Farewell summer - Winter gardening preparations.
The last few days I, Riaan, have started oversleeping. I guess its that time of the year where we'll need to adapt our biological clocks to wake up before the sun. With winter on its way, and in Pretoria (the north) there isn't much of an Autumn. If we want a proper winter crop, timing is crucial. If you plant too early the sun will scorch your plants (scorch them dead), if you plant just too late it will be too cold and the vegetables will be growing way to slow.
This weekend we spent some time planting a few winter vegetables such as leek, beet root, peas, kale, and coriander. Lots of wonderful greens! We're thinking the winter is a bit bleak but it's actually wonderfully nutritious, the leaves and peas great as a foundation to plant based eating. We still plan to plant some broad beans, sugar snaps, spinach and a few other vegetables. We haven't really got any experience in winter gardening, I guess that's partly due to the cold winter outdoors as well as the fact that one's day is so much shorter than in the summer. Winter is not only a negative grey picture in gardening but does also hold its own benefits such as fewer pests and diseases, not as intense sun and less frequent watering, that can become really an issue in the summer.
We've decided on a new approach for our garden and that would be to experiment with poly-culture. That is to spontaneously mix your vegetables and mimic a natural forest system. Weeds are now also more welcome than in the past. Everything that we remove from the soil or cut will be thrown directly back on the ground and will act as a green mulch. The leaves of the plants will in time fertelise themselves.
Chop and drop.
Drop it like it's hot.
OK.
Moving right along... to the visuals
Our vegetable garden still has some summer vegetables such as Jalapeno, beans and sweet potato growing in them, but I don't think they will last much longer.
This weekend we spent some time planting a few winter vegetables such as leek, beet root, peas, kale, and coriander. Lots of wonderful greens! We're thinking the winter is a bit bleak but it's actually wonderfully nutritious, the leaves and peas great as a foundation to plant based eating. We still plan to plant some broad beans, sugar snaps, spinach and a few other vegetables. We haven't really got any experience in winter gardening, I guess that's partly due to the cold winter outdoors as well as the fact that one's day is so much shorter than in the summer. Winter is not only a negative grey picture in gardening but does also hold its own benefits such as fewer pests and diseases, not as intense sun and less frequent watering, that can become really an issue in the summer.
We've decided on a new approach for our garden and that would be to experiment with poly-culture. That is to spontaneously mix your vegetables and mimic a natural forest system. Weeds are now also more welcome than in the past. Everything that we remove from the soil or cut will be thrown directly back on the ground and will act as a green mulch. The leaves of the plants will in time fertelise themselves.
Chop and drop.
Drop it like it's hot.
OK.
Moving right along... to the visuals
Our vegetable garden still has some summer vegetables such as Jalapeno, beans and sweet potato growing in them, but I don't think they will last much longer.
 |
| These are some young bush beans. This specific bean is a summer bean and probably won't survive. |
 |
| These young Jalapenos also won't produce a lot of chillies, but if they are able to survive the winter they might produce a good crop next season. |
 |
| We quite like to keep a variety of herbs in our garden, our parsley will continue growing even during the winter. |
Comments
Post a Comment