Jackie French | Getting my head around seed sowing

The grass seed is a "throw and hope" affair - I want to stabilise a slope in case of thunderstorms, so I race out every time it drizzles - which is the only kind of rain we get lately - and sow just a strip, just in case. So far, though, the only grass I've grown is on my head.

The seeds in the vegie garden are going well though. The thickest, most tender celery plant from last year is popping out masses of seed heads. The carrots have already dropped about 3000 seeds, and hopefully the ants and mice will leave us about 300 to germinate.

I have no idea what kind of carrots they'll look like. I grew three carrot varieties last year - one long and deep red, one thick and orange, and one cute and totally round. Whatever eventuates will taste good, though it may look peculiar.

Sadly our earliest self-sown parsley to germinate this year has already produced umbrella-shaped white flowers, with seed to follow, which probably won't drop and give us parsley till mid-summer. The hoverflies love the flowers - and hoverflies are one of the best predators to munch your garden pests. But there should still be plenty of parsley seed in the soil, so I'm not giving up yet.

The kale produced seed too, till the wallabies ate the seed heads. Hopefully some seed dropped to the ground before the wallaby feast. I'll let you know.

There's no need to worry about the tomato seed - so much ripe fruit dropped before I could get to it that we should have a small tomato jungle. That is a small jungle, with tomatoes, and not a large jungle with small tomatoes. We'll probably have large and small and in between tomatoes, of varied colours and shapes, as we grew several varieties and they will have cross-pollinated, as tomatoes - and humans - tend to do.

I didn't bother cleaning up the pumpkins the bush rats got into. This has meant pumpkin vines popping up everywhere, as the bush rats obviously carried off seeds to their nests and dropped lots of them. Once again, it will be an adventure finding out what grows, and how and where - and will we get any for us to harvest before the bush rats do. NB I am pretending they are native bush rats. They may be introduced black rats, you know, the bubonic plague carriers etc. But outs are fat and fluffy so surely they are bush rats ... I just won't check the length of their tails too closely to be sure.

Somehow one of the zucchini grew massive, hid under the leaves, and rotted, leaving viable seed that has now germinated. They were hybrid Black Jack zucchini, so I have no idea what we will get. They will certainly be edible, though just like the prolific "self-crossed" melons we grew a few decades ago, they may also be entirely tasteless. On the other hand, zucchini don't taste of much at the best of times. They have been bred to accompany tomato sauce, or cheese, or charred with olive oil. Zucchini are the gigolos of vegetables, delightful as a companion.

MORE GARDENING:

The primulas have duly bloomed, and dropped their seed, which wind and wombat fur will carry around the garden. I only planted primulas once or twice, but they have been popping up in various unexpected spots ever since, though not in enough numbers to call them a weed, and none in the bush around us.

We still have plenty of runner bean seed, which sadly doesn't drop from its trellis but needs to be picked and planted. I haven't done that yet. I probably won't do it. After many decades of picking and eating and giving away runner beans, I've decided I don't want to bother. We will eat perennial asparagus again, and silverbeet, which has re-seeded very nicely thank you, a small-leafed tender variety known as "the silverbeet that grows by the water tank".

There will also be commercial varieties of broccolini, as I didn't want to risk crossing varieties, in case they turned out to be too fat, too skinny or too tough. I'm happy to be adventurous with other veg, but I like my broccolini to be reliably tall, dark and delicious. Just add water, and feed every fortnight or so, and they will be. Pick often.