The Carlton Veggie Patch Begins

Just when I thought we’d turned the corner into Spring, the weather turned positively biblical over the weekend here on the Limestone Coast. Friday night brought huge claps of thunder, flashes of lightning, hail and pounding rain on the farmhouse roof, setting both Tessa and the neighbours dogs into a frenzy at 2am. We awoke Saturday morning to piles of sleet on the doorsteps and spent the rest of the weekend shivering through rain and wind. Brrrrr. Out the kitchen window looks a little like this at the moment, Lake Carlton in what should be a paddock…

But…seedlings which I bought in town last week still had to be planted, so in between showers we got to work in the veggie patch. When we were in the midst of moving to ‘Carlton’ I was looking up vegetables to plant in Autumn…ha! Silly me thought we’d have a veggie patch all sorted as soon as we got here. Last week I revised my gardening diary and added some late Winter vegetables to the list instead. We’ve planted rows of savoy and Chinese cabbage, rainbow chard silverbeet, beetroot, baby spinach and iceberg lettuce, as well as a lonely artichoke and a sprinkling of sunflower seeds. I can’t have a veggie patch without sunflowers, I just won’t hear of it.

And so we wait for our little seedlings to grow, at the moment shivering through the last chill blast of Winter coming off the Southern Ocean, but hopefully thriving in some Spring sunshine soon. Grow my little veggies, grow!