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mccnmatt

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May 25, 2015

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fruit trees, Gardening, Plants and what I know about them

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Streets paved with oranges

Standard oranges as street trees

Growing up on the Murray River in South Australia, I know a bit about oranges.

Each morning, the schoolbus drove past row upon row of grapevines and fruit trees, taking us (reluctantly) to class with kids from Berri, the next town along, with its juice packing plant, cannery and stinky wine makers. We played “baby jesus” under the mandarins and grapefruits on my auntie and uncle’s citrus block. And of course, I’ve surveyed the great, flat sweep of the mallee from the viewing platform of that mighty SA landmark, The Big Orange.

But growing up, I never witnessed fruit trees quite like the ones on the Amalfi coast.

The Italians could teach lawn-loving Anglo Australians something about growing food. In fact – thinking about the fertile backyards of the first generation migrants that lived in my grandfather’s neighbourhood in Adelaide, backyards crammed full of loquats, olives, tomatoes and apricots – they already have.

My vibrant and delicious little Freemont mandarin. What is it doing in a garden when it should be promenading in the street?

Even from the train, we could see that every scraggy patch of dirt between the tower blocks on the southern fringes of Naples had its well tended veggies and caged fruit trees. Fennel, broccoli and artichokes found a place between holiday villas and upmarket boutiques on the vertiginous slopes of gobsmackingly gorgeous Positano.

And the mid-winter streets of Sorrento were lined with laden oranges, glowing under the streetlights as the well-heeled townsfolk celebrated the Epiphany – La Befana – in their passegiata finery.

What a grand notion! Fruitful city streets; boulevards and avenues of lemons or pears or mangos! Why doesn’t every city and town look like this? Okay, it might take gun-toting fruit police patrols to keep the street trees looking good for the tourists. Will I lose any shred of PC respectability if I say… it might just be worth it?*

The volcanic sands of mid-winter Positano

Vertiginous veggie patches of Positano

Captive citrus trees in Positano

*Obviously, I don’t mean this. Nor, just to clarify, do I support Switzerland’s strategy of recruiting, via conscription, geranium police, a cadre whose mission is to guarantee a consistently high standard of floral displays on balconies throughout the summer months. In case you were wondering.

Yes to geraniums, no to the vicious geranium police.

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mccnmatt

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May 14, 2015

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Garden trees, Gardening, Plants and what I know about them, Possums, Seasons

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Let them eat light!

Green and orange for closeup real crop horizontal

It’s persimmon season, but, natch, nothing doing on my little Nightingale tree, despite a grand show of weird naked-looking flowers in the spring. Two fruits nearly made it to the finish line, but the possums got there first.

Gorgeous as the golden fruits are reputed to be as they hang on the leafless trees, 2016, I have decided, will be the year of picking green. The persimmons may well be mouth-puckeringly unripe but as human overlord of this place, I insist that it is I who will enjoy their high-tannin nastiness, and not some upstart marsupial.

In fact, my tree is an old fashioned astringent persimmon: the fruits need to be “bletted” to go super soft and sweet. This can happen far from fruitflies and other critters, deep in the pantry, in the comforting darkness of a paper bag, with only an ethylene-emitting banana for company. I have days when crawling in next to the banana to be bletted myself sounds like a good gig.

In theory, me and my persimmons can hole out for a few weeks in an undisturbed corner and it should work out delectably for both of us.

Persimmon flowers last spring

Leaf shadows

Nightingale persimmon tree

But, really, I don’t care! Harvests mean nothing to me! A barren tree is a beautiful tree.

For now, it’s all about the komorebi, a Japanese word I encountered for the first time a few days ago in the marvellous nature blog, Mildly Extreme.

Because who needs food when you can have sunlight filtering through though autumn leaves?*

Love those leaves…

*but thank god for the Freemont mandarins

*Love those leaves… but thank god for the Freemont mandarins…

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mccnmatt

Posted on

April 3, 2015

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Flying foxes, Fruit, Fruits for shade, Gardening, Permaculture, Plants and what I know about them, Plants that attract wildlife, Weeds

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Bats about tamarillos

Tamarillo flower in spring

This time last year, a raid on my tamarillo crop had me pondering on possums. What spidie sense tells the resident marsupials to gobble up your perfectly-ripe figs and grapes the very night before you plan to harvest them? Are they tri-chromatic mutants like we humans, with gerry-rigged colour vision just good enough to grab a ripe mango before the visually well-endowed parrot gets it first? Or do they sniff out your glorious organic harvest in defiance of their typical mammalian red-green colour blindness?

But this year I’ve been mostly thinking about bats.

I’ve had a bumper crop this year off my quick growing and beautiful tamarillo tree, though not quite the 20 kilos that others brag about. So I’ve not been too miffed to find some of the ripe fruit scattered on the ground, flesh neatly scooped out, or to spot a few gnawed items left dangling on the tree. All the other members in my household are either under ten or Scottish, and consequently I have no human competition for weird fruits of any kind. It would seem churlish not to share with the local critters.

Tamarillo leaves

Green tamarillos

Remnants of the tamarillo crop

So who are my fellow tamarillo lovers? I suspect the grey-faced flying foxes (Pteropus poliocephalus), the most common “macrobats” in this part of New South Wales. While I haven’t eyeballed a single flying fox at our place, I’ve heard them playing cricket with the toxic fruits of the cocos palms for weeks. Soon after lights out, there’s a sequence of companionable shrieks, rustles and thumps, and the palms start raining seeds onto the roof.

One of the many reasons cocos palms are a dangerous pleasure for flying foxes is that the fallen fruit lures them down where they can be chewed up and spat out by the local dogs. Every morning for the last month or so I’ve found a little piece of installation art on a stump near the cocos palm – a few half-eaten fruit arranged with an eye to the design possibilities of the log’s in-house fungus. I thought this was a convenient possum picnic spot, but I’m wondering if it’s a safe haven for bats who are obviously unaware that our house is guarded not by dogs but by night-blind attack chickens.

Bat or possum picnic spot?

Cocos palm in our yard – “a telegraph tree”

Cocos fruit rain

Our tamarillo tree (“Matimba”, as our eight year old has named her) is just beneath the hateful-but-expensive-to-remove cocos palm, in a jumble of shade-tolerating subtropical plants – galangal, ginger, bananas, naranjilla. My kind of (sub)urban density.

Flying foxes are opportunists. They don’t just eat eucalyptus nectar, lillypilly fruits and mangrove leaves but take what they can find, and are willing to fly a long way to find it. The closest bat “camps” to our place are in Gordon, Warriewood or Avalon – twenty kilometres or away or more. Having come all that distance for a feed, only a bat-masochist who relishes the guts-ache produced by cocos fruits would turn up its nose at the delightful passionfruit-meets-apricot flavoured snack down below.

Did a bat eat this tamarillo?

Tamarillo sheltering near monstera deliciosa flower

Tamarillos under monstera leaf

Unlike possums with their dud colour vision, megabats seem to be spoiled for choice when it comes to tracking down a ripe tamarillo. When our mammalian common ancestor was hiding in a burrow and sneaking around in the dark to avoid veloceraptors, being able to see all the colours of the rainbow was less critical than decent night-sight. Despite a largely nocturnal existence, fruitbats however have evolved the ability to see not just short wavelength but also medium and long wavelength light – and, like birds, can even see in ultraviolet, perhaps to spot flowers and fruits at dusk, at dawn and in bright moonlight.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that my surviving tamarillos were hiding underneath the banana and the monstera leaves, invisible to fruit bats cruising past above. But flying foxes also have a pretty good sense of smell, so after the mysterious overnight disappearance of my first kiwifruit (and my mulberries, and my persimmons, and my grapes…) I don’t think I’ll chance it.

They may share colour vision with us primates and may even share some of our sexual peccadillos, but unless megabats evolve opposable thumbs and can open my back door, they’re not getting any more of my harvest this year.

Ripening inside – beter safe than sorry!

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mccnmatt

Posted on

March 15, 2015

Posted under

Brush turkeys, Exclusion pest control, Gardening, Microbiome, Plants and what I know about them, Pollination, Seasons, Vegetables, Weeds

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The first winds of autumn

Beautiful jerusalem artichoke flowers

It’s been a dispiriting harvest. No zucchinis. Not one microvegetable. I managed to get the plants to grow, thanks to divine intervention – well, an arresting children’s painting of Cyclops on my cardboard sheet mulch. Not to mention, those secular forms of protection: chicken wire, veggie netting and steel reinforcing wire – in fact everything short of kevlar, plexiglass and concrete. So my zucchini plants survived, but perhaps traumatised by their oppressive high-security environment, they steadfastly refused to reproduce.

I remember my allotment-owning pal Mary’s desperate missions to dispose of her harvest of marrows: abandoning big bags of courgettes on her friends’ front steps at the crack of dawn and legging it before her mates, undoubtedly already in possession of a fridge bursting with zucchini, could refuse. Websites and blogs abound with strategies for hiding surplus zucchini from disgruntled family members in breads, slices, chutneys, muffins. Whereas I can only fantasise about concealing pulverised marrows in my children’s ice cream.

Everyone else’s garden seems to have rampant marrows as eager to breed as randy rabbits, whereas I have somehow I have managed to create zucchini plants with the delicate sensibilities of the giant panda.

Sick looking zucchini fruits

After the trauma of the zucchini experience (not to mention the underperforming watermelons, the disappearing peaches and the epic potato fail) I am considering giving up on planting altogether. Instead I think maybe I’ll just edit the plants that arrive under their own steam. Feral gardening.

For instance, I’ve recent realised the the garden is awash with purslane, an edible weed with a whole lot of omega 3 fatty acids. Flavour wise, it doesn’t rock my world but since the brush turkeys and possums seem feel the same, I may have to work up an interest. I’m still still waiting for the sweet potato vines to hit their stride so I can make free (or more precisely, make stir fry) with their new growth and my warrigal greens have once again been murmalised by something with a sharp eye for bush tucker, so even with the fair success of “lettuce under a draining rack” strategy, the salad bowl is currently a bit bare.

Purslane keeping company with oregano and snakebeans

Lettuce in captivity

Along similar lines, I’ve finally reconciled myself to the self-sown jerusalem artichokes.

Don’t get me wrong, I love jerusalems with a mad, colon-exploding passion, and I’ve tried to grow them in many locations around the yard. They are almost unkillable. Eight foot high plants don’t normally take to container gardening, but back in my expat days I got a decent crop out of a modest sized pot under grey British skies.

Given their invasive qualities – leave just one small tuber in the ground and next year’s crop is sorted – my first plan was to grow them in places where little else would thrive. I set up a kind of slow motion, plant-based reality TV show: The Great Australian Weed Off. Running bamboo, gigantic grass grass that grows through concrete, versus Jerusalem artichoke, towering beauty that sneers at weaklings who need full sun, regular watering or fertile soil. Which would survive on a permanently shaded rubble filled slope subject to occasional flash flooding? I had faith in my sun chokes, but given the number of critters that range this place cruising for food, the bamboo’s quotient of deadly cyanide seemed to be its ace in the hole. My artichokes disappeared without a trace.

Running bamboo

So when some artichokes popped up on the northern edge of the veggie garden, springing from a few peelings I threw to the chickens when the chook tractor was in that neck of the woods, I was not so much delighted as resigned. My dream permaculture garden would probably not include gargatuan invasive plants blocking the autumnal sunlight. But after a decade of watching fastidiously planned planting schemes going to hell, my gardener’s hubris is slowly waning. Who am I, an organism entirely lacking in chlorophyll, to decide what grows where?

Jerusalem artichoke flowers

Sunchoke flower

Jerusalem artichoke leaves – six feet and counting

So the jerusalem artichokes have been left to tower over their neighbours, and it seems like it’s been a good year. The plants have put on great show, looking exactly like the cousins of the sunflower that they are. I’m too impatient to wait for them to die back before I start harvesting, so last weekend, I burrowed around to get the first couple of tubers of the season for a gourmet touch in my potato dauphin.

Jerusalem artichokes straight from the ground

Scrubbed jerusalem artichoke tubers

Thinly sliced jerusalem artichoke, sliced onion and garlic over a layer of sliced, parboiled spuds. Add another layer of potatoes, top with cheese and buckets of cream and bake!

Since they’re so danged delicious, why harvest so few? It’s not that I’m worried that pinching more tubers will kill off the floral display or thin out the harvest. It takes a lot more brutality than that to cramp the style of a jerusalem artichoke. It’s the flatulent dinner guests that trouble me. There’s no getting around it: jerusalem artichokes will make you fart. And as a longstanding vegetarian I should know. Baked beans have nothing on it.

Jerusalems (like the completely unrelated globe artichokes) contain a sugar polymer called inulin, which is totally undigestible, making it high in fibre, a handy sweetener for diabetics and a probiotic which feeds the bacteria in your greater intestine. Sounds great, doesn’t it? In the thrall of this glowing nutritional report card, Mother Jones recommends using jerusalems, with its high fibre, high iron, high calorie payload as a substitute for potatoes. A huge bowl of mashed jerusalems – my idea of heaven! But best not consumed before, say, a graduation ceremony, a silent Buddhist retreat or a solo piccolo performance in the Sydney Opera House, since when those friendly bacteria consume inulin they produce enough gas for a live re-enactment of the Hindenberg Disaster.

I love this vegetable so much I’m not willing to give it up. My other half has worked this out, and now inspects any autumn stew with deep suspicion. I’ve heard rumours about ways of deflating artichokes – slow cooking, long keeping and pickling. I’m not convinced by any of these. In my experience, slowly and gently does it: a diced tuber in a vichyssoise, a handful roasted in the oven, one or two thinly sliced in a stir fry.

And make sure the next day is spent outside, in the fresh air of the garden. Or in the company of artichoke loving friends.

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mccnmatt

Posted on

March 3, 2015

Posted under

Animal pests, Backyard chickens, Brush turkeys, Garden trees, Insect pests, Insects, Plants and what I know about them, Possums, Weeds

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Ecosystems of evil

Okay, I know there’s no such thing as evil ecosystems. You create plenty, and things come. Plenty of chicken food and regular eggs, you get nine teenaged brush turkeys, slouching around your backyard, eating anything that’s not nailed down. Lots of grapes vines and your resident possums bite their way through the mesh exclusion bags and let in the fruit flies. A yard littered with the sulphurous fermented droppings of a cocos palm (not to mention the ordure of those brush turkeys), you get loads and loads of flies.

Aesthetically pleasing flies

Too many bloody flies

I’ve had a red hot go at taking an aesthetic approach to the flies, with their sparkling metallic blue and golden armour and crazy eyes. I’ve tried to think about them as simply part of the cycle of life, but I am starting to stare pointedly at my watch, waiting for the arrival of the cavalry, a wheeling flock of insectivorous SBBs (small brown birds) that will weave through the undergrowth and snatch the pests from the air without breaking formation. I want one of those neat and tidy ecosystems, the ones where the annoying insects become a food source for endangered and good-looking avian visitors.

But no – desite my native shrubs and the absence of a horde of noisy miners, our place is rich in bombastic generalists and SBBs are thin on the ground. Your kookaburra – good for tidying up your left over sausages. Your cockies will make short work of the peach crop. But both of them bloody useless at disposing of flies. The garden skinks have been a disappointment as well. Allegedly they are avid carnivores, and flies are a favourite treat, and we’ve got more Lampropholis guichenoti in the backyard than we have five cent pieces rattling around in the bottom of the washing machine. But they, too, have failed to come to the party. Once again, Gaia appears to be napping on the job.

While the Cocos palm absolutely and definitively a weed (I like the nuggets of invective in the Grow Me Instead Brochure – “a blot on the landscape” “can give the appearance of a garden planted with telegraph poles”) my hatred for this vermin-attracting plant was masked for a while by a sense of gratitude. After all, it did save the house and possibly the family from being crushed under a giant gum tree.

I was at work one day when RB called. “I don’t want to worry you but a tree’s just fallen on the house”.

The SES was summoned: a marvellous mob of guys and gals with chainsaws who belayed themselves to the wonky car port and swarmed over the roof of the house, making short if noisy work of the tree. The big gum had lost its grip on the ground and fallen sideways towards our verandah. Fortunately a forked branch wedged itself across the Queen palm, holding the eucalyptus suspended just a smidgen above the roof. The sum of the damage: one branch lightly brushed a gutter and gave it a bit of a bend.

So, thanks for that, Queen palm (and, needless to say, the SES. You are legends.). We’re grateful for the structural integrity of our roofline.

But if you think it’s going to stop us chopping you down, you couldn’t be more wrong. The possums might view your fruit as ideal picnic food but you’re a hazard for the flying foxes. It’s a worry when you rely for 30% of your diet on something that gives you acid reflux, damages your teeth, chokes you and leads you to stumble around on the garden being mauled by suburban dogs. Even Maccas isn’t that bad. That’s an evil ecosystem if ever there was one.

And that’s leaving aside the trip hazard for someone as poorly coordinated and lazy with the garden broom as I am. So unless I hear about a recipe for cocos palm wine before I afford a tree surgeon, Cocos palm, you’re cactus!

Cocos palm in our yard – “a telegraph tree”

Bat or possum picnic spot?

Helpful local telegraph pole

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Posted on

February 12, 2015

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Plants and what I know about them, Spices, Subtropical gardening, Weeds

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The Ginger family stole my brain!

On the face of it, it seems implausible, I know. But if mimosa plants have long term memories, corn calls out for help, beans search for a supportive pole and tomatoes are flesh eaters, it is possible that my free will has been stolen by the extended ginger family.

When we moved into our place, it was a ginger-rich environment. The front yard had a two metre perimeter wall of shell ginger, the perfect height to conceal the neighbours and our decaying garden fence without blocking the light (or should I say, any more of the light). Its flowers are a homage to Georgia O’Keefe: I feel faintly prurient just looking at these close-ups.

Eat your heart out Georgia O’Keefe

Meanwhile, lingering in the backyard was a much more nefarious member of the family – kahili ginger (aka ginger lily) – producing tall red and yellow blooms and strapping leaves even deep shade and impoverished Hawkesbury soil.

According to the Queensland government, this one lives for 70 years and is “known to invade rainforests, montane forests, agricultural areas, coastland, disturbed areas, natural forests, planted forests, range/grasslands, riparian corridors, scrub/shrublands, urban areas and wetlands.” I’m struggling to think of a habitat not listed there. It may possibly fail to flourish if planted directly on a glacier, but given its origins in Nepal that might be risky too.

You know a weed’s a baddie when official websites entreat you, in red block capitals, to call them immediately if you even suspect you’ve seen it (local rates Australia wide). This one’s in the global “hottest 100” thanks to bird dispersal of seeds and a capacity to survive in deep shade. There’s none left to photograph in my backyard, needless to say – it wasn’t too hard to excavate, given time and a sharp spade, although the NSW Primary Industries reckons it can develop a layer of rhizomes a metre deep.

But I still feel like a criminal: so far I haven’t dobbed in my local primary school to the NSW Invasive Plants and Animals hotline, or the suburban house on my walk to work which displays this Category 3 weed proudly out by its front drive.

Kahili ginger or ginger lily- dig it up and get rid of it!

Strangely, after all the time I spent removing weedy gingers from the yard, I now find more and more members of the Zingiberacae family appearing, as if by delivered by some unknown hand, around the back door.

First it was tumeric and galangal, “for their edible roots“. Yet curiously, three years down the track, I’ve yet to dig up a single rhizome. They’re just too pretty. Is that me, or my Ginger Overlords talking?

Tumeric leaves and flower

Tumeric flower

Tumeric leaf

Tumeric flower from the side

Galangal

Suddenly, leaving no conscious memory of the deployment of a credit card, Atherton ginger, the good-looking redback kind, started appearing all over the place. It’s okay, I tell myself, it’s edible and a native too – with tart but tasty fruits and ginger-flavoured leaves to wrap your tucker in for an extra zing. Not that I’ve laid a hand on a single, lovely leaf, for snack-wrapping or any other purpose. Funny that.

Atherton ginger “Red back”

Blue fly on native ginger

And now, not a week goes by when I don’t find another relative of the ginger family loitering in the undergrowth. Alpinia caerula, the local variety. Cardamom ginger… smelling more suppurating than spicy. Zingiber officianale, good old-fashioned definitive ginger ginger, lurking under the bananas and the monstera deliciosa, a dessert just waiting to happen.

To the best of my knowledge (at least in my waking hours) I haven’t yet planted anything you can get arrested for supplying to a garden centre. But it’s possible one of these days I’ll be found stumbling around under the tamarillo tree in my nightie, raving about the marvellous yellow flowers of Hedychium flavescens and cursing the shallow minds of Australia’s biosecurity fascists with their inability to appreciate the full glory of the gingers.

And when that happens, you know the number to call: NSW Invasive Plants & Animals Enquiry Line 1800 680 244. Or email weeds@dpi.nsw.gov.au

Arty tumeric leaf closeup with little fly

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Posted on

February 5, 2015

Posted under

Animal pests, Backyard birds, Brush turkeys, Damage caused by chickens, Exclusion pest control, Fruit, Gardening, Plants and what I know about them, Pollination, Soil, Vegetables

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Jailbreak!

“I gotta get outta here!”

Cucumbers will go to desperate lengths to flee an attack-flock of brush turkeys, eh?

“Freedom!” – zucchinis under veggie nets

So is it better to die fighting than live in chains? I’m not sure where my zucchini would stand on this one.

I’ve managed to keep the plants alive under an ancient perforated veggie net, held up by a rusty drum stand and contorted steel reinforcing wire. Shyla the Australorp sneaks through to lay the odd egg but so far the brush turkeys haven’t spotted an entry-point. Which is lucky, because if they made it in, there’s no way they would ever find their way out again. I’d arrive in the garden one morning to find a turkey skeleton splayed out underneath the enormous hole these leaves are bursting through.

The bees don’t seem to have found the great big holes in the netting either. Or perhaps the local pollinators suffer from claustrophobia. I’ve seen loads of male flowers but the little golden zucchinis just seem to wither on the vine. I’m trying to figure out if it’s (a) the plant aborting seedless, non-fertilised fruit (b) blossom end rot, thanks to insufficient calcium (c) rampant powdery mildew, caused by constrained circumstances (d) despair induced by a life Inside or (e) all of the above.

Going, going, gone … doomed baby zucchini

It hasn’t been a good year for jam making, either. Here’s the breba crop which was looking so lovely mid-winter. Not really worth setting aside a day in the kitchen for preserving this one. On the right, “dried figs”, but not as we know them. A few hot days saved me the cost of a dehydrator, but I’m not sure gastronomy is the winner here.

The 2014 breba crop

This is not what I normally think of when someone mentions “dried figs”

And a sad discovery this morning – the lone survivor of my bumper crop of coyly fleshy persimmon flowers ripened, unattended, and was demolished overnight, probably by a young possum taking a leisurely midnight stroll from his summer house above the air conditioner in the granny flat. Only a few days back I was thinking if might be time to wrap the precious persimmon in one of the net exclusion bags sitting neatly folded on the bench in the toolshed.

Persimmon flower retreating from the light

The sad end of an unprotected persimmon

Zero tolerance, it seems, is the only solution. Imprisoning the chickens is mean, imprisoning the possums and the brush turkeys illegal. Whereas imprisoning vegetables, pollination issues aside, seems to work quite well.

Incarcerated lettuce

A new generation of okra seedlings group up under a draining rack

And an older burgundy okra plant, growing through the bars of another tiny prison.

Small scale vegetable prisons seem to do the business for seedlings and your slender or ground hugging plants, but now I have the frame of an aged trampoline at my disposal, I’m thinking big. And I’ve started looking at the superannuated chook tractor with a new eye.

Yes, it has traditionally been Andy Ninja’s lofty sleeping quarters, but with a bit of dusting off, what a fine brush turkey exclusion zone it would make. Perhaps, Andy, it’s time you reconsidered the virtues of Palm Beach, the vernacular modernist architectural masterpiece I painstakingly made you and your feathered friends a year ago, now sadly abandoned by every damn chicken in the flock. Even the brush turkeys don’t try to sleep there.

Now there’s an idea: if the new improved carceral complex with its walk-in prisons doesn’t protect my veggies from assaults by poultry, maybe I should start planting them in the chook house.

Superannuated chicken tractor cum vegetable prison?

Andy Ninja roosting on the chook dome

Andy eyeing up the ex-trampoline, soon to be brush turkey exclusion zone.

Remember Palm Beach, Andy?

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Posted on

January 13, 2015

Posted under

Animal pests, Brush turkeys, Exclusion pest control, Gardening, Greens, groundcover, Plants and what I know about them, Vegetables

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Rooted?

I’m the sort of person who always has a plan F. While it doesn’t represent my three previous failed attempts or the well-raked but now choko-free planting site, the following gallery of photos showing my recent efforts to grow a choko vine on my back fence, gives a hint why.

Choko sprouting way back in late winter

After months inside, the choko and sprout are finally in the ground

Something of a setback after planting despite charming view of itself in an attractive arched mirror…

Pleasingly after a week or two the leaves grow back

And slowly the choko vine begins to flourish…

… until one day, it has a visitor….

You might ask “Why the mirror? Do chokos favour selfies? Are they the body builders of the plant world, only able to bulk up while constantly checking their form?”. A good question. You might also ask “Why try to grow the choko in the first place, the vegetable equivalent of the Milk Arrowroot biscuit, a food you will only eat when the pantry is otherwise bare?” but let’s not go there now.

My garden gleams with reflected light in hopes that a sudden glimpse of a rival will put the wind up your peckish but flighty brush turkey and make him head for the hills. I fell for this urban myth, and heavy rubbish day presented any number of opportunities to add a sparkle to my vegetable beds.

Okra in the mirror

The looking glass garden

While a looking glass in the okra patch is aesthetically pleasing, the sad end to to my months of steadfast efforts to grow a choko vine suggests that mirrors may fall into the same category as companion planting – a charming idea lightly resting on a flimsy foundation of optimism and anecdotal evidence.

So I have undertaken my mission of establishing a sweet potato patch with a certain sense of doom. Yes, it is true that with absolutely no attention from me, over summer last year some long-neglected tuber produced a morass of sweet potato vines so resilient that it became my 2014 nominee for “plant most likely to survive the zombie apocalypse“.

But that was then and this is now. Yesterday I saw not one, not two, but four baby brush turkeys in the yard during one 10 minute period. If the undead favour brush turkey brains, the zombie apocalypse is starting to seem like a more and more appealing prospect.

What? Cute little me?

There’s a hint of Hammer Horror about sweet potato slips, enhanced, I think, by the monster themed birthday candles I used to keep the tubers suspended in glasses of water. Yet surprisingly, in the months of watchful waiting, there was only one horror movie moment. A classic: Empty-house-Terrifying-things-hidden-in-enclosed-spaces-Heart-in-Mouth – When Sweet Potato Tubers Go Bad. There was a potential splatter event as I emptied the gut-churning water into the sink. But fortunately, there were survivors.

After a few weeks of waiting for slips to appear in the pantry, I tried water.

Some weeks Some weeks late, faintly disturbing roots

and on the other tuber greenery. Not sure why the strict division of roles between the two tubers…

Soon enough both had both roots and shoots and the tiny dinosaurs were happy

15 cm slips decanted into a glass of real ale… sorry, water… to roots

Time to plant out…

So, time to plant out the sweet potato slips. Needless to say, I won’t be relying on Alice nipping through the looking glass to rescue my sweet potatoes.

Instead, I’m pinning my hopes on a trampoline. It has been a much loved trampoline. But when you find lichen growing on on your backyard play equipment it’s often a sign that it’s time for it to move on to the next phase of its lifecycle. In this case, in the fiscally constrained post-Christmas period, as low-rent vegetable exclusion netting.

Yes, that does mean that the kids can no longer leap and bound with gay abandon knowing that the nets around the tramp will catch them. They now have the “tough love” type of trampoline we had in the 70s and 80s where the threat of a broken leg or fractured spine was ever-present. But sometimes it comes down to a choice between securing the future of your offspring and your root vegetables.

The trampoline in its sunset years

So yesterday, in the foggy early morning, I set out to the bottom of the garden with everything prepared. Commemorative real ale glass full of rooted sweet potato slips. Length of lichen-encrusted trampoline netting. Bucket full of broken terracotta pots, previously used to secure a now-partially composted Christmas tree. And hope. And back in the kitchen, a whole bunch of extra sweet potato slips. Because when hope fades, there’s always Plan F.

Lichen encrusted trampoline netting

Crocks

Partially composted Christmas tree

Little sweet potato slip meeting the earth

Cute/doomed little sweet potato slip

Strawberry plants just slightly oppressed by trampoline netting. Maybe I will get the occasional strawberry now.

Plan F

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mccnmatt

Posted on

December 27, 2014

Posted under

Brassicas, Gardening, Greens, History, Plants and what I know about them, Vegetables

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Superfood of the Undead

In the light of the Berowra Potato Famine of 2014, I am grateful that the obituary I gave for the kale some months ago was premature.

People may say they grow kale because of its alleged status as a superfood, but I know the truth. People grow it because it’s impossible to kill. Attacked by aphids, gone to seed, garrotted daily by the garden hose, baked in the hottest spring on record and scarified on a regular basis by the vicious claws of visiting brush turkeys – after all that, my kale plants have felt the need for a little lie down.

Ragged jack kale stem

Ragged jack kale leaves

Kale flowers

Zombie kale

However, having risen from the grave once, they won’t just won’t lay down and die. Those leaves keep right on coming, whatever I throw at them. Not great big fancy leaves, good for stuffing with, say, quinoa and chick peas. More the slightly stunted, hard living leaves you might expect to be produced by the once-definitive vegetable of a country famous for its disdain for vegetables. In dark and gloomy pre-industrial Scotland, kale was such a staple that the veggie patch was called a “kailyard”. and by extension, the evening meal, “kail”. Any green that can crush the neep in the death-match for vegetable supremacy on the Scots dinner plate is not to be trifled with (boom boom).

Clydeside in late autumn. Ideal habitat for kale.

In the light of this backstory, I’m starting to wonder about the untimely demise of my tatties. The flea beetles are in the frame for the execution of my potatoes, but all the while, the kale lay nearby… unnoticed… waiting… Could it be that my zombie kale has vengefully fed on the life-spirit of the blighted potato, colonial pretender to the Scottish vegetable crown?

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mccnmatt

Posted on

December 17, 2014

Posted under

Gardening, Insect pests, Permaculture, Plants and what I know about them, Vegetables

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Epic potato fail

Over the years I have reconciled myself to the fact that I will harvest, more or less to the tuber, precisely the same number of spuds as the number of extortionately expensive seed potatoes I put in at the beginning of the season. Only the delicious memory of my friend Mary’s fabulous Greenbank allotment crop keeps me dreaming of fresh dug salad potatoes and hoping that my years of abject failure as a tater farmer are simply a consequence of a sequence of unfortunate accidents.

This year I thought I had made a breakthrough. Why not cluster my Kipfler and Pink Fir Apple spuds around the base of equally hungry plants – the banana trees, the citrus, the celery – and mulch them all within an inch of their lives? The piles of sugar cane straw and the level of expectation were both at an all time high.

On the left, I present you with the potato patch. On the right, this year’s harvest.

The potato patch

This year’s harvest

I’m blaming this guy: I believe it’s a flea beetle. Found – no surprises – loitering below the Eureka lemon, which as we have already established is the garden headquarters of Bond movie insect super-villains. Flea beetle has no doubt been plotting world domination with the now well-ensconced victors of Operation Bronze Orange Bug, perhaps while riding on a secret underground monorail that speeds him directly to the locations of my poor doomed potato plants.

Flea beetle on a doomed potato plant

I love the advice on this organic gardening site for combatting the flea beetle. Their main recommendation: blasting a metre wide strip of barren lifeless earth right around your veg. Now, where did I put that flame thrower?

There seem to be two schools of thought on organic pest management. On the one hand, you have the garden hygienists, the short-back-and-sides crew. Weeds? Hoe them! Plants? In neat rows! Spent crops? Rip them out and burn them! And then eat the ashes! Quail in the bright light of day, insect fiends! There is no escape!

And then there’s the permies and the hippies, with their food forests, their companion planting schemes, and their growing guilds. Spent crops? Let them flower and attract the hoverflies! Step away from that spade – think of the the busy worms and their delicate underground cities, rich with seams of organic matter from the recycled roots of yesterday’s vegetables. That patch of nettles in the corner? A fabulous buffet for butterfly larvae, binding together precious topsoil from erosion. The stack of rotten logs and twigs by the back fence? A habitat for sleepy lizards and an overwintering insect hotel. Gaia is at one with all her four and six legged companions.

This particular site seems to want to it a little bit both ways: … Why not grow some lovely cottage garden flowers as companions to your plants? The delightful blooms of Queen Anne’s Lace will attract beneficial insects… and then you must rip the evil bug-harbouring weeds out by their nematode encrusted roots leaving only pure naked earth, free from the taint of exoskeletal evil!!

I’m squarely in the hippie camp, from sheer laziness if nothing else. Swathes of bare soil are indicative of a tragically perished garlic crop or a chicken incursion, rather than some kind of pest reduction plan. So I will be keeping a careful eye on my eggplant seedlings, also susceptible to flea beetle attack, which have, semi-miraculously, successfully made the transition from windowsill seed tray to vegetable patch.

I suspect I know the secret of their resilience – these are “Little Finger” aubergines. I feel deployment of plant varieties named after nakedly ambitious characters in popular fantasy television, particularly arch manipulators dab handed with a dagger, is a form of psychological plant protection under-explored in permaculture. Think you can take “Little Finger”, flea beetle? You may want to think again.