gardening

Garden Tally Half-year Check-in

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We’re nearly at the summer solstice, so I thought it was time to do a check-in on the garden tally project I mentioned back at the winter solstice.

Since 21 June, we’ve been keeping a record of all the food that comes out of the garden. Whenever we bring something into the kitchen, we record it in a little notebook I’ve placed there for the purpose. The months of June, July and August include lots of days when we brought in nothing but eggs. No surprise, the dead of winter is a slow time in the vegetable garden. 

That’s not to say we weren’t eating from the garden. All winter we enjoyed the stored up bounty from last summer—tomato sauces, pickles, jams, chutneys, pesto, pumpkins, frozen corn and peas … There may have been little fresh coming in, but we didn’t lack for delicious vegetables and fruits.

Since September, the incoming volume from the garden has grown rapidly, and some of the half-year numbers are already staggering, despite the fact that the early onset of summer heat wreaked havoc on the spring crops.

If you ever wondered what 6.6kg of gooseberries looked like …

We’ve harvested over 56 kilograms of vegetables, 40 kilograms of fruit, and 335 eggs since the winter solstice.

Those 56 kg of vegetables only covered about half of our theoretical daily need, but that was the ‘lean’ season, when most of what we were eating was stored food from the previous season. Even as a vegetarian, I didn’t feel any lack of vegetables over winter.

There were also some stand-out individual harvests.

The final sweet pepper from last year’s crop was harvested on 2 August! For those of you in the northern hemisphere, that’s like harvesting peppers in early January. The new greenhouse is truly amazing for extending our growing season.

And it not only extends the later crops, it also gives them an early start. This year, I was disappointed, because the zucchini I planted early for the greenhouse never germinated. So the plant I stuck into the greenhouse was sown at the same time as my outdoor zucchini. Despite this, we harvested the first greenhouse zucchini on 13 December, well before my ‘zucchini by Christmas’ goal.

No matter how small, the first tomato is the best.

Oddly, however, the first ripe tomatoes have come from the outdoor tomato plants. These plants are currently less than half the size of the plants in the greenhouses, and honestly look like they’re only barely hanging on. Yet the Gold Nugget cherry tomatoes are already ripening out there.

All these stats make me eager to see what the second half of the growing year has in store. I was blown away by how much we’ve harvested during the leaner half of the year, but the real harvest has yet to begin.

I hope you all have a lovely solstice full of family, friends, and good food. 

Pickling onions, harvested in December, but we’ll eat most of them next winter.

Bountiful Berries–a Summer Celebration

/ Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

In the past two weeks, we have picked and processed (or eaten) 26.6 kg of fruit. Mostly strawberries, raspberries, black currants, red currants and gooseberries, but also a few cherries and boysenberries.

I have run out of half-pint sized jam jars, which is fine, because when you’re making jam with over 6 kg of fruit, you really want to put it in larger jars for the sake of your own sanity. The freezer, too, is beginning to fill with fruit, some of which will be taken out through the summer to combine with later crops in chutneys.

Still, the fruit keeps coming. Honestly, you can hardly tell I’ve picked currants at all. The next two weeks will likely see me pick at least another 20 kg of fruit.

And then it will be largely over. Christmas usually marks the end of the insane early summer harvest. Heading into the new year, the blueberries will begin to ripen, and raspberries, strawberries and boysenberries will continue to come in. But the obscene overabundance of berries will be over for the year. 

Although it is exhausting, there’s something magical about the December berry rush. Eating your way through the garden, having fresh berries on your breakfast cereal every morning, cramming your lunch box with fruit. Making trifle and fresh fruit ice creams. And the days are long—you can fit in a lot of picking and processing of fruit. It’s not unusual for me to be finishing a batch of jam at 10 pm. After all, it’s still light out, surely there’s time to get it done today. Never mind the clock, or the fact that it’s light before 5 am, and I’ll be springing out of bed at first light to pick more fruit before the day heats up.

Can this much work be a celebration? It feels like it. I weed, water, mulch, fertilise and prune all year, and then for a month the berries pour out their thanks. The work to gather it up is full of joy. By the end of the month, I’ve stored berries for the year. In the dark days of June, I’ll be able to make black currant tarts and enjoy the sparkling taste of the summer solstice. 

Spectacular Stick Insects

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One of the first things we did when we bought our new property, even before we built the house, was to establish native plantings. Those plantings have grown spectacularly well, and many of the trees are four metres tall already.

Invertebrate life on the property has increased with the growth of our gardens. Our lush akeake attract katydids, the herb garden is alive with butterflies, native bees, and hover flies. Preying mantids stalk the flowers, snatching up prey. Jumping spiders of several species prowl among the foliage and rocks. And web-building spiders festoon the branches of nearly every plant.

But there are some notable absences. Species that aren’t good at dispersal.

One of those absences is stick insects. Our common native species here in Canterbury are particularly fond of kānuka and mānuka. The kānuka we planted in our gardens has grown beautifully, but is completely devoid of stick insects. 

But not for long …

I was recently gifted some stick insect eggs from a researcher who is studying them. I set them up in an aquarium with some kānuka branches and eagerly awaited their hatching. The researcher warned the eggs were a bit old and might not hatch, but over the course of a few days, seven successfully emerged (a few more died in hatching). 

The seven stick babies are now happily munching kānuka in captivity. I’ll release them into our garden when they’re a little older and I’m more confident they’ll survive. For now, I’m enjoying watching them in their tank on my desk. 

Stick insects are some of my favourite bugs. I love their improbable shape. I love their crypsis-enhancing behaviours—sitting with their forelegs stretched out in front to make them look even more stick-like, and swaying in the ‘wind’ when disturbed. 

I also love the fact that many species are parthenogenic—the females can lay fertile eggs without mating with a male. In fact, there are some species of stick insect for which we’ve never found males.

This parthenogenesis is the result of a strange relationship many insects have with the reproductive parasite Wolbachia. Wolbachia is a genus of bacteria that is passed from female insects to their offspring. Because Wolbachia’s spread is only through the females of its host species, it’s in the bacterium’s best interest to eliminate males. It does this by a variety of methods, depending upon the strain of bacteria and the host species. The result is insects in which males are rare or nonexistent and females can reproduce parthenogenically. Its a cool and complex relationship that I find fascinating.

I look forward to establishing stick insects on our native trees. Hopefully my seven lovely babies will grow into a thriving population.

Homemade Potting Mix

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I’ve been frustrated with commercial potting and seed raising mixes in recent years. Not only are they expensive, but my vegetable seedlings languish in them, if they germinate at all.

The culprit is most likely clopyralid herbicide residues in the mixes. Even ‘organic’ compost may have traces of the herbicide in it, because the chemical doesn’t break down easily, and can be found even in manure from animals that have eaten plants sprayed by it.

So this year I decided to try making my own potting mix. The results have been encouraging.

My biggest hurdle to making good potting mix is ridding my compost of weeds. I don’t do hot composting. Though some of my pile will get to the temperature necessary to kill weed seeds, not all of it does. Fortunately, I have an effective way of sterilising compost—the bread oven.

This spring, every time we’ve fired up the bread oven, I’ve used the residual heat, after all the baking is done, to sterilise compost. 

I put moist, sieved compost into a restaurant steam tray (lidded) and/or a stock pot (lidded) and put it in the hot oven until the temperature in the centre of the compost reaches 82℃. This takes a couple of hours, as the oven is usually only around 150℃ by the end of baking. 

I mix my sterilised compost with coarse landscaping sand in a 2:1 ratio, and voila—my own potting and seed raising mix!

Sterilised soil is prone to fungal outbreaks, because there are no other microorganisms to keep the fungi in check, so when I use my mix, the first watering I give it is a slurry of soil from the garden. This inoculates the mix with the healthy mix of microbes from the garden and avoids excessive fungal growth.

And how did my mix do, compared to commercial mix? Spectacularly well! 

Because I didn’t decide to make my own mix until I actually needed it, some of my seeds were planted in commercial ‘organic’ mixes. Many of these seeds failed to germinate this year. Those that did germinate then sat without growing at all until I transferred them to my own mix.

Seeds planted in my own mix germinated well and grew vigorously.

I will definitely be making my own potting mix from now on.

The Carrot Conundrum

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I love carrots. I love them cooked into everything from pasta sauce to burgers, and I love them raw in my lunch box. As a snack to get me through the day, they are unparalleled—crunchy, juicy and sweet, but not so sweet that they give me a sugar crash. And homegrown carrots are a million times more flavourful than commercial carrots, so growing good carrots is important to me.

Unfortunately, I rarely have luck with my carrots. Last year, I planted three times and got, maybe six carrots. This year, after my first planting failed entirely, and my second mostly failed, I decided to get serious about carrots. 

First, I evaluated why my carrots so often fail. It’s not just one problem that nails them. First, I probably plant my carrots a little too early. Not that they won’t grow at the cooler soil temperatures of early spring, but they take longer to germinate, leaving the seeds at risk of my other two problems: pests (mostly slugs and slaters) which eat the seeds and freshly germinated seedlings, and drying out.

Finally, even once my carrots germinate, they struggle with the heavy clay soil of my garden. If I lighten the soil by adding lots of compost, the slugs and slaters just eat the carrots before they can establish.

So, to try to address all these issues, I started by asking my husband to build me a raised bed. Into the bed we poured a commercial garden mix (half soil, half compost), combined with a sack of garden sand.

I watered the bed well before planting. Then I made my furrows deeper than necessary, so that even after covering the seed, the rows were lower than the surrounding soil. My hope was that the rows would stay moist longer after watering or rain if they were furrowed. 

I watered well after planting, then generously sprinkled the bed with slug bait (I use Quash (iron EDTA), which is also very effective against slaters, but is safe for most everything else). Then I mulched between the rows with grass clippings, and covered the whole bed with feed sacks laid right on the surface.

With the feed sacks on the surface, I didn’t need to water daily, but I watered every other day (with extra waterings on hot days).

Ten days later, I have excellent germination on my carrots!

Was my raised bed necessary? Maybe not, but by making the bed, I focused my effort on a smaller area than I usually plant in carrots. It gave me an excuse to work really hard in that small area to make it work.

Will it work again next year? I’ve had bumper carrot crops in the past, so I know that success one year doesn’t necessarily mean success every year. But I’m hopeful that I’ve hit on a technique that works consistently for me. Only time will tell. 

In the meantime, I’m doing my best to keep my newly sprouted carrot seedlings moist and free of pests. I can taste the carrots already…

Spectacular Spiders: Sooty Orbweaver

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Anyone who knows me knows how much I love spiders. One of my favourite story books as a child was Be Nice to Spiders by Margaret Bloy Graham (never mind the subtle misogyny in this 1967 publication). Growing up, we called the big hairy jumping spiders in the basement “friend ‘pider”.

When I was bitten as a teen by a large wolf spider who’d taken up residence in one of my sneakers, my main concerns were: was the spider okay? (Yes, she appeared unharmed by me squishing my foot into ‘her’ shoe), and was wolf spider venom strong enough to do anything to humans? I was fascinated to find that, yes, my pinky toe, near the site of the bite, was paralysed for about fifteen minutes. Cool, right?

Having lived in Panama, a place with spectacular spiders, the relatively small and harmless New Zealand spider fauna was initially disappointing. But Aotearoa has some fun and quirky spiders. And though none of them rival the tarantulas and golden silk spiders in Panama, New Zealand wins the prize for the sheer volume of spiders. They seem to inhabit every nook and cranny here.

I’ve recently started a wee project to document the spiders on our property. Last Friday, I spent my morning tea break photographing a few.

One of the more common spiders I found on my stroll was the sooty orbweaver (Salsa fuliginata). Despite the name, these dainty arachnids are beautiful creatures, and quite variable in appearance. The three individuals in these photos were hanging out within 50 centimetres of one another—one brown, one rosy, and one yellow-hued. I always find them among the broad beans, capitalising on the heavy insect traffic around the aromatic blossoms.

The sooty orbweaver is native to Australia, and likely arrived in New Zealand from there around 2000.

A Fresh Perspective on a Changing Garden

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blooming daffodils in formal garden beds

Twice a year, on (or near) the equinoxes, I clean the gutters. It’s not a job I enjoy, but it’s a necessary evil living downwind of the neighbour’s huge pines, macrocarpas, and gum trees. 

The one thing I do enjoy about the job is the excuse to spend a few hours up the ladder, peering down at the yard from a perspective I don’t normally have. 

So last weekend when I was cleaning gutters, I took my phone with me and snapped a few pictures from on high.

The last time I photographed the garden from this perspective was in September 2022. At that time, we’d just finished establishing and gravelling the paths in the front yard. Look what a difference three years makes! And what a fun perspective from which to view it.

Three years of change in the herb garden.

Gardening and Community

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blooming daffodils
Blooming daffodils cover a multitude of sins (aka weeds) in spring.

The local veggie gardening group had our first Monday evening gathering for the season last night. And what a lovely gathering it was!

I hosted, which is always a bit nerve-wracking. You don’t want the place to look like it’s been abandoned or neglected, and in early spring, weeds are often more prominent than crops. And some of the group members have absolutely stunning gardens and are way better than I am at growing food. 

But we all have weeds. And we all have different challenges in our gardens and in our lives. And everyone comes in a spirit of community. Once people begin piling out of their cars and strolling the garden, any nervousness is forgotten as we all share our successes and failures so far this season, and catch up with each other’s lives outside the garden.

Conversations ebb and flow as the group wanders, breaking into subgroups around particular plants, garden structures, pest outbreaks, or other items of interest. 

Because we’re not quite on daylight savings time yet, we ended our garden stroll as daylight faded. But like any good gathering, we weren’t done yet—it was time for kai and a cuppa.

artichoke bud
Artichokes are on their way!

Last night, the party broke down on gender lines, as it often does (for no real reason … we laugh at ourselves all the time for this tendency to segregate)—the guys lit the brazier outside and commandeered the cheese and crackers to accompany some home brew. Indoors, the ladies had tea and cookies. 

Without the garden in front of us, the conversation diversified—and we’re such a diverse group outside our interest in growing plants, that you never know what might be under discussion on any given day. Crafts, books, digger operation, food, business interests, travel, rock collecting, climate change … you name it, we’ve probably discussed it. Garden group conversations are always intriguing and full of laughter.

When our guests headed home for the evening, the fire was still burning merrily in the brazier. The night was unseasonably warm, and the sky was clear and washed with stars. For an hour, my husband and I ignored the dirty dishes and sat in the dark by the fire, sharing what we’d both learned from the gathering.

While we sat there, a few thoughts occurred to me:

tomato seedlings
Tomato seedlings in the greenhouse.
  1. We don’t enjoy our garden enough. And by ‘enjoy’, I mean just sit or stroll and appreciate the beauty. Not that we don’t do this at all, but we could be doing it a whole lot more.
  2. We are absolutely blessed to be part of the local gardening community. I’m a total introvert, and being with groups of people where there are multiple non-stop conversations going on is exhausting for me. But I love this crowd of generous, community-focused people, and I look forward to each of our get togethers.
  3. Finding common ground with people can be as simple as sharing excess lemons or cuttings from your favourite herbs.

There is something humanising about gardening. The very act fosters community, brings people together. Reading the daily news, I can quickly begin to think the worst of the the entire human race. The garden group reminds me that there is beauty, not only in the garden, but in the ones who tend it.

Parsnip Cake

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As spring nears, we’re working through the winter vegetables still in the garden. At this point, the remaining parsnips that I planted last spring are monster roots weighing in at nearly 1.5 kilograms. It’s past time to eat them.

So, when I found a recipe for parsnip cake, I had to make it.

The recipe was in the book Sweet, by Yotam Ottolenghi and Helen Goh (I seriously recommend this book, if you don’t already have it). Like many of Ottolenghi’s recipes, it includes flavour combinations and spices I don’t normally work with.

And as with most of Ottolenghi’s recipes, I didn’t have all the right ingredients to make the recipe as it was written, but with a few substitutions, I ended up with some delicious cake. As I often do, I baked the cake as cupcakes—they’re so easy to snag for lunch boxes, and they encourage us to eat less cake, because you can’t cut a big piece like you can with a proper cake.

I love the flavour combinations in this cake—parsnip, orange , nutmeg and aniseed. It’s a fantastic combination that I’m not sure I’ve ever used. 

Here’s my version of the Ottolenghi/Goh recipe:

150 g walnuts
450 g grated parsnip (the original recipe says this is 3 large parsnips, but it was only 3/4 of one of my parsnips)
100 g raisins
finely grated zest of 1 orange (approx. 1 Tbsp)
3 eggs
225 g caster sugar (I would cut this down next time—they’re quite sweet)
280 ml vegetable oil (I would cut this down next time—they’re a little too greasy for me)
190 g all purpose flour
1 tsp cinnamon
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp ground aniseed
3/4 tsp salt

Toast the walnuts in the oven for 10 minutes at 170℃. Cool and then coarsely chop. Combine the walnuts, parsnip, raisins and orange zest in a large bowl.

Beat eggs and sugar together in another bowl until thick and creamy (about 2 minutes). While beating, slowly pour in the oil until it is all combined. 

Sift together the flour, cinnamon, baking powder, baking soda, nutmeg, aniseed and salt in a bowl. Add these to the egg mixture and beat until combined. Fold in the parsnip mix.

Spoon the batter into cupcake tins (greased or lined with papers), and bake about 25 minutes at 210℃.

I found that these cupcakes didn’t rise much—the batter is mostly fruit, vegetables and nuts. If their flat look bothers you, I’d recommend topping them with a cream cheese frosting that includes grated citrus zest. I didn’t make special frosting for mine, but I had a little left over from a previous cake, and it was delicious on the cupcakes. It wasn’t at all necessary, however—they were fantastic with no embellishment at all.

Excitement Builds

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Lately, it has still been light outside on our drive to and from work. The daffodils are up, and a few blooms are even open. When I weeded the asparagus bed last week, the Californian thistles were sprouting new buds 15 centimetres underground. 

And most importantly, my seed order has arrived!

Yep. Spring is on its way. Never mind that the frost behind the house hasn’t melted in a week, and the bird bath is skimmed-over with ice at 3 pm. Never mind that much of the country hit yearly lows yesterday. Never mind that our worst winter weather tends to arrive after spring has already officially started. 

This weekend, I’ll write my weekly spring to-do list, covering August to December. I’ll tidy the garden shed of winter detritus, and pull out the peppers in the greenhouse which have finally died. And I’ll finish the last of the winter pruning and deadheading. I’ll probably also fret over how little of those winter activities I accomplished—the sewing, spinning and other crafts I enjoy. 

And with the windows open (for the few hours it’s warm enough … just), and the house smelling of fresh air and the promise of growing things, I’ll impatiently await spring.