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September 7, 2014

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Brassicas, Climate change, Edible flowers, Fruit, Greens, natural history, Seasons, Vegetables

Flowers of the Frozen North

Something new in the garden today: hazelnut flowers. Our filberts have been in for about three years, and have produced a few catkins, but I’ve never seen these before. They are very very tiny, though, so maybe they were there last year and I never noticed.

Autumn catkins

Today’s red blossoms

The miniscule red blooms are all on one tree – Ennis, “preferred variety for all markets”, Daleys boldly asserts. Lucky Ennis. “Hall’s Giant” sounds so much more magically productive but it’s mainly a pollinator, dangling those catkins.

Will we get some nuts this year? It seems unlikely. The raspberries, our little Stella cherry, three neglected high-chill apples, the Hayward kiwis, and the hazelnuts, all planted with foolish optimism. Okay, Sydney is subtropical and all these plants require a hundred plus chilling hours … that’s a hundred or maybe a hundred and fifty hours below 7 degrees C while in Sydney’s chilliest month, July, the average minimum is 8.1 degrees…. but we are at 200 metres elevation! maybe we’re in a frost pocket! What about those chilly south-westerlies?

Our mighty leader, Anthony Abbott MP, confidently claims that “climate change is crap” so perhaps we are, as my hirsute medallion-wearing neighbour asserts, heading towards a Snowball Earth scenario: the Pacific Highway to Hornsby will be lined with snowpoles and we will be skating, not taking the ferry, across Berowra Creek. All my eccentric plant selections will be vindicated.

While I’m waiting for a glacier to form in the Sydney Basin, or at the very least for a small crop of hazelnuts, at the bottom of the garden the winter veggies are flowering.

Daikon radish flowers

Daikon

Flowers from above

The daikon is too tough to eat now, but the flowers are lovely and I’m planning to save the seeds. The winter’s chinese greens are also in bloom. The leaves are getting smaller, stringier and slightly bitter though I’ve still been picking them. I’ve got a feeling these may be the mutant offspring of my favourite – red bok choi, an F1 hybrid.

The process of creating the F1s is like something from “Game of Thrones” – ten generations of in-breeding to produce a pure-blooded weaking, that is then matched with an inbred of a different tribe, to produce children with renewed vigour, sharing little with their spindly parents. These muscular cross-breeds are frustratingly incapable of passing on their all-conquering qualities to the next generation (an appropriately Machiavellian outcome that keeps gardeners in the thrall of the Plant Wizards of Monsanto). It’s kind of cool to save the seeds of the F1 hybrids not just to give the multinationals a crinkly mouth but also to see what sport comes up in the next generation. And the next. Who knows, perhaps eventually some robust throwback will thrive in the endless Winter?

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mccnmatt

Posted on

August 15, 2014

Posted under

Climate change, Death, Eco renovations, Fruit, Plants and what I know about them, poisons, Recycling, Seasons, Waste

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DIY by subtraction: the kiwifruit arbor

I’ve been laying low on the blog a bit lately while we’ve been doing cut-rate eco-renovations on our house, a poorly insulated 50s fibro place clinging to a steep south-west facing slope, thermally enhanced by a dense cluster of giant evergreen trees perfectly aligned with true north. Short of an avalanche burying the house in boulders or it sliding unexpectedly into the Marianas Trench, it’s hard to imagine a more unpromising scenario for “solar gain”.

Since I’m lucky enough to work from home a day or two a week, seasonally I spend large slabs of time hunched over my laptop in thermal underwear, jeans, flannie, woollens, scarf, beanie, winter coat and laprug, with my bedsock-and-slipper-clad feet resting ecstatically on a hotwater bottle, thinking obsessively about winter sunlight.

The mid-century part of the house, surprisingly, is pretty well thought through from the perspective of passive solar heating that is (mostly) about allowing the low winter sun to enter the house as source of heat while keeping the overhead sun of summer out. In the southern hemisphere, that means having windows on the northern side of the house (or within about 30 degrees of true north) and less on the eastern and especially western walls, where the late afternoon sun in summer will blast in the windows just when everyone is feeling at their sweatiest.

So whoever hammered this place together in the late 50s out of asbestos sheeting and weatherboard put in plenty of north-east facing wooden-framed windows that let morning light in through the bare branches of the liquidambar when that glowing ball in the sky finally peeps over the hill. The kids’ bedroom and the kitchen even have those cool 50s windows that wrap around corners – in this case, oriented to the north.

But it all went pear shaped with the 1980s extension. Lashings of leaky and thermally conductive aluminium windows and sliding doors facing south-west (towards the view, admittedly – okay, windows aren’t just about solar gain).

Winter sunrise

Summer sunset

The ceiling (and of course ceiling insulation) pock-marked with that latter-day house-cancer, halogen downlights. And bizarrely, a whole sequence of interior features and outbuildings, aiming, it seems, to prevent even the tiniest gleam of late-afternoon sunlight from melting the icicles on the extremities of the residents inside. Perhaps the previous owners had photophobia: one can only presume so.

In the quest for light-drenched interiors or at least the possibility of taking my hat and overcoat off indoors, mostly what we have been doing is pulling things down and ripping things out. Renovation by subtraction: cheap entertainment.

First to go was the hand-made bookcase and cabinets that separated the sunny kitchen and the gloomy dining room. (The wood got a second guernsey as an implausible shoe rack and series of wonky shelves – the previous owners must have spent their years in the dark doing advanced carpentry by headtorch-light, as their skills with a mitre saw are streets ahead of mine). Never has so much joy or interior illumination ensued from an hour’s work with a screwdriver.

Next we chainsawed a couple of noxious oleanders on the north western side of the house. When I say “we” I mean RB, with me stabilising the ladder, shouting encouragement through a dust-mask, and hoping like hell the chainsaw doesn’t get dropped on my head. Oleander: a plant that is not only water wise and offers a long-lasting floral display but every part of which – leaves, sawdust, flowers, even the honey made from its flowers – can be used to poison your children. A fine addition to any home.

Just to ensure that no dangerous beams of afternoon winter sunlight might fall on even the windowless exterior of the laundry (itself a protective barrier between the sun’s horrifying rays and the frigid loungeroom) the previous owners erected a dismal tin lean-to, guaranteeing enduring Stygian conditions indoors and out. Removing the corrugated iron from the roof of this bat-cave was again surprisingly easy – the work of an afternoon – and suddenly what was a dank storage area for rusty things and part-time creek bed became an mid-day suntrap, a pergola simply begging for deciduous vines. Too easy.

While I continue to harbour many elaborate northerly-glazing and thermal-mass fantasies, further demolition will require council approval and buckets of money, sadly, so I’ve had to content myself with some eco-thrifty upcycling and, of course, plant acquisition.

So…. the kiwifruit arbor!

I have three kiwifruit growing elsewhere in the garden – a male and female “Hayward” and a Mt Tomah red kiwiberry (a bit of a threesome going there, the Mt Tomah quite happy to make do with the Hayward male as a pollinator). They do a sterling job of sheltering the granny flat from the brutal south-westerly sun on long summer afternoons but I have a sneaking suspicion that we may not have enough chilling hours here to see them fruitful (to wit, absolutely no signs of flowering yet, though we’ve had bunches of grapes from the Pink Iona vine that grows beside them for a couple of years now).

So I acquired a male and female “Sweetie“, a super-low chill variety from the marvellous Daleys, the fastest and best mail-order fruits in the West (okay the East). The New Zealanders grow kiwis on trellises, and my notion is that the kiwi fruit and the recently planted Carolina Black Rose grape will offer some shelter from the midday heat during the summer and lose their leaves in time to let the low winter sun warm up my ad hoc bench made of bricks and some junked marine ply that sits outside the laundry, an ideal defrosting area on nippy mornings.

Drainage is apparently quite critical for kiwifruit, so, given that when it rains, that part of the yard becomes a water-feature, I decided to put the kiwis in raised planters (with an open base so they don’t dry out too much in less torrential times). Unlike a real bat-cave, the old lean-to didn’t have the benefit of a stockpile of guano but rather hard-beaten gravelly soil, so I figured planters would keep the vines clear of any limey ground and give me a chance to whack some heavy duty compost around their roots.

Fortunately for me, my neighbour decided to re-clad one wall of his house, and we had a bunch of cedar siding thrown helpfully over the fence, so over the course of a weekend, I constructed a pair of 6 foot long, 2 foot wide and high planters from some 2x4s that had been used to frame concrete and an bedframe found in the council cleanup, lined with plastic bags that had previously contained cow poo and finished off with the cedar boards. I was quite pleased with the result, although given the shonkiness of the carpentry, I doubt I’ll be leaving them to descendents in my will.

The “solar pergola” last year – looking south west

Looking north east

A year down the track, it’s so far so good with the “solar pergola”. As it turns out, while my Hayward vines, getting very little direct sunlight in winter, lose their leaves quite promptly around the solstice, the Sweeties, in a more promising position, cling to theirs in a rather annoying, shade-producing way. So I’m trying to constrain their enthusiastic growth to the the far end of the trellis-that-once-was-a-bat-cave where they’ll block our view of the neighbour’s yard but not too much of the June sun. Keeping kiwifruit vines under control is no mean feat, given their crazed energy and my morbid fear of pruning. I’ve found grapevines equally prolific but much more compliant in autumn, dropping their leaves just as it gets a bit chilly, so I’ll try to get Carolina to do her fine work above the laundry wall.

It’ll be time for the Sweeties to burst from their buds any day now, and I need to clear the way for Miss Carolina Rose, so I’d better get out into that winter sunshine and prune like the wind!

Later updates from the kiwifruit arbor:

Pollination: Sweets from my sweetie

An unhappy threesome: pollinating kiwiberries

The first bumper crop: Experiments with kiwifruit

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mccnmatt

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August 5, 2014

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Bees, Climate change, Fruit, Garden trees, Ornamental gardens, Plants and what I know about them, Pollination

Bee-ing positive

It’s dry as a chip in the garden: less than 20% the average amount of July rainfall in Sydney and bushfires have already starting in the north of NSW, months ahead of the official fire season. Warm too – a record 24 days of 18 degrees C and above. It’s been 2.7 degrees C above the historical average for July. Climate change – it’s here, suckers.

But on the bright side, gorgeous blooms on the Tropic Snow peach, and plenty of bees. Touch wood, the varroa mite hasn’t arrived in Australia (yet) and our honeybees seem to be doing better than the rest of the world. I’m thinking about getting a hive or two, either of native stingless bees (though you can’t collect their honey here in Sydney) or just your everyday honeybees. So far I haven’t had any flowers from my kiwifruit vines (notoriously hard to pollinate), but you have to plan ahead.

In the mean time… welcome, visiting bees! Please help yourselves to our beautiful if precipitate peach-blossom.

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July 21, 2014

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Climate change, Companion planting, Death, Exclusion pest control, Garden trees, Plants and what I know about them, Possums, Rats, Seasons

Tropic Snow

The first peach blossom of ~~spring~~ winter: TropicSnow, a low chill variety. It has produced Cezanne-worthy fruits from its second year here – but so far I haven’t beaten the critters to them.

This year! This year! Mesh exclusion bags! Fruit fly traps! Pheromones! Chooks given the run of the pepino groundcover – dig, dig my sharp clawed friends! – on the condition that they utterly exterminate all fruit fly larvae. I’m toying with installing a band of slippery plastic (or inedible metal?) around the base of the tree to at least give the possums and the rats a bit of a challenge (or some core body exercise?). Tiger poo?? Whatever it takes!

Peaches apparently only live for a few years, and I simply refuse to have the damn thing die before I wrap my laughing-gear around some luscious sun-warmed home-grown fruit.

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mccnmatt

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July 1, 2014

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Backyard birds, Climate change, Garden trees, Native animals, Plants that attract wildlife, Weeds

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Winners and weeds

Winners and weeds

A sighting in the garden today: brown cuckoo doves. I’ve seen them here before, startlingly portly long-tailed pigeons, hanging out in the neighbours’ tangle of tall trees. I spotted at least three today, one futilely hopping from branch to branch, doggedly followed by a stouter fella: I guess it’s breeding season.

I felt tremendously smug when I first saw this rainforest bird above my washing line. I should have known better, having read Tim Low’s New Nature not so long ago. This is one bird doing alright out in the Anthropocene. It’s a winner.

Brown cuckoo doves are spreading south from their usual stomping grounds. I’m not surprised. If I were a tropical bird, I wouldn’t mind it round Sydney at the moment: third warmest June on record, more than 2 degrees warmer than the longterm average – balmy!

And they don’t mind weeds either. Apparently they relish regrowth around roads and logged forest, and lantana and wild tobacco suit them down to the ground. Witness this shot of a cuckoo dove snaffling fruit from our embarrassingly giant large-leafed privet. Privet tree. Yes, yes, we are going to kill it off and chop it down – the Round-Up is in the cupboard… But reading Low has given me pause. When we poison our oversized weed tree, will we lose our nifty rainforest critters too?

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June 14, 2014

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Australian natives, Backyard birds, Climate change, Garden trees, Natives for shade, natural history, Plants and what I know about them, Weeds

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Sweetness and light

On our shady south-west facing hillside (who went house hunting without a compass, then?) there’s just one spot that gets plenty of light year round: not a bad place for some solar panels on the top of a pole. But right in that spot there’s a native tree, sweet pittosporum or pittosporum undulatum. And there’s a healthy specimen of the same species dead to the north of our kitchen windows, right where the winter sun might otherwise beam through.

Hornsby Council is pretty proud of its status as a leafy north shore suburb – “The Bushland Shire” – and dissuades its rate-payers in the strongest of terms from cutting down trees. But not this one. Until 2011, despite its status as a native, gardeners had a licence to kill sweet pittosporum, along with a select few imported nasties – cotoneaster, camphor laurel, privet and coral trees. But now it’s a different story. You can chop down quite a lot in Hornsby these days – pretty much any non-native tree. You can even gaily hack down Australian natives that don’t hail from this part of the Hawkesbury. But put that saw down! Pittosporum is now right there on that not very lengthy list of protected local trees, shrubs, grasses and vines. It’s a dramatic turnaround, from big-league environmental weed to local hero, all in the space of a single year.

A bird snack

Pittosporum is probably the least of our problems here!

The undulating, light blocking leaves of the pittosposum

So what’s going on here? Tim Low’s immensely readable book, “The New Nature: Winners and Losers in Wild Australia” (Viking, 2002), a fat but fascinating volume filled with stories about birds and trees, insects and frogs and their complex inter-relationships with human beings, has a lot to say about weeds and natives, and in fact quite a bit to say about sweet pittosporum. The essential argument of the book is that any quest to preserve untouched wilderness or to maintain nature free from human interference is not just doomed, but essentially ill-conceived.

Human influence has been making plant and animal winners and losers in Australia for many thousands of years, and Low documents not only the way some pragmatic species capitalise on urban environments (think peregrine falcons nesting in high rise buildings) but the way many others rely on continuing human intervention (like firestick farming or stock grazing) to survive. Sydney’s green and golden bell-frog survives at the Brickpits in Homebush, a location described as “one of the most industrially polluted in the Southern Hemisphere” (24) because these frogs are tolerant of high levels of heavy metals, while the frog-killing chytrid fungus is not. Low points out the limitations of the distinction between “native” and “exotic” as a way of gauging the impact of animals and plants on biodiversity, and argues that decisions about what to conserve and how to do it, are in short, very very complicated. Koalas can be forest killers and cows can step into the gap left by extinct megafauna in maintaining diverse grassland. As a greenie and a gardener, I found the anecdotes and ideas in “The New Nature” provoking and intriguing, making me take a good hard look at my weed anxieties and my fantasies of a bird-friendly, local provenance garden.

Hornsby Council’s change of heart about sweet pittosporum illustrates Tim Low’s arguments beautifully. Don Burke, the Australian Native Plants Society of Australia, Grow Me Instead (The Nursery and Garden Industry Association) and the Queensland Government all agree that it’s an invasive weed. “The New Nature” with its ambivalence about such terms calls pittosporum “our worst native weed” (250), “replacing diverse systems with monoculture” (201). While a canopy of eucalypts allows a rich understory, pittosporum shades out nearly everything else (although that nasty garden escape, privet, apparently copes well). Birds enjoy the pittosporum’s orange fruits and disperse its sticky seeds. Not needing fire or light to germinate, and tolerant of richer soils than many other natives, pittosporum is a native to this neck of the woods, flourishing on the shale ridgetops on Hawkesbury sandstone – most of which are now built on. Run off from houses and gardens has enriched the sandstone soils on the slopes and pittosporum has moved on in. According to Low, “If you take eucalypt forest, add fertiliser and water and take out fire, you have a recipe for rainforest. The pittosporum invasion is really a takeover by rainforest” (248).

Pittosporum undulatum has its defenders. Jocelyn Howell from the Royal Botanical Gardens suggests that pittosporum can shade out and outcompete other more troubling weeds (although Tim Low would argue that even invasive weeds like lantana can play their own role as a habitat). Others argue for it in terms of the food supplies it offers and the fact that it *is* a local really. Obviously, Hornsby Council has plumped for this point of view. Most of the advisories suggest that it’s a weed only outside its home range, using provenance to distinguish true locals from native invaders.

But according to Low’s arguments, its home range isn’t the home it once was. His book gives poignant examples of Sydneysiders talking about the impact of pittosporum (“pittos”) in terms of solastalgia, the sense of homesickness you have when you haven’t left home, but your home has changed forever. Orchids and grasses gone, along with the smell of eucalyptus (248). There are no easy answers here: it’s “a hard one”, “one of the most sensitive issues around” (249). Are the eucalypt forests of the Hawkesbury slowly morphing into (monocultural) rainforest? Will the catastrophic fires I expect and dread drive it back?

From a more selfish point of view, it seems like my kitchen windows will remain gloomy and my solar panels a dream, even as my fantasy as a kid growing up in the arid lands of the South Australian mallee, of coming home to a rainforest seems to be coming true…

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Posted on

May 29, 2014

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Climate change, Companion planting, Death, Fruits for shade, Gardening, Greens, Ornamental gardens, Plants and what I know about them, Rats, Vegetables, Weeds

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Night of the Living Mulch: cover crops for the zombie apocalypse

When the very existence of humanity is threatened, perhaps by catastrophic global warming, perhaps by an attack of brain-eating monsters, what is the first thing you think of? Yes, we’re on the same page: ensuring an adequate layer of mulch under your fruit trees. Ideally something that not only retains moisture and maintains soil structure but offers a little something for the humans struggling with a post-industrial lifestyle nearby. So, to address the needs of fellow survivalists in these difficult times, I offer a run down on chlorophyll-laden companions for such moments of adversity.

Strawberries.

Chance of surviving: Good, given consistent moisture and morning sunlight. After a couple of years in the ground, susceptible to a virus that makes the fruits look like hairy-faced Cousin It out of the Adams Family – greenish protrusions all over the fruit. Still tastes okay, though: it doesn’t pay to be fussy after the zombie apocalypse.

Productivity: Theoretically, excellent. A delicate reminder of the luxuries of gentler times. In reality, in my garden, nada: easy pickings for critters. Maybe netting would help.

Capacity to out-compete weeds: Could do better. Needs extensive straw mulch or weed matting. This is your pampered city no-nothing who is the first to bite it when weapons are drawn.

Pepino.

Chance of surviving: Excellent. Said to be short-lived but can reproduce by layering, so new plants take root wherever branches lay on the ground. Tolerates partial shade well and copes well with periods of drought.

Productivity: Again, theoretically, impressive. Produces peach-sized juicy, mildly sweet fruits tasting like a slightly insipid melon – good in a mixed fruit salad. Flavour will be surely enhanced by the scarcities after the breakdown of civilisation. Fruits early, within the first year or so. Unfortunately, fruit tends to droop towards the ground where fruitarian zombies and/or rodents can easily nab them.

Aesthetic appeal: (the art galleries may be filled with mindless corpses, but the beautiful things in life are still important) High. Gorgeous little white and purple striped flower with a contrasting yellow stigma. The light apricot-coloured fruit is dappled with purple and the long leaves are an attractive greyish green.

Capacity to out-compete weeds. Not bad. Plenty of leaves right down to the ground, even in shade. Can’t entirely crowd out ehrharta or trad, though, and it’s a pain to weed around and through it. Not for neat freaks. But neat freaks probably won’t cope with the survivalist lifestyle too well, so not to worry.

Comfrey.

Chance of surviving. Comfrey will be the last plant standing. Deep tap roots enable it to access any water available. Needs some sunlight but copes with very little in my garden.

Productivity. This is the permaculture mother lode: high nitrogen, high potassium, a dynamic accumulator of minerals. No doubt there are herbal types who will profess it cures cancer. You can’t eat it and your chooks probably shouldn’t eat too much of it either unless you want them to have liver failure, but it’s a fantastic compost activator and decomposes into a comfrey tea that’s an all purpose liquid fertiliser.

Aesthetic appeal: Enormous textured grey-green leaves and lovely delicate purple flowers. Smells pleasantly of cucumbers when cut.

Capacity to out-compete weeds. Comfrey is a weed. Well, the non-sterile versions are: you are best getting your hands on the Bocking 14 sort which don’t produce seeds. Spend some time in the underground bunker planning ahead before you plant this, since, a bit like Jerusalem artichokes, once it’s in it stays there. Any tiny piece of root (or stem) in the ground will produce another plant. You can tear off its leaves three or four times in a year and it will come right back. In fact, comfrey may well be the plant version of the undead. The large leaves and capacity to grow when all around are wilting means it keeps most competitors down though trad seems to be able to find a way. Dies down briefly in winter which gives the other nasties a go. Since Sydney will no longer have a winter in the near future this may become less of a problem.

Sweet potato.

Chance of surviving: Very good. In theory dies back in winter (but see above). Regrows from tubers left in the ground in previous seasons. Copes well with drier periods, though it does need quite a bit of sun.

Productivity. In my garden hasn’t produced an astonishing number of tubers, but I haven’t taken it very seriously as a root crop. That will obviously change when civilisation breaks down and there’s no longer a chip shop around the corner. The new leaves and shoots are an excellent alternative to spinach or swiss chard, juicy and quite mild flavoured. They are much nicer to eat raw than rainbow chard, for instance, and apparently are a favourite food in the Phillipines. The leafy tips grow back quickly after being harvested.

Aesthetic appeal. Gorgeous. Some varieties have heart shaped leaves, others palmate. The leaves are a deep glossy green with purplish new growth. Related to the (weedy) morning glory vine, so you may get some very pretty flowers towards the end of summer. Apparently there are ornamental varieties with near-black or lime green leaves, but the culinary varieties are nothing to sneeze at. Note: there will be zero tolerance of ornamental plants after the zombie apocalypse.

Capacity to out-compete weeds. Not bad at all. The leaves are large and there are lots of them. The vine is quite vigorous and, like pepino, sends out roots where it touches the ground. With a little light supplementary weeding, my sweet potato seems to have kept things under control around the artichokes and the citrus pretty well.

* * *

No advice here on weaponry or tips on an antidote for those snacked on by the undead, but we have covered the important issues. Next week: hydroponics after the collapse of the West Antarctic Icesheet.

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mccnmatt

Posted on

March 29, 2014

Posted under

Brush turkeys, Climate change, Exclusion pest control, Gardening, Plants and what I know about them, Seasons

Cherry blossom in autumn

What’s the difference between a good gardener and a bad gardener?

Two weeks.

That’s me, at least two weeks late with everything. Most of the autumn planting happened today, in delicious sunshine after three days of deep, seeping rain. Peter Cundall says my newly sown carrots (should they germinate, always rather unlikely – I got one solitary seedling out of the batch sown a month or so ago) will be pale and thin. Gothic carrots. Hopefully the spindly survivors will be the purple ones: seems more appropriate somehow.

I’m not very optimistic about my garlic either. In previous years I reaped, almost to the clove, an identical amount of garlic to the quantity I planted six months before (I have a similar success rate with potatoes). However, I live in hope that all that will change in 2014: “The Year of Lime”. I have been very slapdash with soil preparation in the past, hoping that cow manure and lucerne-and-straw mulch, with the odd splash of comfrey tea will do for pretty much everything. This year I’ve taken the same approach to dolomite on my leeks and garlic, that the Scottish other half takes to salt on his dinner: more is more. Hopefully it will make a difference. I’ve also put in not just the usual Italian White but also a day-length neutral type, Glen. Perhaps its not me that is harshing my garlic, but my latitude. Now I have a controlled experiment to settle it.

Having discovered the implausible passion of brush turkeys for the allium family, I’ve gone for a belt and braces approach to protecting seeds and seedlings. This year I’ve draped my usual little hoops of wire fencing with vege nets, partly to keep out the beasties and partly to shade the newbies in what’s been an unusually warm March. My home grown brassica and fennel seedlings are working with that same goth aesthetic and I fear that one sunny day might be the end of them. The nets have done sterling service with the beans, which are up and cropping well.

So since we’re in the dying days of March, it may be that my celery and rainbow chard, broccoli, kale and fennel are destined to spend the next six months in suspended animation waiting for the sun to hoist itself above the trees and get things going again on our chilly south-west facing slope. But then, I noticed only a few days back that the little pot-grown cherry tree that has, for the last five years stubbornly refused to flower or fruit, has spluttered into bloom at this most inpropitious time, and that the strawberries beneath the custard apple have sprung little white petals and even greenish fruits. I’m not sure what all this portends: the unnatural beginnings of climate change or just the confused reaction of temperate plants to subtropical seasons. Either way I’m hoping for a harvest.