TOP & FLOP CROPS

PASSIONFRUIT:

When I first moved to Hunua, I trained a grafted passionfruit vine along the front of our stableblock. For three years it fruited prolifically – producing so many juicy, fat fruit that I could freeze pottles of pulp – but when we renovated the stables it had to be sacrificed. In all the years since, I haven’t managed to get passionfruit to crop here successfully again – if it’s not frost, it’s possums or rabbits attacking the vines.

Conceding defeat, I planted a vine in the rather more temperate backyard of our Tairua bach and last year it was laden… just in time for Covid-19 to lock us all at home. I didn’t get to eat even a single fruit.

But this year, the weather gods (and Covid-19) have played ball to produce a bumper harvest that has ripened much earlier (ditto my ‘Fortune‘ and ‘Damson‘ plums, which I picked a full month earlier than last year‘s crop).

Passionfruit can be temperamental, falling victim to fungal diseases and root rots, so I'm chuffed to have a great crop.

Over the summer, my niece Jaime had a job waitressing just down the road from our bach at Flock in Tairua’s main street, where they serve scrumptious passionfruit mojitos and mocktails. It has motivated me to preserve shelf-stable passionfruit syrup (bring equal quantities of juicy pulp and sugar to the boil, then bottle in hot, clean jars) for cocktails and icecream sundaes. Note: if that quantity of sugar horrifies you, simply sweeten the pulp to your taste and freeze in ice cube trays instead.

PICKLING GHERKINS:

Gherkins are the only vegetables I grow for pickling, but these prickly wee cucumbers are like courgettes: if you turn your back on them for more than a week, they swell up so fast you can’t fit them into a jar.

I prefer to pickle baby gherkins whole, or cut into chunky crunchy spears, but this year that was out of the question. Having ignored my vegetable garden over the summer holidays, my gherkin vines were all laden with fruit as large as ‘Telegraph‘ cucumbers. I had no choice but to cut them into rounds or I’d only fit one per 500ml jar!

To make posh-looking crinkle-cut pickles, my friend Sarah loaned me her Tupperware MandoChef – a nifty gadget that comes with interchangeable blades so you can slice, dice, julienne and waffle cut.

You can either ferment gherkins in brine to make sour dill refrigerator pickles or preserve them in a 50:50 solution of water and white vinegar. Add 1 teaspoon of sugar (optional) to each jar, along with sprigs of fresh dill (or dill seedheads), garlic and some peppercorns and mustard seeds. If you fancy yellow pickles like the ones in fast food burgers, use cider vinegar and add a sprinkle of turmeric to each jar.

‘BLACK DORIS’ PLUMS:

Four years ago, I planted a ‘Black Doris’ plum in our chicken coop. It had its first crop this year – only a dozen fruit – so I moved the chooks out when they began to colour up. I needn’t have bothered. Thieving wild birds scoffed 11 of them.