I was right. All the seeds needed was a lit­tle love from old Mis­ter Sun. I didn’t realise how lit­tle they needed.

After just one day of blue skies and sun­light the water­melon finally sprouted. Egg­plant fol­lowed a cou­ple of days later and now I even have some oregano and basil shoots showing.

Sat­ur­day was the big day. I raked out the excess pea straw from the gar­den and knocked down the few clumps of manure to smooth things out. Wet­ting the soil down proved to be a bit of a prob­lem. I dumped around 20 litres of water into the gar­den n prepa­ra­tion for the seedlings, but it only man­aged to soak down around 3cm or so. I ended up dig­ging holes for the seedlings with a trowel, then pour­ing another 10 litres of water into them just to pre­vent the roots from dry­ing out.

Some­thing else I didn’t do with last year’s gar­den was prop­erly space out the plants. The gar­den is now a uni­form 5x3 grid.  Five zuc­chini plants run along the entire right hand side, three egg­plants sit in the front left quad­rant and three water­melon plants are up the back.

The zuc­chini place­ment is an exper­i­ment. I still don’t know how much sun is too much when it comes to them, so each plant gets a dif­fer­ent level of sun­light depend­ing on place­ment. The one up the very back stops get­ting sun­light around 2pm each day, the rest fol­low as the sun dips below the fence line. The egg­plant thrived up the front of the gar­den in full sun last time so there was no ques­tion about where they’d be. The water­melon died off fairly quickly once the sum­mer heat started blaz­ing, so I’m hop­ing that keep­ing them shaded for half the day will keep them alive long enough to get some fruit this year.

I should note that the gar­den still smells ter­ri­ble. Three weeks on and it smells like a pet­ting zoo. My Dad says: “The worse it smells the more plants love it.”  If that’s true then this gar­den will be amaz­ing once it’s fully grown.

I have a problem.

Two weeks after set­ting it up, my prop­a­ga­tion tray isn’t doing as well as I’d hoped. In fact the only thing that’s grow­ing is the zuc­chini plants. Every other sec­tion is still bar­ren dirt.

The crappy weather we’ve been hav­ing cer­tainly hasn’t helped. With the first two weeks of Octo­ber being com­posed of alter­nat­ing rain, hail, thun­der and light­ning. So much for it being the mid­dle of Spring.

I was hop­ing to plant them all out this week­end just gone, but I’ll give them a few more days. The local weather ser­vice is sug­gest­ing we’re in for good weather, so maybe, just maybe the seedlings might see fit to make an appear­ance. Fin­gers crossed.

Set your sense of child­like won­der to 11.

In the pre­vi­ous post I briefly men­tioned the  state of my veg­etable gar­den.  I wasn’t as artic­u­late as  I’d hoped so I thought I’d fol­low up with an image –heavy post to give you a bet­ter indi­ca­tion of what I’m start­ing Project Pri­mav­era with.

Orig­i­nally the gar­den was planted with egg­plant, zuc­chini, water­melon and car­rots. Every­thing was doing OK in the gar­den Well every­thing was green — which I took to be a good sign. But then Mel­bourne had that infa­mous string of days where the tem­per­a­ture soared of over 40 degrees cel­sius. I couldn’t get water into the gar­den quick enough, so every except the egg­plant whith­ered and died. It wasn’t a total loss as the egg­plant thrived in the heat and I ended up with bumper crop.

Once the risk of the self immo­la­tion passed I trans­ferred a few tomato plants out of the crowded pot I had them in and into the back right cor­ner of the gar­den. I thought they love the addi­tional room to spread and grow, but I was wrong. It wasn’t long before the went to that big com­post bin in the sky.

Being the stub­born hardy plants they are the egg­plants sur­vived the win­ter frost. But back in August, soon after trim­ming back the dead stuff, we had another cold weather front blow in and kill off the freshly exposed ends. After that I left them alone. Not will­ing to risk los­ing another few cen­time­tres from the branches.

Last Sat­ur­day they lost a lot more than that when I decided to tear every­thing out of the gar­den bed and start from scratch. After remov­ing the egg­plants I mulched the bed (uncov­er­ing a hand­ful of car­rots in the process). To that I added three bags of manure, half a bag of Blood and Bone and a hand­ful of pea straw and mulched again.

The new gar­den will be made up of oregano, sweet basil, thyme and zuc­chini seeds.  Along with water­melon and egg­plant for “per­sonal use”. I know the egg­plant does really well in that gar­den bed so it was a no-brainer . As for the water­melon? Well I’m a glut­ton for punishment.

I eschewed the hap­haz­ard plant­ing tech­niques of the pre­vi­ous year by  plant­ing the seeds out in prop­a­ga­tion trays with an intent to shift­ing the seedlings to the gar­den bed once they’ve germinated.

Ger­mi­na­tion should occur by next Sat­ur­day. By that point the gar­den bed will have set­tled in, with a nice layer of rot­ting detri­tus right where the roots are going to end up once the plants have matured. If I’ve done this right it should give the plants a turbo charge of nutri­ents right when they hit the “grow­ing fruit or veg­eta­bles stage”.

My veg­etable gar­den isn’t doing that well these days. What was once a boxed delight of  semi-thriving zuc­chini, water­melon and egg­plant plants has been pared down by blis­ter­ing hot sum­mer days and freez­ing win­ter nights to just three egg­plant plants (that aren’t doing that well now). Because I suf­fer from acute lazi­ness I still needed a good rea­son to tear up and replant the gar­den. After all, the egg­plants could come back any day now…I hope.

I got my rea­son when Mike threw down the gaunt­let. Chal­leng­ing Stephan and I to make Pasta Primev­era from scratch. I threw all cau­tion to the wind and accepted detailed be damned.

Of course, as they say, the devil is in the details. I had no idea what Pasta Pri­mav­era was. There’s no ref­er­ence to it in any of Ange’s syack of Italio-centric cook­books. A quick visit to Wikipedia and the Taste web­site and I had my answer:

Pasta with veg­eta­bles? Hell, I could do that.

We’ve got until the end of Novem­ber to get the dish finalised, so the first step was to fig­ure out what ingre­di­ents I could grow and what would need to be be pur­chased fur­ther down the track.

I’m only using the Taste recipe as a basic guide. Cream with veg­eta­bles seems a lit­tle too weird for my palette. Pri­mav­era may be an Italian-American dish, with an empha­sis on the Amer­i­can, but I want to put more focus on the Ital­ian side. That means squash and snow peas are most def­i­nitely out. Nobody likes squash any­way, and snow peas are a pre­dom­i­nately Asian flavour, not Italian.

Off the top of my head I can think of six ingre­di­ents I want in my Pri­mav­era:  zuc­chini,  aspara­gus, chilli, gar­lic, basil and sage. The “rules” stip­u­late that all ingre­di­ents, sauce and pasta alike, must be sourced from places in this order of impor­tance: Grown > Farmer’s Mar­ket > Organic Store > Super­mar­ket. The Gar­de­nate cal­en­dar sug­gests I’ve got just enough time to plant zuc­chini and basil. Chilli plants I have. Aspara­gus takes over two years to grow and sage doesn’t even make an appear­ance on the calendar.

So already I have a fair idea of what I’m going to do. First thing is to hit Bun­nings for sup­plies (today seeds, manure, pot­ting mix) then I’ve got a long pro­duc­tive after­noon till­ing soil and plant­ing the seeds of this project.