It's the time of year when the winter veg are finishing off and it's time to make room for the summer shift. My tomato seedlings are busing at the seams! I've given away two already but the remaining black cherry are outgrowing their pots. The basil sprouts are powering along quickly too.
The only problem is that their tub is occupied by beets! At the front and in the smaller pot is silverbeet (developed for its leaves), behind that are beetroots, and behind that is the last of the kale.
I keep hoping the beetroot plumps up a bit. I want to eat them as baby beetroot but they're still too small even for that, as you can see here. I thinned out the smallest seedlings as I probably should have done weeks ago, and I'm hoping the remaining beetroots plump up in the next week so I can plant the tomatoes.
But in the meantime I picked some of the silverbeet to try for the first time ... and learned I don't really like silverbeet. I like spinach and I don't mind kale and other brassicas, but silverbeet has an unpleasant sort of bitter flavour to me. It's meant to be such an easy-to-grow garden staple but I won't be growing it again.
As you can see in that photo I'm often harvesting my herbs all year round. My front herb bed, where I used to grow geraniums, now has chives, sage, thyme and my huge rosemary bush. The smaller herbs are finally starting to fill out after a quiet winter. They're all hardy sun-lovers so they should appreciate the hot spot much more than the geraniums did!
My snowpeas are finishing off their winter shift too. One of them got some strange and sudden die-off for a while before sprouting a bit more new growth, but as you can see it's on its last legs. I'll have to start thinking about what to grow in these two big pots this year. Last year it was a capsicum and a zucchini, which didn't work out too well. I'm thinking this year of trying green beans for the first time, we eat a lot of green beans.
It is well and truly spring! Such an exciting time, preparing for the summer garden.
I finally planted enough gai lan (Chinese broccoli) to really enjoy it. It grows quickly but you need 2 stems worth to make a small portion, more if you're feeding several people. I have 8 plants reaching maturity and yesterday for lunch I ate two in my favourite way - stir-fried quickly with garlic and oyster sauce. And in this case I had it with some pan-steamed dumplings from the freezer. Now that was a great lunch!
Despite my enthusiasm for growing fruit and veg, my harvests are usually very small - a lemon here, a handful of lettuce leaves there. But today's dinner is a celebration of spring and called for one of my largest harvests. 
My local possum has a green tooth. They're known for eating fruit and flowers but mine eats greens. It never lets a hardenbergia vine flower because it eats every new shoot. I have stood and watched it gnaw at the pine bushes outside the back door. And the other day I found that it savaged my pea shoots. I suspected snails at first but I don't have too many snails about considering how quickly they were chewed down to stems. And then I noticed that a few stems had been snapped clean off and carried to another part of the bed before being finished off -a bit of a trick for snails to pull off. And this is all that's left of them.
Luckily it's still early in the season, so I planted some more snow peas and put a bird net over the bed. These plants may survive and if not the new seeds will sprout, and hopefully I'll still have snow peas before the winter is over. My luck with snow peas is absolutely rotten!
OK so the roi de carouby are officially farked. We had another strong windstorm and it ripped them right out of the frame.
I thought I'd show you how my force plants are going this winter. First, the snow peas have become a bit of a disaster. I grew two climbing varieties and it turns out they want to climb waaay more than I have space for. As you can see the roi de carouby outgrew its teepee, and the winter winds have not been kind to it. Also, I grew them in a mix of soil and sand from the big pile of dirt I used to have in the driveway. I didn't bother to add fertilizer of any kind because I was told that peas make their own nitrogen from the air which they then add to the soil to enrich is. Turns out they still need more nitrogen than I was giving them, as you can see by how pale and yellow it became. I have it a drink of Powerfeed and some fertilizer pellets and it shot out dozens of new green shoots, so at least I got that right. 
On the right side of the porch there's a lot going on. On the right is the broccoli raab that's been fighting a horrific aphid infestation. I finally got rid of the aphids but they're still looking thin and unhappy. But behind them the spring onions are still going well. Once they're full grown you just snip them at ground level and within a few weeks, with amazing speed, they've grown back! But I've also got a fresh crop coming up, once they're full sized I'll pull up the old crop and start another round.
Finally, my broccoli isn't on the porch but I wanted to show you the side shoots that grow once you eat the main head. I've eaten all the heads now, I'm just waiting to eat a few more side shoots before I pull up the broccoli and fill in the bed with more compost and dirt. The dirt settled quite a lot from the first time we filled it. 
I've started nibbling at the winter garden now. Here's my first head of broccoli. It's really small but I'm not surprised, that garden bed hardly gets any sun. I'm happy it made heads of any size! But you can just tell that the buds were starting to swell and I didn't want to push it, hoping for them to get bigger but ending up with flowers instead of broccoli. So it got chopped up and thrown in the fry-pan along with some garlic chicken. Hardly enough for even one serve, but it was nice and tasty and Tom doesn't like broccoli anyway so it was all mine!
My golden-podded peas had been making just as many flowers as the roi de carouby, maybe even more. But for some reason the flowers weren't opening. As you can see in the photo, they stayed stubbornly closed. Even more worrying, some of the flowers started getting the blueish tinge to the purple colour which meant the flowers were dying off. I was worried that they were dying without actually making peas.
