Septembers plate is refreshingly green: saladings, celery, parsley, cress, silverbeet, kale, nettle, broccoli shoots for Africa, the last of the cabbage and – joy oh joy the first of the asparagus. There’s so much cool stuff to do in the garden right now, so much prettiness, you want to be out there every spare moment.
Check in with your soil. This is the most important job, each month. Smell it, feel it and count the worms. Take its temperature. Align all your crop choices with their preferred soil warmth – particularly important in spring.
Put a concentrated effort into eating overwintering rootcrops still in the ground. As weather warms they’ll gear up to seed getting a hard core up the centre or they’ll start to crack and split and do other crazy things – get them up before they go past their best and along the way, make room for new stuff.
Asparagus is popping up and soon to be part of dinner. If you’ve yet to weed or mulch the bed, be ever so careful – the spears break off with the slightest knock.
Fast growing potatoes like Liseta, Rocket or Swift or even Cliffs Kidney, planted now will be ready to harvest for the Christmas table. Best present ever! Plant them into buckets, sacks or a pile of organic matter if your soils are still cold and wet.
Spring is all about mollusc prevention in my neck of the woods. I hold back on mulching around new seedlings at this time of year, teamed with popping out at night for a slug and snail hunt and the population is greatly reduced.
Toss them into a bucket of salty or limey water. Or collect them in a bucket, put a lid on and tip them into the chookyard in the morning. Keep on the job at this time of year! Prevent them annihilating your newly planted/ newly germinating seedlings.
Sort any weedy spots in your garden this month so the ground is ready to plant next month. Do it the easy way and grab a bit of plastic, lay it on top of the weeds and weight it down. You could also use card and mulch or just thick mulch. Forget about it for a while and when you return all the weeds will have melted into the soil in the most nourishing of ways. Spread some compost and get ready to sow or plant!
Divide and plant rhubarb and perennial herbs into any gaps. A few more every spring in this way and before you know it, they’ll be jammed packed, no room for weeds and a continual display of flowers for the bees, the beneficials and you.
Tie strings to overhead wires, ready for planting tomatoes and cucumbers sometime this month. Set up frames for climbing beans.
Plant out companion flowers like alyssum, bishops flower, calendula or borage to entice the bees and beneficial insects in. Get some by the entry.
Do you have enough compost to spread a generous layer over your planting areas?