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Green Gardener25 July We're told it's very dry throughout the region and I've not reason to disbelieve my hydrologist friends, but it's still possible to get drenched pushing my way through the herbage in my garden. Surface water just doesn't evaporate the way it might in warmer seasons. Tanks are running dry though, and the water trucks are delivering in Otatara and Riverton. We'll have to take care not to use up our reserves on baths for our 16 year old daughter and so on. We've got our garlic into the ground, I'm pleased to say - two beds full and looking very good. The soil was friable and surprisingly warm and the cloves fat and full of promise. I dug up, divided and replanted into new sites, all of my blueberry bushes. If the move went well, and I'm pretty confident that conditions were perfect for the task, I'll have 10 times as many fruiting bushes than I've had up to this point. they are a very productive blueberry and much sought after by my visitors. The birds love them too, so I'm on the lookout for a supply of nets. I did hundreds of black and red currant cuttings and they are safely tucked into their river-sand beds. I'm going to travel out to Waianiwa soon to get cuttings from the extra-special bushes on the Baker farm and set those out in the sandy Community Orchard soil to root up and grow unhampered over the spring. 27 June I refer to he circular never-ending moon calendar that is pinned to our noticeboard whenever I'm wanting to plant, sow, prune of graft and find it's a very useful guide as to the best time to do these tasks. I also look out the window though, to check that it's even going to be possible. Weather over-rules the moon's influence more often than not, especially if it's raining and cold! I'm not sure what influence last night's eclipse of the moon would have on the planting calendar. It sure was something to see though and I made the effort to get up and outside to watch the shadow of our earth slowly creep across the face of the moon. It was well worth the effort and exposure to the cold. I wrapped up very well and nipped in and out for viewings and sessions beside the heater. The weather has been settled and crispy over the past few days and the morning frosts have been harder and harder. Today's feels like it will be quite severe, though I can't see it yet as the sun hasn't come up! We've had some quite extrordinary vegetables coming into the Centre lately, grown up in the Pourakino valley and including some very large orange pumpkins about which I will write next time. 10 June Should be wintery here right now but despite the coolness in the air, you'd think winter had either been and gone or was due to arrive. I do know that it can change in the twinkling of an eye but I'm enjoying this calm phase for as long as it lasts. I can see a heavy covering of snow on the Takitimu mountains and on Mid Dome, so I'm not entirely unaware that cold days are not far away. Surprisingly, we've had a couple of frosts. In the past couple of years, we've been all but frost-free through the winter but the blackened leaves of some of our vegetables, especially the ulluco from South America and my out-door-growing tomatoes from the same region, show that we've been visited. No great harm done though and it's certainly sweetened up the swedes. The apples crop has been picked, mostly by birds sadly, though the Gloria Mundi are still on the tree, looking very autumnul and tasty, covered for their own protection by a very sturdy net. I'll pick them soon and store them, probably in paper, for as long as they will last. Most late season apples store for a considerable time, whereas early season apples soon go soft and fail. I've enjoyed several very delicious apple desserts lately, baked with apples of unknown name and various origins, many of those being the old orchards around Southland. The cookers are becoming very popular indeed, even when their names are not known. People recognise a good thing when they taste it. 15 May I've planted cardoons here in my hillside garden where the soil is rich and loamy and down beside the beach in the school garden where it's nothing but sand and to my surprise, those in the thin and hungry sand are doing much better! It might be that cardoons originate from the coast and are designed to do well in maritime conditions, as asparagus and sea beet are. Either way, it's made me think about looking more closely at the two gardens and comparing other plants that I've got growing in both. I've dragged some great heavy lengths of kelp from the beach and laid them beside the rows of cardoons for the winter, so spring might reveal even more impressive growth. Cardoons are good to eat and it's the leaf stems, sliced into a salad or stir fried, that provide the most interest for epicures. This site might interest you: http://robertguyton.blogspot.com/ 14 May Autumn is the season for gardeners to reflect on their trials and tribulations, bring their harvest in out of the deteriorating weather and fill their jars, shelves and freezers with the fruits and vegetables they laboured over through the spring and summer. And so it is for me this autumn, though there’s one harvest that hasn’t made it inside and that’s our usually heavy apple crop. It was intercepted, cut off at the pass, by the birds. They helped themselves to just about everything we grew; Merton Russets, Keswick Codlins, Kidd’s Orange Reds, Lawfams, pearmains and pippins, they took the lot - well almost everthing, we did rescue a percentage of the crop between attacks. It took a lot of netting and some very early picking to beat the unusually rapacious birds. I don’t know what got into them, aside from my apples. Reports from around Southland suggest that the 2009/2010 season has been the worst for many a year for bird attacks on, not only apples but stone fruits and berries as well. No doubt someone will arrive at a conclusion as to why it happened, but so far, we just know that we need to do something in preparation for next season, or our preserving jars will again stand empty on the pantry shelves. 13 May Several days of exceptionally warm weather has lifted the spirits of gardeners down here and provoked a flurry of activity out of doors. The combination of rain and seemingly never ending warmth has produced a bumper harvest, where earlier in the season we worried over the grey skies and cooler temperatures and the lack of growth and ripening that goes with it. Parsnips in particular, have done themselves and their growers proud and have reached epic proportions. Yams are still swelling in the soil, awaiting the first serious frost and we've expectations that they will be remarkable as well. Even pumpkins have produced sizeable fruits this season, which is somewhat unusual for the south, where ripening can be a problem for the larger varieties. I almost wish I'd sown water melons as, chances are, they'd have come to something this year. Certainly our corn grew impressively. The kanga ma seed I was given has gone full cycle and I'll have plenty to sow next season and a few ears to soak over the next few months to make my first kanga pirau. My family is less keen than I am to sample this traditional dish, but once they smell it cooking on the stove, they'll change their minds (smiley face). You might be interested to read this discussion from a blog that occasionally features vegetables and fruits amongst it's discussions. Here they are swapping experiences with New Zealand spinach. It's interesting to see how varied are the approaches to growing it and the conditions it can be grown under. http://blog.greens.org.nz/2010/05/11/photo-tetragonia-tetragonioides/#comment-124808 27 April Heavy downpours of rain in the west have swollen our rivers this week, covering paddocks with dirty water, washing all sorts of farming stuff down to the estuary here and out onto the beach. I hope there are no livestock amongst it, but often there is. We've received less rain here on the coast but still enough to soak the ground and make gardening a task for when it dries out. My 'townside' garden drains very quickly, being sand from the old dunes that rolled here before the town was built, so I went down this morning to check on progress there. I took a bucket full of ashes from the fire (we only burn wood and paper) to sprinkle about, as the soil there is very 'thin' and lacking in nutrients and some minerals. I'll take a bucket full of 'worm rum' down this afternoon to feed the cardoons that are growing there, to give them a boost before the cold winter weather sets in. It's easy soil to work and I try to do most of it by hand, pulling up weeds rather than digging and laying them back down onto the soil as mulch. I don't like to leave soil exposed to the air and sun and mulch makes a great home for small insects and even tinier micro-organisms that do so much useful work without being asked. I'm sowing tick beans and white lupins as cover crops and alexanders,fennel, angelica and sweet cicely as perennial herbs that will attract hoverflies. The oats have all self-seeded and are coming up thickly, much to my amazement, having watched the seed eating birds spend days clinging to the oat stalks, feasting on the grain. Obviously they missed some! 25 April What constitutes a garden? Must it be planted by hand, in which case, does a forest revegetation project qualify? I've been down to one of the mutton bird islands, where nature has done the arrangements, but have needed help from humans to clear out the seed and seedling munching rats that threatened to destroy the special forests that grow there, forests that feel to me like a garden - beautifully planted, carefully managed. Certainly the birders keep the paths in good order. Ulva Island, in Stewart Island's Paterson Inlet, is another partially managed natural garden. People have been very busy there, track making, removing pests and relocating birds, including the kiwi. I went there last weekend and here's an account of that trip. It takes one hour to get from Bluff to Stewart Island by ferry. If the trip was a gentle one and the waves small, you’ll be more than happy to go another 10 minutes further to get to the island of the birds, Ulva. It’s just around the corner from the township on Stewart Island, but seems an age away when you arrive. It’s so pristine and relaxed. Nothing rushes there, other than the weka that noses out to see who’s arrived, or the kakariki that stream away up into the taller trees when you get too close. It’s a very pleasant place to wander, Ulva Island, and you can take your time doing it. There are walking tracks that divide and run down slopes and up rises, none difficult and all tempting. Bird calls you probably won’t recognise echo around the forest. Have you heard the clacks and screeches of a kaka? The quiet peeps of a brown creeper? The bray of a blue penguin? On Ulva you will, if you walk carefully and talk in a whisper. And there are kiwi there, odd -bods of the greater kiwi family, that come out to snuffle about in the bushes during the day when their kiwi cousins are in their burrows with their eyes closed. Ulva has it all. Even a little danger. Our group, on the island for an afternoon of bird spotting and learning how to keep rodent pests away, took time to wander slowly along a sheltered sandy beach, looking at the little blue penguin bobbing about offshore and the kelp swaying in the tide, only it wasn’t a frond of kelp we say lazily flapping beside us where the waves were breaking, it was the flipper of a very large sea lion and he was watching us closely, tossing up whether to rush us off his beach or ignore us. He chose to pay us no heed, thankfully, and sauntered off, or rather rocketed away through the waves and out to sea. We could have stayed all day on the island, so varied and interesting was the bird life, but not over night, as the island has rules and over-nighters are out. Bringing mice onto the island is another no-no, and you’re asked to check your day packs before getting aboard the water taxi that takes you out to the island, and your boots need a quick check as well, to make sure no mainland pest plant seeds make it across either. It’s no hardship and gives you the feeling that you’ve done something to help with the protection of the beautiful outdoor, wire-netting-free aviary that Ulva Island is. If you like to see and hear native birds in their natural surroundings, enjoy a day at the beach or amongst the trees of a New Zealand native forest, a boat trip to Stewart Island then on to Ulva will satisfy all of your needs. Take your camera. 20 March I'm a terribly distractable gardener and I've been terribly distracted over past months, but now that I've been slotted in to the Radio Live Gardening Show on Saturday morning at 7:00 am for a 'deep south' chat about gardening on the south coast, I feel I had better get my comments here up to date! I talked this morning about fungi - the sort that lives amongst the roots of trees and shrubs and works in cooperation with the root tips to process the harder-to-get minerals from the soil, making them palatable and easier to up-take and in return, receiving sugars from the tree as reward. I also described the challenge to southern gardeners, of the punishing winds from the southern ocean and ways to shelter yourself and your garden, without having to fork out money. I grew most of my native shelter plants from cuttings and seeds and that extra work, such as it was, has paid off handsomely. Our shelter is attractive, resiliant and does a tremendous job in inproving our environment, both for everyday living and for the food plants we grow. I've found that a sloping shelter belt works best and is more effective than a 'wall' style of shelter that is so often seen on farms around the south. A graduated series of shrubs and trees, lifts the wind up and over the garaden and yet allows a soft cushion of air through to keep the garden healthy. Apple trees in particular, need some flow-through of air to keep fungi at bay and berries such a gooseberries and black currants benefit from some air movement. Our apple trees have been subject to an extraordinary attack by birds this season, despite our best efforts with nets, flashing tapes, rustling plastic bags hung in the branches and starving the cat of Whiskers in order to encourage him to hunt, but to little avail. The bulk of our apples have been pecked, either partially or completely and it's not a pretty sight. I'm organising an air rifle and hardening my heart, in readiness for a clean up. The native birds; tui and bellbird, are safe, but if you are a blackbird or a thrush that likes to hang out in my garden, look out! 2 December The wind has just kept on coming- even with lots of shelter the soil temperatures are still low- when you get a couple of hot sunny days then cold again many plants decide there has been a season change and start going to seed before they are fully grown. We have had to pull out some first crops and replant all over again- seems disheartening but necessary if we are going to get some good crops this season. It looks like relying on main crops like you could in the old days is no longer viable. The old saying 'don't put all your eggs in the same basket' applies to gardening 'don't plant all your carrots in the same month'. Try a few rows or batches of every vegetable every month- more when it should be good growing and sneak a few in even when it shouldn't- I have planted carrot seeds in May and had young spring carrots in August as that year was a mild warm winter! 8 November 2009 It has been very windy for the last few weeks so we are pleased most of our land is mulched. Mulching is great because if it is windy or dry the soil stays damp underneath and if it is very wet the top soil doesn't get washed away. The other good thing about mulching is that the mulch breaks down at an every increasing pace, due to the ever increasing micro organisms in the soil, and builds soil. We drop organic waste on the spot so our whole place is like a forest floor- any unwanted plants, leaves, weeds etc are our mulch- no need to buy pea straw! Also because the soil is covered few weeds need to grow to cover the soil. 4 November Hail, hail, rock and roll - it's awful out there! Whatever happened to our weather? We were coming to terms with what looked like a coming dry summer, then the skies opened and the temperature plummeted. We've even had snow! Luckily, in line with our low-tech approach to management, all of our hail sensitive plants have been grown behind and under 'natural' shelter - stands of tall rye, lupins and vetch, or in the lee of standing shrubs and trees, so we've not suffered any damage. The plums have set their fruit before this all began (though the kereru have exacted their toll) and most of the apple trees have done the same. Once this appalling sweep of weather has passed, the late blossoming apples will, with luck, have a chance to 'do the bee thing'. The usual follow-up to days of unseasonal cold with its hail, sleet and snow, is frost. Hard frost. Destructive, cell exploding frost. It's very easy to look at a clear sky, and feel relieved that the blizzards are passed and relax but we've learned from experience to keep our guard up and lay out the frost cloth. Frost does a deal more damage to potatoes, for example, than any other 'weathers', with the possible exception of cyclones, hurricanes and tornadoes, none of which we experience down here ... yet. The report is for settled weather tomorrow - but we'll be out and about tonight, laying cloth. If it snows, we'll be out of luck and our veges will be crushed. It's all part of being a southern gardener. We will prevail! 14 October A surprisingly fine day and hardly any wind here in our treed micro-climate. The fruits on the plums, apricots, nashi and currants (red, white and ...black) are set and prolific. I've spread cow parsley seed everywhere and they are growing vigorously, smothering the grasses and drawing the pollinating flies. One year old rhubarb plants are looking strong and I've let some of them flower, with the idea of collecting seed from them for spreading around the community. In the past I've snapped the flower stems off, in order to encourage leaf growth, but I'm not sure now that it really matters. I'll know after this season. Lots of French Sorrel and 'wilding' silver beet plants are thriving amongst the berries and fruit trees and it looks very natural. I'm even enjoying the dock plants, traditionally disliked by gardeners, but I'm of the opinion that they are doing a very useful job, drawing up leached nutrients to the surface, the way the comfrey is reputed to do. Dock has a marvelous, broad leaf that I think is under rated. Praising dock reminds me to mention that I am soon to spread stinging nettle seed around the apple trees, partly to interrupt the codlin moth's cycle of development and partly to provide habitat for Red Admiral butterflies to lay their eggs, as they did last year. Habitat like nettles is as threatened as any due to our habit of 'cleaning up' plants that irritate us. I'll talk about tutu another time! 8 October Like mushrooms, (but at the same time, unlike mushrooms)little hot-spot vegetable gardens are popping up all through our orchard. Wherever there is a pool of sunlight, a vegetable garden is appearing, planted with kale, lettuce, beans, beets, onions, shallots, potatoes; anything and everything we can start off in the tunnel house and transplant outside once a new micro-garden has been cultivated. Even the hen run, with it's wonderful guano rich soil, has been turned over to garden. The hens are holidaying at the community gardens, scratching up the couch and the snails down there and preparing that ground for planting. While they are away, we're building a new, swept-up run for them here and planting their old run out in vegetables. We expect those to reach prize-winning size, given the richness of the soil and its claw-cultivated qualities. Despite our enthusiasm to get growing, we are well aware of the probability of frosts and hail and we are deploying the frost cloth nightly. The more sensitive plants, like the beans, have been tucked under the shelter of eaves and overhangs and should survive anything falling from the sky, even if we are caught out and unable to cover them up. Today's forecast is for hail, so we shall see how the best laid plans work out. 29 Sept Following an evening of extraordinary cloud formations - like huge pearls hanging from an opalescent curtain, the wind changed and rain fell - just the thing to get more seedlings up and growing! I roamed the garden with my camera charged, looking for pollinating insects - just who (or what) is visiting the pear, apricot, plum and now apple blossom to ensure that there is fruit later in the season? Our two honey bee hives are not running on full at the moment - somehow the winter was especially hard on them, and I'm concerned that there won't be enough pollinating happening, but...I found that they aren't the only ones out there! I took photos of large drone flies, big-eyed hoverflies, dome-backed beetles, bumblebees and honey bees, all busy over the blossom.I've been keeping a photographic record also of the progress of one of our special apple trees, a Keswick Codlin,and looking more closely at that particular tree has helped me see how stunningly prolific it is! The blossom alone seems enough to weigh the branches down. It's no wonder we have to thin the young apples rigorously in order to save the tree from destroying itself. The Keswick Codlin is a tree I heartily recommend for any home orchard - beautiful soft-yellow apples, each with a distinctive seam and a lovely refreshing taste. 26 Sept: I spent a half-hour flinging sour milk around the garden this morning! This might seem odd...and it is, if odd means something out of the ordinary! The milk was 'past it's date' and destined for the dog or the chickens, but I'd read that milk and milky things like yoghurt and cream cheese are effective in controlling powdery mildew on apple trees, so, I flung and flung! A curious fragrance now hangs over the garden but I like the smell of ferment. If it keeps the mildew at bay, I'll be very happy. I'm back out into the garden now, to check on the starling nests in the cabbage trees. There seem to be very few this year. Thinking of nesting birds, our duck has sequestered herself somewhere very close to the back door, judging by the drake's attentive behaviour, but she's un-findable. We'll know where she was once she emerges with ducklings in tow, hungrily searching for anything to break her long fast. Fingers crossed that there's no thunder and lightning between now and then! 31 August Having written that the curious South American 'earth gems' are now available in supermarkets, I was very pleased to find some for sale in Queenstown (of all places!) I bought several bags, knowing that I can grow them on and increase our stocks from the plump yellow and pink ones I found. The earth gems (or ulluco) will be great to give to children to plant in the little 'square metre kitset gardens' that are proving so popular down here. Multiplying up our other crops is high on our to-do list this season, now that we have expanded our garden by buying the neighbouring 1/2 acre. We intend to set out potatoes, yams, beans and peas as the mainstay crops, all protected and nourished by swathes of lupins and mallow, planted to the windward. As well, the many soft-fruit cuttings we set out during the early winter will be grown as 'stock' for ongoing multiplication. We are predicting a high interest in those in the same way that we were sure fruit trees would become sought after. With the weather turning in favour of gardening, the next wee while (nice Southern term there!) will be hectic (in a nice way). Plums are blossoming, perenial herbs are poking their feathery heads out of the soil and bulbs are flowering brightly. It's great to be a gardener! 20 August It's full steam ahead with fruit tree project and there have been some marvelously named trees passing through our garden this week - sent from nursery's around the island, tucked into the soil in my garden then collected by Southlanders keen to become home orchardists. The names of the trees promise much: Kentish Fillbasket, Winter Banana, Golden Delicious, Slack My Girdle, Kidds Orange Red, Laxton's Fortune, Crowder's Delight .. history lies thickly about many of these old favourites. We are dispensing plums as well, Black and Red Doris, Coes Golden Drop, Wilsons Early and Greengage and apricots, quinces and pears. Makes your mouth water to think of them. Southland is well on the way to becoming, as I've long thought it must, a fruitbowl. Now to work on it becoming a vege bin and a breadbasket as well! 29 July The soggy depths of winter finds us in full-speed-ahead mode with visits to our garden by learner-pruners and trips throughout the region to speak with communities wanting to set up orchards of their own. It's a very exciting time with the demand for information so high from people everywhere. Our own garden has sat fairly still for a while I have to say, but there has been major advances in one area - the tunnelhouse! We didn't have one a month ago, but now we do! 6 metres long, the plastic hothouse sits out on the flattest space we could find, with the new bullrush and papyrus-filled swale running along beside it. We plan to use the tunnel house primarily for raising seedlings, but I'm sure we'll fit a grape or a passion fruit in there somewhere. Elsewhere in the garden, things are a bit wet for anything much, following a bit of a deluge at the weekend. We've spent plenty of time on the floor of the lounge, sorting seeds into packets and boxes in the hope of maintaining control over the increasing variety we have. It really does pay to lable and store well. Opening a packet of seed at sowing time and not knowing what you are about to cast onto the soil can be very frustrating. We have adopted the same all-care-taken approach to collecting scion wood from the old apple varieties around Southland. They are all sitting now, labled clearly with the time and place, in damp newspaper and inside of a plastic bag, out in a dark and cool place, waiting for grafting time, set for late September. Busy times indeed! 30 March A summers day at the end of March! Inconceivable! But there it is and there are more to come I feel. They're re-catagorising March as a summer month and I'm not really surprised. It's been a great, long summer, one that has featured huge harvests and for a seed saver, significant multiplication of resources. The days are still dry enough to collect seeds successfully and have them keep well, free of fungi. I'm going about the garden with tin in hand (I've collected all sorts of biscuit, sweet, honey and tea tins for the purpose) stripping off plantain, wild carrot, parsley and other ready-now seeds and storing them away in a cupboard dedicated to the task. My motto, 'strike while the iron is hot' means I rush off at odd, dry times to gather this and that, much to the chagrain of my wife who often has other more pressing tasks for me! But come the next planting season when the seeds are vital to the success our gardeneing venture, I will know that I was right to dodge the dishes for a dash around the daisies! 7 March The 'beak and claw' battle is ongoing, with the birds drawing ahead as we're swept up with our day jobs! We harvested most of the greengage plums, after the initial round of stripping by the birds and now it's all on with the Purple Kings! I don't mind eating the big pecked plums but if we had bird flu in the country I'd be more careful! Our shelves are groaning (cliched term, but I couldn't resist)under the weight of the preserves we've done lately. Beetroot by the preserving jar full and plenty of it. I've taken the monster beets, those too big to fit, even sliced, into any jar and stored them whole, leaves and all, in the clamp outside, packed in dry straw. It looks to be a winning idea but I'll confirm in Spring. I'll try carrots in dry sand as well, as I'm told that works well. I'm sowing the fresh black parsley seed now. It doesn't retain its viability for long and I'm very keen to get some more of these monumental herbs established in my other orchard gardens. I'm putting in fresh Queen Anne's Lace and Alexander seed as well in an effort to establish a mass of robust herbage before the winter. I have my eye on the plantain and the chickory which is yet to ripen. The three pretty-much-solid days of rain were a tremendous boost to growth and well timed to avert trouble of the dry kind. A dozen or so trays of seed set out under the Liberty apple tree are my insurance against loss at the other gardens, only the falling apples are putting pay to some of the seedlings as they poke their heads out of the ground. We lifted 4 boxes of honey from the two hives at the weekend - 2 were pale and subtle and two were dark and luscious! The bees took the process quite calmly, but we are due some new queens. The bees are looking a bit dark. Plenty of bumble bees around at the moment, seeming to favour the blue flowers of which there are a riot. 21 February The heat is on! Its been unrelenting (aside from the times it relented!) The arid conditions continue to dry the soil out everywhere, but we are o.k. for now. The mulch is saving the garden from dessication and the heat is working for us, ripening the fruit and making gardening a job that can be done early morning and late evening. The birds are getting their moisture needs met by pecking the middles out of our plums and apples, but Im fighting back without having to resort to violence, by netting. It means a lot of messing about with hooky, snaggy stuff, but it does mean the we get fruit that is more than just a shell. I have a huge Peasegood Nonsuch apple that is big enough and hollow enough to house a family of sparrows! Despite that, there is still a mass of fruit for us. The danger time is just before ripening but with a bit of effort and thinking like a bird (!) most of the harvest can end up in the fruitbowl, not the avian tummy. 4 February Long time, no diary! It's been a very busy time in and around the garden and we've made a lot of progress in all sorts of ways. Wwoofers (willing workers on organic farms) have been a feature of the garden's progress over the past 3 weeks. People from a range of countries have cultivated, planted, picked and pruned everything, from buckwheat to plums! The mulching we did in the late spring has paid off handsomely in these very dry conditions, keeping everything turgid (great word!) and fresh. The fruit that set in abundance earlier is swelling and ripening perhaps better than ever before and we've been free of any serious hail events, so the crop is bounteous and beautiful to look at. In the vegetable garden, if such a place can be seperated out from the background of shrubs, vines and flowers, is also looking its best - plump beetroot, clambering peas, an over supply of lettuces and plenty of everything else, all off-set by beds of phacelia, buckwheat and oats in preparation for the next stage. The standout for this season has to be the plums - never before have we had such heavy crops! The Burbanks are laden, the Early Wilson's covered (and now eaten or bottled), the Coe's Golden Drop heavy with golden drops and the greengage drooping under the weight of fruit, for the first time! Plum heaven!. 3 January 2008 Into the new year with two very hot days, followed by a night of deluge! Perfect conditions for more growth! Our second garden in the township will benefit the most as it is largely sand and very prone to drying out. This rain will boost the growth of the herbal understorey in particular and wash in the duck poo that has been building up as the ducks grow larger and eat more. The garden was infested with snails when we first began and the ducks have been the perfect solution to that problem. Situated behind the firestation and directly facing the estuary, it gets thrashed by the wind and the leaves of the fruit trees suffer from windburn, especially with the spring equinox winds. They are learning to hunker down behind the tall grasses and the tree lupins I have left for shelter. The soil is very easy to work, however, and makes weeding around the trees and shrubs quick work. There is a great deal of couch in the garden and efforts earlier on to remove it were in vain, so the policy now is to ignore it or use it as a mulch and eventually it will become a minor player in a diverse orchard garden. It's nice not to have to worry about it any more. In fact it has gone from being a pest, to being a bonus quick-growing, reliable mulch source. Rains stopping, must get outside (the red currants need to be picked!) 27 December Now the rain is pelting down! So long as it doesn't turn to hail (there was snow on the hilll-tops around Athol yesterday!), the garden will be fine - in fact it will benefit from the wetting. The deep layer of mulch I've built up right across my two-acre garden means that drought is less a threat than it is to a garden presenting bare soil, but never-the-less, rain at this time of year is welcome. The lettuces seem to require vast amounts of water and not too much heat, if they are not to bolt to seed, so this latest 'climate event' could be termed, 'lettuce weather'. The tomatoes and basil I've planted in the glasshouse both enjoy a regular drink as well and it is very easy to forget that the rain doesn't get in there and to keep the watering going regardless. Our recent visitors from France, famous locally for their plump, tasty tomatoes, described the system of channels they construct every year to regularly quench the thirst of their tomatoes. Perhaps that is the answer. Meanwhile, the rain continues to fall... 23 December Two days of hot weather, the dog's on 'full-pant' mode and the cabbages are wilting if I don't remember to water them in the morning. I'm trialing the previously scorned 'slash and burn' style of gardening (on a small, sustainable scale mind you) where I carefully use fire to clear a spot in the 'jungle' then plant directly into the ashes once they've cooled. The fires are small campfire-sized and pruning-fuelled and as yet, harmless (I won't be doing anymore for a while, it's getting dry here!)and provide a novel way to reinvigorate patches of land that have languished or become overgrown with knotty herbs like tansy or applemint. I'm then planting vegetable plants and seeds, with the aim of increasing the amount of food from our garden and the growth rate seems very good. Often the sites are very sunny and well sheltered by trees and shrubs. As the soil is only exposed for a short while and is protected fom the wind, I think there will be no loss to the elements. I would like to trial a 'smouldery' type of fire that produces charcoal from the branches and prunings, rather than white ash, as this should add a great deal of value to the soil, if what I have read about terra preta soils is true. From now on though, I'll be devoting much of my time to hand clearing around fruit trees and harvesting berries, with gooseberries first on the list. Keeping me motivated will be the raspberries, ripening now, and the white strawberries that are pumping up in several secret spots in the jungle garden. The blueberries are a few weeks away from ripe, so I'll work my way toward them as I clear. Motivation is everything! 16 December The ducks have gone! Because of their increasing familiarity and boldness, resulting in a back door foyer deep in duck-doo, the 6 remaining duckings and their mum are now hunting snails down at the Community Orchard. As happens every year, those appealing little balls of fluff rapidy develop into peeping, demanding adolescents with no sense of decorum and their early morning calls for food and their sloppy calling cards, become too much - so, they're on holiday! We can walk safely bare-foot once again. We are shoulder high in herbs now, towering parsnips, arching cow parsley and scaffolds of sweet cicely, all flowering and seeding with gusto. I am keeping an eye too, on the elecampane, only half as tall as yet, a slow starter but a plant that triumphs in the end, growing to tremendous heights then flinging out bright yellow flowers late in the season. Its broad leaves are magnificent and very different from the usual filligree-type of apiacaea/umbel- carrying hoverfly attracters. Elecampane has a marvelously scented and medicinally active root as well, so its a valuable herb to grow. Far easier to get going, but similarly tall and yellow-flowered is the Jerusalem artichoke, which will perform year after year no matter what, producing plenty of food for those who like the taste. Nice sliced and fried. They are prone to wind-throw though and end up sprawled over everthing else, but they are happy to grow just about anywhere. 3 December Were now into December and the growth in our garden is astounding! I call it 'the green tide' and it can swamp us at this time of the year. While most of the upsurge is herbal, some of it is grass and this makes the place look very shaggy for this month or at least until I get out and about with my sickle. I like to think that the term,'unruly by design' best sums up my intentions for the garden. I struggle sometimes with the chaotic nature of my 'backyard', but over all I am a believer in the non-linear approach to growing things. There are times though, when I waver and wonder if a team of minions with instructions to 'straighten this all out' might be a good solution! That said, it's beautiful amongst the green at the moment, the miriads of insects setting of the flowering plants beautifully. Fruit abounds. Vines are climbing, roots a'clumping - the TV cameras were back last week, filming a group of students from Aparima College talking about 'creatures that help in the garden'. They showed off bumblebee motels, weta tubes, piles of drilled logs and talked up to the starling nests in the ti kouka and all the while ... it rained. My job was to hold the enormous umbrella over their heads so that they didn't get drenched (as I did!). You can see their performances on Channel 110 next week. 21 November Well, it's not a daily diary, is it! This is a very busy time of the year for everyone and for me it's one thing after another, and the temperatures! Hot, hot, hot! I'm concerned that our bees will swarm while I'm away at work. They usually go in the late morning of an unusually hot day and if they make too much progress, we lose them. I have boxes ready for them, just in case, but it can sometimes take a lot of work to capture the swarm and get them into their new home. Last time, the swarm settled high in a tree in our woodlot and we had to climb a ladder to shake them out into a box. The bees themselves have been extra busy amongst the flowers of the herbs and orchard over the past three days and the fruit-set will be full. Already apples are swelling behind their wizzened blossoms and the berry bushes are fully loaded. I've begun to cultivate 'snakes' - winding furrows planted with vegetables and small herbs, in and around the fruit trees. It looks to be a good plan, as I've chosen sunny places to dig and the soil is very friable and has stayed moist, as it wasn't exposed to the sun and wind. I feel like a mole, working my way around the garden. I'm not digging in the usual way, just loosening the grasses and broadleafed 'weeds' then piling them alongside of the furrows as mulch for the seed potatoes that I will plant next week. 4 November A fine weekend with wind, though we barely noticed, so well protected by our native tree shelter that it seemed calm. The trees around the periphery of our land are tall enough now to be letting in a little wind under their 'skirts', so I'll be underplanting soon. If I was starting again, I would copy the form of the bush on the coastal side of the Mores Reserve and grow a tight, tough barrier that gradually increased in height. I'm looking also at the tangly vine that grows successfully up and over forest edges, binding everything together. I know that people say that it smothers out trees, but on a small scale I think it could be managed easilly. 31 October A big gap in my posting I know, but it's been busy! We built our cob oven - it's magnificent! It took a good deal of work and many friends to prepare the cob (clay and straw mix) and build up the shape of the oven and all the while the sun beat down on us! It was by far the hottest day so far this season. The ducklings suffered from heatstroke and two of them succumbed, sadly. Once the oven was built (I'll post images soon) I finished off by pressing hexagons all over the surface in a honeycomb pattern to complement what I thought looked like the beehive or skep-shape of the oven. I have 6 rosemary bushes to plant around the oven, in keeping with its function of cooking pizza. The temperatures were so high on the day and the next, that it seemed the clay would crack so I draped the oven with wet cloths and kept them damp until today, which is raining and cool! The ducks will be pleased and so will the seedlings in the vegetable garden. I planted out a bowl-full of 'earth gems' yesterday evening - they had been sitting in a dark place all winter and had thrown up long, thin shoots that looked ready to leaf-up, so I felt the time was right. I hope there will be no late frosts to nip them back, but I'll need to have the frost covers at the ready, just in case. The earth gems are multi-coloured and might be good to eat - certainly the South Americans have been growing them for food for a long while. 24 October It might seem an unusual garden activity, but it was fun building a bee-bank! I've long talked about constructing a rammed clay 'bank'to atttract the tiny native solitary bees to my garden and now I've done it! The clay came from one of the ubiquitous cow underpasses being carved beneath Southland's roads and is very high quality, plastic potters-grade stuff. I've lugged it from trailer to the site chosen (full sun, dry, accessible) and pounded it down. I know that the little bees like compacted clay, rather than loose. They dig tiny holes in which to live and need heat to get going about their business. They need better, warmer weather than honey bees as they live alone and don't share the heat of a hive. Even bumblebees have a colony to keep warm. The little bees are pollinators, but I'm not yet sure what they pollinate and how well they do it. With the varroa mite threatening the viability of our honey bee industry it will pay to have something in place, pollination-wise, before that crash comes (expected within two years), especially as a home orchardist. There is more clay on its way - we are building an adobe oven at the weekend, requiring plenty of clay, sand and leg-power for the preparation of the mix. Plenty of good earth between willing toes! 21 October Wild, thrashing winds have made little difference in our garden - we have a very good staggered shelter of tough native trees and shrubs which filters the strongest winds down to a breeze. I read long ago that the three most important things to have in a southern garden by the sea are shelter, shelter and shelter. Even the apple blossom survived the blast and now, all is calm. I've used my marvelous Niwashi 'Shark' to cut three large harakeke back to the ground in order to open up the view from our verandah and make some more room for fruit trees. The goo that seeped from the cut flax blades is good for healing the cuts you get from not being careful enough with the 'Shark', I learned! Our duck has successfully hatched 12 ducklings, some yellow, some chocolate, carob and vanilla, I'm reliably informed (a colour-blind gardener needs help with the oddest things sometimes!)and the drake has a new role, rounding up the slower ducklings and sheparding them back into the flock, gaggle or whatever a cluster of ducklings is known as. With 14 ducks roaming our garden, any slugs or snails have no chance at all and it's difficult to feel any sympathy for them (the molluscs that is!) |