My Garden December 2011
Winter does strange things. It sent my gardening ambitions into hibernation. I lost interest. The backyard was bare (except for some persistent weeds) and I didn’t care.
In late autumn I’d planted a few broccoli seedlings, but winter seemed to come early and they refused to grow. I prefer to grow brassicas over winter because it’s a cabbage moth free time when there’s less chance of caterpillars spoiling the crop. Few things are more off-putting than finding boiled caterpillars hiding within the stalks of broccoli on your dinner plate.
This year we had no winter broccoli. They didn’t have the chance to become established and start cropping before the coldest weather set in.
Things have changed now and a few things are starting to grow. The broccoli has recovered from its few months of inactivity and while it’s still early days, we are able to pick enough whenever we want some to add to a meal.
We’ve also had our first taste of asparagus. Only two spears, but it’s a promising start. I noticed there are another two generously fat spears almost ready for picking.
The warming weather has also inspired me to get back in the garden, preparing beds for lettuce, beans, tomatoes, capsicum, chillies, zucchini and pumpkins, but I still have to work out where to sow the corn.
It will be a while before the onions and garlic, planted before winter, will be ready – and they are taking up quite a lot of room at the moment, spread across three different beds.
It’s a time of excitement and anticipation, a time of promise, with a healthy crop of home grown food to look forward to; a time before the pests emerge to compete with us for that food. And a time before our neighbours start avoiding us through fear of having to accept another kilo or two of our excess zucchinis.
Onesimus Files 
As we head for an uncertain winter I’m a little envious of your growing successes. This growing season has been terrible with massive amounts of rain and then the soil baked to potter’s clay for a few weeks.
Hoping for better things next year. Keep posting about your garden, I compare notes with you …
For the first four years we had hardly any rain. The top 6 inches of the “soil” was like concrete, but when I broke through there was fine dust underneath. That was the last four years of a 10 year drought.
Things have improved since then and we’ve had quite a lot of rain for a couple of years but we have a lot of clay which doesn’t make gardening easy, so I use quite a few raised beds.
Strangely we seemed to get better crops during the drought. I suppose the dryness hindered a lot of pests and we had more control over the amount of water given to the plants.