February top & flop CROPS
Lynda’s regular round-up of the best & worst seasonal performers in her Hunua country garden
LETTUCE: While I grew all my lettuce from seed sown direct this summer (so easy and so cheap), when I was helping my parents plant their vege patch, I popped in a punnet of mixed red and green Salanova lettuces. If you have a small plot, this hybrid – available in cos, oak leaf and butterhead forms – is such great value. You can harvest it leaf by leaf or cut the whole head off, and if you leave some foliage on the stalk it will come away again. Best of all, every tightly curled head boasts three times as many leaves as a standard lettuce. (Plus, as my niece Grace, pictured above, discovered, frilly Salanova lettuces also make fine cheerleading pom poms!) SPINACH:
Creamed spinach (and cheesy potato gratin) is my idea of homegrown comfort food, but I’ve never had much luck growing my own spinach and, given how it wilts down to nothing in the pan, bagged spinach is horribly expensive to buy. This season I direct sowed Kings Seeds’ ‘Medley’ mix, which is advertised as “a tasty nutritious blend of five different varieties bred for harvest as baby leaf greens.” Never mind the baby greens: my seedlings were fully mature plants (pictured at left) in just 40 days! That’s what I call spinach success. ‘IZNIK’ CUCUMBERS:
This F1 hybrid snack-size variety isn’t cheap (you only get five seeds per packet) but it’s worth every cent. All five of my seeds germinated, and their vines were the first to bear fruit – lots and lots of tender, sweet cucs – in my ongoing trial.
CHIVES:
It has been an endless summer of broccoli salads at our place, courtesy of the cracker crop of ‘Green Midget’ broccoli at our Tairua bach. I put in two punnets of this variety (from Zealandia’s Grow Fresh range) and we ended up with a dozen big, beautiful heads. This variety is also a reliable (and speedy) secondary side-sprouter, so after the first round of large heads came another three dozen smaller heads! Why am I mentioning this in the Flop Crops column under chives, you ask? Because I turned in desperation to Jamie Oliver’s smokey bacon, broccoli, tomato and chive salad recipe, which is supposed to be garnished with chive flowers. Sigh. I have lovely clumps of chives in pots and in my herb garden, but do you think I can get them to flower? No. Perhaps they do best with a little tough love, because in my sister’s completely neglected herb garden, they bloom so abundantly that I was able to pick them by the bouquet (as seen above). Anyone know the secret to free-flowering chives? ‘RAMPICANTE’ SQUASH: Who else is growing these giant climbing courgettes this year? My attempt to grow the biggest trombone squash in the land isn’t looking promising at this point. I took so long dithering over where to transplant them that I think I’ve irreparably stunted their growth. CAULIFLOWERS:
Why is broccoli so much easier to grow? My sluggish caulis were mauled by white cabbage butterfly caterpillars.