Gardening

Ushering in Autumn

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

 

Thursday’s dawn farewell of Gita.

Gita blew through earlier this week, dumping 96 mm (nearly 4 inches) of rain on us. She also seems to have ushered in autumn. Sultry summer heat has given way to crisp air in Gita’s wake. The sun is still hot, but the nights have been chilly. The crickets sing their welcome to a new season. Even the garden has taken on an early autumn look, tired plants beginning to look tattered and yellow. Before Gita, I had ordered my firewood for the winter. It seemed too early at the time, but now, I’ll be happy to see it arrive.

Summer fruits and vegetables should still roll out of the garden for the next six to eight weeks, but the end is in sight. We’ll enjoy it while it lasts.

 

Preparing for Gita

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Just some of the weekend’s harvest.

I have been AWOL from the blog for longer than usual. I have good reasons, one of which is whirling toward New Zealand as I type. Cyclone Gita is bearing down on us, and though we aren’t likely to bear the full brunt of her damage at our place, we will get heavy rain and gale-force winds.

So I’ve spent the last two days bringing in the crops that might be damaged by her—wheelbarrow loads of corn, soy, black beans, borlotto beans, tomatoes, and apples. This summer’s intense heat and sufficient rainfall have not only encouraged excess cucurbits, but also increased my bean harvest—picking took far longer than I expected, and I will spend the next week shelling them all.

But when the rain starts later tonight, I’ll be able to relax, knowing I’ve done as much as I can to protect the crops. And the rush to bring them in means the job isn’t still hanging over me, lingering on the to-do list.

So I may not have posted the blogs I’d hoped to, but I’m ready for whatever Gita throws at us.

Summer Soup 2018

/ Robinne Weiss / 3 Comments

I feel like a broken record sometimes (those of you under the age of 45, ask your parents what I mean by that). The garden season repeats itself each year in a pretty predictable fashion, and I find myself blogging about the same events every year.

Saturday was Summer Soup day, which I’ve blogged about more than once before (in 2015 and again in 2016). This year’s production was 25 quarts of soup and 6 quarts of vegetable stock, bottled and ready for quick meals throughout the year. Production time, just over 14 hours.

It always feels good to fill every pot in the kitchen with delicious vegetable soup…at least for the first hour or so. But by the end of the day, I’m sick of being in the kitchen and ready to collapse. I need to remember the feeling later in the year when I’m feeling guilty about just pulling a jar of soup out of the cupboard for dinner. I’ve put in the time. We all have, because even the kids help pick and chop vegetables for summer soup. We’ve earned every ‘free’ meal we get from it.

Downsizing?!

/ Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

I realised a shocking thing the other day. My son will finish high school in December this year. We all hope he’ll be leaving home for university shortly thereafter.

Next year, my teenage boy won’t be here all summer to eat vegetables.

Next year, I’ll need to plant a smaller garden, or be completely overwhelmed with food we can’t eat.

This is the last summer I will ever have a garden this big.

I’m having a harder time adjusting to that thought than I am the thought one of my kids will leave home in a year. Oh, I always knew that someday I’d scale back the garden, but ‘someday’ in my mind was always when I grew too old to manage so much garden.

But ‘someday’ is next year.

How am I going to cut back? Which varieties will I not plant? How will I curb my zucchini problem? What am I going to do with my time, if I’m not forced to spend every daylight hour in the garden from September to December?

It’s a good thing I have several months to prepare. This is going to take some getting used to.

Aftermath

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The courgettes (zucchini) will recover, in spite of all the broken leaves.

The remnants of cyclone Fehi hit New Zealand yesterday. We didn’t receive the brunt of the storm, and I am thankful for that. But we didn’t escape damage.

After Fehi’s wind dumped rain on the West Coast, it swooped over the Southern Alps and raced down the other side, heating up as it went. We were blasted by the hot, dry wind—gusts at least 130 kph (and higher, by the damage inflicted), and a temperature that reached 35ºC by early afternoon.

Parts of the garden will not recover. I’m glad we ate our first sweet corn earlier in the week, because it might be our last—the corn lies flat on the ground today.

The greenhouse plastic was shredded, and the stakes holding the greenhouse in place were pulled from the ground. Only my paranoia about the greenhouse taking flight in the wind saved the structure—years ago, I’d tethered it to y-posts driven deep into the soil. They were the only things left holding the structure in place.

Today is cool and rainy. The change will help the garden recover from yesterday’s thrashing, but it can’t bring back the stripped fruit, broken branches, and fatally flattened vegetables. It won’t fix the greenhouse.

We pick up the mess and get on with it. The damage is discouraging, but I am not discouraged. If gardening (and life in general) were not laced with setbacks and disaster, we could take no pride in our accomplishments. I will be extra-pleased with every tomato and cucumber we eat for the remainder of the summer.

And, by the way, if cyclone Fehi did nothing else, it reminded me where the name Debbie’s chutney came from—cyclone Debbie stripped the apples from the trees before they were ripe. We made chutney from those apples, and named it Debbie’s. Perhaps we will be making Fehi’s chutney this weekend.

Year of the Cucurbit

/ Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

A portion of one day’s cucurbit harvest…and the melons and pumpkins haven’t even begun.

The Chinese New Year is coming up in less than a month. It will be the year of the dog.

I beg to differ. At least at Crazy Corner Farm, it will be the year of the cucurbit.

Extremely high temperatures combined with an unusual amount of rain seem to have encouraged growth of the pumpkins, zucchinis, melons, and cucumbers this year. I have never, in over 30 years of gardening on three continents, seen cucurbits grow like this.

I accept responsibility for the zucchini. I know I always plant too many. But the others aren’t my fault.

Melons are usually incredibly difficult to grow here. They barely grow, and give very few, tiny fruits. I’ve tried them in the greenhouse, and they seem to do even worse there than in the garden. Too cool and dry, I suspect. Not this year! They have outgrown their bed and are invading the beans on either side of them. There are dozens of fruit set, and those fruits (still quite immature) are already larger than most of the mature fruits I’ve gotten in previous years.

The pumpkins have simply devoured half the garden. They’ve invaded the corn, overtopping it in some places. I’ve had to push them back into the garden when they’ve escaped, growing over five metres from where I planted them. I planted just a few plants each of pickling cucumbers and  table cucumbers, and spaced the two varieties well apart from one another. I am now hacking them back to keep them separate and avoid them spreading over the shade house. My plan with the pickling cucumbers was to have just a handful for making fresh pickles (because I only ‘make pickles’ every two years to avoid becoming the crazy pickle lady), but I’m harvesting as many pickling cucumbers as I do on most pickle years.

I have lost all paths in half the garden to cucurbits, and many of the paths in the more clear half are overgrown, too. It is truly out of control. I have never seen this sort of cucurbit exuberance before.

So, I declare 2018 Year of the Cucurbit. Care for a pickle, anyone?

Infidelity

/ Robinne Weiss / 3 Comments

It’s time to come clean. This will be hard for some of you to hear, but it needs to be said. I never thought this would happen. I never thought I’d be saying this, but I can’t deny it anymore.

I’ve found a tomato as good as Brandywine.

I know, I know, you can’t believe I would do something like that. Can’t believe I’d be so unfaithful after decades of tomatoey bliss.

But there you have it. Indigo Apple is my new love. She’s a black tomato—a beautiful medium-sized fruit on an indeterminate plant. Her flavour is complex and rich, like Brandywine’s and, in contrast to Brandywine’s long maturation time, she ripens early. What can I say? I’m in love.

Hawksbeard: a Cheerful Weed

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We’ve had recent, much-appreciated rain, and the grass is unusually green for January. But even with the grass growth, summer is weed season in the lawn.

More specifically, summer is weed flowering season.

Some of the weed flowers are uninspiring, and merely annoying—the dull greenish flowers of plantain, for example.

Others bring a splash of colour to what is normally a bleak time in the lawn.

Hawksbeard (Crepis capillaris) is one of the more prolific colourful weeds in the lawn in summer. An annual or biennial member of the dandelion family, this plant bears small, cheery yellow blooms on tall, branched stems.

The NZ Plant Conservation Network shows hawksbeard as being naturalised in 1867 from Europe. Like its cousin dandelion, it was most likely brought to New Zealand on purpose as a food plant—it’s young leaves are edible. Like the dandelion, it is no longer valued as a food, but is considered a weed.

I will admit, the tall flower heads of hawskbeard can be annoying in the lawn. They seem to spring up overnight between mowings, and they slap against your legs as you walk through the yard. But I do appreciate their yellow blooms at a time of year when most other plants give up from the heat and drought. I have been known to use hawksbeard in flower arrangements, and their green rosettes are sometimes the only green to be found around the yard.

Rolling out the Welcome Mat

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When we first moved to our house, most of the landscaping, at our place and at the neighbour’s, was non-native. Gorse, photinia, oaks, birch, macrocarpa…plants of little interest to native wildlife. We’ve slowly been replacing much of the non-native vegetation with natives. When the property next door changed hands, the new owner replaced the gorse hedges with natives. Our plantings are all maturing, and I’ve got my fingers crossed we’ll soon attract some native residents.

Over the years, piwakawaka (fantails) have shown up occasionally, usually in autumn, and only for a week or so before moving on. But this year, one has arrived in summer. He’s been flitting around for over a week now, chattering and declaring ownership of the place. I’m crossing my fingers, hoping he’ll stay.

Piwakawaka don’t stay still for photos, but he was talking to me through the kitchen window yesterday and, with the window as a bird blind, I was able to snap a couple of photos that weren’t just a blur of feathers. He’s a cute wee guy. I hope our welcome mat is acceptable to him.

A Zucchini Problem

/ Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

Hi. My name is Robinne and I have a zucchini problem.

They say the first step is to acknowledge you have a problem. I did that years ago with my zucchini addiction, but it doesn’t seem to have helped. Every year, I say I’m going to plant fewer zucchini. But in early July, with icy rain lashing the windows, the pictures in the seed catalogue are so alluring…

When it comes to planting time in October, I find I have four or five varieties of zucchini seed—how did that happen? Well, since I have the seed…

I plant only six of each variety—I use those little six-pack seedling trays, so it’s really the minimum reasonable number of any one variety.

Let’s see…six times four or five…hmmm…

At plant-out, I swear I’ll cull some. I’ll only plant the best-looking individuals of each variety. Two of each kind, just in case one plant dies (which, by the way, has never happened to me, but it’s always a risk).

But I’ve earmarked an entire bed for zucchini on my garden plan. I couldn’t leave part of a bed empty. That would be a waste of space. And there are plenty of plants to fill the bed…

As I say, I have a zucchini problem.