To read the forty ninth issue of my FREE weekly newsletter filled with gardening tips, please visit the newsletters section of my website. I have uploaded the latest issue here.
If you're using a smart phone, it's best viewed as a pdf document received by email. To be added to my mailing list, please email me at anitakundu.nz@gmail.com and write "subscribe" in the subject field. Have a great weekend! Anita
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To read the forty eighth issue of my FREE weekly newsletter filled with gardening tips, please visit the newsletters section of my website. I have uploaded the latest issue here.
If you're using a smart phone, it's best viewed as a pdf document received by email. To be added to my mailing list, please email me at anitakundu.nz@gmail.com and write "subscribe" in the subject field. Have a great weekend! Anita Over winter, I hope to explore seed saving in my blog. I feel quite guilty as I don’t make much of an effort to save seeds from my plants, despite being such an avid gardener. The main reason is because autumn, the time of the year when most seeds are harvested, coincides with typically the busiest time in the garden. The summer plants are often at their peak and it is a mission to stay on top of the harvest. Much time is spent in the kitchen helping my mother prepare delicious meals with our produce. I am also busy raising seedlings for the winter garden and slowly starting to prepare and plant the garden beds for the coming season. There are simply not enough hours in the day to save seeds on top of this. Also seed saving requires keeping plants in the garden when they're past their prime, which of course takes up space. Sometimes I get a bit impatient and want to pull out finished plants to make room for new season's seedlings. That has long been the way that it was, but I have decided that this is simply not good enough. This year, I want to make a conscious effort to save seeds from some of my plants. I don’t intend to try to save seeds from all of them because that’s too ambitious for someone who is just starting out saving their own seeds. I do admit to liking certain hybrid varieties, especially for container tomatoes, which makes seed saving futile because seed saved from hybrids probably won’t come true to type. Furthermore, I enjoy growing lots of different cucurbit varieties and they have a tendency to cross-pollinate, meaning that seed saved from these plants probably won’t be true to type.
So what has brought about this change of position? The following two reasons:
Prakesh, a man that lives down our street, is a real inspiration to me. He is from Fiji. Wandering around his garden, you might mistakenly think you are actually in Fiji. His garden is mainly an assortment of Indian veggies, herbs and fruit trees. I spent some time over at his place on Sunday afternoon, walking around his garden as he talked me through what he is growing. Prakesh is a diligent seed saver. He needs to be because there is no way of sourcing what he has in his garden from seed suppliers. He showed me his seed drawer, which contains an assortment of seeds which he has saved from his garden over the years, all carefully labelled and dated. He kindly gave me some seeds from his garden, which you can see in the picture above. I was so impressed with his efforts and it was the impetus I needed to change my old cycle of simply growing, producing and pulling out plants at the end of the season, only to purchase more seeds of the same varieties the following winter for the next season. This just doesn’t make sense, financially or otherwise. The saying start small, think big comes to mind when I think about my plans for seed saving this year. I would like to start with saving seed from the extra hot chilli seeds I will be growing in our garden, thanks to seeds kindly given to me by my gardening friends Minette Tonoli, Robin Sharrock and Anthony Smith. I will write more about these special varieties when I come to sow them in the coming months. This will be a separate blog subject. To close, the other person who I really admire for her seed saving efforts is the lovely Stella from Running Brook seeds. Over the years, Stella has amassed an enormous collection of seeds from her seed saving efforts and has an incredible catalogue, which you can view here. I had a lovely conversation with Stella over the phone a few days ago, as I was looking for boda beans (or cowpeas) and wanted to check whether what she had listed in her catalogue corresponded with what I was looking for. Again, to expect to be like Stella in my first season of seed saving is completely unrealistic. But it is great to have good role models such as Prakesh and Stella to inspire and motivate me in my own efforts. Yesterday afternoon I spent some time with one of our neighbours. Prakesh and his wife Anu are lovely. They live just down the street from us and are also keen gardeners. One day Prakesh came to talk to me while I was working in the garden and a friendship blossomed. It has been a long time since I have seen them. I had been meaning to catch up for a while now but then Covid intervened and social interaction became impossible.
As is common when visiting an avid gardener, you don’t leave empty handed. Prakesh kindly gave me some boda bean seeds (cowpeas) to grow in the garden this summer. He also gave me a curry leaf plant, much to my delight. Prakesh had a lot of curry leaf seedlings growing in his greenhouse. I get a lot of requests for curry leaf plants from customers in my nursery. They are very hard to find and take a long time to mature. It’s not a plant that I know much about, so I thought it would make a good topic for a blog post. Curry leaf is a sub-tropical shrub native to India and Sri Lanka. The botanical name is Murraya koenigii. Its leaves are used extensively in cooking throughout Asia, including curries and soups. It has white flowers throughout the year. Curry leaf plants do best in rich, free-draining soil. Plants can be propagated from seed. Prakesh only had a couple of seeds spare as he sowed them all himself, so I’m going to have to wait for my plant to go to seed and collect some, which may take a few years. Prakesh also has an enormous curry leaf tree growing outside in his garden and he gave me a cutting, so I’m also going to try and propagate a plant that way. Curry leaf plants do well in full sun. Especially when they are young, the curry leaf plant is very frost-sensitive, so it’s best to keep them inside a greenhouse over winter. After several years, it is fine to leave them outside all year round, at least in Auckland. From my understanding, curry leaf plants can be grown in containers, which is what I’m going to try doing because space is so scarce in our garden. For on-going use, it’s best to have an established plant outside and pick the leaves fresh as you need them. The leaves can be dried and stored for later use, but the taste is inferior. Seeds must be ripe and fresh to germinate, so I’m going to germinate the seeds which Prakesh gave me on my heat pad today. I’m also going to dip the cutting he gave me in a bit of rooting hormone and plant it in some potting mix to see if it takes. I’ve already put the plant he gave me in our greenhouse, which I hope will over-winter. I will post an update regarding the progress of the curry leaf plant in our garden in the future. To read the forty seventh issue of my FREE weekly newsletter filled with gardening tips, please visit the newsletters section of my website. I have uploaded the latest issue here.
If you're using a smart phone, it's best viewed as a pdf document received by email. To be added to my mailing list, please email me at anitakundu.nz@gmail.com and write "subscribe" in the subject field. Have a great weekend! Anita To read the forty sixth issue of my FREE weekly newsletter filled with gardening tips, please visit the newsletters section of my website. I have uploaded the latest issue here.
If you're using a smart phone, it's best viewed as a pdf document received by email. To be added to my mailing list, please email me at anitakundu.nz@gmail.com and write "subscribe" in the subject field. Have a great weekend! Anita It’s the start of winter! It’s amazing how fast time flies. It wasn’t that long ago that we were in March, at the start of lockdown. To help you, I have compiled a little list of things to do around the garden in June. This is written with Auckland, New Zealand, where I live, in mind. If you live overseas, this task list may not be suitable for your climate.
Veggies
Flowers
Roses
Fruit trees
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