Despite the set­back of not hav­ing a func­tion­ing veg­etable gar­den I was able to meet the Pasta Pri­mav­era chal­lenge, as the photo above will attest.

I had a rough, sev­eral hun­dred word post in my head on my adven­tures in veg­etable out­sourc­ing, how I made my own pasta from scratch and only dis­cov­ered the cho­sen Pri­mav­era recipe a day before I was due to cook it.

But this photo says it all really. I did it.

So much has hap­pened since the last post. Here’s the rundown:

Bugs and failure

The prop­a­ga­tion tray was a dead end. Only about a third of the trays sprouted and the few that did were snipped of their del­i­cate leaves before I moved them to the gar­den. Once in the gar­den it took about two days before I noticed that the zuc­chini was being slowly anni­hi­lated every night. The next night I went out to inspect the gar­den and saw a fam­ily of ear­wigs tag-teaming the plants. Not hav­ing any spray or bug­dust handy I picked them off one-by-one and flicked them over the fence. Before I could stock up on repel­lents the gar­den was attacked again and the  gar­den was left look­ing like a bar­ren wasteland.

Sorry, Try Again

I wasn’t look­ing for­ward to replant­ing the entire gar­den from scratch. I eschewed the prop­a­ga­tion tray and just dropped the seeds into the gar­den to see what would hap­pen. The plants only took around half as long to sprout this time, which was great!

The gar­den is look­ing really healthy now. The ear­wigs and other insects moved on once the orig­i­nal plants had died, so every­thing there has been able to grow in peace. (I still haven’t bought any­thing to pro­tect the garden.)

Water­melon and egg­plant are com­ing along well and the pot­ted tomato plant is fir­ing off a lot of flowers.

Today I added Stephan’s ice­burg let­tuce, a small pot of chives I’d grown from a packet bought at Coles and a small cherry tomato plant from one of my cowork­ers (Who appar­ently can’t get rid of the damn things quick enough).  Pro­vided we don’t have any more scorch­ing days for the next week or so they should set­tle nicely.

Home stretch

With only one week to go I won’t be fin­ish­ing Project Pri­mav­era with any of my own veg­eta­bles (or fruit if you’re being picky).  Luck­ily Abbots­ford Con­vent is hold­ing a Farmer’s Mar­ket next Sat­ur­day the 28th. The same day the project is com­ing to a head.

The plan is to wake up crazy-early that morn­ing, head to Abbots­ford for sup­plies, cook the sauce and then head to Mike’s house with a steam­ing Tup­per­ware con­tainer and maybe even some beer. It won’t be a dish grown by me, but it’ll still be my primavera.

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.

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”.