gardening

Currants

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

100_4192 cropNew Zealand produces about 8,000 tonnes of blackcurrants each year—5% of world production. We have at least one large blackcurrant farm nearby, and more popping up, as a craze for blackcurrant products grows. Marketing for blackcurrant products focuses on their health benefits (antioxidants, vitamin C).

We grow both red and black currants, but not for their health benefits. We grow them for their flavour, colour, and prolific production.

Let’s forget healthy entirely–currants’ bright colours and tart flavour make for beautiful and decadent pies, jams and ice cream. They liven up fruit salad, and their juice makes a lovely drink on a hot day, mixed with tonic water and a splash of gin.

And you can toast your health with that!

See! Three Pea! Oh!

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

100_4187 smI couldn’t help myself, what with Star Wars release date coming up…

In truth, it’s four pea varieties. I just can’t seem to stop myself from planting them. And it’s still not enough to get us through the year—peas are so good in just about everything!

I plant snow peas, sugar snap peas, and two varieties of shelling pea each year. My favourites have become the purple shelling peas. The plants are tall and vigorous, they have gorgeous purple flowers and pods, and they just keep on giving through the heat of summer, even after all the other peas have given up. The only problem is that the peas themselves are grey when cooked—delicious, but not so attractive.

My favourite way to eat peas is standing up in the garden as a pick-me-up while weeding—juicy, crunchy and sweet. The kids take them in their lunch boxes, and a big bowl of them vanishes faster than cookies at Christmas parties.

And Santa’s reindeer will eat as many as we put out for them!

Carrot thinnings

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

100_4178 smI used to hate thinning carrots—it’s tedious work at best. But that was before I changed how I thin.

When thinning most crops, I naturally pull out the smallest plants, leaving the robust ones to grow and produce. This is how I used to thin carrots.

But if I thin the carrots by pulling out the biggest ones, I end up with a big bag full of beautiful little carrots to eat. Then the smaller ones will grow, and I’ll get to pick and eat them later on. Makes the thinning job so much nicer, because I know I’ll get dinner out of the deal.

 

The Cherry Mystery

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

100_4169 smWhen you move onto an old property, it takes a while to become familiar with all the plants previous owners planted. Our property was blessed with a variety of fruit trees. There are a few apples—three varieties, from what we’ve seen, though we can only identify one of them. There’s a late-season peach. And there is a cherry tree. The cherry tree is old and had been damaged repeatedly over the years.

In the spring, the first years on the property, we would watch as the tree put out a few flowers, but we never saw a ripe fruit. The birds seemed to eat them all before they ripened.

Then one year the tree flowered profusely. It was loaded with cherries. But still, they didn’t seem to ripen before they were eaten by the birds.

That’s when it finally dawned on us—it was a yellow cherry! The fruits were ripening. The birds knew that—they can see the change in reflected UV light when a berry is ripe—but we didn’t.

Once we knew what the cherries were, we were able to get a harvest most years, in spite of the birds. It’s still difficult for me to tell when one is ripe by look, but I pick by feel—a ripe cherry is subtly softer than a nearly ripe one.

We still don’t know the variety. The fruits are relatively small. They’re sweet, but very heavy in cyanide flavour, and we can’t decide if they’re better for eating fresh or baking.

This year is a bumper year for cherries, so we’ll be able to have them both ways. This morning’s harvest was more than enough for a pie, so you can guess what we’re having for dessert tonight!

Colours of the Season

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

100_4093 smStrawberries, gooseberries, black currants, red currants, cherries, raspberries—they all seem to come at once in a tsunami of colour and flavour.

The weeks before Christmas are filled with jam, pies, and shortbread. Fingers are permanently stained with juice. Festive splatters decorate the kitchen walls and floor. Bowls of green and red fruit stand in for more traditional holiday decorations.

Today, we put up the Christmas tree and made the first jam of the season.

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

Watch Out—She’s Packing Secateurs!

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Among my favourite garden tools is a pair of small, straight-bladed secateurs. In addition to the secateur function, the tool also acts as a knife—the “back” edge of each blade is sharpened.

It took me a few very deep, nasty cuts to my fingers before I quite got the hang of this tool. When I use it to trim goat hooves, I have to wear heavy gloves, because the goats always kick and send the blade into my hand.

Thankfully, the tool comes with a sheath. The sheath clips to a belt or pocket, and I’ve found it quite handy to always have a knife and secateurs with me in the garden. So I’ve taken to automatically clipping it on when I go to the garden.

With my secateurs at my hip, I feel like I’m packing heat.

**Apologies—I spent most of my day away from internet access, only got home at 10.30 pm, and didn’t get a photo for today’s post. At least I got it posted…just an hour to go in the day!

Oyster Mushrooms

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

100_4082 smWay back in June I blogged about the mushroom growing bags I made from a repurposed tent. About a month ago, my husband and daughter started a batch of oyster mushrooms, and the bags were finally put to the test.

Today, we had our first harvest from them—mushrooms as big as my hand! And not a single fungus gnat larva in them (which was the purpose of the bags—to keep the fungus gnats from eating them before we did).

I can taste tonight’s mushroom stir-fry already!

Aphids

/ Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

20151127_125023710It’s aphid season here. Lettuce, strawberries, dill, parsley, and roses are covered in the little green girls.

I used to fret about aphids—they can certainly cause a great deal of damage, particularly to young plants. But I’ve learned to live with them. Here are a few of my aphid strategies:

  1. When I plant out, I check every plant carefully, and squish any aphids—knocking back these early individuals goes a long way to limiting damage.
  2. If a plant is heavily infested, I turn my hose on jet and blast the aphids off. This technique doesn’t get them all, but it does knock the population back to manageable levels.
  3. I allow some plants to get covered. In my garden, my early dill always gets nailed by aphids. I accept this. I don’t kill the aphids, either. The aphids on the dill attract ladybugs, lacewings, and parasitic wasps that eat aphids. Lots of aphids on the dill means lots of predators later in the season.
  4. I plant purple varieties of crops, which are usually less attractive to aphids.
  5. I accept aphids as a source of extra protein and vitamin B in our diets. We eat aphids. They’re good for us.
  6. I have patience. By midsummer, the aphids have all but vanished, decimated by the predators I cultivated in springtime.
  7. I admire aphids’ abilities and beauty—parthenogenic reproduction (that is, the females clone themselves—no need for males), dainty legs and antennae, and a remarkable ability to survive.

Favourite Garden Tool–Machete

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

100_4045 smI learned to use a machete in Panama, where it became an extension of my arm. I learned my macheteing technique from greats such as Julián Valdéz and Onofre Gonzales. Not having been born with a machete in my hand as they were, I could never match their skill, but by the end of my two years, I could at least keep pace with a crew clearing brush for a new crop. Of course I could only do this because I’m ambidextrous, and when my left arm gave out, I could switch to the right. But, hey, that meant I was at least half as good as the farmers around me!

In rural Panama, a machete may be the only tool a farmer owns. It’s used for everything from taking down trees three feet in diameter to paring one’s toenails. Machetes are kept razor sharp, and if a farmer isn’t using her machete, she’s probably sharpening it. All that use wears them down. As a machete grows smaller and smaller, its use changes—from land clearing, to weeding tool, to kitchen knife. The smallest ones are given to little children, who proudly toddle around with machete in hand—able to help around the farm now they have a tool.

When I left Peace Corps, I sadly had to leave my “Collins”* behind—it was Peace Corps issued, and went to the next volunteer in my village. But I couldn’t live long without a machete, and soon had another upon my return to the United States. Actually, we had three…size is critical, and you have to get just the right one, so my husband has a long one, and I have a shorter one, and we have an even shorter one that fits neither of us well, but is useful for edge-destroying activities.

Those machetes came to New Zealand with us when we moved, and they are as useful here as they were every other place we’ve lived, though they get odd looks from the neighbours.

Here in the developed world, the machete is an anachronism of sorts. Its jobs are done by petrol-powered weed whips, chainsaws, saws and secateurs.

But there is something satisfying about a tool that can do just about anything. A tool that never breaks down, doesn’t need fuel, and requires only simple maintenance—sharpening—easily done with a file or even a chunk of concrete.

And of course, as the forerunner of the sword, a machete comes in handy if you happen to come across a dragon in the garden…

*Collins is a favoured brand of machete in Panama.

Parsley

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

100_4036 smParsley is a ubiquitous herb, easy to overlook, easy to undervalue.

It is said its seeds must go to the devil and back seven times before germinating. I don’t think it takes quite that long, but parsley is slow to germinate.

Once up, though, parsley is tough and long-lasting. The plants I start in August will survive spring frosts to flourish through the heat and drought of summer, and continue flourishing through the cold wet winter, to be finally pulled out in October of the following year, when they begin to bolt, to make room for new plants.

We eat parsley by the handful (none of this Tablespoon stuff), and love it in risi e bisi, soup, potatoes, and gratins.

We grow both the Italian flat-leaf and the curly varieties (because, why not?), and enjoy the flat-leaf parsley fresh in salads (or just standing up in the garden as we pass by). We also enjoy parsley mixed with other fresh herbs to make a non-basil pesto that is lovely on pasta or as a topping for polenta crostini.

Of course, the best reason to grow parsley in much of the world is to attract the beautiful swallowtail butterflies, whose caterpillars specialise on parsley and related plants, incorporating the toxins from the plants into their exoskeletons to serve as defence. Unfortunately, we have no swallowtails in New Zealand, but the flowers of parsley attract bees, flies, and our native butterflies in large numbers.