My top & flop CROPS

Lynda Hallinan’s regular report card on the best and worst seasonal harvests from her Hunua garden.

FIGS:

It has taken me a long time to truly appreciate the merits of a tree-ripened fig. In my previous city garden, there was a huge fig tree that bore hundreds of dry green fruit that either got eaten by birds, or fell in a sticky mess onto my deck.

After that experience, I’ve never felt inspired to plant a fig tree, but the Hunua cottage we’re currently renovating came with one. I was tempted to chop it down as it’s horribly misshapen and appears to have been planted half out of the ground, but I figured I’d see if it fruited first. The good news? It does, and its brownskinned, red-fleshed fruit (left) are sweet and flavoursome and produced in glorious abundance. But the bad news? Those figs ranged from the size of a cherry guava to a ping pong ball at best.

This winter, I’m going to prune it back hard then build a low raised bed around its base, which I’ll fill with compost and mulch to cover its exposed roots. Next summer I’ll water it too, in the hope it’ll repay me for its stay of execution with much bigger figs. ‘SHINY FARDENLOSA’ BEANS:

I feel like I’m cheating on my old love, the perennial ‘Scarlet Runner’, to confess that my best summer climbing beans this year were ‘Shiny Fardenlosa’ (McGregor’s Seeds and Yates Seeds). This prolific old-timer has large, long, glossy green beans that never get stringy. They’re still going strong and I suspect the vines will carry on flowering and fruiting until the first frosts send them packing.

PEARS:

Over the years, I’ve put in five varieties of pears. I have small, sweet ‘Seckel’, rusty brown ‘Beurre Bosc’, ‘Taylor‘s Gold’, burgundy-skinned ‘Starkrimson’ and the delicious French dessert pear ‘Doyenne du Comice’. Most years we have pears coming out of our ears… but only ‘Beurre Bosc’. My ‘Taylor‘s Gold’ trees have never fruited, although in their defence they have the worst spot in our orchard, shaded by boundary trees.

I’ve never had a pear off my ‘Doyenne du Comice’ tree either, until this year, when it produced four fruit – and much excitement! I picked one and sat it on our kitchen windowsill to ripen, giving it a gentle squeeze every couple of days in anticipation of its sugary goodness. When I felt the flesh start to yield, I sliced it up and… oh, such disappointment. It was mealy in texture and bland in flavour. Meanwhile, birds filched the remaining three fruit. How grateful I am for my ‘Beurre Bosc’, which is hardly romantic but, like the Granny Smith apple, always dependable.

BROCCOLI:

My children willingly eat broccoli so I put in an early autumn crop. I should have waited until winter, because it turns out my children won’t willingly eat white cabbage butterfly caterpillars. All my brassicas are full of them.

POTATOES:

In March I planted a box of Perlas. A rat dug them all up, then the dog caught the rat. The circle of life continues, albeit without a late crop of baby spuds. ✤