How fast does my garden grow?

Right now, it's racing.

 Seven weeks ago I had a bare garden bed from which I had just wrangled buckets and buckets of rocks. See Picture 1.

Picture 1: My rock harvest - seven buckets after three hours of digging.

Six weeks ago I planted out sweetcorn plants which I had raised indoors from seed. They were about 10 cm tall when planted. Five weeks ago I planted out pumpkins with 4 or 5 leaves each in between the corn plants. Today the biggest corn plants are nearly a metre tall, and the pumpkins have so many leaves there is hardly any bare earth to be seen. See Picture 2.

Picture 2: Seven weeks later - a lush vege patch.

Plus in the same part of the garden the dwarf beans which were planted in late September have started to flower, and the Cliffs Kidney early potatoes which were planted in early September are thriving and will soon be ready to eat.

We have already eaten zucchini from plants that I started off in the glasshouse in big buckets, then moved outside, and one plant in the garden has finger-sized fruit which will soon be big enough to eat. We no longer need to buy lettuce,salad leaves, silverbeet or spinach. The brassicas are also thriving, remarkably unmolested by the few white butterflies which I have seen about. How long can this last?

For now, we are enjoying getting all of our green veges from the garden  in such a short time - and anticipating that yellow corn and those orange pumpkins.

The OTHER New Zealand flax

 Rauhuia flowering 
beside the road 
to my home.

For most people 'New Zealand flax' means the magnificent harakeke, or Phormium tenax. This is indeed a wonderful plant, both dramatically beautiful and extremely useful. Its fibre can be used to make rope and sails, as well as clothing, bags and other useful items. It was therefore of potential interest to those who financed Captain James Cook's exploratory voyages of the southern oceans, because home-grown British supplies of linen flax for these purposes were insufficient by the late eighteenth century, and substitute fibres were being sought.

Cook saw that Maori had many uses for harakeke, and reported back that
there was good 'flax' to be had in New Zealand. The first people who
subsequently came looking for 'flax', though, could not find anything they
recognised as linen flax, Linum usitatissimum. (This European plant also produces linseed, a source of valuable oils.)

Yet New Zealand does have its own endemic member of the Linum genus,
L. monogynum, or rauhuia. It is a neat little plant with a pure white flower, which is in bloom right now. It usually grows in inhospitable sites, such as dry banks and cliffsides near the sea. It can even cope with introduced grasses, which are normally death to NZ natives.

Its sky-blue European cousin, L. perenne, is the flax most often grown as a border plant in NZ gardens. It is well worth giving space, both for its colour and for the way that the whole plant sways gracefully in the wind. But rauhuia also deserves a place in the flower border. This is recognised in the UK, where the BBC gardening website can tell you more about the plant and growing it than any New Zealand site I have seen.

Rauhuia is not a long-lived plant, but it is easy to grow from seed and keep replenishing that way. I had very good germination recently from two year old seed which I collected from plants growing on roadside banks on the Purau-Port Levy road. I think the full grown plants will look very nice next November, when they are flowering under a pink or red rose.

Rauhuia is happy growing on dry banks and cliffs.

Restorative Weeding and An Instant Herb Garden

 Dawn rainbow over Mt Somers

I am back from retreat, feeling rested and refreshed from having so much quiet time, and time alone in the beech forest. I was pleased to see that the woody weeds which were hacked back in February this year had not made as much of a comeback as I had feared. However it was dismaying to discover that cut cotoneaster branches which are only 2-3 centimetres in diameter can keep growing green leaves on their side branches for months! They sprout back from their cut stumps like crazy as well, as do sycamore, rowan and hawthorn. Blackberry is also very difficult to discourage. Nevertheless, it is worth chopping back all these plants before they can fruit for the year, and create another generation of weeds. As the old gardening adage goes, 'One year's seeding is ten years weeding.'

My 'guerilla' herb garden at the edge of the campsite.

On the plus side, I planted a tiny herb garden in a spot where I hope it will get enough rain and sun, and miss out on being sprayed and mown over. It is an experiment I could afford to make, since the plants cost me nothing.
I raised them all by division (pizza thyme, chives, oregano, lemon balm, marjoram) or from seed (sage, parsley). The fertiliser and mulch were free, and local. For the former I used sheep droppings gathered from the nearby paddock and LOF,* and for the latter I used cut grass.

Will anyone notice the garden and water it? Will the herbs be picked? Will they survive the summer without any care? Will they (or their descendents) be there for me to use next time I am at the campsite and on cooking duty? How much control over life in all its forms does one really have - or need to have - anyway? I prefer the 'give it away and see what comes back' approach. On the whole I have found that nature in particular, and even human beings in general, are much more generous than the ruling economic and political orthodoxy would have us believe.



*LOF = liquid organic fertiliser. We all make around 1.5 litres of it a day in our bladders, and it contains nitrogen and potassium, two of the most important elements for plant growth. Why toss it down the toilet to cause a waste disposal problem somewhere else, when one has a garden in need of it?  Pee in a 10 litre bucket (cover with a lid between contributions), dilute a day's production by topping up the bucket with water, and go and give some plants the elixir of life.

Weeding Meditation

 A forest path at Staveley camp site

I'm taking a break from words, both written and spoken, from tomorrow until next Monday. I'm going on an insight meditation retreat led by Stephen and Martine Batchelor, a wonderful team of teachers who are making their third visit to New Zealand. The retreat is at a camp site near Staveley, close to Mt Somers. The camp site includes a couple of acres of remnant native beech forest. Beech (tawhai/Nothofagus) forests used to cover all the mountains and foothills of Canterbury, and extend out to the plains.

I love to do walking meditation in the forest - except I keep seeing weeds.
Weeds as big as trees (sycamore, rowan and hawthorn) and all the other
rampant exotic plants which can easily colonise a small patch of native bush
and rapidly destroy its ecological integrity and natural beauty. They include
cotoneaster bushes, Chilean barberry, blackberry, nasturtium vines and other plants with nice seeds and fruits which are easily carried by birds. 
I tune them out when I am meditating, but in the break times I come back to the forest with secateurs, loppers, a weeding hook and a pruning saw, and do what I can to make more space for the locals.

If one is a skilled weeder (and I have had heaps of practice, and know how to
tell a desirable plant from a weed even when it is very small) then weeding can be a meditative experience. The eyes and hands do their work almost
automatically, and the mind is free to rest in the present, if one so pleases. In my own garden, I find that I enjoy weeding for this very reason, and have no wish to attack weeds with machines or sprays. These are not at all restful or conducive to meditation.

Last month I was on my knees in the vegetable garden, weeding a space to plant tomatoes, when there was yet another of the earthquakes we have been experiencing in these parts since September 4. I felt the earth rolling beneath my knees, in a sinuous way. Now that was something to meditate on!

Dawn lights the peak of Mt Somers, above a dark band of beech forest.

Vegetable Fried Rice

 

A freak courgette  - but still great for vegetable fried rice.

 

I was visiting a friend the other day when his teenage son was set the task of cooking Vegetable Fried Rice for the family's evening meal. The recipe he had to work from (from a junior cookbook) was rather inadequate. It included carrots, which don't work well in stir-fries unless you cut them into very small dice or strips. It also seemed to be a bit low on flavouring ingredients.

So I thought I'd put up the recipe I use, which is versatile, easy and tasty.

I don't have a picture of it, so I have put up a good ingredient for it instead, in a cute accidental double form which I grew last year.

 

 

VEGETABLE FRIED RICE
(dinner for two)

Ingredients

250g rice
2-3 T light oil for frying
3-4 cloves garlic
thumbnail-sized piece of fresh ginger, peeled and finely chopped
1 onion or 3 spring onions
Vegetables suitable for stir-frying
(e.g. capsicums, celery, mushrooms, broccoli, asparagus,
courgettes, green beans, sugarsnap peas, bean sprouts, leafy greens),
sliced or chopped into small pieces
3-4 T soy sauce (shoyu)
1 t chilli oil
1-2 t mushroom or other flavouring sauce
1/2 t salt
1 or 2 eggs (optional)
1 T sesame oil
spring onions OR fresh coriander, to garnish


Method

Cook the rice by the absorption method.
Let it cool and fluff up the grains.
Finely chop the onion, garlic and ginger.
Heat 2 T of oil in a large wok, and stir fry the onion, garlic and ginger for 1 minute (do not brown).
Add the rest of the chopped veges, and stir fry for 5 minutes.
Add the cooked rice and stir fry for 1 minute, tossing in the hot oil.
Add the soy sauce, chilli oil, flavouring sauce and salt, and stir fry 1 minute, mixing well.
Break in the egg(s), if using, and mix them through until cooked.
Remove the wok from the heat.
Sprinkle the sesame oil over the dish and toss.
Garnish with sliced spring onion OR chopped coriander leaves and serve.

The Law In Flower

 The deceptively lovely bush lawyer in spring.

This gorgeous blossom belongs to an otherwise fearsome native plant.
It seems that lawyers in the nineteenth century were no less tenacious and rapacious than they are today, for the vernacular English name of this plant, (which has vicious little hooks on its stems and the backs of its leaves), is bush lawyer.

Its Maori name is tataramoa. I do not know how this translates, but as pre-colonial Maori society was free from lawyers, we can be sure that the English name is not a translation.

The scientific name is Rubus cissoides, indicating that this genus belongs to a  large family found in both hemispheres which includes blackberries, raspberries and other good-to-eat berries. The fruit of the bush lawyer do look like small blackberries, and they are edible, but they are very dry and seedy compared to a real blackberry.

Bush lawyer scrambles through a dead tree on the Purau/Port Levy saddle.

There are three other Rubus species endemic to New Zealand, all of them equally scratchy, and one of them leafless. Apart from growing them on boundary fences and hedges where you want to repel intruders (cheaper and much prettier than barbed wire), I can't think of a garden use for them, but at this time of year the wild ones do have an attractiveness which belies their mean streak.

The leafless lawyer, Rubus squarrosus.

Blackboy Peaches & Ghazala Sahiba's Peach Cake

My friend Ghazala (who has been a vegan for over twenty years) recently
celebrated a birthday. I used my home-grown and bottled blackboy peaches, and our home-grown almonds and walnuts, to make a special cake for her. I think she liked it, because she had three slices.

Every home should and can have a blackboy peach tree. As well as being tasty and nutritious they are dead easy to grow from seed (just toss the pits into the garden in autumn and look for seedling trees in spring); they come true from seed; they are very healthy trees which do not get leaf curl or other
diseases; they grow fast and start fruiting early; and they have many
culinary uses. You don't often see them for sale in supermarkets. I am not
sure why this is, but perhaps it is because you can't 'cheat' with them the
way you can with other peaches, picking them a bit hard and letting them
soften (but not really ripen) in the packing, transport and sale process.
They need to ripen and soften on the tree to be prime fresh eating - otherwise they are a bit floury and tasteless. How fortunate, then, that it is so easy to grow one's own tree.

GHAZALA SAHIBA'S PEACH CAKE
(a delicious vegan dessert cake)

Ingredients

1 C rolled oats
1/4 C almonds, skins on, broken in half
1 C wholemeal flour
2/3 C brown sugar
2 t baking powder
1/4 t salt
1/4 C walnut pieces
3/4 C flavourless oil

blackboy or other peaches, around 250 g
If fresh, peeled and sliced;
if bottled, well-drained and sliced

3/4 C soy milk
1 T finely ground linseed beaten into 4 T water*
1 heaped t ground cinnamon


Method

Oil a 21-22 cm flan dish.
Heat the oven to 180 degrees C.
Put the oats and broken almonds into a food processor, and whizz them until
the almonds are blended with the oats.
Add the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt to the oats and almonds, and
whizz them to combine well.
Tip the mixture into a large bowl, add the walnut pieces, and mix in the oil
until the whole mixture is moistened.
Press half the mixture into the bottom of the oiled flan dish, to make a firm
base.
Put the peach slices evenly on top of this layer.
Mix the soy milk, linseed and cinnamon into the remaining ingredients in the
bowl, and pour the mixture over the peaches.
Bake for 30-40 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean from the top layer.
Dust with icing sugar to serve.
Can be served warm as a pudding or cool as a cake.

* Linseed beaten into water can used as an egg substitute in vegan baking.
 It is best used in 'wholefood' cakes like this one, where its flavour fits in
with the other ingredients.

The Emblem of our Land

A silver fern (Cyathea dealbata/ponga) growing beside the road in Port Levy.

I wonder how many of those who have seen the silver fern thousands of times on sports jersies, and other representations, have ever seen one for real, and actually touched a live one. Further, of those who have seen them, how many have ever put them to one of their old time uses?

I did it once, and it saved me from a cold night out on a mountain side, without tent or sleeping bag. Let me explain...

It was in 1978, when I was making a very modest living in Auckland, editing Broadsheet (the feminist magazine) for twenty hours a week, and working for the Environmental Defence Society as an administrator for another twenty hours. One weekend I took a budget holiday break with a friend. We camped on a beach on the Coromandel one night, and the next evening we pitched our tent in the bush on Mt Te Aroha, about a fifteen minute walk up the main track from the township of Te Aroha. The campsite was barely a minute's walk into the bush from the track, but when we came back to it after eating dinner in town, it was almost too dark to see where the turn-off to the site was, and far too dark in the bush to see the tent.

If I hadn't fallen over a guy rope by accident we could have stumbled around for quite a while, and perhaps got seriously lost. We very much wanted to go back down the track to enjoy the hot pools for which Te Aroha is justly famed, but we also did not want to have to spend the night out in the open for lack of finding our way back to the tent. We had neglected to bring a torch with us. So what to do?

At this point I remembered reading about Maori war parties marking routes through the bush by cutting the fronds of silver ferns, and and laying them with the silver side upwards. When the moon is out, they make a silvery trail which is easily followed at night. Perfect for sneaking up on unsuspecting enemies - or tents.

There were silver ferns in the bush near our tent, and we only needed three or four fronds to mark our route to and from the track. As luck would have it, the sky was clear and the moon was shining. We had a good long soak in a hot pool, and found our tent afterwards with no trouble.

So the silver fern will never be just another quasi-corporate logo for me, and I will always think that a silver fern in the bush is worth two million on a TV screen.

Two Kiwi symbols on one tree - fern leaf and koru.

Labour Day garden labours

                          My newly-planted tomato (and gherkin) patch.

I have been wondering how gardeners in New Zealand knew when to start planting out tomatoes, pumpkins and other frost-tender plants before
Labour Day was first celebrated as a public holiday exactly 120 years ago. 

I have been labouring so hard in the garden since Labour Day weekend I have had no time for blogging! That's because Labour weekend marks a watershed in the Kiwi gardening year.

Since Labour Day was first celebrated, at least three and in some cases four generations of Kiwi gardeners have been adhering to the rule that the third weekend in October is the safe time to put frost-tender plants out in the garden. It is a rule that makes sense, even though in over a century there must have been some years when a rogue frost came late and ruined the plants, while there are of course some places where earlier is possible, or later is advisable.

I have tried to push the boundaries several times, by planting two or three
weeks earlier when it seemed like the weather was warmer than usual. Every
time I have been caught out and had to contemplate the sad sight of once
healthy pumpkin plants going brown and mushy. So now I either stick to the
rule, or provide protection for tender plants.

Unless one is really lucky with the weather there is no point in planting out
earlier in any case, as cool temperatures mean that the plants grow very
slowly, and seldom flower and fruit before those planted later.

So this Labour weekend, and the weekend just past, I planted out 21 tomatoes, 15 pumpkins, 3 zucchini, 12 gherkins and 6 cucumbers. All of them were grown to planting-out size from seed which was sown indoors on August 20. The baby plants were potted up when they got their first true leaves and grown on in the glasshouse.

I produced so many plants this way that I have had heaps to give away or trade.  I had an excess of around 60 'Labour Day' plants, plus six-packs of broccoli, cauliflower, parsley, basil, sweetcorn and silverbeet which were also surplus to my requirements. (I am still seeking good homes for a surplus of watermelon, rockmelon, capsicum and aubergine plants, which will not fit in the glasshouse.

I am still growing some zucchini, cucumber and tomato plants in the glasshouse for planting out in December, having read (and noticed) that all these plants crop most heavily at the beginning of their fruiting time. So to keep up production, and prolong the harvest period, it is good to make two plantings rather than just sticking to a big Labour weekend plant-out.

I planted 9 different varieties of tomato - Baxter's Early Bush, Sweet 100,  Red Pear, Yellow Pear, Tigerella, Brandywine Pink, Black Krim, San Marzano, and Roma. The first four are cherry tomatoes (great for salads), and the last two are good for bottling and making sauces. (I made 26 half-litre jars of tomato and herb puree last season, and I am aiming for 52 jars next season.) The Tigerella, Black Krim and Brandywine Pink tomatoes are for a variety of flavour and colour when eaten fresh.

I put in 4 varieties of pumpkin, although I favoured Whangaparaoa Crown, as it has the deep orange tasty flesh which seems to be most favoured in NZ generally (and certainly by our household). However I also put in Queensland Blue and Marina di Chioggia to see how they go (and how I like them), plus one plant (my last remaining seed) of an amusing pumpkin called Galeuses d'Eysines. Galeuse is French for scab, and this is indeed a very scabby (or warty) pumpkin. It tastes OK, but I grow it for fun rather than substance.

 A great variety of pumpkins and squashes on display 

at the Auckland Botanic Gardens, Manurewa.