April top & flop CROPS
As another growing season draws to a close, Lynda compiles a bumper edition of the best and worst performers in her Hunua garden this autumn
ONIONS:
When you weigh up how cheap onions are to buy in bulk versus the effort and time it takes to grow your own, do you ever wonder if it’s worth it? I think it is. Not just because onions are one of the most chemically aided commercial crops (have you ever seen a weed in an onion paddock?), but also because it’s satisfying.
This summer I harvested 21.8kg of organic ‘Pukekohe Longkeeper’ onions (pictured) from a 2m x 2m bed. The bulbs were of mixed sizes, from small to large, but that’s a bonus. My husband loves pickled onions and usually I have to pay $4/kg for small bags of baby onions, but this year they’ll all be homegrown.
BORLOTTI BEANS:
When is a top crop not a top crop? When it‘s a pod-them-until-you-drop crop! Having sown a full packet of Italian ‘Borlotti Fire Tongue’ beans (Kings Seeds), I harvested two bucketloads of speckled beans (above and top right). Fortuitously, we had a German WWOOFer staying with us at harvest time; Hannah spent a quiet afternoon splitting open the pods.
From a 2m x 2m bed, I ended up with 2kg of dried beans. That’s enough to fill a 5-litre airtight container (to keep pantry weevils at bay) and more than enough to enrich our winter soups and stews.
Borlotti beans can also be eaten fresh, but they need to be gently simmered for at least half an hour to soften them up, otherwise they’re tough and chewy. Fresh borlotti beans go beautifully with garlic, shallots, lemon juice and herbs. If you overcook them until they turn mushy, purée them with a stick blender to make a dip or bean spread instead.
‘KARAKA BLACK’ BLACKBERRIES:
These bramble berries are the most vigorous, vicious thugs, with arching canes studded with fierce prickles, but by golly the fruit is worth the agony of the harvest. Unlike my thornless ‘Black Satin’ blackberries, which have sweet but small, raspberry-sized fruit, this prickly beast has elongated, fat, juicy berries – think of a jet-black boysenberry – that are almost three times as big. This variety is highly recommended, though plant at your own peril, preferably somewhere they can be mown down if they get away on you.
PLUMS:
On the whole, it wasn‘t a good year for plums, or any other stonefruit in my orchard, aside from ‘Satsuma‘ (good for bottling), shiny red ‘Fortune‘ (delicious fresh or in jam) and sour purple ‘Damson‘ (preserved in plonk).
While it‘s disappointing when the weather intervenes to spoil your autumn preserving plans, as it did in early spring when my orchard was in full blossom but the bees were hiding from the rain, it won‘t have done the trees any harm to have a rest. I‘ve pruned off this year‘s unproductive growth to reduce their height, so next year, all going to plan, not only will I get a better crop, I‘ll actually be able to reach the fruit too!
Incidentally, if you’re thinking of planting a ’Damson’ plum tree (they’re self-fertile, so you only need one), choose a sunny, open position where there’s no risk it will become shaded out over time. My five trees are slowly being crowded out by an overgrown farm shelterbelt and this year the fruit at the top of the front tree was twice as big as the fruit at the bottom of the back tree. The shaded fruit was marble-sized, with more than 100 per kilogram, making processing them for jam or paste a bit of a palaver. APRICOTS:
Timmbbberrrrr! That’s the sound of me conceding defeat, cranking up the chainsaw and chopping out all my unproductive supposedly “low-chill“apricot trees. They just don’t bear fruit here. The moral of the story? If at first you don‘t succeed, wait five years then give up and buy fresh fruit by mail order from Central Otago.
MAIN-CROP POTATOES: Since the tomato/potato psyllid arrived, uninvited, in New Zealand a decade ago, many of us have been forced to change our spud-planting habits. Because psyllid numbers start to rise from early January onwards, I aim to get all my potatoes – the earlies and main croppers – lifted by then. That means planting good keepers such as ’Agria’ and ’Red Rascal’ (both of which need at least 120 days in the soil) at the same time in spring as gourmet waxy speedsters such as ’Jersey Benne’, ’Rocket’ and ’Swift’, which are ready to dig in 70-90 days.
Provided you leave your main-crop varieties to die right down before digging, early planting has no effect on their keeping quality. This season, as well as my favourite high-yielding ’Summer Delight’, I was chuffed with my crop of two new main-crop varieties, ’Jelly’ (white skin, creamy flesh) and ’Cristina’ (red skin, white flesh). Both are from the Fiesta seed potato range and produced large tubers perfect for roasting or baking whole.
When storing spuds, keep them cool, dark and dry to stop them sprouting or turning green. I layered mine between recycled hessian coffee sacks in a bin; they now smell weirdly of coffee beans. APPLES:
Codling moth larvae claimed half my crop, but there was still more than enough fruit on my ’Gala’, ’Liberty’, ’Granny Smith’ and heirloom ’Winter Banana’ trees to meet our needs. The chooks and pigs enjoyed the rest of the crop, so all’s well that ends well, as William Shakespeare would say. ‘SCARLET RUNNER’: I’ve never met a bean – aside from the ones baked for Wattie’s – that I didn’t like, but if I could grow only one variety, it wouldn’t be a Peruvian lima, broad-seeded fava or fancy French haricot vert. I was raised on lumpy-podded, stringy, overcooked ’Scarlet Runner’ beans and they will always be my favourites. This season it took three attempts, not to mention a new roll of plastic bird netting, to get my perennial runner beans up their strings and out of reach of rabbits. Meanwhile at our Tairua bach, which is bunny-free, they just got on with the job of climbing back up the steel mesh I nailed to the boundary fence last year. The result? Buckets of beans without any work from me: what more could you ask of any crop? HOPS:
Home-brewers might like to grow their own ’Smoothcone’ hops for making beer, but I tried that once and the result was a dozen bottles of bitter, barely drinkable plonk. These days, I grow Humulus lupulus purely for decoration – the vines are wonderfully ornamental – but the aromatic hops can also be dried and stuffed into pillows to ward off sleepless nights (they’re a natural sedative of sorts). The biggest problem with growing hops is finding something tall enough to support them, as they only grow in one direction: straight up. I found a sculptural solution this summer, training them up a rusty cube made from 4 x 2.2m sheets of recycled reinforcing mesh. They started to flower just as they reached the top of the frame, with the excess growth hanging down for convenient harvesting.
GRAFTED GHERKINS: My gripe with my $7.99 gherkin plants was not that they didn’t produce, because they did, but that the fruit swelled from baby pickles into ginormous gherkins seemingly overnight, and I just couldn’t keep up. Also, the vigorous rootstock refused to surrender, sending out trailing vines that soon burst forth with what looked like buttercup squash (above). The stems I chopped off and left lying on the ground beside my gherkin bed managed to resurrect themselves, rooting down in the gravel. I can’t say for sure what these cucurbits are, but I’ll be saving their seed to have a go at grafting my own gherkins, for a fraction of the cost, next spring. SELF-SOWN CORIANDER: Having let my first bed of coriander run to seed in early summer (truth be told I didn’t get much say in the matter as I wasn’t home to harvest it or water it) I hoped that it would generously self-sow. But it didn’t: not a single seedling popped up. However, when my second sowing also bolted in late summer, I left the plants to dry and die before harvesting enough seed to refill my spice rack for years to come. Wearing gloves, I stripped the seedheads off the stalks then wind winnowed it (to sort the seed from the chaff) by shaking it in an old soil sieve (pictured). It worked a treat, though I suspect my gardening gloves are now permanently perfumed with eau de cilantro. CROWN PUMPKINS: For for some reason (too cool at night; too dry?), my pumpkins stopped swelling, prematurely, in midsummer.
‘OPHELIA’ EGGPLANTS: “Think big thoughts but relish small pleasures,“said American self-help author H Jackson Brown Jr in his best-selling collection of tips and quips,
Life’s Little Instruction Book. I took his advice literally this season, turning my miniature eggplants into brinjal kasundi (an Indian-spiced chutney).
Eggplants need a long, warm summer and can be a temperamental crop, with inconsistent pollination if the nights are cool. So I’ve given up trying to grow the large purple ‘Florence‘ varieties and now stick to grafted ‘Ophelia’ plants (in the Enrich with Nature range). Though the fruit is smaller (about 8-10cm long), each plant produces at least a dozen eggplants.
‘DUTCH RED’ CABBAGES: Gardeners generally don’t give much thought to the tastebuds of white cabbage butterfly caterpillars, yet it’s clear that they prefer to eat some brassicas more than others. For instance, my experience has shown that they adore bok choy and Savoy cabbages but leave my red and purple cabbages virtually untouched. They prefer raggedy ’Red Russian’ kale to cavolo nero and curly borecole and – like most cooks, to be fair – don’t seem to have a clue what to do when presented with a whole bed of fat-bottomed kohlrabi. As I rarely plant broccoli, I couldn’t tell you if they target it before cauliflower, but Brussels sprouts are usually spared a savaging – though that could be due to the fact that they don’t heart up until the weather’s chilly. What do you think? Is it worth growing sacrificial Savoys to lure these chubby chompers off the rest of your brassicas? TOMATILLOS:
A must-have for Mexican salsas, tomatillos look like green tomatoes crossed with cape gooseberries. Grow them once and you’ll grow them forever as they seed like weeds: in my garden, they’re even fruiting along our driveway. If only all my weeds tasted this good blended with lime juice, chilli and coriander. Serve with corn chips. PERENNIAL ROCKET: Peppery arugula isn’t as tender as its large-leafed annual cousin, but it’s a hardy cool-season salad green. My summer crop seeded like mad, mostly into my gravel paths, but it transplants pretty well if pricked out on a damp day.
SAVOY CABBAGES:
White cabbage butterfly caterpillars made a meal out of my Savoys' crinkly leaves, rendering them good for nothing but pig fodder – and even our kunekunes turned up their snouts at them. I‘ll try again with a late autumn sowing (under insect mesh) in the hope of winter cabbages. ‘SECKEL’ PEARS:
These diminutive gourmet pears – the smallest of all the commercially grown varieties – are fireblight resistant and partially self-fertile. Their red and green fruit also has exceptional flavour, with creamy white, sweet, juicy flesh. Or at least that’s what it says on the label. I couldn’t possibly comment because, for the fourth year in a row, thirsty birds stole every pear, pecking the fruit to bits long before it was even slightly ripe. LEEKS:
Given that rabbits left my garlic, onions and shallots alone, I (mistakenly) assumed they had no taste for alliums. Wrong. They adore leek seedlings and keep trimming their tops so, heading into winter, my crop is shrinking rather than growing. WATERMELONS:
I grew two healthy, flowering vines but neither produced any fruit. What am I doing wrong? Everything, it seems. (That reminds me of my favourite bumper sticker: “If at first you don’t succeed… well, maybe you just suck.“) I’m beginning to wonder whether watermelons were put on this earth to ensure gardeners never get too big for our boots. Has any NZ Gardener reader ever managed to grow a whopping watermelon? Send photos, please.