Yearly Archives: 2011

We’re not eating much out of our vege garden yet, because there’s not much in there that’s ready to harvest. But last night we celebrated the start of spring – and the end of another good day in the garden – with homemade fish cakes, boiled eggs from the chooks, most of a bottle of French champagne (it was a wedding gift)… and the first salad of the season.

The fish cakes were a bit of a disaster. I’ve never made them before and we didn’t have any breadcrumbs, so they all fell apart in the frying pan. We ended up with a pile of what can only be described as fishy mashed ‘Agria’ spuds, topped with parmesan and heaps of fresh chives. The salad wasn’t exactly exciting either, just baby spinach, shredded mint, more chives, a mini ‘Buttercrunch’ lettuce, perennial rocket and spring onions. But it tasted like the start of something good: the new season.

Another first for the week: I took Lucas for his first trip to a garden centre on Friday afternoon. We got there five minutes before closing. (I have calculated the effect of having a baby on my ability to get anywhere on time as T+1 hour and 20 minutes.) But that was just long enough for me to cram the car boot with perennials and a big bag of seed-raising mix.

So yesterday we cleared the weeds and scrappy alyssum out of the two beds at the end of the lawn, staked the six ‘Awapuni’ cherry blossom trees, dug in some compost and planted Orlaya grandiflora, a few pale pink cineraria, babianas, violets, hellebores, night-scented stock, poppies, Brachyscome ‘Strawberry Mousse’, pink gnautias and the potentilla ‘Miss Willmott’. I’ve tucked the potentillas between some orange and red-stemmed silverbeet. Should be a cute colour combination.

We* finally planted our bareroot plum, plumcot and stonefruit trees yesterday too, and just in the nick of time. The ‘Tomcot’ apricots have got their first blossoms already. I don’t have high hopes that they’ll ever fruit well, as apricots are the holy grail in Auckland’s humidity, but they will get a decent winter chill so you never know. We also put in some ‘Blackboy’ and ‘Golden Queen’ peaches; ‘Mabel’, ‘Goldmine’ and ‘Queen Giant’ nectarines; and five ‘Smyrna’ quinces.

When I met Jason, he’d already planted two plum trees on the hill between the house and the arena. I have no idea what varieties they are (one’s a yellow plum, the other red), but we’ve given them some mates: ‘Santa Rosa’, ‘Elephant Heart’, and the apricot-plum hybrid, plumcot ‘Spring Satin’.

Which just leaves five ‘Bramley’s Seedling’ and ‘Peasgood Nonsuch’ apples to plant today and the new orchard area will be finished, aside from sowing wildflowers around the trees. (Plus I still have 10 ‘Seckel’ pears to espalier, but they’re going into our new formal garden and that hasn’t been excavated yet.
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*When I say we, I mean that I laid out the trees and then went back up to the house to mind Lucas and make a chocolate cake while my husband dug all the holes. Heh.

I’ve had a marvellous weekend of minor triumphs. First, my snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis) started flowering. Given that I only got the bulbs into the ground six weeks ago (and when I say “I”, I really mean my husband’s cousin’s wife Nicki, who has been helping me catch up on all the gardening chores I missed in the weeks before, and the weeks after, Lucas was born). But I can’t really skite as they’re the saddest little snowdrops you could ever see. Each bulb has each sent up two chive-sized leaves and a wee flower on a 10cm high stalk. I picked a few to take a photo of but I couldn’t find a vase small enough to do them justice. Ah well, next winter they’ll be fabulous – and fully sized too, I hope. 

This weekend also marked a major milestone in Lucas’ life. We discovered that, if we push him in his stroller to the end of the driveway and back, and then along the gravel path through the paddock and around the old equestrian arena and then up the hill past the chickens and around the horse chestnut tree to the end of the lawn and back (repeat as necessary), he’ll happily sleep for a couple of hours, parked up on the lawn, while his parents dig, sow and plant like crazy. Consequently, we made a fair bit of progress, in between feeding, changing, burping and, our current favourite pastime, behaving like a couple of middle-aged dorks to get a gummy grin (or 20) from our little man.

Seeds sown this weekend: Angelica pachycarpa (this glossy-leafed species isn’t edible but is very pretty in the garden), a packet of ‘Romanesco’ Florence fennel, giant red mustard, sorghum (I found a packet from Koanga Seeds that must be at least three years old so I’m not sure if the seeds are still viable, but what have I got to lose?), Nasturtium ‘Empress of India’ (I’ve sown the seeds direct, between my ‘Bright Lights’ silverbeet seedlings), a row of ‘Onward’ climbing peas, a packet of old-fashioned fragrant sweet peas, Chinese broccoli (kailaan), honeywort, Salvia ‘Turkistan White’ and Orlaya ‘White Lace‘.

Flower seedlings transplanted: 1 row of Oriental poppies, 1 row of ‘Strawberry Parfait’ dianthus, 1 row of the dwarf double Sweet William ‘Pinocchio’ (available in garden centres in punnets).

Anything else to report? I also planted two more rows of dahlias, 2 x 1.5kg bags of ‘Cliff’s Kidney’ seed potatoes and 50 cloves of garlic. Oh, and in exciting news from my mini plastic propagating house on the deck… I now have 3 parsnip seedlings! Gosh they take a long time to germinate. The swedes in the same tray are already ready to transplant. (And yes, I know you’re not supposed to raise root crops in trays, but rules are made to be broken.)

It’s becoming a habit to wake up to white dusted paddocks, crystallised cabbages and celery in the vege patch, and a front deck patterned with the dogs’ thawing paw prints. It has been so cold here this week that the frost is usually settling in before we’ve even gone to bed. The payoff, of course, is that a clear, still, cold night is usually followed by a clear, still, sunny day. Bring on the weekend! I have lots of work lined up for my husband…

1. Even weeds look like works of art when they’re dusted with ice
2. Frost kills aphids in the rose garden and fungal spores in the orchard (sadly it also eviscerates the early almond blossoms)
3. It’s impossible not to chuckle at a perplexed dog licking a frozen puddle
4. The cats are always cuddlier on a cold morning
5. A frozen lawn sounds like a bowl of Rice Bubbles underfoot
6. I remember why I bought woollen gloves and Ugg boots: to stop my fingers and toes freezing when I whip outside at daybreak with the camera
7. Frozen dew drops look like Swarovski crystals
8. The forlorn hung heads of last summer’s sunflowers (the sparrows nicked all the seeds) look exquisite in their sparkling state of decay
9. It’s a pleasure to see the paddocks slowly thaw as the sun comes up
10. I can justify an extra spoonful of brown sugar on my porridge (and I’d have cream too, if only I had a house cow)

The weather forecasters got it right. Snow, not just on the Hunua Ranges, but on our front lawn! The dogs had no idea what to make of it. Take that, aphids, and any other summer greeblies still hanging out in my garden!

This might sound like I’m skiting (because I am), but today I picked two ripe passionfruit off the vine scrambling along the front of our stables. Passionfruit! In August! That surely warrants a bit of a skite, even though I can’t really take the credit for it. We’re just lucky to have had such a mild winter.

Passionfruit has always been one of my nemesis plants. Over the years I’ve killed more passionfruit vines than I care to count. But then I bought a grafted plant from Oratia nurseryman Chris Davidson, who grafts passionfruit vines onto vigorous sweet granadilla rootstock, so they grow like triffids. The plants aren’t cheap, at $40 a pop, but I can’t recommend them highly enough. I had my best crop ever this year, and I’d be prepared to bet that next year’s haul will be the stuff of legend. That’s if I can persuade the passionfruit vine to play nicely with the hops I’m also training over the stables…

Click here to read my Good Life column on passionfruit, from the February 2011 issue of NZ Gardener.

It’s not spring yet but I just can’t wait any longer. I’ve put in my first row of spuds for the season. (And there are 10 more bags of seed potatoes sprouting in trays in our stables. I’m aiming to sell new spuds for Christmas at the local farmers’ market, along with, all going to plan, my first crop of purple asparagus.)

This rocky raised bed wraps around a cherry blossom tree right beside our house. I’m not sure how successful it will be as a vege patch, given that I’ve had to chase the dogs out of it twice already today, but it’s as close as you can get to our kitchen. So far it’s home to lettuce, carrots, garlic, onions, spuds, rocket, celery, globe artichokes and mint.

I’m ditching the designer potager look this season. My garden’s too big to plant flowers, herbs and vegetables all together in a happy jumble, the way you can in cute raised beds in the city. It will just end up looking like a big mess.

Instead, I’m going back to the future. I’m planting my vege patch in perfectly straight rows (I laid down the rake to make the trenches) that any grandfather would be proud of. And my next job? We’re going to rotary hoe up the 35m long borders along each side of the lawn, where we sowed wildflowers last summer for our wedding, then fill them up with neat rows of food crops and flowers for picking. It’s going to look fantastic. Which is just as well, because it couldn’t look any worse than it does now. It’s just as well the lawn is still picture perfect.

I do like a good frost (much more so since we installed a heat pump… frosts aren’t quite so nice when your wee farmhouse is so chilly you feel like you’re sleeping inside the fridge). We had a wicked freeze on Tuesday this week. The deck was white with ice, apart from the thawed pawprint patterns from the dogs. The paddocks were powdery. The puddles were iced over. The lawn was wonderfully crunchy underfoot. The rhododendrons along our driveway looked like someone had spraypainted them white. And the metre-high ornamental tobacco plants (Nicotiana mutabilis) in my rose bed were completely coated in ice crystals. Their large, soft leaves had all slumped to the ground. I figured they were a goner… but I was wrong. As the ice thawed, they perked up miraculously.

Nicotiana mutabilis is one of my all-time favourite plants. The flowers open pink and fade to white (or do they do that in reverse? I can never remember), which means that at any one time the plants are smothered in tubular flowers that range from pure white to marshmallow pink to bright cerise. (Here’s a pic). You can order it from Marshwood Gardens.