12/05/2026
When I get a minute I’ll start picking these early Brussel Sprouts for you. They are delicious.
It’s been gorgeous weather and I’m spending my time picking and filling the fridges with broccolini, Tokyo salad turnips (sweet crunchy with salad tops), Tuscan kale, coriander, cabbages; sugar loaf and red, tomatoes, beans, zucchini, gooseberries, pumpkins- butternut, jack be Littles, tas grey, and Queensland Blue which are the cut pieces in the fridges I can’t keep up with! baby cooking greens are fab this time of year with a bit of chill increasing sugar content for antifreeze. Tomatoes are finished at the garden and I am just picking the last of those, the zucchinis are still just going warmed between the brassicas, and green beans keep producing but are tired and maybe one more pick before the back block gets tucked away till spring - but neither will last long.
Main focus at the moment is staying on top of the stinging nettle which is a “bonus” in our main fertiliser input- local sheep manure. Around beginning and this time of production I like to pour bags of sheep manure along the length of beds to suppress w**ds, add organic matter and nutrition (I also amend with gypsum, bull kelp, chicken manure, compost, guano, rock phosphate, as well but not much because of the large quantity of sheep manure we use- maybe 1-200 bags a year. I find it conditions the soil, adds fertility, richness, biology, worms, holds moisture, and as I said bonus stinging nettle if managed well- is also very good for the soil.
Sometimes it gets away from me… so the chefs get some of that… but at the moment I am trying to knock the little germinated w**ds over and back into the soil and testing a trench method of burying w**ds in situ as we have a drought coming up and I want to build up organic content of the soil to hold moisture at maximum capacity for this next summer.
Our black clay is reactive so when it’s dry it cracks open and any water falls down the cracks. So I try to drop the leaves of the brassicas onto the soil to break down, the w**ds buried into the soil, and add as much as we can into the equation as we are extracting a lot in harvesting.
I lov
