January: Summer in the Home Vegetable garden.

Well I hope you were able to get plenty of water and mulch on to your garden over the Christmas break to keep the weeds down and the growing up. There were not many parts of the country who have needed to apply water though – it’s been wet everywhere. Here in North East Otago we have had rain pretty much every day since before Christmas. It’s not really cold though so everything is growing well but we are all ready for a little sun please!  And the mulch has done its job of protecting the soil from so much rain - so getting that extra mulch on in December has worked well.

Now is the time to start literally reaping the reward of your work over the past few months.  Keep picking beans peas and whatever else you have fruiting to prolong the season.  Hopefully you will have some time off and can spend some of it in your garden – you will be well rewarded.  Many fruiting plants if left to themselves will go quite unruly and sprawl all over the place putting energy into growing and you could be left with less than lovely vegetables. Tomatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins, courgettes, beans, peas – all will appreciate a little tweaking and training, pinching out and chopping back. Keep tying up your tomatoes and pinching out the laterals.  Once your pumpkins have set 2-3 fruit per vine then pinch out the growing tip – in our shorter southern growing season it is better to put the effort into getting those 2-3 ripe. Keep liquid feeding these plants as they grow. Make sure any climbing beans or peas have twiggy sticks or similar to climb up for the same reason. 

Make sure your beans don’t dry out.  Some people mound up the soil around their corn and tomatoes like you do around potatoes to increase the rooting capacity and ability of the plant to draw up nourishment. As it gets close to harvest for your potatoes and garlic, stop watering. You want them to start to dry out a little. I haven’t dug up any of my potatoes or garlic yet as I am waiting for a few dry days – will be interesting to see how this rain has affected them.  Get your winter brassicas in before mid January.  Add a little bit of lime before planting.   If you do have a problem with club root a good crop of mustard green crop will go a long way to sterilize the soil of any fungal diseases. Finish planting celery and leeks early in January if you haven’t got them in already. 

Jobs for this Month

Sow:  Keep up succession sowing of beans, peas, carrots, lettuces, swedes, turnips, spinach, radishes etc.

Plant: Winter brassicas such as cabbage, cauli, kale, broccoli.  Plant celery and leeks into well composted trenches.  Plant herbs such as basil, coriander, parsley.  Silverbeet and spinach can go in as well.

Stake: Tomatoes, cucumbers, beans and peas.  If you planted Brussels sprouts in the last month or two you might need to start staking them too.

Cultivate: Keep weeds down with regular hoeing and mulching where possible. Keep sowing mustard, phaecilia and other ground cover crops either down the rows or on any bare ground.  Thin beetroot and carrots if you haven’t already done so.

Harvest: Garlic, shallots, onions, early potatoes, beans, peas, herbs, tomatoes, courgettes, lettuces, spinach, silverbeet,

In the soft fruit department we have strawberries, gooseberries, raspberries and black currants all ripening now.  The rain is not so good for the berries and cherries causing splitting. Flavour is reduced too as the too much water dilutes the sugars. Gooseberry tart was on the menu for Christmas along with lashings of berries and cream. It was always traditional when I was growing up to have gooseberry tart over Christmas – even though we did not live in a growing area. My grandmother always got some sent up by train from the South Island.  What a joy it is now to be able to grow them in my own garden.