Gardening

Fabulous Flatworms

/ Robinne Weiss / 7 Comments

Australian flatworm

One of the common animals in my yard and garden is the flatworm. Strictly speaking, “the” flatworm here in New Zealand is actually multiple species—possibly up to a hundred—but they have been poorly studied, so it’s unclear just how many species there are.

Flatworms are some of the most impressive predators in the garden, able to consume prey up to 55 times their own size. That’s the equivalent of your house cat taking down a female elk. They eat snails, slugs, and earthworms, digesting them externally before sucking them up with one or more mouths located midway along their bodies.

I love to find flatworms around the yard. They come in striking colours, and some have lovely brown stripes—the orange Australian flatworm (Australoplana sanguinea) is most common in my garden, followed by the relatively nondescript brown New Zealand flatworm (Arthurdendyus triangulatus). Like the slugs they eat, they prefer damp places, and they protect themselves with a layer of mucous. Flatworm mucus is stickier than slug mucous, and they use it to attach themselves to their prey during feeding.

New Zealand is full of non-native invasive organisms, but New Zealand flatworms are one of the few organisms that have turned the tables and become pests overseas. They are easily transported in potted plants, and have successfully invaded Ireland and Scotland. Though there was widespread panic at first about their potential to threaten the local ecology, they appear to have caused little damage to earthworm populations in the UK. Like most cold-blooded animals, their appetites are small. Far from being a devouring hoard, each flatworm can manage, on average, just one earthworm per week. And if they don’t manage to find an earthworm every week, it’s not a problem—they can go a year without eating.

Weeding Therapy

/ Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

You know it’s been a good therapy session when it leaves a clear weeding front.

I make no secret of the fact I have a weeding problem. I’ll ignore hunger, thirst and bodily pain to pull just a few more weeds—fill the wheelbarrow, finish the garden bed, never mind the cost.

But in spite of my obsession, I believe there is a place for weeding therapy, even for me.

Today, when the temperature hit a sweltering (for mid-winter, at least) 18 degrees (64ºF), I had no interest in my usual lunchtime walk. No. Today, after weeks of inactivity in the garden, I needed to weed.

I grabbed my gloves, and hove to. A sweaty half-hour later, I was refreshed and ready to get back to work.

The key to good weeding therapy (to avoid it becoming a weeding marathon) is setting limits—I give myself half an hour, and set a timer so I’ve no excuse for running over time. It helps to choose the therapy weeding job well; I go for places that have been irritating me, places that are desperate, or places where the weeds are big and easy to pull. It gives me a greater sense of accomplishment in a short amount of time, so I feel I can quit when my time is up.

And if I do quit before exhaustion, pain or hunger set in, I can return to other work in a focused state of mind, ready to bang out the next chapter or tackle the next editing job.

And the best part is that, with so much garden area here, there will always be more weeds, so therapy is always available when I need it.

Appreciate the season

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Drizzle-soaked hebe.

It’s another grey, damp day in a string of grey damp days. We’ve had little rain, but almost no sun, either. Though my last blog was about spring, this weather reminds me it’s still winter.

I’m itching to get out into the garden, to plant seeds, to get on with the business of springtime. The weather hasn’t been cooperating.

In a way, that’s good. It is too early to plant, to early to turn the soil. The weather reminds me to appreciate what winter has to offer—the excuse to stay indoors and sew, the opportunity to play board games and read books, a reason for a mid-afternoon cup of tea. I forget to value these things when I have them, instead looking forward to the next season of frenetic activity. Sometimes I need a week of fog and drizzle to remind me.

Red Currant Orange Muffins

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I’ve occasionally noted how alike in smell, flavour and texture red currant jam and cranberry sauce are. And since I’ve got a freezer full of last summer’s currants, I decided to use them in a recipe calling for cranberries.

The result was a lovely red currant orange muffin. Even better than the cranberry version, because the fruit came from our own garden.

2 cups all purpose flour
1 c. whole wheat flour
1 Tbs baking powder
3/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
3 eggs
zest of one orange
juice of 1 orange, plus enough yogurt to make 1 1/2 cups
1/2 cup brown sugar
125 g (8 Tbs) melted butter
1 cup fresh or frozen (thawed) red currants

Combine flours, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a large bowl. In another bowl, whisk together the eggs, orange zest, orange juice, yogurt, sugar and butter. Combine wet and dry ingredients, stirring just until evenly moist. Fold in the currants.

Fill well-greased muffin cups—for me, this makes 21 muffins.

Bake 15 minutes at 210ºC (400ºF). Allow to cool in pan 5 minutes before removing.

Still Life with Insects

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I’ve written and discarded half a dozen blog posts over the past week. Nothing seems to be quite right. Out of ideas, I resorted to the book of 500 writing prompts I created for my daughter. A random stab at the non-fiction section of the book brought me to the question: What objects tell the story of your life?

I tried to encapsulate everything in four objects:

The fiddle: made by a neighbour in Panama, given to me for my birthday by my husband. The fiddle not only tells the story of our years living and working among the incredible, resourceful people of Panama, but also tells the story of my lifelong interest in learning to play the violin…an interest which always ended up being pushed aside for other interests. Because I’m interested in learning so many things, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day.

The beetle puppet represents my insatiable curiosity about arthropods, and how that curiosity has bled into my other interests. Peanut butter jars full of bugs on my dresser when I was a kid led to the entomology degree, which led to teaching about insects at Penn State University, and then starting the Bugmobile. And the puppet is only one of many insect-themed and inspired artistic projects I’ve done over the years, as art and science mingle in my brain.

The gardening gloves speak of my weeding addiction and my love of growing food. The gloves are never more than a month or two old, because I wear through them in that time. I think that says it all about gardening for me.

The rock represents adventure, the natural world, and the wild places I have visited and lived in. Like me, the rock has traveled far and has been changed by the stresses it has experienced along the way.

Salt-preserved Green Beans

/ Robinne Weiss / 3 Comments

I always struggle with what to do with too many green beans. I can (bottle) some, but none of us really like the taste of canned beans, and their mushy texture leaves a lot to be desired. I don’t freeze any, because freezer space is at a premium, and I prefer to fill it with sweet corn and peas instead.

So this past summer, I preserved some green beans in salt. The recipe I used claimed that the flavour and texture of salt-preserved beans is far superior to canned or frozen.

I pulled out the crock of salted beans the other day to test them out.

At first glance, they didn’t win any beauty contests, especially the yellow wax beans, which came out of the salt a sort of dead-flesh colour.

I rinsed them and soaked them for two hours, as directed, and then tossed them into a green bean and potato charcharis.

Cooked into a flavourful Indian dish, the beans most definitely had better flavour and texture than canned beans. Almost as good as fresh, even.

Unfortunately, they were so excessively salty, they made the dish almost inedible. Even my salty-olive-loving family couldn’t choke them down. Most of the dish ended up on the compost pile, and I expect an epidemic of high blood pressure in the local sparrow and mouse population who dine at chez-compost.

There are still some beans left. I’ll try using them again—small quantities in otherwise unsalted stews or soups might work well (sort of like a salty ham hock in bean soup). Maybe.

But I’m thinking I’ll just give away the extra green beans next year.

Happy New (Garden) Year!

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I love the month of July; it’s the beginning of the garden year in my mind, because it’s the month I plan the garden and order my seeds. It’s been a few years since I blogged about my garden year, so I figured it was time to do it again. I unearthed this little graphic my husband helped me create a few years back, showing my annual planting and harvesting schedule. It has changed a little since then, and I notice some crops, like garlic, are missing from it, but it’s still a fairly good indication of my year in the garden.

I struggled the first few years here. Coming from the Northern Hemisphere, I had no idea when I should plant things. And the idea of growing vegetables over winter was foreign to me, too.; gardening in Minnesota and Pennsylvania is sharply seasonal. It’s seasonal here, too, but much less dramatically so.

Instead of growing a ton of spinach over the summer and freezing it for winter, I learned to simply plant small quantities regularly throughout the year, for a perpetual supply of fresh greens. Same with lettuce, chard, broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower.

Today my garden year ebbs and flows, but there is never a down time in the garden. There is always something to plant, weed or pick. The end of last year overlaps with the beginning of this year, so while I plan my seed order, I’m harvesting the lettuces, broccoli, leeks and other late crops planted in the autumn, and I’m weeding the garlic and broad beans that will be harvested in the coming spring and summer.

Sometimes I miss the complete downtime of gardening in Minnesota—the winter lull when there’s no need to go out and weed in the cold. But only sometimes. The never-ending garden year here has its perks in garden-fresh vegetables year-round.

Self-control … yeah, right.

/ Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

Now that we’re on the upside of the winter solstice, I’ve planted my garlic—108 cloves, which should yield about 100 heads, assuming my usual success rate.

That’s absolutely too much garlic.

It’s a bad omen. I drew up my garden plan this morning—a garden roughly three-quarters the size of the one I’ve planted for the last decade. Hopefully it won’t yield 200 pumpkins and 80 kilos of pickling cucumbers next year when my teenage son won’t be around to eat them all.

But, plan or not, if I plant other crops with the exuberance with which I planted garlic today, I’ll end up with a garden every bit as big as past gardens. Some time in the next two weeks, before this year’s seed catalogue arrives, I need to get control of my gardening urge.

Wish me luck.

Beautiful Basket Fungus

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Mature fruiting body

One of my favourite fungi is Ileodictyon cibarium, the basket fungus, native to Australia, New Zealand and Chile. We have been treated this year to an amazing display of these fungi in our recently wood-chipped pond garden. Usually we don’t notice them until the fruiting bodies are fully formed, but because there are so many this year, we’ve been able to watch their whole emergence, from egg-like volva to lacy soccer ball.

Aside from their striking look, there’s nothing particularly lovely about these fungi. The basket fungus is in the family Phallaceae, also known as the stinkhorn fungi. Members of this family—you guessed it—have a foul odour (and many are phallus-shaped). The carrion or dung-smelling fruiting bodies attract flies to disperse the spores. Supposedly, the young fruiting bodies are edible … but not very tasty, as you can imagine.

Immature volvae

In spite of their smell, basket fungi have a certain celebrity status, owing to their remarkable structure. In fact, in Hagley Park in Christchurch there used to be a play structure in the shape of a giant basket fungus. I’m not sure if it’s still there—my kids don’t frequent playgrounds anymore—but it was always a favourite with my kids.

In Praise of Parsnip

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The rangy rosette of a parsnip plant.

A bit like carrots, but sweeter and starchier, parsnips are wonderful winter vegetables.

I’m not certain when I first ate parsnip, but I know I’ve eaten a lot of it. When I was breastfeeding my son, nearly everything I ate gave him colic (It took eight weeks of 24-hour-a-day screaming for me to work this out … longest eight weeks of my life). Parsnips were one of the few safe vegetables, so I ate parsnips. Lots and lots of parsnips. But I never got sick of them. Their comforting, earthy flavour only grew on me the more I ate.

I try to grow parsnips every year, but I’m not always successful. Parsnip seed has a short shelf-life, and germination can be poor, even with seed that isn’t officially past it’s ‘plant by’ date. I buy a new packet of seed every year, whether I’ve used all of the old seeds or not. Even so, I don’t always have luck germinating it, because parsnip doesn’t like to be transplanted, and needs to be seeded directly into the garden beds. In my garden, that means the seeds tend to dry out, in spite of my best efforts. It also leaves tender seedlings at the mercy of birds and slugs, which seem to enjoy parsnip as much as I do.

But this past summer the parsnips did well, like many other crops that appreciated the unusually warm, wet weather. The parsnip I picked for dinner yesterday was 15 cm in diameter at the crown, but still tender and delicious. And there are plenty more out there to harvest.

Parsnips are sweeter after the first frost, so they’re a great autumn and winter food. They store well in the ground, so there’s no need to fill your fridge with them at harvest time. When we lived in Minnesota, I used to use a pickaxe to chip them out of the frozen ground through the winter.

Parsnips make wonderful additions to stews and casseroles. Their flavours meld well with potato, carrot, and celeriac. They compliment beans and pulses. They’re great vehicles for butter and cheese. Back when I was subsisting on little beyond parsnips, we used to mash them (like mashed potatoes), braise them, and roast them, in addition to using them in stew and soup.

It’s no wonder these versatile vegetables have been cultivated since long before Roman times. They’re a great winter staple—a vegetable you can eat again and again and still enjoy.