Talking of vegetable babies – it must be spring!

My feet, in gumboots, crunch down on the dry, brittle stalks of the linseed straw covered pathways of the vegetable garden. Two long rows of mounded up earth hide early season Lisetta potato tubers. Under protective netting, the green smudges of lettuce seedlings punctuate one edge of a raised bed. In another bed, the exuberant vigour of new season garlic and shallots encourages us to hope for bumper crops of fat garlic cloves and shallot bulbs.

Our first summer here, our harvest-ready shallots were characterized sarcastically by a visitor as “baby shallots”. Our garlic cloves, though, had always been fulsome. Then, in the last few years fungal rusts attacked the leaves of onion, leek, celery and garlic and “baby garlic” harvests became the norm.

Those wetter than usual La Nina years are behind us for now. But no one’s praying for a drought, although the drier El Nino conditions building should help keep those moisture loving rust spores at bay. And June, foregoing her usual practice of saving cloves for next season’s planting, has bought in big garlic bulbs to see whether they will be less susceptible to rust. We’re looking forward to a harvest of large cloves.

That’s the thing about gardening in general (despite the inevitable setbacks and the hard grind), you’re always looking forward. So counter to having a negative outlook on life when there’s so much of the good life in your garden. It’s visceral for both of us, but more so for the gardener: June.

After crunching around the vegetable garden, I went on up to June’s studio to see how the Maris Bros tomato (a black, intensely flavoured, early ripening heritage variety), aubergine and capsicum seedlings were progressing. Sitting on their heat pad on a table under sunny, north facing windows, I almost had my nose on them as I squinted to read the felt pen inscribed names on the ice block sticks.

“My babies don’t like being peered at like that!” Was this some wet nurse of the plant world? June had just finished watering them and no doubt half-serious in her quip about my somewhat proprietary approach. “Babies!” Visceral, eh?

Obeying June’s instructions as I wandered back down through the vegetable garden, I took in the early maturing carrot seedlings that had recently poked their heads through the soil, also the rows sown in not yet up beetroot, radish, turnip and parsnip.

Final destination, the glass house – more deferential as I took in the healthy-looking seedlings resulting from a late winter planting of various vegetable seeds. All for June to transplant, in due course, outside in the vegetable garden: brassicas, lettuce, onions …

Of course, there will be more babies to nurture as the season progresses. We look forward to the harvest: as always, self-sufficient in vegetables.