Last year I grew a couple of plantings of potatoes in a few beds to see how they went. My first lot were spectacular. Seven or eight weeks after planting, I hilled up the beds, dragging the soil between the rows up and over the stems of the vigorous foliage. Come harvest I dug masses of beautiful spuds.

'Oh, this is easy', I thought. For the second planting I dug the seed potatoes in deeper, but didn't bother to hill them up.

But when it was time to harvest, I chucked into the compost about half the crop of spuds. Without the hilling up, all the spuds exposed to light were patched with green. And the bigger the potato, the more likely to be poking up through the soil. It was a disheartening exercise, especially in the muddy soils of autumn.

You can't see the green patches in the photos due to the mud -- but they're there!

So this year, when I've planted spuds in all of last year's corn patch (photo at top), I am determined to hill, and hill well!

Seven weeks from planting, the potato tops are up and growing fast. First I run the tiller between the rows. This knocks back any weeds, and loosens the soil so it's easier to shift. In the photo below I've tilled either side of the first row.

Once I've tilled between all the rows, it's time for my trusty hoe. Standing on one side of the row, I use the hoe to drag the earth in the next row towards me onto the plants at my feet. This takes two passes for each row of potatoes ; one for each side. Today I am hilling the first 11 rows (of Pink Eyes), then I'll do the Dutch Creams next week, and the Nicolas after that.

So above is a photo of the second row hilled up. You can see how much of the foliage is covered by the earth (compare the two hilled rows on the left with the unhilled rows on the right). As I hill, I often stop to remove any clods of grass or lumps of rock from the soil of the potato patch. I also pause regularly to clean and sharpen the cutting edge of the hoe -- it's surprising the difference a sharp hoe makes!

After an hour-and-a-half, and nine rows, my arms feel like jelly and there's sweat stinging my eyes. Beautiful sunny afternoon....no breeze, though, and it's goood to stop for a breather between rows....

And after the last four passes up and down the final two rows, the Pink Eyes are hilled, and, as with so much in farming, you can stand back and look at it and say, muscles aching: 'job done'.

Now it's only the Dutch Creams and Nicolas to do....but that's a job for next week.

At this time of the year, the only cured garlic you can buy in the shops comes from somewhere else....Mexico, China, Brazil. This is because all the Australian-grown garlic starts to soften and sprout sometime after July, as it tries to reproduce itself. In the process it loses volume, texture and flavour. And this season's garlic (planted in April), won't be ready until December.

Rather than buying imported garlic of unknown provenance, I fill this gap in the garlic year by using the immature garlic in my garden.

When the garlic sprouts are very young, I use the whole plant; then when they are of middle size, I chop off the leaves (which have become coarse), and use the stems. When the garlic has started to bulb up (as in the photo above), I use the whole bulb and the paler parts of the stem.

The flavour of spring garlic is milder than cured garlic, so I use a bit more in each dish. Generally, I find a stem like those above may last me up to a week; I start by cutting across the top of the stem on Monday and by the weekend I am eating the tender bulb. Delicious, fresh, and local....

With the onions in, and the salads, beets, turnips and peas underway, it's time for the next big thing: fruiting annuals.

Around here the rule of thumb for planting out tomatoes and other frost-susceptible fruiting annuals is "after Showday", and showday was last week so I'm good to go, having hoed up a patch in preparation for the big day....

Meanwhile, my tomatoes, zucchinis, tomatillos and cucumbers have been shooting up in the potting shed, and they are looking keen to see some real dirt.

Rather than spading up the beds as I usually would, this year I am trialling planting straight into the field, so with the help of my neighbour, I've staked out all the beds and paths so I can use a string line to show where to walk and where to plant.

So in the photo above you can see the 400mm wide path marked by string on the left, and the 800mm wide bed with tomatoes planted at one metre intervals. This pattern continues across the patch. This year I am planting mainly 'Stupice' tomatoes (an heirloom Polish variety), as well as some Kotlas, Wapsipinicon and Rouge de Marmande. These varieties all hail from the cooler regions of the northern hemisphere, so they are more suited to the climate here at 42 degrees south than the more common Mediterranean varieties (think Roma, Grosse Lisse, etc).

Around the base of each plant I have spread a couple of litres of seedmeal fertiliser, which will break down slowly and provide more nutrients when the plants need them as they reach maturity. 

Like last year, I plan to let my tomatoes sprawl again this year. This saves a lot of trellising and pinching out of side shoots, not to mention tying (and untying, and un-trellising!). Sprawling tomatoes have far heavier yields, but of smaller fruit.

The thing is, I think I was lucky last year that we had a hot, dry summer, so the sprawling tomatoes remained free from moulds and other nasties that like the dark, damp conditions under the vine. The coming summer is forecast as warm and wet, so I have to take action to avoid potential trouble.

Firstly, I'm going to lay dripper pipe down the rows, so that irrigation is delived directly to the soil, avoiding creating wetter conditions in the leafy part of the plant.

Secondly, I plan to mulch heavily over the pipe and around the plants. For mulch I am using spoiled silage. Silage is moist hay that is cooked (hot composted/fermented) in plastic rounds. Apparently the heat from the fermentation kills all the hayseeds in the silage, so my mulch should not sprout a forest of grass like mulch hay does. (Note the "apparently" in that last sentence....)

Here are the rounds of spoilt silage (the cows got to the silage and ripped the plastic, letting moisture in so that it is no longer suitable as animal feed):

The silage mulch should do several things: retain moisture in the soil; prevent weeds from growing; and provide a dry-ish, airy top layer to prevent the damp from damaging the vines.

However, I do have a final trick to keep the vines off the ground: wattles.

There's a couple of stands of young black wattle on the reserve road that runs between my land and a neighbour's. 

They are pretty at the moment, but black wattles tend to grow very fast and then fall over, so these are to be sacrificed for the good of the tomatoes. I will cut the boughs to lengths of roughly a metre, then pile them fresh between each of the 70-odd tomato plants. The boughs will dry quickly (hopefully!) and the nitrogen-rich fronds will drop off, creating a second layer of mulch on the silage, while the twigs will provide a firm, airy buffer between the mulch below and the sprawling vines and fruit on top.

This is fairly adventurous gardening. I hope it works.

In any case, my cunning plan will keep me busy for a little while, once I've planted the corn and tidied the place up for a farm visit this week and dealt with this week's succession plantings.........and hoed up the spuds.

Wish me luck!

'Costata Romanesco' zucchini.