Time to ramp up pruning activity

STONE FRUIT SURGERY

It’s time to prune summer fruit trees, particularly plums and any peaches and nectarines that have finished cropping. Of all the courses I host on my property, pruning is the most popular as people can see the results of various pruning techniques I have employed in my orchard over the years.

No one technique is ‘‘right’’, and it’s just a matter of working out which best suits you and your tree. Removing the 3 Ds – dead, diseased and damaged wood – is for the benefit of the tree. Anything else is for your benefit: if you need the tree lower so you can reach fruit, higher so you can get underneath with the lawnmower, smaller so it fits in the space allocated or with picking bays so you can reach the fruit. Don’t believe anyone who says you have to prune to get fruit – Mother Nature is not that perverse. And remember, the more you reduce leaf area, the less energy the tree can photosynthesise and therefore the less fruit and disease-fighting the tree can do.

HARVEST DAILY

It can be hard to get past what I call the ‘‘supermarket mentality’’ that a fruit or vege is going to hang on there until you are ready to eat it. I often note a broccoli or cucumber is ready to go and three or four days later plan a meal around it, only to find it has now matured past its best and sometimes is barely edible. Daily forays into the garden and orchard are needed at this time of year to check up on everything. If it is ready and ripe today it will be overripe by tomorrow, so picking and storing it in the fridge is, unfortunately, better than leaving it on the plant. Anyone who has grown a courgette knows how quickly it can transform into a marrow.

I put the best of everything into a bowl in the centre of the table. Cherry tomatoes, ‘Luisa’ and greengage plums, small nashi, radishes, an apple cucumber and some grapes are there for passing nibbles during the day. Other crops are stashed in the fridge to become part of a meal or until there is enough to preserve, freeze or dry, or they are given away.

SOW PEAS, CARROTS & RADISHES

It is kinda weird when you are flatout picking and enjoying the heat of summer to start planning and planting your winter vegetables, but now is the time to do so.

Peas grow and produce happily in the colder months, but frosts can damage both the flowers and young pods. Starting succession planting now in mild climates means you can have peas throughout winter – the plants will get a chance to establish before the winter slowdown and hopefully flower before any hard frosts.

My favourite pea type is sugar snap, simply because I never get around to three-weekly successive sowings and sugar snap seems to produce over a long period – perfect for just the two of us.

Carrots have ticklish feet. They do not like being transplanted and do not like lumps of hard soil or excessive fertiliser around their toes. Take that into account and they are hardy, easy-to-grow vegetables. Seed planted now will be ready early winter. Mix your carrot and radish seed together and sow as thinly as you can in a row. I use an old kitchen sieve to lightly cover the seed with a thin layer of soil – a general rule of thumb is to

GET GROWING

This column is adapted from the weekly e-zine, get growing, from New Zealand Gardener magazine. For gardening advice delivered to your inbox every Friday, sign up for Get Growing at: getgrowing.co.nz

cover with soil the thickness of the seed. Keep the seed moist and protect emerging seedlings from the burning sun. Covering the seeds initially with damp newspaper stops the birds scratching and helps keep everything damp – but check them daily and remove the newspaper as soon as you see the first hint of the new seedlings. Carrot seeds can take two to three weeks to germinate whereas radishes germinate in five to eight days. Harvest your radishes first, then harvest some of the carrots as babies until you’ve thinned the carrot plants about 5cm apart to give them room to grow.