Welcome to the winter ramblings about Paddington Community Garden!  This is my first attempt at both writing a blog and gardening during the winter season.  Since I come from Washington DC (where winter is pretty much a sleety, slushy, bleak, and blustery mess), I grew up only gardening in the spring and summer months.  So it was such a wonderful experience and a  real joy to be able to garden through winter, see all the fabulous things growing, and witness all the changes in the garden!

Well, for starters it was a very wet winter and that was great because I don’t think we had to water the garden plots at all over the last few months.  It seemed that every time I thought to myself, "Hmm, might be time to water the veggies,” down it would pour.  And not just a little bit either.  I really don’t remember another recent winter that was quite so damp, but perhaps that’s just because I’m gardening now and taking more notice of the weather conditions than I used to.  The rock face became a veritable waterfall at times, overflowing the frog pond and making the mulched pathways between the beds a spongy, squishy bog.  The tadpoles didn’t seem to mind the torrential rains at all, as they overwintered quite well.

All the wet weather meant that the wonderful winter veggies did exceptionally well, too.  We had terrific kales and cauliflowers, gorgeous cabbages and Brussels sprouts, lovely lettuces, bountiful broccolis, ridiculous radicchios and all sorts of other fabulous things.  Communal plot A produced some wonderful parsnips, beetroots, and carrots, while plot B tackled the lettuces adding a touch of colour with the 5 colour silverbeets.  Plot C is still patiently coaxing their broad beans along (the plants look so healthy and once they start to produce, it looks like it will be a bumper crop!)  And plot F produced some great brassicas: mizuna, tatsoi, and broccoli.  Being new to winter gardening there were a few personal surprises, too: my Tommy Toe produced beautiful little cherry tomatoes right through winter, while the fruit on my heirloom beefsteak tomato is ripening up now.

Some of the other great things we’ve had growing include the hot and spicy mustard greens (Red Giant and Green Wave), roquette and my new-found favourite, the feathery looking red mizuna, which packs a punch and has a hit like wasabi.  It literally takes your breath away.

One of the other interesting things about winter gardening is seeing the change in the sun patterns, compared to summer.  Patches of the garden that were sizzling in the summer sun were quite shaded during winter.  And vice versa; areas that were shaded during summer seemed to get a good dose of winter rays.  Now that we’ve gone through nearly a full annual cycle we will know what to expect in future years.

Then there were the worms and the compost.  I was wondering if, because of the colder weather, the worms would slow down at all.  So it was a bit of an observational experiment for me; being a scientist, I needed to know.  Well, as it turns out, no, the worms don’t slow down.  In fact the number of worms seemed to expand exponentially every time I looked.  It’s been great fun to see huge clumps of worms in the worm farms and compost bins busy doing their jobs.  At times it almost seemed that there were more worms in the bins than actual compost.  Which kind of made me worry about squashing them when I turn the compost.  Oh well, it’s a jungle out there.

I’ll end for now with the great news that we’ve just received some much needed funding from Woollahra Council to purchase a solar-powered water pump for one of the water tanks.  Now that winter is coming to an end, this will be very helpful when we actually need to get the watering cans in use again!  Bring on Spring!

Karen Firestone