Tomato planting time

An Orange Cherry tomato plant, grown from seed sown on 12 August, and already flowering and busting to be planted out on October 26.

My patch of mostly Roma tomatoes, grown from seed sown on August 13 and planted out on October 29.

Have you planted your tomato plants yet? Labour Weekend/late October is the traditonal time for putting frost-sensitive veges into the open ground in New Zealand, but although I had my home-grown plants ready to go in on Labour Day I delayed planting until after the big southerly blow we had on October 25. Cold winds aren't as bad as frost for tomatoes, but they sure don't get them off to a good start.

Tomatoes are no longer considered exotic plants in New Zealand, so it is interesting to look at their remarkable back history, which starts with the wild ancestors on the west coast of South America, moves on to breeding up to the modern form in Mexico, and from there to the rest of the world from the sixteenth century onwards.

With tomatoes now available all year round in supermarkets, why bother growing your own? There are lots of reasons, but the three that make most sense to me are that the supermarket ones are flavourless (a result of being bred for colour and size, not flavour, and then picked too soon), they are covered in pesticides (especially the imported ones), and they are boring to look at, being all a uniform size and red.

Over the years I have grown green, yellow, pink, orange, purple and striped tomatoes, as well as red ones. I have grown tomatoes shaped like pears, cherries, ribbed pumpkins, and cylinders. Every year I try to grow one or two new varieties, to see if they do better for me than previous choices. I am easily seduced by names like Black from Tula, Brandywine Pink, Cherokee Purple, Riesentraube, San Marzano and Tigerella. This year I am trialling Scotland Yellow and Orange Cherry. I have by no means exhausted the huge variety of this wonderful plant, and every year I have to sit on my hands rather than order too many packets of seed, because I can't grow them all.

I grow most of my tomatoes in the open ground, but I have had a 'Sweet 100' and 'Kakanui Girl' in planter bags in the glasshouse since late August. They are flowering well already, and we will be eating fresh tomatoes from them in November. With any luck the cherry tomatoes in the open ground will be pickable in December, while the main crop will start in January and go through to March. Most of my open ground tomatoes are the Italian bottling and paste varieties Roma and San Marzano, as I like to bottle my own tomato puree with herbs for use in cooking the rest of the year.

Growing tomatoes is pretty easy. They dislike heavy, soggy soils and moisture on their foliage generally, so plant them in a well-drained, sunny spot and water their root area, not their leaves. Each one needs a tall stout stake or other form of support, and you need to keep tying up the plant and pinching out the laterals (those little leaves between a big leaf and the main steam, which will make another stalk if you let them) as often as needed. Seaweed-based fertilisers and any others rich in potassium are good once fruit starts to set, but tomatoes do not need heavy feeding.

Eating everything from the garden - a recipe

 Vegetable Slice with silverbeet, asparagus, leek and onion

In spring time there are often only small amounts of any particular vegetable in the garden – not enough to create a whole dish from any one of them. So recipes that use a variable medley of whatever is available are great to have. I went hunting for such a recipe when I surveyed my vege options last night – a leek, some silverbeet, a few spears of asparagus, an onion – and decided on a vegetable slice.

I adapted a recipe from the New Zealand Vegetable Book (published by Horticulture New Zealand) so that it was totally vegetarian, and had herbs as well as veges. It was very quick to make, from start to finish about 45 minutes. It is baked in the oven, so to make good use of the oven I roasted potatoes with rosemary to go with it, and we also had a salad of rocket and curly endive (from the garden) enlived with orange and avocado slices. The recipe made enough for dinner for two, plus leftovers for lunch today. It is equally nice hot, warm or cold, and would be a great picnic dish.

VEGETABLE SLICE

Ingredients

3 C vegetables, grated or finely chopped -

1 coarsely grated onion

plus any of

grated carrot, courgette, pumpkin

and/or

lightly-steamed asparagus, green beans, leeks, silverbeet, broccoli florets

and/or

lightly-fried mushrooms, courgette, capsicum

and/or

finely chopped tomato, capsicum

1 C grated cheese (tasty cheddar)

4 eggs

¾ C milk

1 t salt

freshly ground black pepper

fresh chopped herbs to taste e.g. parsley, sage, thyme, oregano

½ C flour

½ t baking powder

Method

Heat the oven to 200 degrees C.

Grease a large baking dish well.

Put the vegetables and cheese in the dish, and mix them together.

Whisk the eggs and milk together in a large bowl.

Add the salt, pepper and herbs.

Sift in the flour and baking powder, and whisk the mixture well, so there are no lumps.

Pour the mixture over the vegetables and smooth.

Bake for 30-35 minutes (until golden brown).

Serve hot or cold.

A successful crop cover experiment

The small potato plants in the front of the picture were covered with straw; the much larger ones at the back  (planted on the same day) were covered with microclima cloth.

The 'spud gap' has opened up in the Eco Garden (and kitchen). We ran out of home-grown spuds about a month ago, while in the ground the two rows of 'Liseta' potatoes I planted on 29 August have only been up for three weeks. In one row the plants are almost twice as large as in the other one, and the difference is that they were covered with microclima cloth from the day they were planted until the leaves started pushing against the cloth. The other row was covered with straw. When I pulled back the straw I found that soil in that row was wetter – and cooler. I removed the microclima cloth ten days ago, and although the weather since then has not been very warm, the bare soil around these spuds was much warmer than the soil under straw. The cloth-covered spuds also came up over a week earlier than the straw-covered ones, and have definitely got a head start.
 
The same goes for carrot seeds sown in a three-covers experiment. The ones covered with microclima got their first true leaves a week before those without any cover at all. The same goes for the straw-covered row. Even worse, the seed leaves there were long, pale and skinny (etiolated I believe is the technical term) because of being forced to come up through the straw.  So I have now proven for myself two things I had to take on trust before. Firstly, microclima cloth is worth the expense (and it is not that expensive) in terms of giving open ground plants a head start. We will be eating baby new potatoes at least a week earlier than we would have otherwise. Secondly, what I have read about not mulching the ground in spring because it keeps it cooler is true. So I'll be saving the straw mulch for summer time, when I want the ground to be wetter, and not too hot.

The carrot seedlings in these rows are a bit too small to photograph yet, but trust me - the ones under the cloth (draped behind) got their true leaves a week earlier than the ones sown in bare soil (in the front).

Kakabeak – the parrot plant of springtime

 The distinctive parrot beak flower of the kakabeak

The kowhai ngutu-kaka or kakabeak (Clianthus puniceus) is one of New Zealand's brightest native flowers. A bush covered in flowers, as mine is at this time of year, really glows. (It also buzzes with bee visitors). Like the pohutukawa the kakabeak has bright red flowers and is native only to the northern parts of New Zealand, but there the similarities end. The kakabeak can tolerate much colder weather than the pohutakawa. One of the few wild populations left in New Zealand is on the hills above Lake Waikaremoana, where it snows most winters.

Despite being cold-hardy and able to grow in infertile soils the kakabeak is now almost extinct in the wild. This is because it is very palatable to browsing animals, which had almost cleaned it out by the end of the nineteenth century. Luckily, although the plant itself is shortlived (15-20 years), its seeds are very long lived. Even more luckily, it is such an attractive plant that humans have been propagating it and planting it near their houses for at least three centuries, if not longer.

As this plant is endemic to New Zealand it would be sad to see it die out in the wild. The Department of Conservation therefore has a programme of protecting the few known sites where there are good wild populations left by fencing them off. (Find out all about this and more about the kakabeak on DoC's webpage on the plant.)

The kakabeak, as its name suggests, has a flower shaped like the beak of one of our native parrots, the kaka. It is a member of the legume or pea family, and it has a close cousin in the floral emblem of South Australia, Sturt's Desert Pea, which looks just like a kakabeak except for a little black 'cap' on top of the red beak. The kakabeak bush in my garden, which has been there about ten years, is now well over two metres tall and the same wide. It starts flowering in August, keeps it up for at least two months, and draws lots of compliments from visitors impressed at its vigour and its gorgeous red flowers. There are also white and pink versions of the kakabeak, which are equally lovely. There are very few native plants which are more easily or better conserved in the home garden than the wild – how fortunate for us as well as the kakabeak that it fits this bill.

 Kakabeak bush in flower in the Eco Garden