The first plantings of our cool-season vegetables are enjoying some wonderful growth conditions and will be well ready for the coming of the cold.
Sowing or transplanting cool-season vegetables during early to mid-autumn is certainly a pleasurable weekend activity for the whole family. It’s a real refresh period: the last of the warm-season crops are finishing up and being replaced with a fresh lick of compost and mulch, followed by the beginnings of an array of winter harvest delights.
Broccoli, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, cabbages, and leafy vegetables – including all of the ‘choys’ – are wanting to be planted now if they haven’t already been, along with broad beans, garlic, leek, and all those yummy soup-making root crops that will get us through the depths of our cold Victorian months.
Once you have your new babies in their comfy beds, they will pretty much take care of themselves for the next month or so. Cool-season crops don’t require quite as much attention as we give our gardens during summer, although there are a few things to keep an eye on.
Caterpillars – in particular the cabbage white butterfly offspring – will still be out and about for a few weeks, and their favourite meal consists of the leaves of most of your brassica crops. You’ll want to check your kale, cabbage, cauliflower and broccoli every few days until the weather really cools, otherwise you may find your new plantings silently disappearing. The easiest way to tackle these little critters is to pick and squash (if you’re that way inclined) or feed them to the chickens. They’ll love you for it – the chickens, I mean. You can also protect your vegetables with suitable netting or the ‘old-school’ garlic/chilli spray, which will render the leaves most unpalatable to the caterpillars.
Slugs and snails will also be getting ready to advance into your edible gardens, with all the beautiful leaves signalling a glorious feast for them. Again it’s a matter of picking them off and tossing them to the hens. If left unchecked they can certainly ruin a good crop very quickly.
Portuguese millipedes are also becoming very active around this time of year, and while they prefer feeding on decaying organic matter in your edible gardens, they can grow in number very quickly and some may decide that your new plants are quite tasty. They will be hiding in the mulch layer along with the slaters and can nibble the base of your seedlings unnoticed. Again, employ the pick-and-toss method to avoid using pesticides.
Enjoy this perfect gardening weather, and fingers crossed we get a mild winter so that our enthusiasm for tending to our vegetables isn’t dampened too much.
HAPPY GARDENING!
