July top & flop CROPS
Lynda’s regular round-up of the best & worst performers in her Hunua vege garden
BABY PARSNIPS: Parsnips are notoriously difficult – and slow – to grow. Seed is best sown in October, after the risk of late frosts has passed, and then it’s a long wait until winter, by which time their long white roots should reach the size of prize-winning carrots. But if the seed isn’t fresh, germination can be patchy and, by the time you re-sow, you’ve lost precious growth time. Rather than buying fresh seed each year, I save my own ( just leave one plant to run to seed). I harvested so much seed last summer that I even used their heads for decoration (pictured above) when we were photographing apricots on our deck. Afterwards, I swept the deck clean… which explains how the gravel around our deck ended up conveniently carpeted with tiny but tender, slender baby parsnips.
SLIM PICKINGS:
In winter, I‘m forced to take a glass-half-full approach to living off the land. Where others see only weeds, piles of fallen leaves, chook poo and mud, I see wild greens, sequestered carbon, organic fertiliser and an opportunity to improve drainage. Granted, none of those things actually feeds you (unless you roast the chickens with wild herb pesto).
What are you harvesting from your vege patch this month? I must confess that at our place, there‘s a peculiar mix of produce on the menu. I‘ve just done a comprehensive stocktake, notepad in hand, and this, ahem, is all I‘ve got to eat: baby carrots, softball-sized celeriac bulbs, blood sorrel, little leeks, ‘Meyer‘ and ‘Yen Ben‘ lemons, ‘Iceberg‘ lettuce, Florence fennel, rhubarb and rocket.
You may notice the absence of winter brassicas – I neglected to plant or sow any broccoli, cabbages or cauliflowers – while our free-range chooks completely blitzed my spinach and silverbeet.
Given that it‘s soup and stew season, I do at least have lots of herbs for flavour and scurvy-foiling nutrition, including bronze fennel, coriander, mint, curly and Italian parsley, rosemary, pineapple and purple sage, and English thyme.
At least I don‘t have to buy potatoes, onions or pumpkins as these – and a big bucket of dried borlotti beans – are all safely stored in the shed, along with several shelves of bottled fruit. In winter, our desserts make up for our dinners!
MANDARINS:
When friends announce pregnancies, I suggest they plant a celebratory mandarin tree. That’s because it takes a seedless ‘Satsuma’ or sweet ’Clementine' a few years to start cropping prolifically, by which time those babies will be old enough to peel their own citrus snacks.
When I had my children, I took my own advice and planted a pair of ’Silverhill’ mandarin trees on either side of a ’Cutler’s Red’ grapefruit on a south-facing slope by our house. I concede that it wasn’t the smartest spot to plant a trio of citrus trees, given that they are shaded by a horse chestnut and a large conifer, but I figured that might afford extra frost protection.
Six years on, those mandarin trees have barely put on a metre of growth and this year they produced the precise sum of zero fruit. The grapefruit tree is doing marginally better: it has four small fruit.
Is there anything more depressing than a non-fruiting fruit tree? Yes. My parents have a mandarin tree that’s covered in fruit every winter, but they rarely sweeten fully so my kids aren’t keen to eat them. CHILLIES:
He (or she) who hesitates is lost, along with their cayenne crop. While I was away in May, my plants were wiped out by hard, back-to-back frosts. I had already made a few batches of sweet chilli jam but there were dozens of fruit still ripening on the plants, all of which turned to mush! My thuggish choko vine also came a cropper, turning black overnight.