November top & flop CROPS
Lynda Hallinan’s regular report card on the best and worst seasonal crops in her Hunua vege garden.
HUNGRY CATERPILLARS: I find it hard to feel hateful towards caterpillars, even cabbage whites and apple-munching codling moth larvae, because it seems mean to welcome in monarch butterflies while murdering their mothy mates. So when my son Lucas found a hairy, black and orange-striped caterpillar in his school garden, I could hardly blame him for wanting it for a pet.
Nyctemera annulata, the native magpie moth, has “woolly bear” babies (above) that feast on cinerarias and daisy-flowered groundsel weeds, which was lucky because I have heaps of both in my garden.
Nicknamed Herald, “because it has hair all over“, it spent a week in an Agee jar on our dining table before climbing up the fabric jar cover to spin a plain black cocoon. (Unlike the glorious gold-spotted chrysalis of a monarch, this moth metamorphosises inside what looks like a possum poo.)
Google said to expect a wait of 12-35 days for signs of action, but 17 days later, the cocoon started to show colour and, on the 19th day, out popped a silken moth with bold white spots and a wasp-like underbelly of yellow and black stripes. Job done! Or so I thought, but in the meantime Lucas had found another 60-odd eggs on some groundsel and was demanding a bigger preserving jar to incubate them in...
DILL:
My favourite November herb! Dill looks so lush and tastes so lovely this month, but only this month. By December, the jolly stuff always bolts to seed, regardless of where I sow it.
CELERY & SWISS CHARD: You learn something new every day – and I’ve just learned that the “rust” that has plagued my celery bed this season is from the same fungal family as the chickenpox on my Swiss chard.
There are about 80 types of cercospora, including Cercospora apiicola, which turns celery leaves spotty, and Cercospora beticola (above), which attacks beetroot, spinach, silverbeet and quinoa. Although quite unsightly, it isn’t a major problem on mature beetroot or celery as you’ll be cutting off their leaves anyway, but it looks unappetising on leafy greens.
This problem gets worse over summer when the weather’s warm and humid. As the spores survive for up to two years in the soil, it’s best to rotate these crops to avoid repeat infections. Don’t compost the spotty foliage; bury it in a trench.
GRAPEFRUIT:
Eight years is too long to wait for my grapefruit trees to crank out a decent crop. I only got half a dozen fruit this year. Again. When grapefruit rot, unwanted, in so many other people’s gardens, it makes me feel quite inadequate! It’s almost as bad as having an infertile feijoa.
PARSNIPS:
I no longer have any trouble germinating parsnip seeds, for they self-sow like weeds in my vegetable garden. The problem is quality, not quantity. I have parsnips by the hundreds, but they are all the size of baby carrots and it’ll be Christmas before any of them are big enough to uproot. ✤