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.

I am not a morning person. Never have been. As a child I’d crawl out of bed at the last possible moment and was always cutting it fine to sprint down the driveway in time to catch the school bus. (Thus I can’t help but admire my niece Jaime’s cunning: she – in a stroke of pure genius – tried to wear her school uniform to bed under her PJs. It would have worked too, had my sister not gone in to wish her goodnight only to spot her school shirt collar poking out from under the blankets.)

I am not a morning person, but since Lucas was born, I’ve seen in the dawn on at least a dozen occasions. And every time it’s a thrill. (No, that’s not just the sleep deprivation making me say silly things.) One of the simple pleasures of living on the peak of a hill is the way that, on clear winter mornings, the fog rolls in, slowly swallowing the valley, leaving only the trees around our lawn and the tips of the Hunua Ranges in the distance peeking out of the mist.

By the time it’s light enough to take a photo, the fog has usually lifted. So, as ridiculous as this might sound, it always makes me feel like this ephemeral effect is for my eyes only. (And Lucas’ too, though to be quite honest at that time of the day he’s rather more interested in looking up my shirt than out the window!)

Irish author and celebrity chef Darina Allen is a woman after my own heart… and not just because she has, shall we say, a fairly flexible approach to meeting deadlines. (In her credits for her latest book, Forgotten Skills of Cooking, she admits: “I once heard my publisher introducing me as, ‘my author who doesn’t start to write the book in earnest until the deadline has passed’. “)

Darina is the founder of the famous Ballymaloe Cookery School in Ireland and has spent her life promoting her passion for honest, seasonal, organic food. I interviewed her earlier this year, when she was holidaying in New Zealand, and she was charming. Charming and so full of enthusiasm for all those old culinary skills like smoking, bottling, brewing and butchering the odd animal.  (I wrote about this book in my Down Country column in the Sunday magazine last month. Click here to read it.)

With more than 700 recipes, Forgotten Skills of Cooking is worth every cent of its $79.95 cover price (it’s published by Kyle Cathie and distributed in New Zealand by New Holland) I think it’s even better than Nigel Slater’s Tender Volume I (Vegetables) and Tender Vol. II (Fruit). And I think Nigel Slater is the thinking gardener’s crumpet (so to speak), so that’s saying something.

From small acorns, mighty oaks can grow…
If you’ve wondering why I’ve been a little quiet on the blogging front this month, I’ve been ever so slightly preoccupied with the arrival of our little fella. Lucas Sebastian Hinton arrived at 10.11am on June 7, weighing in at a sturdy 9lb 14oz (or 4.47kg). We think he’s pretty adorable. Almost as adorable, in fact, as all the lovely handknitted clothes he has been sent by friends, family members and NZ Gardener readers. Thanks to Jan Freeman for this gorgeous green outfit. How ever did you guess that it’s my favourite colour?

Okay, so its actually the 1st of June, but I took this photo yesterday, just as the weather pundits confirmed what we gardeners have been aware of for weeks: the weather was amazingly mild in May. In fact, it was the warmest May on record. NIWA climate scientists say it was almost 2.5 degrees warmer on average than usual, with twice as much rain too. Which explains why, among other things, my crabapples are in blossom, my asparagus is sending up out-of-season spears… and all my baby daffs have burst into bloom.  Strange times.

Or should that be corn-u-copious? Who would have thought you could harvest buckets of fresh, sweet, succulent corn in the middle of a rather wintry May?

Back in January, I sowed 1200 sweetcorn seeds to fill up the gaps at the back of our wedding garden. I sowed it purely for decoration – I wanted a lush green backdrop and sweetcorn seemed the quickest, cheapest, most tropical-looking solution. I didn’t expect to get a crop; indeed the agricultural seed merchants I bought the bulk seed from initially wouldn’t sell it to me, because it was far too late in the season to be sowing it.

And they were right. The cobs that formed on the plants around our lawn were small and scungy. They were too far back in the border to get any benefit from the irrigation system, and then black aphids and green vege bugs (also known as shield beetles) descended like a plague and sucked the kernels dry.

But what a different story it has been on the steep hill below our house. This part of the garden used to be the chook run but, before the wedding, we carved it into four terraces with gravel paths to provide access for guests to get from their cars to the ceremony. My original plan was to sow wildflowers in the terraced beds, but then I ran out of time so I just chucked in heaps of corn just to keep the weeds at bay.

And now… we have ears of corn coming out of our ears. I should be composting the shabby old stalks after picking the cobs, but it’s far easier just to pull them out and biff them over the fence to the cows. They absolutely love the stuff. Ditto the chooks. They’re getting all the undersized cobs.

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My latest pregnancy craving? Mandarins.

Pros: Sweet, seedless, easy-peel ‘Satsuma’ mandarins are in season! I can buy them on my way home from a roadside stall near here for just $3/kg. They are divine. I could eat a whole bag in one go. Mum’s tree is also laden – she filled up my fruit bowl with even more mandarins this weekend.

Cons: Fresh citrus gives me chronic heartburn at the moment. I only have to look at a mandarin and my chest hurts. I’m chewing through antacid tablets almost as quickly as I’m chewing through the citrus. Ah well, not too many days to go now!

(But I have to admit, I a’m getting a bit tetchy about the state of my garden. Not being able to bend over is a definite disadvantage, but luckily Mum came to the rescue yesterday and put in a few punnets of cauliflowers, spinach, red-stemmed silverbeet and spring onions for me. This afternoon I also sowed a packet of ‘Dwarf Early Green’ broad beans, a packet of ‘Wiltshire Ripple’ sweet peas and prepared two dozen elderberry cuttings for the edible hedgerow I’m planning in our orchard. Now I just have to bribe my husband to mow the orchard so we can plant the 200 or so spring bulbs I’ve bought to go under the apple trees…)

Photo credit: Capay Satsuma Organic Mandarins