Salads Year-Round. A Planting Guide by Dennis Greville

The best thing about this book is the photography. It is sumptuous. The same cannot be said for the text, despite the author being vastly experienced and presumably knowledgeable. It does not show. You too can grow salad ingredients all year round. The recommended crops range freely and randomly from traditional lettuce and radish, across Europe (blood orange and bocconcini), through the Middle East (pomegranates and figs) and Asia (bamboo shoots, Vietnamese mint and galangal). Throw in some edible flowers like heartsease pansies and calendula and you have global salads, rounded out with the mandatory recipes. But it claims to be a planting guide. The growing information is perfunctory at best, but often woefully inadequate and sometimes entirely absent. There is no indication whatever of the range of climatic conditions we have in this country. You could not tell from this book whether you can expect to grow blood oranges in Invercargill or grapes and aubergines in Turangi. Nor will you learn anything about caring for the crop as it grows, let alone pests and diseases.

This is candyfloss gardening for the Christmas market. Leave it on the booksellers’ shelves. It should be remaindered on Boxing Day and disappear without a trace by New Year.

Salads Year-Round. A Planting Guide by Dennis Greville (New Holland; ISBN: 978 1 86966 3285) reviewed by Abbie Jury.

Grow It Yourself – carrots

First time we have had to net in the carrots but Peter Rabbit paid a visit in the night and nearly put paid to a row of very expensive gourmet carrots

First time we have had to net in the carrots but Peter Rabbit paid a visit in the night and nearly put paid to a row of very expensive gourmet carrots

Generally, carrots sold in the supermarket are high quality, cheap and grown in New Zealand so the main reasons for growing at home are if you are aiming for self sufficiency, you want to be organic, you really like eating them at a juvenile stage or you want to try some of the less common varieties. They now come in purple, yellow, red and white as well as in a squat radish shape. As far as the traditional orange carrot goes, there are higher value crops to grow if space is tight in your garden. The critical aspect is soil preparation. Carrots do best in sandy or grainy soils so you need to make sure that yours is very well tilled and cultivated.

Carrot is direct sown from seed and that seed is extremely fine. We usually cover the row with a narrow strip of Novaroof to stop the seed from being washed out by heavy downpours. Once the seed is germinating, start thinning the crop and keep thinning it several times to get final spacings of 3 to 5cm. This allows each root space to grow.

It is usual to sow carrots in an area where you grew leafy vegetables before but don’t add more manure, compost or fertiliser. They certainly don’t want nitrogen which encourages leafy growth. Fresh animal manures can cause the roots to fork.

The main pest is carrot fly whose larvae chew holes in the carrots. We find early crops sown in September or October usually mature before the fly is on the wing. There are some carrot fly resistant strains. Other than that, we just cut out the larvae holes and trails because we prefer not to use insecticides in the vegetable garden though Diazinon is effective if you wish to try that. Crop rotation (growing them in a different area each year) also helps reduce the build up of pests.

The different carrots are available from Kings Seeds for New Zealand gardeners.

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

In The Garden: November 18, 2011

A fortnightly series first published in the Weekend Gardener and reproduced here with their permission.

Planting out hostas now

Planting out hostas now

With our annual garden festival (now the Powerco Taranaki Garden Spectacular) over, it is back into the garden with a vengeance. The festival is incredibly important to us but standing on concrete all day every day for ten days on end, meeting and greeting visitors is far more tiring than a hard day in the garden. Unless we have a very wet spell, it is late for planting out woody trees and shrubs. Large plants will now be heeled into the vegetable garden because it has very well cultivated soil and offers easy planting and growing conditions, to be relocated next autumn. Any planting now requires wetting the root ball thoroughly. We plunge the plant, pot and all, into a bucket (or a drum for large plants) until the bubbles stop rising which means the root ball is saturated. This can take anything up to 30 minutes. Once a root ball has dried out, it is very hard to get it to take up water again without soaking.

We will continue planting out perennials, particularly hostas and bromeliads. Perennials in full growth can be divided now, as long as they are well watered and planted into well dug soil where they can get their roots out easily. We mulch with compost as a matter of routine, to enrich the soil and to keep moisture levels up in the soil before summer arrives. It also controls weeds, as long as you make a hot compost mix which kills any seeds in the composting process.

Top tasks:

1) The daffodils in the lawn need to be lifted and separated. I will only replant the large bulbs. They have been there for many years and the flowering is now greatly reduced which means that either they need dividing or we have a problem with narcissi fly in them. If I leave it any longer, I won’t remember exactly where the bulbs are because the grass will cover them.
2) Narcissi fly are on the wing. They look like a small blowfly but with a yellow abdomen. Removing all foliage from narcissi bulbs will reduce problems as long as I cover the bulbs with dirt so the narcissi fly can’t lay its eggs in the hole left from the foliage. Mark also stalks the flies individually with a little sprayer of Decis, which is a synthetic pyrethroid.
3) Label overcrowded patches of spring bulbs which need lifting and dividing when they are dormant over summer.

Fairy Magnolia Blush picked for success in Australia

Fairy Magnolia Blush - Mark Jury's pink michelia

Fairy Magnolia Blush - Mark Jury's pink michelia

Australia’s leading garden magazine and TV programme, Gardening Australia, has named Mark’s new Fairy Magnolia Blush as one of its top ten selections for plants for the future in Australia. This is in addition to naming the Jury-bred Cordyline Red Fountain as one of the top twenty plants in the past twenty years. Gardening Australia is currently celebrating its own twentieth birthday.

Fairy Magnolia Blush is the first of a new series of michelias released by Mark, the result of a plant breeding programme over many years. It brings a distinct pink colour into a plant which is usually resolutely white or cream. It is an evergreen plant which clips easily and can be kept compact.

Blush is readily available from plant retailers in New Zealand.

On the case with Grandma’s violets (subtitled: it is hard to find the perfect groundcover).


I see it was only a little over two years ago that I gave the death sentence to Rubus pentalobus (commonly called the orangeberry plant because few of us can recall its proper name) and chose Grandma’s violets as a ground cover instead. In fact they are more likely to Mark’s great grandma’s violets because they date back to the 1880s house site and have gently survived paddock conditions there ever since. Once divided and planted into the garden, they have taken off with alarming vigour. Sweetly scented and charming though they are in flower, they were starting to overwhelm everything in their path.

Last year we tried thinning the patch and it was a surprisingly difficult task because the violets had formed an impenetrable mat. I figured this year it would be easier to dig the entire patch and replant small divisions. Digging is only difficult when the ground is heavily compacted or with a blunt spade. Using a sharp spade, I cut the violets into squares as one does with turf. Each square was easy enough to lift.

I raked over the bare soil to level it. Some of the clumps I had dug fell apart quite readily, giving me small divisions to replant immediately. Others, I pulled apart as required, spacing at around 15cm intervals.

There was a large surplus of violets. Not every plant is precious. This barrowload (one of several) is destined for the compost heap.

A final topdressing of compost feeds the soil, reduces water loss from the poor stressed plants and makes the whole area look more attractive. There is an open verdict here as to whether I want to persist with a groundcover that looks as if it will need drastic digging and dividing every year. I will make the call next spring.