Planting paradise one seed at a time
My view OPINION: My artichoke plant has collapsed, its elegantly expiring limbs draped dramatically over the adjacent dahlias.
Planted three years ago, I hoped for arching spires and spectacular thistle headed flowers, not to mention the edible chokes.
Last Friday, home from a short trip to Amberley for the funeral of husband Steve’s much loved aunt and godmother, we were greeted by parched lawns, desiccated borders and the dying artichoke.
Gardening for us, it has to be said, is the triumph of hope over reality – the bald reality of the 50 per cent plus failure rate of our garden dreams.
Take our ‘orchard’. Lucky to have enough room to plant fruit trees, around eight years ago we planted two apricot trees, an apple, two peach trees, a pear and a cherry tree.
We imagined enjoying a bounty of our own sweet, juicy fruit so much more delicious than the cardboardy, bland peaches, pears and apricots sold by Messers Countdown, New World and Pak’nSave.
Full of enthusiasm, we willfully ignored our well-established history of failing to adhere to spraying regimes and the fact that we had no idea how to prune and/ or train fruit trees to take an accessible and productive shape.
I thought I could learn to prune from a guide on the web. I was wrong. The peach trees have never recovered from the ill-considered cuts I inflicted on their infant limbs.
Before Christmas, youngest son suggested we put them out of their obvious misery. It won’t be a big job as they have never thrived. I could probably manage it myself with the smallest hacksaw in the shed.
Other orchard disasters include a dead apple tree, a pear that looks promising and then gets a toxic looking blackish blight on its leaves and drops all its fruit in a disconsolate pile around its anorexic trunk, and apricot trees that specialise in lush foliage but don’t fruit.
The cherry is the sole success in this doomed exercise in fruity selfsufficiency. It produces bountifully, attracting every blackbird in Stoke and Tahunanui.
One year we tried to protect the fruit with netting. This attempt involved two unsteady ladders, lengths of malevolent black netting for all intents and purposes possessed by the devil, a lot of bad language, and a depressing amount of marital bickering.
For the sake of our relationship we never attempted it again.
If we move quickly and get our timing right, (for who wants to eat unripe cherries?), we can beat the birds to about two-thirds of the crop. But then what to do with it?
Have you ever spent time with five kilos of cherries and a cherry pitter? It’s sticky, tedious and it makes your hand hurt.
There’s a similarly sad story in the vegetable garden: sugar snap peas producing a mere handful of useable pods, a courgette that gives birth to one fruit the size and shape of a snooker ball about every three days but only if it is watered copiously by hand every single day, stunted tomato plants (yes, I know I planted them too late for the hot weather this year) and a lettuce crop that reached the peak of perfection just as we left Nelson for 10 days in Auckland and has now gone extravagantly to seed.
The news is not all bad. I can get some comfort from a crop of healthy herbs. Rosemary, oregano, chives, sage, parsley and thyme all like hot dry weather and are thriving. And the dozen Jersey Benne seed potatoes I planted in November have come up trumps too – pale little globes of sweetness, delicious with the last of the Christmas ham.
It took us many years to learn that the biggest factor in successful gardening is learning to work with the conditions you’ve been blessed with. And those ‘conditions’ include your own skills and resources as well as the soil and climate.
On the way to learning this lesson many species we’ve attempted to establish have withered and died. I love roses, but only feral ramblers do well in our gravelly, free draining soil. Even those tough occupants of traffic islands, carpet roses, struggle in our borders.
But penstemens, dahlias, daisies and geraniums of all kinds, gladioli, hardy Solomon’s seal and naked lady lilies, petunias, marigolds, poppies and cistus all thrive in the regime of benign neglect and erratic watering to which we subject our garden. Maples, magnolia grandiflora and many species of michaelia also seem cheerful.
In spite of annual, and perennial, disappointments we go on gardening, hoping for the best but knowing we will fall short. Twenty-seven years on we’re still attempting to turn our garden into the earthly paradise we’re convinced it’s meant to be.
And if it’s true, as some say, that optimists live longer, we’ve got a few more years to get it right.