Borage is popular with insects, particularly bees, and is a great cover crop over winter. Photo / Phil Thomsen
Borage is popular with insects, particularly bees, and is a great cover crop over winter. Photo / Phil Thomsen
Kem Ormond is a features writer for The Country. She’s also a keen gardener. This week, she’s chatting about how winter is a great time to learn more about the aspects of vegetable gardening.
OPINION
The one good thing I find when winter starts to arrive is that it does give me the time to read a lot more without feeling I should be out in the vegetable garden.
Autumn/winter is a wonderful time to use the twigs and branches that are now starting to become bare and make some growing frames ready for next summer.
I always like to keep the vine trimmings from my grapes when they are finished and turn them into a wreath in preparation for next Christmas.
As gardeners, we never stop learning, no matter how long we have been gardening.
Swap books with friends, visit the library, check out second-hand bookshops and maybe splash out on a good gardening reference book.
Once all your preparation is under way for your winter garden, take some time out to learn more about how you can produce even better vegetables next season.
While I have always planted basil with my tomatoes and calendulas willy-nilly, I have only really just learnt the importance of other companion plants, which can be let go to flower from existing vegetables in your garden.
If you let the odd carrot, fennel, or parsley go to seed, they produce the most wonderful tiny, prolific small flower heads.
These seem to attract beneficial insects that will help to protect your nearby cabbages from pest insects.
The reason is that these tiny flowers are a key source of food for the tiny parasitoids such as Cotesia, whose larvae attack aphids, caterpillars, and other vegetable pests.
You will be surprised what other vegetables you can let go to flower.
Even when you have harvested your broccoli, leave the side shoots from the plant to continue growing and flowering, as parasitoids find these rather delicious also.
Carrot flowers in Kem Ormond's vegetable garden. Photo / Phil Thomsen
Did you know that some vegetables exude an aroma that works much like a GPS, assisting pests to locate them?
If you plant strong-scented vegetables such as spring onions close to your lettuces and cabbages, it makes it much more difficult for pests to smell out those vegetables.
This also works if you plant a varied range of vegetables close together, as this creates the diversity needed to confuse pests.
That is how it works for tomatoes; when you plant basil alongside, the strong aroma is designed to reduce the attack of white flies.
Kem has planted basil alongside capsicums in the tomato house. Photo / Phil Thomsen
We also must remember that our bees, invaluable to our vegetable garden, love scented herbs — if it has a blue flower, even better!
Sage, lavender, rosemary, and borage are great to have as borders around your vegetable patch and while borage is easy to grow from seed, the others will easily grow from cuttings.
While not every idea will work in your vegetable garden, all our gardens are different, so it is still worth trying!
Remember, as winter sets in and the days get shorter and colder, take time out, grab a notebook and start writing ideas for your vegetable garden next summer.
Decide what crops have been worthwhile and hunt out recipes that you can adapt to the produce you plan to grow.
While being in your vegetable is good for relaxation, so is curling up by the fire with a good pile of gardening books by your side.
