Keeping pesty moths in check
WHAT TO DO ABOUT CODLING MOTHS
Have your apples and pears been eaten from the inside out? Codling moth larvae damage (pictured) is easily identifiable, both from the trails of brown waste (frass) inside the fruit, and the exit holes in the skins.
Codling moths can be controlled but you need to act in spring, when the trees are in blossom. Hang pheromone monitoring traps (from garden centres) and spray trees fortnightly with eco-friendly caterpillar-specific insecticides such as Kiwi care’s Organic Caterpillar Bio Control or Yates Ultra Success. Both are made from natural soil bacteria that caterpillars can’t digest.
At this time of the year, all you can do is cut out the bad bits postharvest, and make sure there’s no rotten fruit left on your trees or on the ground under them. If you keep chooks, let them eat the blemished fruit (and its pesky inhabitants). For those in the north, this advice also applies to guava moth infestations, though they don’t have a season as such, so you need to spray year-round to protect everything from feijoas to citrus.
PICK & PRESERVE AUTUMN FRUIT
Apples, pears, feijoas, crabapples and quinces are the mainstays of the autumn preserver’s orchard. Bottle and stew fruit for winter, make jams and jellies, or try your hand at posh pastes and fruit cheeses for antipasto platters. • The basic jelly making method is the same for all of these fruits. Roughly chop unpeeled fruit into a large pot and add just enough water to cover, then bring it to a gentle simmer (lid on, if possible) and cook until the fruit is tender. Then tip the pulp into a jelly bag, large sieve or colander lined with muslin, or a cheap cotton pillowcase and strain over a bowl. (Catch the drips, as it’s the liquid you want, not the pulp.) Then simply measure the amount of liquid you have, and match with an equal quantity of sugar (or jam-setting sugar if using a low fruit). Boil briskly until a little jelly dribbled onto a cold plate (from the fridge) gets a wrinkled skin. • Feijoas are wonderful bottled, and it’s not difficult. Cut firm fruit in half and scoop out the flesh with a teaspoon. (Reserve the skins to make feijoa jelly). Place the scooped fruit into a large bowl of water with the juice of 1 lemon (this stops the fruit turning brown as you work). In a large pot, dissolve 1 cup sugar to 3 cups water. When simmering, gently lower the feijoas into the syrup and simmer for 5-10 minutes. Then, using a slotted spoon, pack the stewed feijoas into hot glass jars, top up with the stewing syrup, and screw on lids to seal. Turn the jars upside down (the extra heat improves the strength of the seal) until cool. Pears are also easy to preserve this way, as the fruit is firm and holds its shape. • A tip for making quince paste. Instead of boiling chopped quinces, cook them whole in your slow cooker until their flesh is tender and rose-pink, then squish off the skins and slide out the cores. It’s the easiest way to get a smooth pulp.
Combine this pulp with the same amount of sugar and cook slowly, stirring constantly, in a large heavy frying pan, for 30 minutes (or more), until thick and dark.
STORE ONIONS AND SHALLOTS
Dry alliums indoors. I’d dug my shallots and was drying them in rows on the wooden edge of a raised bed when all that rain fell. Result? A fair proportion have either resprouted, softened or started to rot. Drats! It’s important onions and shallots aren’t allowed to get damp (even from dew) after harvest, so take them indoors, into a warm, well ventilated room or shed or lay them out under a covered verandah. Once fully dry (rub the stalks; they should be brittle and papery), you can store your alliums in paper bags, hessian sacks or recycled onion bags. They should last all winter.
MELONS ARE FAST RUNNING OUT OF TIME
Growing melons outdoors is fraught with difficulty in many parts of New Zealand as if they take too long to set their fruit, there’s every chance it won’t fully ripen before the warm weather runs out. Melons need a reliably hot summer to germinate, flower, set fruit, fatten it up and ripen, and the weather hasn’t done them any favours this season. Like pumpkins, if they aren’t reaching maturity by now, they might start to soften and rot in the cooler weather to come. That’s because the fruit ends up sitting on damp, dewy soil for most of the day.
Can you do anything to speed up ripening so all that effort doesn’t go to waste? You can lift the fruit up off the soil – use a small brick or an upturned terracotta pot – to keep it warmer and drier, or slip a piece of black polythene under it.
Don’t judge ripeness by size, as tennis ball-sized rockmelons (like mine) can be just as sweet and juicy as rugby ball-sized watermelons. When the vine starts to shrivel back, tap the fruit gently – if ripe, they will sound slightly hollow – and be aware that birds are liable to peck holes in them if you leave them unattended.
GET OUT YOUR HOE & GET RID OF WEEDS
Photo caption: A carpet of freshly germinated creeping speedwell
Autumn brings rain, cooler nights, colourful leaves... and weeds! Nothing makes weeds grow faster than regular rainfall and it doesn’t help matters that, at this point in the growing season, you’re generally pulling crops out rather than putting them in, leaving lovely vacancies for weedy vagrants to act like squatters.
If your summer crops of tomatoes, courgettes, pumpkins and potatoes have been dug and devoured, don’t just leave the beds sitting empty. If you aren’t planning on immediately replanting, sow cover crops (also known as green manure crops) of nitrogen-fixing broad beans, oats or blue lupin, or lay mulch to stop weed seeds germinating. You don’t have to buy bagged mulch – you can lay down newspapers or cardboard and dump grass clippings on top.
In my garden, one of the worst (and most annoying) weeds is creeping speedwell, which seeds thickly and grows into a multi-rooted mat. So my main task this weekend will be taking a push hoe to the green stubble of tiny seedlings spreading like a carpet over my vege patch. They come out easily when still small.