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5/27/2019

Over the past month, I have been busy in the garden with the following activities:

Digging and chopping up giant sunflowers – following their beautiful display in summer comes the hard work in autumn of clearing dead sunflowers. It was quite an effort to chop them all up and they filled four waste bins (two collection cycles as we have such a large garden that we require two bins). Sometimes this puts me off growing them as the clear up is such a big task but they are beautiful and remain one of my favourite features of the summer garden
Clearing the strawberry patch – I weeded the area where we planted strawberries last year in preparation for planting the fresh lot of plants when they arrive. Last year, I purchased plants from a commercial grower in Katikati and we had the best crop of strawberries since I started gardening! Every day saw a huge silver bowl full of strawberries over a period of three and a half months. I’m purchasing plants from the same grower this year and they are supposed to arrive in May/June, so they shouldn’t be very far away at all. Although the plants will go in the same area, I did plant zucchini and cucumbers in between cycles so this should hopefully provide adequate crop rotation
Planting winter veggies – I have started planting a winter garden, consisting of cabbages, broccoli, cauliflower, kale and broad beans. I’ll be putting in more of these plants once I’ve finished planting the last of our spring bulbs (see below)
Sowing pea and broad bean seeds – As I have had a late start to the winter garden this year, I decided to sow peas (Alderman from Egmont, Climbing from Yates, Petit Provencal from Kings Seeds and Snow peas from my friend Rob Hammington) and broad beans (Imperial Green and Exhibition from McGregors) indoors, to be transplanted outdoors when they are big enough. Initially I had them on the heat pad but as we have been having such warm weather lately, I took them off and they have been germinating just fine. I’ll plant them outdoors when they’re a bit bigger and I’ve had a chance to clear the trellises at the back of our house which have Malabar spinach from summer growing over them.
Potatoes – I’ve started giving thought to the potatoes that I’d like to grow over winter. I managed to source two bags of Summer Delight from Tui, which I have been meaning to grow in our garden as mentioned in a previous blog post, but somehow keep missing out. I have read good things about Summer Delight from Lynda Hallinan, who grows a whopping 25 kg of this variety in her country garden every year. It’s a main crop variety and is an incredibly high yielder. A 1.5 kg bag is supposed to produce 20kg of potatoes! I plan to put these in on the shortest day, which is when the days gradually become longer and you can start planting potatoes outdoors. I also hope to source some Agria, Jersey Benne and Liseta potatoes for our garden, too. Tui have also released a new variety called Summer Beauty, which is a cross between Summer Delight and Coliban. Like Summer Delight, it’s also a main crop variety. I haven’t seen this one at Mitre 10 (who stock Tui), but I’ll keep an eye out for it in future.
Planting spring bulbs – I have been busy planting my stock of spring bulbs in the garden bed by our neighbour’s willow tree. I am very excited about this space as the new owner who moved in late last year cut down the willow tree, so the area now gets full sun! In summer, I can’t wait to try growing a sun-loving crop such as pumpkins or squash in the area so we can make better use of this space.
Ordering garlic – Following a bad season last year, I was understandably reluctant to grow garlic again. I say that every year, but I always give it another try as my philosophy when things go wrong in the garden is that “there’s always next year!”. This year, I ordered five different varieties from Bulbs Direct – Printanor, Elephant, Turban, Kakanui and Ajo Rojo. I also sourced two huge Printanor bulbs from Farro in Orakei, which I will also plant in the garden. The garlic I ordered from Bulbs Direct will arrive in mid-June, which gives me a fortnight to clear some space and prepare the bed prior to planting.

It’s been a long time since my last post, so I thought this would be the perfect time to reflect briefly on some of the more successful aspects of the summer garden. In my next post, I’ll talk about what I’ve been up to around the garden lately.

First, I must report back on the success we had with growing pumpkins over summer. Although they shouldn’t be terribly difficult to grow, we’ve never had a bumper crop and I could never quite work out why. Then I read on my gardening friend Cynthia’s blog (www.thiftykiwi.co.nz) that she lay black plastic on the ground and made holes for each plant. She had the biggest and best crop ever, so I thought I would give it a try myself. After all, I had been doing this with melons every year and found that the plastic helped keep the soil temperature consistently warm. I must say that we have never had such a successful pumpkin season. In total, we harvested around 75 pumpkins – 25 Big Chief Butternut (Kings Seeds), 25 regular Butternut and 25 other pumpkins (mainly a mixture of Blue Hubbard, Queensland Blue and Crown). From now on, I’ll definitely be rolling out the black plastic prior to planting my pumpkins and squash! We have been enjoying pumpkin in a variety of ways – in soup with parsnips from the garden (more on these below), roasted butternut stuffed with feta and as a side accompaniment to meat. The star performer was the variety Big Chief Butternut from Kings Seeds. The vines were extremely prolific and the pumpkins were enormous AND heavy! I’ll definitely be growing this outstanding variety again next season.

Roasted butternut stuffed with feta and herbs

Parsnips were another successful crop, following a previous bad season with not one single parsnip having germinated! I sowed these in mid-September, after our early Swift potatoes which were planted on the shortest day were lifted. The seeds were from Egmont and they germinated incredibly well! One little tip when sowing parsnips is to use fresh seed – the fresher, the better. Apparently older seed doesn’t germinate reliably. They were ready in Mid-January, but I left them in the ground until early May and we harvested them as needed. I was flabbergasted by the size of some of our parsnips! They have the reputation for being rather bland but we find ours very flavoursome. Parsnip fries are a favourite, roasted with some sea salt. We have also been enjoying them in mum’s veggie soup and another delicious soup recipe we discovered, featuring pumpkin and parsnip, from Weight Watchers. We shared some parsnips and pumpkin with my aunt and uncle, who live across the road from us, who commented how delicious they both were.

Mega parsnip from the garden!

We have also been enjoying NZ Spinach from the seeds I sowed in early summer (Kings Seeds). This is another plant which can be tricky to germinate, but once it gets growing, it simply doesn’t stop. It’s something that I like growing every year. To my knowledge, you can’t purchase plants so if you want to grow it, you’ll have to start plants from seed. One of the things that I like most about NZ Spinach is that you simply snip off what you need; there’s no need to pull out the entire plant. Mum made a pumpkin and spinach lasagne using our veggies from the garden, which was lovely. It’s also delicious steamed. NZ Spinach can be eaten raw. We have been having it every day in our green smoothie and it’s incredibly delicious.

Finally, our banana tree which was planted two years ago by an American couple called Becca and Alex who wwoofed at our place now has fruit on it! We are very excited by this development. You’re supposed to put a bag over the bananas to help them ripen. If you can use a blue bag, it’s supposed to be even better so this is what I used to cover our bananas. You can expect to harvest bananas in spring. The variety in our garden is called Misi Luki and the plant was purchased from Kings Plant Barn in Orakei.

Misi Luki, our banana tree, from Incredible Edibles

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