Author Archives: Abbie Jury

Unknown's avatar

About Abbie Jury

jury.co.nz Tikorangi The Jury Garden Taranaki NZ

Garden Lore

“I always think of my sins when I weed. They grow apace in the same way and are harder still to get rid of.”

Helena Rutherford Ely “A Woman’s Hardy Garden” (1903)

Sago!

Sago!

Garden Lore: Friday 10 January, 2014

Most of us above a certain age grew up with milk puddings. Semolina, sago and tapioca were the most common thickening agents. Until recently, I had vaguely assumed that they basically derived from the same source of starch and the difference was in the grade of grain. Not at all. Semolina is usually durum wheat-based. After the outside husks and wheat germ have been removed, what remains is the inner part, or middlings. This is what gets ground into flour but before that stage, basically it is semolina. It can also be obtained from rice and maize crops – the latter becomes the dish known in USA as “grits”. Modern times have seen old fashioned semolina give way to the trendier North African couscous, which is essentially very similar in makeup but sold as a quick-cooking product having been steamed and then dehydrated. Israeli couscous (which resembles tapioca or frogs’ eyes) is simply further processed to this larger form.

Sago, on the other hand, is a starch that comes from the pith in the trunks of various palms but particularly Metroxylon sagu and is largely a product from New Guinea and South East Asia. Tapioca has an entirely different origin, being from cassava (Manihot esculenta) which grows as a tuberous root and is a tropical plant which originated in South America but is now a staple food in the Pacific and Asia as well.

These days, I only have sago in the kitchen cupboard. That is because I sometimes use a recipe idea which is vintage Alison Holst. When stewing rhubarb, add sago with the diced fruit (1/4 cup to 4 cups of fruit). It takes a little longer to cook, but the result is somewhat jellied and the acidity of the rhubarb has gone. It is very palatable, even for non-rhubarb fans.

First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.

The answer truly lies in the soil

005 (2)Who has never complained about the absence of flavour in supermarket tomatoes, particularly when out of season? Almost without exception we laud the merits of homegrown produce as being much more flavourful, even more so if crops have been grown from heritage varieties. Very hipster these days. Many people believe that the flavour has been sacrificed in commercial crops in the quest for high production.

Things are never that black and white. For some years, we have been pondering the triggers for flavour. I cite my experience with tomatoes in Southern Italy. A taste treat beyond compare, so full of flavour were they. But it was only the first week of June so it wasn’t a hot, dry summer that determined the quality of the taste. Nor, indeed, was it the variety. In recent years there has been an explosion of heirloom or heritage seed varieties becoming available in this country. We have tried growing a fair number of different ones and, to be ruthlessly honest, while better than the wishy washy supermarket ones, they all fall well short of those I ate in Italy. That leaves the soil as the key variable.

The answer may indeed lie in the soil. Unfortunately the solution is not as simple as scattering fertiliser with added trace elements, which is the usual recommended treatment. We have taken good care of our soils here and believed that we made good, balanced compost to nourish them. I use the past tense – believed. Summer reading here is “The Intelligent Gardener” by Steve Soloman. That is to say, Mark is reading it and sharing the highlights as he goes. While some of the book drives him nuts, the underlying premises make a lot of sense. Our soils are almost certainly nowhere near as good as we thought.
008
The subtitle of the book is “Growing Nutrient-Dense Food”. Nutrient density has been hovering on the periphery of our lives ever since Kay Baxter started writing about it. It is the principle that you can have two apparently similar crops but one has a much higher nutritional value than the other. Kay Baxter is the leading light of the Koanga Institute and a true pioneer of organics and the preservation of heirloom and heritage varieties in this country. She advocates the use of Brix measures to determine nutrient density. Brix are commonly used in the wine industry to measure sugar content.

It may be something of a leap to link flavour to nutrient density, but it seems logical that there may well be such a link and certainly both go back to the nature of the soil.

As a country, New Zealand has some widely recognised soil deficiencies. Insufficient naturally-occurring iodine is why we have iodised salt in this country. Prior to that, goitre was very common in humans and indeed in animals. “Bush sickness” is a widely recognised problem attributable to cobalt deficiencies on pumice soils. Selenium is deficient. At the risk of treading on sensitive ground in the Waikato, I understand that the trace element fluorine is deficient in NZ which is a major contributor to why New Zealanders have long been renowned for poor teeth. According to my father, who was a medico in the British army in WW2, they could pick the NZ soldiers at time of autopsy because most had false teeth. Correspondingly, pre-dental bleaching, all those beaming white toothy smiles of many Americans were apparently attributable to higher levels of naturally occurring fluorine.

If you are really keen on running a closed system of food production with no external inputs, it matters a great deal that you understand the exact composition of your soils in considerable detail. Even then, it is not as simple as topping up a certain element because there are reactions and inhibitors which can affect the ability of soils to incorporate additions. But most of us get our food from a variety of sources, which means deficiencies don’t usually have dire effects on human health because there is a degree of balancing out which occurs.

Mark is planning to delve further into the exact compositions of our soils. We are interested to see whether better balanced soils will give us better flavoured food. We will be watching to see if the link between flavour and nutrient density is proven. Certainly, it is disconcerting to have our existing notions about the quality of our soil and compost turned upside down. But this is not a once over lightly project which will appeal to all gardeners.

If you want to know more, the Koanga website is: http://koanga.org.nz/ The book referred to is “The Intelligent Gardener” by Steve Soloman. (New Society Publishers; ISBN:978 0 86571 718 3). Elder daughter purchased it for her father from the bookshop of Canberra Botanic Gardens. In this country, you may need to order it, in which case the ISBN number is important.

First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.

Plant Collector: Justicia carnea alba

The white candles of Justicia carnea alba

The white candles of Justicia carnea alba

Christmas candles? Reminiscent of the tufting of old fashioned candlewick bedspread? It has also the unromantic name overseas of shrimp plant, a reference to the shape of the flowers. The white justicia has been bringing me a great deal of pleasure in recent weeks. We have always had the pink and yellow forms but I thought we had lost the white until I found it looking a little ragged and squashed by surrounding plants. I moved it and it hasn’t looked back. It can be a bit of a straggler so I constructed a discreet little bamboo frame to hold the plant together.

There are over 400 different justicia species, mostly from tropical to warm temperate Central and South America (think Brazil, amongst others) but J. carnea appears to be one of the showiest and is the most common in cultivation in this country. It has a very long flowering season across the summer months. This plant is only a metre tall at this stage but left to its own devices, I expect over time it will reach the 2.5 metres of the pink and yellow ones we have.

There aren’t many plants which will flower profusely in heavy shade. Most plants need sun to bloom. So it makes an ideal larger woodland plant with one proviso. The information online says it will not take below 7 °C. I don’t think it is that sensitive. We can get colder than that here and it has never shown damage but clearly it is quite cold sensitive and is regarded as a glasshouse plant in many areas of the world.

Justicias belong to the acanthaceae family.

First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.

Garden Lore

“It takes a while to grasp that not all failures are self-imposed, the result of ignorance, carelessness or inexperience. It takes a while to grasp that a garden isn’t a testing ground for character and to stop asking, what did I do wrong? Maybe nothing.”

Eleanor Perenyi, Green Thoughts (1981).

Japanese black trifele tomatoes

Japanese black trifele tomatoes

Heirloom and heritage seed varieties

I see Kings Seeds define “heirloom” seed varieties as being selected strains dating back to pre-1960s. Anything grown from seed will be a selected cultivar from the original species over time and may be very different from wild forms. While, by definition, heirloom varieties are open pollinated (by insects or wind), so too is the vast majority of seed we grow. I tried to work out whether there is an agreed difference between “heirloom” and “heritage” but generally the terms seem to be used loosely and interchangeably.

A number of people and organisations have been working for years to preserve our heirloom varieties in this country but none more so than the Koanga Institute and Kay Baxter in particular. Why does it matter? It is really important to keep genetic diversity in a world where commercial production is driven by other imperatives – particularly high productivity. The kiwifruit industry is a clear example of the perils of depending on a single cultivar of yellow fruit. If disease (PSA, in that case) takes it out, the impact is devastating.

Heirloom is not a synonym for high health. Some will be, some won’t and some will not perform well outside their original area. While most of us like to think it is synonymous with better flavour, that is not always true, either. It has nothing to do with being organic although many organic gardeners will favour heirloom varieties. Essentially, all “heirloom seed” means is that a particular seed strain has shown sufficient merit in some area of performance for people to keep it going for over fifty years. And long may we continue to preserve these different strains of seed.

First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.

New Year’s Gardening Resolutions for 2014

Plant food for the bees. Collectively, gardeners can make a difference

Plant food for the bees. Collectively, gardeners can make a difference

I failed on the Christmas-themed column. I am not big on poinsettias and I couldn’t think of anything new to say about Christmas trees. But New Year’s resolutions – these are different. If you are making garden resolutions, you may like to consider some of the following.

Lawns are a shocker when it comes to good environmental practice. There is nothing sustainable and healthy about most lawns but the vast majority of us have them for a variety of reasons. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that if you cut your lawn really short, it will mean you have to mow it less often. Not true. You stress the grass and open it up to weed invasions. Set the level on the lawnmower a little higher to keep a green sward. Good lawns invariably have longer grass.

Next time you buy a lawnmower, choose one that mulches the clippings. That way you don’t have to remove the clippings to get a tidy finish and if you are not removing the grass, then you don’t need to feed the lawn to keep it looking healthy. It reduces your inputs and therefore reduces both time and cost.

We are encouraging clover back into our lawns. It stays green, doesn't need mowing as often and feeds the bees

We are encouraging clover back into our lawns. It stays green, doesn’t need mowing as often and feeds the bees

Be cautious about lawn sprays and read the label information carefully. We are not fans of lawn sprays at all here. Year in and year out, we field enquiries about plant damage which is attributable to spray drift from lawn sprays. If you are using a spray which has a six month withholding period before it is safe to use on food crops (and that is common), you may want to think again about how environmentally sound is your gardening practice. Putting it through the compost process will not make the clippings safe for use. It might even be time to move on from the Chemical Ali generation. We are going back to encouraging the clover here. It used to be popular in days gone by and it has many merits.

Mulch. Mulch well, but only after the soil is wet through. If you lay mulch on top of dry soil, it stays drier longer. The rains this week may have been a reprieve for those who missed getting mulch laid in spring. If you lay the mulch on top of relatively weed-free soils, it will save you a lot of work later because it should suppress many of the germinating weed seeds that lurk in all our soils.

While on the subject of weeds, if they really worry you (and they do worry most of us even though, as the old saying goes, a weed is merely a plant in the wrong place), remember the old adage that one year’s seeding gives rise to seven year’s weeding. It is best to weed before the plant sets seed if you want to save yourself work down the track. If you weed with the push hoe, you need to remove seed heads that have formed already. You can leave the rest of the plant to wither in the sun but the seed heads will just continue to ripen and then germinate.

Single flowers with visible pollen and stamens feed the bees and indeed the butterflies

Single flowers with visible pollen and stamens feed the bees and indeed the butterflies

Grow plants with flowers for the bees. This means any flowers with visible stamens and pollen. We all know the bees are under deep stress, here in New Zealand as well as the rest of the world. We need the bees for pollination even more than honey. Every gardener’s contribution counts and collectively, we can make a difference to their food supplies. Fortunately, most of us have moved on from the austerity of the 1990s minimalist garden which contributed a big fat zero to the natural environment.

I am of the view that gardening should be two things above all else. It should be a pleasure. At its best, it can make your heart sing at the beauty. At a more mundane level, it can be quietly satisfying. If you get neither pleasure nor satisfaction from your garden, if it is all a great, big, tedious chore then review what you have and what you are doing.

If you really don’t enjoy gardening, then keep it very simple. It is much easier to maintain, especially if you can’t afford to pay someone to come and do it for you. If all you have to do is maintain edges, sweep paved areas, mow the lawns and do a seasonal round of tightly defined garden beds in order to keep it looking tidy, then it becomes more manageable for the reluctant gardener. Alternatively, move to an upper floor apartment.

Secondly, I think we should be gardening WITH nature, not in spite of it. Gardening shouldn’t be about imposing human will over nature, controlling and suppressing it, establishing dominance. Too much gardening practice is an imposition on the landscape, a battle with nature. Happy gardeners are often those who have managed to carve out a more constructive relationship with the natural world.

On which note, I wish readers a happy gardening year in 2014.

First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.