Gardening – Preparing for summer crops

The shortest day is well and truly behind us, so I can start looking forward to the next growing season, so exciting for a committed gardener. I’ve been sowing seeds outdoors throughout winter, mostly vegetables like brassicas, onion family and fresh greens. Now I can start sowing the seed for my summer garden. For these I use heating pads set up on my propagation bench in my tropical greenhouse. Plastic trays repurposed from storage cabinet shelves sit on the pads, with the edges holding just enough water (a couple of millimetres high) to keep the seed punnets moist, but not enough to make them waterlogged.

I find most commercial seed raising potting mixes to be too heavy in consistency, so I blend coco fibre at a 50/50 ratio to increase the aeration of the mix and add some extra three-month slow-release fertiliser. For seed trays I use recycled six-cell punnets, I’ve saved lots of them over the years and use them for striking cuttings as well.

The trays take 14 punnets each, there are two trays with heat pads underneath with five more that have no heating to harden the seeds or cuttings off once they have set a root system. Once the plants are big enough, or if I run out of room, I transfer the most advanced ones to either the unheated greenhouse or in mid-summer, some seedlings can go straight from the heated greenhouse to outside.

So, what do I have growing on the propagation bench right now? Hibiscus cuttings, several species of palm seeds, longan seeds, blue butterfly pea seeds, papaya seeds, several passionfruit species (seeds and cuttings), Tigerella tomato seeds, mango seeds, several costus (a type of tropical ginger) species, sugarcane and lemon grass offsets, several tropical cordyline varieties and a bunch of miscellaneous ornamental tropicals.

Most of these will need to get a move on, as over the next few weeks I’ll be sowing more tomatoes, plus capsicums, chillies and eggplants. Why these in particular? Well, they are all plants that have a long growing season, so the bigger they are before they get planted out, the more crop I should get. Once they germinate and are ready to be pricked out into 7cm pots, they’ll go into my tomato house to grow on.

As they grow, they can be potted up, eventually going into 1-1.5 litre pots, by which time they should be at least 30cm high with their first flowers opening. All things being equal, that will hopefully coincide with late October to mid-November, a perfect time to get these plants in the ground outside, aside from any that will stay in the tomato house.

As soon as the bench space is cleared from this lot of seedlings, the next batch will be going in. Melons, pumpkins, cucumbers, beans, sweet corn and the like. These are faster growing plants, so they don’t need such an early start, and I’ll plant them outside once they’ve filled their 7cm pots. It’ll be a busy time, but so rewarding!