Garden Share Collective: February

This is my first post for the Garden Share Collective. I'm delighted to be part of this community of gardeners and writers who share what they're doing in their gardens every month, so others can learn and get growing themselves.

My garden is in Wellington, New Zealand, on a tiny, steep section close to the city. It's mostly an edible garden, but I also grow roses, clematis, daphne, jasmine and honeysuckle.

This is what it looked like out the back door this morning. Overcrowded! But that's how I like it. I don't have room to grow big crops here, so I grow little bits of heaps of different things, some in the ground, and others in containers. I think of this as a nibbling garden -- at the moment we can nibble strawberries, blueberries, tomatoes, bits of lettuce and sorrel, basil, fennel seeds, mountain pawpaw, figs and blackberries... just a wee bit of each.

Here's what's happening in my garden in February.

FEBRUARY HARVEST

Tomatoes. There are just enough tomatoes ripening for us to declare Really Good Tomato Salad season open. The long green tomato is called Green Sausage, and the big gnarly one is a Oaxacan Jewel -- my favourite tomato ever. The other green ones got "harvested" by an over-active dog's tail, so only got into the photo on a technicality.

You can see what I mean by overcrowding. The tomatoes are all growing through each other, and interlaced with mint and basil, but they seem quite happy.

If you want to learn how to grow tomatoes from seed, I've written Tomatoes 101 to get you started. It's too late to plant tomato seeds this season, but it's never too late to start dreaming and scheming about all the wonderful heirloom varieties you're going to grow next summer.

Strawberries. I was expecting the strawberries to ripen in December, but they're really only getting going now. The top photo is of an heirloom strawberry with roots (not literally) all the way back to the first ever strawberry to arrive in Wellington -- at least according to my friend Kaye who gave me a plant three years ago. I now have hundreds of these little beauties everywhere in the garden -- they throw out heaps of runners, and start baby plants all along the edges of the paths, and they make fantastic weed mats. The berries are small and a bit misshapen, but they have incredibly deep sweet flavour. Sadly, the dog's taken a liking to them too, so the harvest is a bit of a competitive sport at the moment. Surprisingly, the birds don't seem that interested in them. It might be because they are quite shy -- the berries, not the birds. The berries grow and ripen under the leaves, so you need to know they're there, and dig to find them.

The second strawberry came from the garden centre. It's bolder, more "perfect" looking (maybe), but you can just tell it's not going to taste anywhere near as good as the heirloom variety. And it doesn't.

Fennel pollen and seeds. The fennel grows huge in our neighbourhood, and it attracts bees, so I like to let it flower and go to seed. Then recently I read that fennel pollen is used in the middle east as a culinary spice, so I decided to have a go at harvesting some. The pollen is like little yellow pieces of sand. I just pick the flower heads after the bees have had a good go at them, and stick them into a paper bag. The pollen falls out into the bag, and voila, you've got a new spice in your pantry. I've only got about .05 of a teaspoon so far! But man does it smell good -- just like a bag of Licorice Allsorts.

I love these fennel flower heads -- the shadows are so gorgeous.

Some of the fennel flowers I've left to go to seed. I love chewing on the seeds and getting that childhood memory taste of aniseed wheels. Also good in chai and curries of course.

Basil. February is also basil month. I plant loads of basil seeds in spring, and usually get enough for a couple of batches of pesto and several weeks of salad garnishes. I'm diligent about snipping off the flower heads as soon as they appear -- that's just so the plant doesn't put all its energy into flower and seed production, when I want the leaves to get nice and fat and flavourful. Sounds a bit mean, I know, but sometimes you have to be tough in the garden. I plant the basil in the same pots as tomatoes, and along the edges of the paths, and just in among everything else.

FEBRUARY PLANTING
The garden is so full at the moment, that I'm not going to actively plant anything out in February. But I am doing a bit of passive planting, by letting some plants go to seed.

This is a buttercrunch lettuce. More like several hundred butter crunch lettuces. I just leave one or two plants to go to seed like this, and in winter and spring there will be buttercrunch lettuces all over the garden, on the paths, and probably all over the neighbours' gardens too. They don't mind. We all use this technique, and passively swap lettuce, coriander, fennel, spinach, parsley and more across the fences and hedges... Frankly, if we didn't let our veges and herbs seed all over the place, we'd have more weeds to deal with so this is an awesome way to garden.

This is a crop of coriander that has self-seeded in a trough at the back door. The parent plants came up at the end of last winter, matured over spring, went to seed in November, and now the next generation have germinated. Fantastic.

If you want to know more about letting plants self-seed, read my Going to Seed post.

FEBRUARY CHORES
Watering:
Our summer warmth is only just arriving now, and I need to water the plants in pots every day now. I only water the plants in the ground a couple of times a week, and only if it doesn't rain. We have a mild climate, the overnight temperatures are low, and we have dew overnight almost every day, so the ground plants aren't that needy when it comes to water.

I like to water in the morning, while the soil and the plants are cool, so the water won't be a shock to them. It doesn't seem right to water at night, and expect the plants to hang about in cold wet soil overnight. But I know many great gardeners who water at night... do what you think is best!

Feeding:
Every couple of weeks in spring and summer, I try to remember to give all the plants a seaweed feed. I usually just mix some seaweed concentrate from the garden shop into the watering can and water that around the roots. Seems to do the trick. I will also give the plants in containers a soil top up. Just sprinkle some compost (your own, or bagged from the garden shop) into the pots or containers if there's room. After you've been watering container plants for a while, the soil gets washed away or compacted, and the nutrients will have been used by the plant or washed away. Think 'top up' so the potted plants have enough nourishment.

Shouting at the birds:
The birds have already eaten almost all the ripe figs, but I'm not going to let them get the blueberries. So I'll either put up a net, hang some bright shiny dangly things from the clothes line, or keep running outside like a mad woman shouting at the birds. Or perhaps all of those things.

Potting up wild seedlings:
Because I'm not a terribly neat gardener, and let plants go to seed, I have a lot of seedlings growing 'wild' around the place. These are just free plants, and I like to put them in small pots, and give them away to other gardeners. The community gardens or school gardens seem to like free plants, and so do people starting new gardens. This month I'll be potting up and giving away heirloom strawberries, oregano, and lemon balm plants.

Sitting quietly doing nothing:
Sometimes I forget to just go outside, sit quietly and soak in the sights, sounds and smells of the garden. So in February I will make a point of doing that. I always have something to learn from my dog.

Thanks for visiting the Five Course Garden. I hope you find some inspiration here, and learn something useful. I'm very happy to answer questions about gardening in tiny spaces, and growing in containers. Just leave a comment and I'll get back to you.

Happy gardening.