July top & flop CROPS

Lynda Hallinan’s regular round-up of the best & worst performers in her Hunua garden.

LEEKS:

The Covid-19 lockdown has given me a whole new level of respect for edible crops that do their thing, year after year. When you are banned from whipping off to the local garden centre for gap-filling punnets of seedlings, you start to feel grateful for perennial mainstays such as rhubarb, native spinach and even, dare I say, Jerusalem artichokes (possibly the only vegetable I grow where supply vastly outstrips my family’s demand for them).

Most gardeners treat leeks as an annual crop, replanting seedlings each summer for winter and spring harvesting, but I have a permanent leek bed. A few years ago, I was late planting my leeks and, because they didn’t fatten up until summer, I ended up leaving them to run to flower (they’re rather pretty in a vase).

After they’ve flowered, leeks send up new shoots from the base of the old stalk, giving you a bonus crop of baby leeks the following season. I aim to pull three-quarters of those baby leeks and leave the rest to repeat this habit. Due to the drought, my leeks have been smaller than usual this year, but are no less tasty.

BABY BOK CHOY:

I’ve also developed a new admiration for raw bok choy. I’ve never grown this Chinese cabbage as a baby salad leaf before but during the lockdown I sowed it in tubs with perennial rocket. It kept us in tender cut-and-come-again salad greens for six weeks before getting a tad chewy, at which point I grew it on to mature (left) for stir-fries and noodle soups.

FLORENCE FENNEL:

It is one of the enduring mysteries of backyard vege gardening that the more you like something, the harder it will be to grow. When I lived in the city, I grew Florence fennel bulbs with huge bottoms but, back then, I only ate it occasionally, usually finely sliced into a raw slaw with ‘Granny Smith’ apple and a drizzle of lime juice. More recently I’ve come to crave baked fennel, as slow cooking sweetens its aniseed flavour. (Slice and steam it, then bake in a lidded dish with butter, garlic and grated Grana Padano, parmesan or Gruyère cheese).

Ironically, now that I want it, I seem to have lost the knack for growing it well – and when I have to pay $3-4 per bulb, it hurts! Florence fennel prefers cooler growing conditions, so if direct-sown now, it should be plump by spring.

PEAS:

We should be enjoying a good crop of peas in the pod (’Sugarsnap Climbing’ is reliable and productive). Instead, we’re trapping rapacious rodents. Not only did they dig up all my trays of sweet peas, they burrowed through my direct-sown pea and garlic beds. While they don’t like garlic, leaving the cloves strewn on top of the soil, they made off with every pea seed. To stand a fighting chance, I’m forced to sow in trays and keep these indoors to sprout. I’ve noticed that it’s not until pea seeds have produced their first true leaves, and in doing have exhausted all the nutrition in the seed, that rats and mice finally leave the seedlings alone. ✤