August top & flop CROPS

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

KALETTES:

As someone who is partial to brussels sprouts, it irks me that they can be so difficult to grow in warmer conditions. My garden gets the necessary frosts but also enjoys mild autumns, during which my brassicas take a beating from cabbage butterfly caterpillars. If the brussels sprouts survive that onslaught, they often refuse to heart up anyway; or if they do, they are often infested with hibernating aphids.

This winter, once again, my brussels sprouts have proved reliably unreliable. I transplanted seedlings in January and while the plants are big and healthy, there’s little hearting up to be seen yet.

However, my first attempt to grow kalettes has been a real hit. Kalettes, also sold as flower sprouts, are F1 hybrids bred by crossing kale with brussels sprouts.

I direct sowed a packet of kalettes seed (from Kings Seeds) last Labour Weekend, as part of the 24-hour makeover of my parents’ potager. The seeds were a mix of green, purple and pink/purple bicolor varieties and the plants are now as tall as my seven-year-old son Lucas (above).

The Kings Seeds website says kalettes take 110 days from transplant, whereas my plants took eight months from seed to their first harvest. Although they were slow to get started, it looks like we’ll be eating them for months to come, as each stem is tightly packed with hundreds and hundreds of frilly mini rosettes.

Give kalettes a go. They are a fun crop that’s a real talking point in the garden, and pretty versatile in the kitchen too.

LEMONS & LEMONADES:

When life hands you lemons by the 30-litre bucketful, it’s a sign that something is seriously amiss with your citrus tree!

Twenty years ago, I planted a grafted ’Meyer’ lemon tree in my parents’ mini potager. Even though half the tree is now riddled with citrus borer, it has produced a huge crop of glowing yellow, largely verrucosis-free fruit every year since.

This year was no exception, but it turns out that the healthy half of the tree was overladen with fruit, because it split right down the middle in a storm last month.

Bad luck, I’d say, except the same thing happened to one of my ’Lemonade’ trees this winter. Having waited seven years for it to produce its first decent crop, my tree promptly snapped in half, having been weakened by borer. There was nothing I could do except make lemonade from my lemonades (or lemon cordial, at least).

If you’ve never tried a ‘Lemonade‘, you must. This hybrid has easy-peel fruit that can be eaten in segments, like an orange, with a sweet lemon squash flavour.

ORNAMENTAL KALE:

Given that kalettes are my top crop this month, it only seems fair to lament the loss of my ornamental kale. Having developed a soft spot for these hot pink and purple bedders, I bought a boxful of potted colour. However, before I’d even had a chance to get it in the ground, our free-range chooks attacked it. Did they nibble its frilly edges? No. They pecked the guts out of every plant, ruining the lot.