Kem Ormond’s vegetable garden: Top tips for solving summer problems

Having the right tools of the trade helps when tackling your summer garden. Photo / Pexels

Kem Ormond is a features writer for NZME community newspapers and The Country. She’s also a keen gardener. This week, she’s discussing the problems associated with summer vegetable gardening.

OPINION

While we all love summer and being able to harvest crops and turn them into wonderful preserves ready for the cooler months, the season does come with its own set of problems.

These include continuous watering, marauding insects on our brassicas, crops that bolt in the heat, failed and dismal plantings, and uninvited nasty weeds like convolvulus and oxalis that seem to show their heads in the warmer months.

I am often asked what tools are necessary for a vegetable garden, how I can make kneeling and weeding more comfortable, and hints on weed eradication and what I use to feed my vegetables to promote growth.

While I am not one who likes to use weedkiller in my vegetable or general garden, there are three weeds that I work continuously on eradicating and that is oxalis, convolvulus and veldt grass.

Luckily, I have extraordinarily little of these in my vegetable garden, but I still do regular patrols and if I see any, I use the paint method.

This involves a paintbrush, some appropriate weedkiller, and a pair of non-porous gloves which I use to hold the offending plant while I paint the leaves.

While I know a lot of people who will be against this method, I have seen what happens in gardens when people let these weeds get out of control by only pulling the tops and vines from the surface.

All of a sudden, these weeds are taking over, and it turns into a battle to get them back under control.

Weeding can be challenging work on your knees and a kneeling mat or even knee pads that attach with Velcro are a worthwhile investment and make sitting on your knees so much easier and more comfortable.

My Pop used to sit on a tiny child’s chair and weed and that worked for him.

While we can end up with quite an assortment of gardening tools, you are better off having fewer but purchasing a more ergonomic brand of better quality.

You need to have a good fork for digging over your garden, a rake for levelling, and a torpedo or Dutch hoe, (I have a cut-down torpedo hoe with the wings cut off and a shortened handle which I use between my onion rows).

You also need a spade for planting and digging, a round and square-headed shovel, a short-handled trowel and hand fork and a Niwashi, which is ideal for removing annual weeds.

Remember to keep them sharpened and they enjoy an occasional wipe with some vegetable oil.

When it comes to feeding my vegetables, number one is the chop-and-drop method of putting all that goodness back into the soil, but I am never one to turn down a bag of sheep poo or make tea from horse poo.

Add some of your homemade compost and use worm tea if you have a worm farm.

You can also use liquid seafood, comfrey seeped in a bucket — to make comfrey tea — liquid seaweed, or try using diluted chicken manure.

As we all have different soils that need different feeding, try experimenting, it is quite satisfying making up a few brews!

Kem Ormond is obscured by the absolutely enormous onions she grew this year.

And finally, here are some of the onions that I have just harvested, and while last year they were a bit dismal with the bulbs being just average size well not this year — they are like tennis balls on steroids!

This is partly because I planted the seedlings further apart this year to give the bulbs more room to expand.

While I mostly planted brown onions, I did plant a few red onions, and they have been successful too, along with my spring onions.

I have them drying and soon will plait and hang them in my studio-come-gardening shed, ready to be used over winter.