Alan's Garden Blog

There are still plenty of veges to grow in now: cabbage, carrots, lettuce, chinese veges, onions, peas, shallots and silverbeet to name a few. I’m sticking with what works for me, spring onions (they grow quicker and have a better yield than schollots), chinese cabbage, carrots, chinese veges (still a fast grower), snow peas and silverbeet. I have already planted some ‘green manure’ in about one third of my garden area which will be ready to dig in for planting August/September. I will be taking out my sixty odd garlic then as well and plan to plant a heap of spuds and ginger. Fresh ginger from your own garden is just the best.

One of the weird advantages of these gardens is they just don’t get waterlogged. They have vents so flooding rain first fills up the reservoir for free and then the rest drains away.

Now I am not saying my plants don’t suffer, but nowhere near as much as in a conventional garden and they recover much more quickly as you can see below. I thought I had lost everything in this garden (another experimental one) but it recovered!

I have been experimenting with new versions of my gardens which has meant I have had to put more in much to my wife’s disgust. I filled this garden with a range of seeds all in neat rows with lovely little markers. The flooding rains came and you would think that would be the end of that. But no, even though the seeds got washed around more than clothes in the washing machine many germinated over time. What a wonderful time bomb a seed is.

I am new to growing asparagus but this looks pretty good at this stage. The asparagus seems to like the constant water supply in a watersaver garden. This coming winter I can chop it off at ground level and in spring I will corner the market in fresh asparagus (hopefully).