THIS WEEK'S FEATURE ARTICLES

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The Kitchen Garden Guide - DECEMBER / JANUARY
As usual, late November brought a good dumping of rain to our laden fruit trees, new seedlings and water tanks. Summer weather in this chaotic climate era is anyone’s guess but, come what may, we will have tomatoes soon, as the annual race is on to have them ripe before Christmas. Plants do their best to perform that crucial step of reproduction and for that we must be eternally grateful as we chomp into strawberries, raspberries, blueberries or peaches for breakfast, chop up cucumbers, capsicums and tomatillos for lunch and wonder again why we planted so many zucchinis while we search for new recipes!
One thing I can tell you for sure is that this is my last Kitchen Garden Guide for The Classifieds, after over 12 years and writing it more than 130 times! I have loved it from the start but feel that I keep writing the same things each year now. Thank you so much readers, from Kingston to Dover. I have kept writing it because of the joy it has brought me to have that tap on the shoulder in a café or you stopping me in the street and telling me you enjoy and appreciate what I write.
My passion is not just to grow food but to cook it in delicious, nourishing, creative ways and this space does not allow me to express that passion. If you want to follow me on Facebook, you will find all my garden and kitchen stories there, almost daily, with photos of produce, garden work and recipes. Many people have suggested I write a book and maybe 2025 will be the start.
Beans
Bean seeds are like jewels; shiny, bright, smooth and gorgeous. Whether you grow Lazy Housewife or other long, thin, green beans, yellow bush beans, flat beans, scarlet runner beans, or beans like borlotti, for drying and using in winter stews, there is a bean for everyone and now is the time to sow them. Runner and other climbing beans generally grow more than two metres high so don’t be stingy on supports.
Beans will happily grow up sunflowers, corn or a wire fence. Anything with tendrils grows best up coarse wire or thin reo but will not succeed on timber trellises or slippery plastic. Tendrils are remarkably strong and will hold the weight of their fruit, even quite large pumpkins. (Zucchinis and some cucumbers are ramblers, which means they don’t have tendrils and you have to train them up and over low arches as they cannot grab on by themselves.)
Beware the summer sea breezes that will flatten your bean supports and bring tears to your eyes if you don’t use droppers/star pickets or a built fence! When sowing seeds, I keep birds away by leaning a length of fine mesh all the way along the bottom. Once they germinate, water well to get them established but not too often or they will develop shallow roots.
Wind
Oh late spring and early summer, how you batter my seedlings and developing fruit! The combination of wind and rain is hard on young seedlings too, knocking them down and wobbling their roots, stopping them getting established. To protect from the wind I surround whole beds with walls of lace curtains from the tip shop. Lace curtains are a much under-utilised resource as they are also fabulous over any small or creeping plants, like cucumbers, to provide shelter but still let the light through. I use wire crates, often discarded from freezers etc, which I get from the tip shops. One edge of a lace curtain can be tucked under one side of a crate and a row of crates holds up the curtains from touching the plants, then the far edge can be tucked under the last crate. I also cut up curtains and just use a piece over one crate. Wire crates on their own keep birds off lettuce etc. I put a brick on top too, if possums or wallabies are around.
Summer irrigation
It seems like summer is getting going early this year and we need to be mindful of what this means for our gardens. Roots are extremely tender, as we know when we dig up a plant and notice how quickly many start to wilt, often within minutes of disturbance. Roots are like straws and you know how fruitless it is sucking on a straw that is stranded in the air! In order for plants to grow, the roots need a steady supply of moisture, a little bit of air and some nutrients. Dry, hard, hot soil cannot provide any of these.
Many of our summer vegetables are annuals and those in our gardens now should be growing fast and preparing to produce their fruits, such as tomatoes, beans, cucumbers and corn. So, how do we know how much water they need and how should we irrigate them?
Soft, friable soil absorbs water better than a hard surface and is full of microbial life. Mulch will help to preserve friability. Now, after plenty of warm weather and the recent rain, is the perfect time to mulch. I use soft mulch on vegetables and a hard mulch on trees. Always look for something local and avoid bringing sugar cane mulch from Queensland!
The feeder roots of plants extend outwards at least half the height of the plant, so that is where we need to mulch and keep extending the mulch out further as the plants grow. It is pointless mulching and watering the trunk.
In very general terms, water soaks in to about 10 times the rainfall. So, 1cm of rain soaks in 10cm. The roots of half-grown tomatoes would be down at least 15cm, so you need to apply at least 1.5cm of water to the surface to reach those roots. Stand with your watering rose turned on and see how long it takes to put 1.5cm of water into a bucket. I bet it’s longer than you think! Once your tomatoes reach Christmas time, they will be down (and out) at least 30cm so you need to give them 3cm of water.
That far down, the soil will stay moist enough from a week to a month here. So, I will be giving my tomatoes 3cm water once a week but once the tomatoes are abundant to pick, that becomes a month; not by the trunk, but out about 30cm, preferably on two sides. Shallow, frequent watering, on the other hand, ensures your plants have a shallow root system, susceptible to the stress of constant heating and cooling, and will grow a wonderful canopy of leaves, with little fruit, before succumbing to some disease.
May your summer harvests be abundant and your days sweet, through December and January. Eat, think and be merry, and do as Michael Pollan says, “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants,” and I will add, “from your own state”. We are so fortunate. I am so grateful. See you at the Cygnet Seed Library and Crop Swap Cygnet and Surrounds throughout 2025.
“And that’s your bloomin’ lot!” as Peter Cundall always used to say.
December jobs
Sow seeds:
Beans, zucchini, cucumbers, basil, carrots, celery, lettuce, leeks, parsley, sunflowers, radish, parsnip, pumpkin, chicory. Sow winter veg too.
Plant out:
Corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, pumpkin, other veg seedlings, potatoes, potted herbs, flowers etc.
Basil: keep in greenhouse in good sized pots with rich soil and water well but allow to drain well before watering again.
Fill in spaces with flowers, comfrey, daisies, herbs and love.
January jobs
Sow seeds:
Lots of winter veg benefit from early summer sowing so they reach a good size to plant out in autumn: fennel, Brussel sprouts (late Dec too), red cabbage, leeks, kale, beetroot.
December and January:
• Mulch vegetable garden well, preferably with soaked peastraw or old silage.
• Mulch fruit trees well, preferably with bark chips.
• Feed food garden with seaweed solution for pest resistance and fish emulsion or home made worm brews.
• Harvest and enjoy!
Kate Flint

A white Christmas
A white Christmas is hardly likely here, though a light dusting of snow has been known to happen atop Mount Wellington.
White Christmas is an Irving Berlin song about dreaming of an old-fashioned Christmas setting. Maybe one that never really happens except in dreams.
The song was written by Berlin for the 1942 musical film Holiday Inn at a dire time in WW2. The composition won the Academy Award for Best Original Song at the 15th Academy Awards. Bing Crosby’s recording topped the Billboard chart for 11 weeks in 1942 and returned to the number one position again in December 1943 and 1944. His version would return to the top 40 a dozen times in subsequent years.
According to Wikipedia: “Crosby’s nephew, Howard Crosby said, “I once asked Uncle Bing about the most difficult thing he ever had to do during his entertainment career… He said in December 1944, he was in a USO show with Bob Hope and the Andrews Sisters. They did an outdoor show in northern France… he had to stand there and sing White Christmas with 100,000 G.I.s in tears without breaking down himself. Of course, a lot of those boys were killed in the Battle of the Bulge a few days later.”
So, the myths and legends of Christmas are born.
A 2019 book by Andy Thomas, a prolific writer and lecturer with an interest in history, folklore, intrigues and unexplained mysteries, entitled Christmas: A Short History from Solstice to Santa goes beyond the usual stories and explains in many instances why we celebrate as we do.
St Francis of Assisi staged what might have been the first nativity tableaus in Italy in 1223 using actors and live animals.
Feasting has long been part of the celebrations, but some took to extremes. King Richard 11 of England was said to have employed 300 cooks for his Christmas banquet in the 1390s to prepare 28 oxen, and 300 sheep on each day of the festivities. Let’s hope he shared them widely.
There used to be a few more feast days, including February 2, to celebrate the presentation of the child at the Temple, traditionally 40 days after the birth. This was according to the Gospel of Luke. Called ‘Candlemas’ it has been linked to the Celtic festival ‘Imbolc’ and the Roman festival ‘Lupercalia’. A lot of the festivals seem to have overlapped previous pagan ones.
Although earlier references can be found of December 25 being ‘Christmas Day’, the first acknowledgment that it had become a fully fledged feast day can be found in The Chronography of 354 AD. The actual birth date has been the subject of much discussion by Biblical scholars for centuries.
Not all countries observe Christmas Day for gift giving either. Several European countries swap gifts on Christmas Eve. This is personally recommended as the children go to bed with their gifts and there is no waking at the crack of dawn to see what ‘Santa’ has brought. We started this when the organist in the family had to be away early for the first Christmas service of the day.
The Russian Orthodox Church has a calendar which celebrates Christmas on January 7, though gifts are often exchanged on New Year’s Day. These gifts are thought to have been brought by the blue-robed Grandfather Frost and his granddaughter Snegurochka – the Snow Maiden. So, although ‘Santa’ may be the most famous of Christmas characters, he is far from the only one seen around the world. Some are kinder, none of this “have you been good?” business, as if that means you get what you wished for – always unfair, as gifts depend on your parent’s income.
They are also not always male. There is a more positive female Christmas character in ‘Snegurochka’ the previously mentioned Snow Maiden. She owes her being to a 19th century Russian folk tale. She is a beautiful young woman, dressed in a sparkling white robe and white furs.
So, back to White Christmas. It is often cited as the most-recorded Christmas song ever, with more than 500 recorded versions of the song, in several different languages.
According to internet sources and TIME magazine though, Silent Night is the most popular Christmas carol, with 733 copyrighted recordings since just 1978.
Whatever your favourite may be, enjoy, and have a very happy Christmas.
Marian Hearn

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