide the year into three parts: spring and early summer; late summer and autumn; and winter. At the start of each of these periods I print out a plan of my vegie garden, compare it to last season’s plan, and then plot out my rotation for the months ahead using the basic LBR sequence.

Then, with paper plan in hand I head to the vegie garden and get the appropriate beds prepped for the new round for crops. Those that like an alkaline soil get some dolomite lime, gross feeders get some rotted manure and blood and bone, other beds get some potash to help with flowering. Carrots, one of the more important vegetables in my household, get special treatment with a finely dug bed. This gives their long, tapering roots plenty of room to grow deep into the earth and resist drought.

If you’re new to growing your own vegies, or a laidback Type B personality like me, this kind of planning probably sounds like complete gobbledygook. My advice is to plan (preferably on paper), practice and be patient. It takes a while to really get the hang of a rotation system that will work in your garden, but eventually it will become second nature. And guess what? You’re vegies will love you for being such a disciplined gardener. They’ll be bigger, healthier, and best of all, the tastiest things you’ve ever shovelled into your mouth.

First published in the Toowoomba Chronicle 4th September, 2010. Photo by Justin Russell – Thistlebrook vegie patch.

Mention the words “winter vegetable garden” and one plant immediately springs to mind – the humble, and much maligned cabbage. I picture ornamental rows of big ruby red drumhead varieties, all standing bravely against the worst weather that a Darling Downs winter can bring. There’s one problem with this image though. It’s the sight of slimy, boiled cabbage being unceremoniously dumped onto a dinner plate beside slices of corned beef. To me, it looked and tasted like boiled seaweed. Don’t even mention the “wind”.

Do you share my dilemma? On the one hand, I love the look of a winter garden full of cabbages. On the other hand, I absolutely loathe eating the things. Since my gardening philosophy is to concentrate on growing what the family likes to eat, I’m very choosy about the cabbage varieties I grow, and of the few that make the cut, most of the plant will end up in the gizzard of a chook. Fortunately, they don’t share the same sense of repulsion.

I’m probably being a bit unfair to what is actually a valuable, nutrient-rich vegetable. Half the problem was that my Mum, who is otherwise a first-class cook, probably didn’t know how to cook it. Maybe it’s a hereditary thing. Mum is of Scottish descent and I guess that meant that vegies were either roasted or boiled. If she was Irish, I might have scored colcannon. If she was German, sauerkraut would have been the go. Even bubble and squeak would have gone down alright. But boiled it was.

There I go again, deriding an innocent vegetable. Poor thing. Let’s see if I can put the image of boiled seaweed out of my head and highlight some of the cabbage’s good points. For one, it is about the hardiest winter vegetable there is. Cabbages, and their closely related cousins the kales and choys, contain natural anti-freeze which allows them to easily cope with frosts down to minus 10 or lower.

I wasn’t kidding when I said that cabbages are packed with nutrients. They are particularly high in Vitamin C, making them useful for warding off winter ills, and also have high levels of calcium, fibre and Omega-3 fatty acids. There’s evidence to suggest that cabbages can help prevent cancer due to their high levels of antioxidants.

Neither was I kidding about ornamental value. The crinkly leaves of savoy cabbages are especially beautiful, and red drumhead varieties look good when backlit by a low winter sun. Some of rocket-shaped sugarloaf cabbages look pretty, but my favourite of the lot is Tuscan kale or cavolo nero. The Italian name translates as “black cabbage” and indeed, the foliage combines an unusually dark, slate green colour with lance-shaped, savoy leaves.

The other good thing about cavolo nero, is that it’s actually edible. Delicious in fact. I like it pan-fried in olive oil with chopped bacon and garlic, then mixed through mashed potato. Maggie Beer does a lovely looking bruschetta with cavolo nero, and describes it as “a rustic dish for which I would travel miles.” Perhaps I do like eating cabbages after all.

There are three rules to bear in mind when growing cabbages, and any related members of the Brassicaceae family such as broccoli, cauliflower and rocket. The first is that they love rich, well drained soil. Manure heavily, add well rotted compost, and plant cabbages after a crop of nitrogen fixing legumes (beans or peas). The second is that cabbages appreciate a sweet soil, so incorporate about a handful of dolomite lime per square metre to raise the pH if required.

Finally, time your crop to mature when the weather is cool. Considering that spring on the Downs can be warm and dry, the best time to plant cabbages is in autumn, with harvest occurring progressively through winter. It’s not too late to get some plants in now. Brassicas grow easily from seed, and this is a good way to experiment with some of the old fashioned varieties. Depending on the variety, you might need to plant as far as half a metre apart.

Pests are few. Possums will eat the tender young leaves, but the main enemy of most brassica growers are those frustratingly persistent cabbage white butterflies. Their numbers are much reduced during winter, but in warmer areas, you have two choices to keep them at bay: netting the plants, or spraying with non-toxic “Bt” (Bacillus thuringiensis, sold as Dipel).

There you go – cabbages are a virtuous plant after all. Does this mean that I’ll be filling my patch with them? Probably not. I’ll always find room for cavolo nero and stuff like bok choy, but I still can’t come at the big drumheads. By all means give them a go, but for me, the sight of slimy boiled cabbage has left a permanent scar.

First published in the Toowoomba Chronicle 12th June 2010. Photo by Justin Russell – Tuscan Kale or Cavolo Nero.

I was tidying my office the other day in one of my semi-regular attempts to regain control of the mountains of paper that end up on my desk. What I hadn’t accounted for was the number of plant labels that had found a home beside the computer and under a stack of gardening magazines.

I keep all the labels from purchased plants as a reference. If I were to pull out the file they reside in and add them all up, I suppose there would be hundreds, probably thousands of individual labels describing hundreds of different plants species. They’re not always accurate, often carrying an incorrect botanical name or providing dodgy cultural advice, but they’re worth hanging on to nonetheless. You never know when you might need to refer to one.

Anyway, while tidying up the labels it got me thinking about some of my favourite plants. Apples top the list. I am, after all, the grandson of a man raised in Herefordshire, one of the world’s great apple growing regions. Salvias are up there. So are ornamental grasses, pear trees, roses and grevilleas. But one group of plants I’ve developed a recent affection for are berries.

I guess much of the enthusiasm is for the fruit, but I also have a genuine appreciation for the plants and their culture. I’m one of these weird people who has a dedicated berry patch in the garden, and because I enjoy training plants, one of my favourite jobs is to tie the raspberry canes to a wire trellis to keep them in some semblance of order and to make for easier picking.

And let me assure you, there will be plenty of picking. Raspberries in particular produce large yields of fruit for the small amount of space they require. My plants take up about six square metres, yet produce scores of punnets of plump, organically grown, absolutely delectable fruit. The kids graze on them most mornings, relatives and visitors to the garden always want a sample (one family likened the taste to raspberry cordial!), and still there are copious amounts of fruit to be picked. Blackberries are even more productive, but depending on the variety take up more space.

If berries are so productive and easy to grow, why do so few people have a berry patch in the backyard? I think one reason is the perception that cane berries can be invasive. This is true to some extent. Blackberries grow in wild thickets just down the road from my house, and left untended, they’d perform similarly in a garden setting. Raspberries sucker like mad. Some growers plant them in a contained bed, but the suckers are easy to dig up and provide plenty of new plants to give away. And while it’s true that some blackberries have vicious thorns, that’s never stopped rose growers and varieties such as ‘Waldo’ are thorn free.

I think the other reason people don’t grow them much is that they have a reputation for being cold climate plants. Again, this is only half true. Some raspberries and blackberries need cold winters to set fruit, but autumn fruiting raspberries such as the variety ‘Heritage’ tend to be low-chill. Plus, the red soils of Toowoomba, Highfields, Hampton and so on are ideal. Berries prefer rich, slightly acid soil and above all, excellent drainage.

The third reason most people don’t grow them is due to a perception that they’re hard to grow and need special training. Again, half true. Get the soil right (see above but also add lots of organic matter prior to planting), give them an aspect with full or morning sun, and a bit of water when dry, and you’re half way there. Training is a bit trickier, but not much.

Raspberries are classed as either summer or autumn fruiting. Summer varieties produce flowers (and therefore fruit) on second-year wood called floricanes. In the first year, these are called primocanes. Pruning is done in autumn and consists simply of cutting out all floricanes than have finished fruiting, leaving the pale green coloured primocanes to produce next summer’s crop. Blackberries are dealt with in a similar fashion. Autumn fruiting raspberries are even simpler. In winter you just cut all the canes back to ground level. They’ll shoot again in spring, and produce fruit on one year old wood.

Why buy those expensive packets of frozen berries from the supermarket when you can easily grow your own berries at home? In my view berries ought to be considered an essential plant in all but the warmest parts of the Downs. They deserve a bit of space alongside those other ubiquitous plants of the Aussie backyard, the lemon tree and the passionfruit vine.

First published in The Chronicle 30th January 2010. Photo by Justin Russell.

Strawberries are an integral part of my family history. I grew up at Birkdale, a bay side suburb in Brisbane that is now wall to wall housing estates but 25 years ago, was one of south east Queensland’s major food bowls. I remember it as a landscape of rich red soil, coastal streams running freely into the bay, and small farms growing everything from gladioli to passionfruit. Strawberries were a staple crop in the area because of its ideal growing conditions.

There’s also a more personal connection with the strawberry. My Mum’s late father, Douglas Fleming, worked a large market garden at Manly West and one of his major crops was strawberries. Sunday lunch at Grandma and Pa’s house was always a bit nondescript – Grandma had a penchant for burning the roast – but dessert was a thing of beauty and simplicity. A bowl full of fat “berries”, dusted with icing sugar, and served with vanilla ice cream. Superb! I’ll always associate Pa with strawberries.

I don’t know whether it’s in my blood or just a fluke, but this season has produced the best crop of berries I’ve grown to date. The plants are loaded with fruit. A new flush of flowers means that we’ll be enjoying berries with icing sugar for a couple of months yet. My one-year-old son Fergus wanders through the garden picking every half ripe strawberry he spots, calling eagerly to his brother and sister to come and share the harvest. Rarely do they knock him back, since kids seem to have an innate attraction to strawberries.

The wild or alpine strawberry, Fragaria vesca, is known in France as “fraises des bois” (fraze da bwa). This translates as strawberries of the woods and in appropriate conditions wild strawberries can be found growing all over Europe, from Iceland to the balmy shores of the Mediterranean. In my experience fraises des bois is an adaptable plant that will grow happily in quite hot conditions with plenty of sun – a division given to me by a neighbour is growing beautifully in a north facing bed as a groundcover beneath old roses. I haven’t tasted the fruit yet, but my wife (who nicks them before I have the chance) tells me that they have a silky texture and a sweet/sharp balance that’s more intense than the garden strawberry. Fraises des bois might be tricky to come by, but it can be grown from seed. Definitely worth a try.

The common garden strawberry is a hybrid, Fragaria x ananassa. Its cosmopolitan heritage includes the Chilean strawberry, F. chiloensis, and the F. virginiana, a north American species that once covered vast tracts of open land on the US east coast. The fact that the garden strawberry prefers a warm, sunny position is reflected in its parentage, though like the wild European strawberry, good soil conditions are important.

Site your strawberry patch in an open position with soil that is very freely draining, and slightly acidic. The red ferrosol soils found along the escarpment are perfect, but if this isn’t your situation, try adding lots of compost and manure to your strawberry beds, and grow on a raised mound or in a tub to provide drainage. Black plastic was traditionally used as a disease and weed suppressant, though for home growers the better option is a decent mulch of sugarcane, pine needles, or straw. This will keep the fruit off the ground, keeping roots moist and cool.

Perhaps the main issue with strawberries is that they are prone to disease. Verticillium wilt is a problem, and plants shouldn’t be grown where tomatoes or potatoes have been for at least five years. Fungal diseases are rarely fatal but can ruin a bumper crop. Try spraying with a milk spray or something like potassium bicarbonate (EcoRose). Always start your patch with certified virus free plants from a nursery, and to really stay on top of disease, replace your plants every four years. This is easily achieved by replanting runners, ideally into fresh ground, and discarding the old plants. Slugs love strawberries, so keep them in check with beer traps, or non-toxic snail pellets made from EDTA.

A final word of warning: strawberries are perhaps the most irresistible plant in the garden, and have a habit of disappearing before they ever reach the kitchen. The usual suspects are kids. Well and good I say, and another reason to grow your plants organically. Nothing is quite as gratifying as seeing a toddler wandering through the strawberry patch, picking berry after plump berry, popping them straight into the mouth still warm from the sun. If there’s any fruit left over, you might even like to try it yourself.

First published in The Chronicle 3rd October 2009. Photo by Lily Zhu via flickr.com.

Rhubarb seems to be one of those plants that gardeners either love or hate. I fall in the former category. I could go on about how I appreciate the plant for its ornamental qualities, what with its big bold leaves and stunning red stems, but I’d be only half telling the truth. In reality, the reason I love rhubarb is simple – it’s the key ingredient, alongside apples, in one of my favourite desserts.

Rhubarb’s eating qualities were actually discovered quite recently. For a couple of thousand years, the plant was cultivated solely for its medicinal qualities. Chinese herbalists used the root of wild rhubarb as a purgative, and Marco Polo wrote about the plant in the accounts of his travels through China. Not until 1778 did people learn that they could cook, and eat, the plant’s stems.

The rhubarb that we grow in our gardens is commonly thought to be a hybrid, Rheum x hybridum, and a number of cultivars are commonly available at this time of the year. ‘Ever Red’ is one of the best for smallish gardens or pots. It forms a compact plant with deep burgundy stems that are produced over an extended harvest period. Another old favourite is ‘Glaskin’s Perpetual’, a more vigorous plant with red to green stems. Not all rhubarbs are red though, and ‘Victoria’ is an old green variety that tastes just as good. In my garden I grow a local strain called ‘Highfields Ever Red’

Because it hails from northwestern China, Mongolia, Siberia and Tibet, rhubarb needs a cold winter to break dormancy. Temperatures below about five degrees Celsius will get the plant growing strongly in spring, but there’s a catch – rhubarb also prefers coolish summers. Grown in full sun, dry soil, and a hot climate, rhubarb will wilt quicker than an iceblock in the Sahara. My plants are tucked in to a sheltered border of the vegetable patch where they receive morning sun, but benefit from a full afternoon of shade in summer. Still, I find that on warm days deep watering a few times per week might be needed to keep the moisture in those big parasol leaves.

While rhubarb loves a reliable supply of moisture, the crown will quickly rot if conditions become waterlogged. So in addition to a rich soil, a must for growing great rhubarb is drainage. Work in plenty of organic matter such as rotted manure or compost prior to planting, but if your soil is heavy black clay, try using raised beds. If you’re still having trouble, consider planting rhubarb in a decent sized container filled with top quality potting mix. A half wine barrel is perfect.

The most difficult aspect of growing rhubarb has nothing to do with the plant itself, but everything to do with patience. Don’t harvest any stalks for at least a full year from planting. For the less temperate amongst you, or those who, like me, have an addiction to stewed rhubarb and apple, this waiting game will be excruciatingly hard. But it’s worth it. Give the young plant time to develop a decent sized crown, and you’ll be amply rewarded.

When harvest time finally rolls around, always ensure you gently pull the stems from the crown, rather than cutting. Cut stems create an ideal entry point for fungal attack, and in wet summers, this can lead to crown rot. Also, it’s important to not harvest too many stalks in a single summer. Leave about half to grow to maturity and develop full sized leaves, as these will feed the roots that provide next summer’s crop.

Pests are rarely a problem. Slugs and snails can wreak a bit of havoc with the leaves, but this is mostly an issue of cosmetics. Flavour is unaffected. In my garden possums are the main threat to our enjoyment of rhubarb and apple for dessert. Believe it or not, they manage to eat the leaves without being poisoned, and in the space of a week, entire plants can be chomped almost to ground level.

One final word of warning: rhubarb leaves are high in oxalic acid. In other words they’re poisonous, and if you manage to chew through around five kilograms of the things, they’ll probably kill you. Seriously though, it’s best to leave them to the possums, and make full use of the stems. Rhubarb and apple – I can taste it now!

First published by The Chronicle 15th August 2009. Image by Emily Barney via flickr.

First it was the Obamas. In March they ripped up a section of the White House lawn and planted an organic kitchen garden, the first of its kind since 1943 when Eleanor Roosevelt planted a Victory Garden in defiance of the US Department of Agriculture.

Then the Queen decided to join the Grow It Yourself revolution. Hers is a ten by eight metre “allotment” full of heirloom varieties with regal names like tomato Queen of Hearts and the beans Blue Queen and Royal Red. Like the Obamas, the Queen has eschewed the use of toxic chemicals, preferring home made compost and seaweed extract as fertilisers. It’s also the first vegetable garden at Buckingham Palace since World War II and though Her Majesty won’t don wellies and a scarf to work the garden personally, the vegetables are being harvested for use in the Palace kitchen.

Now it’s British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s turn. He’s planted a garden at 10 Downing Street. Though it’s mostly tended by the Royal Parks Agency, Brown’s wife Sarah and their 5-year-old son John, are particularly relishing the opportunity to grow berries and tomatoes. The produce harvested from the garden is sold in Downing Street’s cafeteria.

But what about our own Prime Minister Kevin Rudd? Is he joining the Browns, Obamas, Queen Elizabeth II and thousands of Australians by ripping out a section of lawn at The Lodge and planting an organic vegetable patch? Vegie growing legend and 2009 Australian of the Year nominee Peter Cundall proposed the idea to Kevin Rudd personally back in January, suggesting that he was willing to help the PM establish a six bed rotational garden similar to Pete’s Patch in Hobart.

“I’m looking around and I can see lawn and rose bushes,” said Pete. “I said to Mr Rudd, ‘I can’t believe it. What a disgrace! Where’s your vegie patch?”

At the time, Mr and Mrs Rudd apparently expressed a keen interest in the project. Cundall said to the PM that he’d like to see him digging spuds. But the self described farmer’s son, who likes to remind us of his frugal, agrarian roots, has since scotched the idea, citing Canberra’s ongoing drought as making the project impractical.

Following the exchange between Pete and the PM in January, the campaign for a vegie garden at The Lodge has grown legs. A “Kev’s Patch” website has been set up with the tagline “C’mon Kev, plant some veg.” Renowned cook Stephanie Alexander has offered her support. She is on a mission to set up kitchen gardens in school playgrounds right across the country, and argues that “it would be a great model for the rest of the country if they did follow the Obamas’ example and create a show garden that could be seen by the public.”

Here are three simple reasons why Kev’s Patch is a great idea. For one, it sets an example to the Australian public, and example setting is the most potent aspect of leadership there is. In Peter Cundall’s words, The Lodge “becomes a famous garden. It publicises the urgent need for people to grow their own. Let everyone see what can be done and it will inspire them to do the same.”

Second, Kev’s Patch would help elevate the global food crisis to the prominent position it warrants. The industrial food system is under severe strain around the world, yet in our country, it’s an issue that tends to go largely un-noticed, at least until the price of your favourite brand of cheese jumps by 10 percent compared to last week. Lots of people are on the hunt for solutions, yet the silver bullet is right under our noses – Grow It Yourself (GIY). Kev’s Patch would send a powerful message.

Finally, Kev’s Patch could offer a model of practical sustainability. The Obamas and the Queen haven’t chosen to go organic for the feel good factor. They want their gardens to demonstrate that it’s genuinely feasible to grow at least some of your own food by means that are energy efficient, water wise, and free of toxic chemicals.

I’m not silly enough to seriously believe that Mr and Mrs Rudd will get out and work in the patch themselves. They’ll need helpers. But you watch the volunteers emerge from the woodwork if they decide to give it a go. This is a project whose time has come. So c’mon Kev, plant some veg.

For more info on the Kev’s Patch campaign visit www.kevspatch.wordpress.com.

First published in The Chronicle 8th August 2009. Image courtesy Downing Street.

Despite being a big fan of small, traditional nurseries, I have to confess that on occasion, I visit the hardware behemoth in Toowoomba’s western suburbs to pick up gardening supplies. It’s almost impossible to resist a quick poke about the nursery while I’m there. Some interesting plants are sometimes unearthed – I’ve found things like a Beschorneria and a sought after Heuchera tucked away among a sea of shrubs – and sometimes I’ll go home with a punnet of veg seedlings for a quick result.

I was dumbfounded though when I visited the other week to notice that the range of vegies changes little from season to season. Customers galore were grabbing punnets of sweet corn, beans and tomatoes, but I’m yet to come across any locals who grow their own in a heated greenhouse. Therefore I get a bit annoyed. How much audacity does it take to sell frost tender plants to unsuspecting gardeners in the middle of a Darling Downs winter?

For those who caught last Saturday’s Secret Garden, you’ll hopefully be reminded that our part of the world can be prone to severe frosts. At the risk of stating the obvious, it’s not the time to be planting summer vegetables, even in the warmer eastern suburbs of Toowoomba, and even if you’re the ambitious type. You’ll almost inevitably do your dough. Worse still, the hardware behemoth and its suppliers will be laughing all the way to the bank.

I’ve learnt through hard won experience to play it safe. To garden traditionally. Winter vegetables are physically made for cold weather, so my advice is to ditch the tomatoes and buy a broccoli punnet instead.

Actually, any member of the Brassica genus will do the trick. These remarkable plants have natural antifreeze proteins in their leaves, and old timers believed that frost tolerance could be increased through an application of one cubic inch of salt per plant early in the growing season. The latter probably makes anecdotal sense. Wild cabbages can still be found growing on chalky sea cliffs in Britain, Wales and the Mediterranean, totally exposed to salt laden winds.

The species that is probably of most interest to home gardeners is Brassica oleracea, which includes cultivars like cabbages, broccoli, kale, Brussels sprouts and kohlrabi. My favourites of this bunch are broccoli and kale, and I especially like the heritage Italian varieties. Tuscan black kale, or ‘Cavalo Nero’ is about as ornamental as a vegetable gets in my opinion and ‘Di Cicco’ broccoli is superb eating. I always grow the odd cabbage as well, preferring ‘Ruby’ for its looks and ‘Sugarloaf’ for its substance.

Brassica rapa is the other main species of interest. It includes the Asian greens like bok choy, mibuna and mizuna, all easy plants to grow yet so versatile in the kitchen. My favourite of the lot is mizuna. It grows well from seed, and is a cut-and-come-again crop, renewing itself quickly after harvest with a fresh batch of pepper-infused leaves. It’s a knockout in a warm winter salad, like rocket but better. Another beauty is bok choy. It grows like a freight train, but is best picked when small and tender. Perfect in stir fries.

The biggest enemy of the brassicas is cabbage white butterfly. My kids think they’re pretty (as all butterflies are), but in reality, they’ll merrily chew your crop to stumps if you give them a chance. Thankfully, they’re less prevalent during winter. If control is necessary throw a fine weave net over the crops, or spray with Dipel, a product containing a natural bacterium that kills the caterpillars.

The next biggest enemy in my experience is the possum. This year they’ve massacred the broccoli and slaughtered the cabbage (don’t mention the rhubarb), so I strung up netting to protect those plants that were relatively untouched. The little blighters simply ate the plants through the holes. Wire cages are being planned as I write. It’s an aesthetically challenged solution, but I love my broccoli and have no desire to share with a marsupial, cute as it might look under torchlight.

I’m under no illusion that this column is likely to change the selling habits of the mother of all “big box” stores. So it’s up to us, fellow gardeners, to choose wisely. Traditional cold climate vegetables are traditional for a reason: they don’t fade to black as soon as the temperature hits zero. Grow some brassicas and you’ll not only eat well this winter, but save yourself money, and an ounce or two of disappointment in the bargain.

Edited version published in the Toowoomba Chronicle 27th June 2009. Photo by Justin Russell.