Patience is a virtue
Possess it if you can
Seldom found in women
Ne'er in a man ...
My grandmother often used to recite that 1360s verse from William Langland's* Piers Ploughman, usually at an "are we there yet" moment.
I've been surrounded by impatient gardeners this week, refraining them from racing out to buy seedlings for their spring and summer garden beds long before almost any seed should hit the ground, unless that ground is a seed-raising mixture on a sunny windowsill.
This is a time to cultivate patience, not corn, basil and tomatoes. Do not plant yet! Or not tomatoes, corn, melons etc. Seed will rot in cold soil. Seedlings will die in cold nights. Carrot and parsley seed won't rot, but the ants will steal it before it germinates, as their larders are emptying about now. A few canny birds may also associate your gardening activities with a sudden bounty of garden seeds.
Wait. Or if you don't want to wait, try these:
- Onions. There is still enough winter weather left to plant onions, including spring onions, mild red onions or deliciously sweet 'flat white' onions you can usually only find if you grow your own. (Avoid the slow growing brown onions till next winter.)
- Garlic, broad beans, choko, peas, snow peas and 'eat the them pod and all' peas and even sweet peas can also be planted now. You won't get as big a harvest as you would have if they'd been planted in Autumn, but it should still be a good one. Look for the 'leafless' podding pea varieties - they just twine and bloom and give the greatest abundance of peas of any variety, possibly because most of the nutrients can head for the pea pods.
- More 'winter plantings' of asparagus plants, rhubarb and artichokes sets, Jerusalem artichokes, strawberries berries can all go in now, to quench your garden longings;
- Spuds. Potatoes are too big for even a regiment of ants to carry off, and unless you have a drunk goanna, they'll stay where they are put. (A goanna who'd just eaten fermented peaches once thought the quarter acre of spuds I'd just planted were eggs, as seed potatoes are slightly the same colour as brown eggs and vaguely egg shaped. She dug up every single one, bit them, then spat them out. We didn't get any spuds till late that year.)
Potatoes have the endearing habit of not rotting in cold soil, unless it's deeply frozen, a problem we don't have. Potatoes won't begin to grow till the temperature is right.
Flower seeds are hardier, with a greater chance of just sitting there till they feel it's time to grow. Snails and slugs, however, seem to love flower seedlings even more than lettuces. You can wake up to find an entire row of cosmos or strawflowers has vanished down snail gullets.
What is the right temperature to plant? There is no one answer, as various flowers and veg germinate at different soil temperatures. But any of the traditional spring veg plantings need at least 12 degrees before they'll grow. If you lack a soil thermometer - as most people do - dig a 10cm hole and feel the soil. Cold to touch? Don't plant. Surface temperature isn't much use as you want roots to travel down fast.
Air temperature also matters. Many plants will be fine at 2 degrees above freezing, but if the air drops to even one or two degrees, wham, every leaf is brown and the stems die, too ... and possibly the whole plant. The easiest way to tell if it's the right time for tomatoes is to sit on the soil, bare-bummed and without a cardigan and out-of-sight of neighbours. If you are still comfortable 15 minutes later, it should be safe for tomatoes. This is not guaranteed - our climate can spring a frost on us as late as Christmas.
Try satisfying for spring urges (the gardening-type ones) by creating a display for the coming years. The secret here is LOTS. Try at least three crab apples, possibly hedged along the front garden. Make sure they are the same variety - my 'camelia' hedge has half-a-dozen varieties, all of which have different blooming times, as well as different shapes. They'll always look like 'a mob of camellias', never a hedge.
You don't even have to buy them. Both camellias and crab apples grow well from seed. Chill the seeds for three weeks in the fridge, then plant, and you should have fascinating flowers in about four years' time - fascinating, as they probably won't look the same at the flowers on the parent bush you picked them from.
Rhododendrons and azaleas are show-stoppers in spring. Sadly they are boring and even ugly for the rest of the year. Azaleas take up little room and a truly spectacular when planted in bulk under deciduous trees, but they are also prone to various leaf spotting problems, not to mention gourmet black tailed wallabies who'll eat every leaf they produce.
Daffodils are one of the great garden investments, but their bulbs can rot in hot summers. Stick to the golden single or double varieties, and you should be safe. If broke, buy 10-20 daffs, then plant them about a metre apart around you favourite deciduous trees. They'll look lonely in the first year, but in a decade you'll have wild abundance as they multiply.
We have two stunning displays of gold blooms just now - yellow daffs and gone-to-seed mini bok choi. It's hard to tell which is the loveliest, at least from 10m away.
Pest-eating predators, birds and butterflies adore gone-to-seed mini bok choi, too. The secret to getting masses of blooms from them is to pick the first lot of flowers to encourage multiple stalks, then prune each week to keep the seed heads short and compact. Next year I'm putting a late winter patch of mini bok choi purely for the flowers.
Best of all, $10 worth of bok choi seeds will give you about four square metres of blooms. You can save their seeds, too, for next year. The flowers may cross-pollinate, so their plants may not be as good tucker-wise, but the blooms will still be a bright froth of yellow. Keep snipping the flower heads off as they fade - once a bok choi has set seed it will stop putting up flower heads.
This does mean weekly maintenance, but it's also possibly the best 'bang for your buck' you'll ever find to turn you garden gold for all of spring.
*Probably
This week I am
- Admiring the accidental hedge of vivid yellow bok choi flowers outside my study window.
- Flicking through the far-too-small box where I keep my seed packets, to choose the 'must haves' to plant the earliest: spinach, silver beet, parsley. Carrots will go in a little later - they will go seed after only a couple of warm days followed by a cold snap, then more warmth. Melon, pumpkin and zucchini seeds should be planted with a day time temperature of at least 24 degrees.
- Letting the seedlings from last year's tomatoes that dropped on the ground pop up to tell me it's time to plant the varieties I want this year, though I'll keep many of the seedlings, too.
