October in the Patch

Spring has sprung, exciting times, blossoms, shoots and leaves with lots of promise, and the days are warming to whats ahead. its tome to plant your veges out and prepare your garden for the dry months ahead. These are the main planting time for the year, you will be planting the veges you'll be eating all summer, so take a grip, whatever you plant now you'll have to tend in December, the more you dig now, the more you'll have to weed in a months time. start small and extend your plot week by week. that way you wont start more than you can tend.

One crop plantings, that will see you through most of the year such as ,corn, silverbeet, celery, leeks, parsnips, turnips, potatoes and pumpkins and watermelons. plant enough to pick and store or if you don't fancy preserving the harvest plant only enough to eat.

Then there are the staggered croppers, - beans peas, lettuce, tomatoes, spring onions, beetroot carrot, and zucchini. Plant in succession when the first lot is just starting to flower, or form root swellings.

Prepare beds for sweet corn, by working in sheep manure laced with blood and bone, an old saying is to plant corn when the peach blossom falls- unless of course it has been frosted off.

Sow those pumpkins, zucchini and squash seeds directly or the plants that you had planted on back in August, into a lovely rich mound of mushroom compost and old manure.

Sow root crops such as carrot, parsnip, beetroot, swede and turnip. keep the seedbed moist and cover with old net curtains to keep the birds from scratching.
Plant the lase of the seedlings of cabbage, cauliflower broccoli, and kale. Seeds planted now will not develop in time before the heat of summer and will just bolt to seed.

You can get a quick crop of Chinese greens and lettuces, water well and fertilise with seaweed spray to get rapid growth before the heat of summer. Plant in dappled shade.

Spring onions can be grown now as easily as lawn. sow them in rows direct in the soil which has had a generous handful of dolomite raked through first. cover with a thin layer of soil and in two weeks they will erupt. then in 4 weeks time plant another, you'll be guaranteed a steady supply.

Celery is grown from seed sown into containers keeping the seed raising mixture quite wet. water twice daily if possible or sit them in a container of water . when big enough plant them out in a well limed soil.

Use a mulch of old manure and pine needles around strawberries for bigger sweeter yields.

Hold off on those tomatoes till the end of the month, keep watering well in pots and allow to become slightly root bound in pots that way they will jump out of their pots and set flowers early. Some more on tomatoes at end of month.

Beans and peas can go in directly where you want them to grow. Slater's can be a problem so use a collar pushed down into soil around seed made from an used yogurt container etc with the bottom cut out.

Hopefully this covers it all - if not post a comment with your expertise or a question....