One of my favourite salads is baby spinach, beetroot, and fetta, beautifully topped off with a tasty dressing. It’s so much nicer if the spinach and beetroot are from your own garden.
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In March there is so much you can do in your vegetable garden. Spinach and beetroot are both on the list of plants to grow.
Beetroot is extremely easy to grow. Buy your seeds and soak them for a day in cold water before you plant, this makes the seeds easy to separate.
Sow the seed in rows and try and keep the seeds a few centimetres apart from each other and then be prepared to thin out the seedlings when they start growing – this gives them room to develop.
It is vital that you thin out seedlings, let them grow too close to each other and you will get a row of sad little plants that don’t grow well. Young beets can be harvested quite quickly - seven to 10 weeks from sowing the seed. Of course, you can leave the plants in the ground longer than this, but the young ones taste great. What on earth would we do without golf balls, they help us measure the size of hail and golf ball size is perfect for harvesting beetroot.
Compatible with beetroot is spinach, so plant them near each other.
This is another easy to grow vegetable. Sow your seed in rows and be prepared to thin out the young seedlings when they shoot.
Ideally, the plants should be about 10 to 20 centimetres apart. As with the beetroot, you should be able to start harvesting in about seven to 10 weeks – then all you need is the fetta to make a great salad.
Silverbeet should be a staple in vegetable gardens. It has large, dark green leaves with wide stalks that are produced for months and months.
This vegetable should be used regularly – just cut and chop and then steam or boil until the leaves go soft.
I’m told a small sprinkle of nutmeg when serving makes a difference, I must try that.
With any fast maturing vegetable you must be prepared to undertake succession sowing. This means to plant one or two rows, wait a fortnight and plant the same amount again, and so on.
This means you will have a steady supply of produce over a long period of time instead of a mass of produce all in one hit.
If you’ve gone to all the trouble to have a veggie plot you need to make it work for you, plant what you like to eat and spend time in the garden.
Diary: Wodonga TAFE’s horticulture department is taking expressions of interest for an autumn kitchen gardening course, run over four half-day sessions.
For more information call 1300 698 233 (1200 MY TAFE).