In the Garden this week: January 28, 2011

• A point of clarification from last week: if you want to try water retention crystals (Saturaid, Crystal Rain or similar) on a dry lawn, you must rake them in, not just leave them scattered on top. Otherwise you will just hoover them all up with the lawnmower.

• If you read the article on the food pages of our local paper last Tuesday about pine nuts, you may be interested to know that they are easy enough to grow here. Pinus pinea, the Italian stone pine, is the most common variety though there are other species suitable for seed (pine nut) production. However, and it is a big however, as soon as it comes to harvesting the seeds and peeling off the outer coating of each seed, you will realise why they are relatively expensive in the supermarket. You are more likely to decide that they are actually extremely cheap to buy instead.

• If you needed an extra reason to get motivated to plant a winter vegetable garden, the Australian floods may be it. Vegetables are tipped for hefty price rises this year – it is all a matter of supply and demand. So start digging. If you are working on grassed areas skim off the top layer of turf and stack it to one side to rot down. Or, if you are not determined to be organic, spray with glyphosate (formerly known as Round Up) which will also kill off most of the perennial weeds (but not clover). Current evidence is that glyphosate is safe to use when applied according to directions. It has been around for many years now so there has been time to discover lingering ill effects or contraindications.

Last weekend's rain means it is safe to return to planting out herbaceous material

Last weekend's rain means it is safe to return to planting out herbaceous material

• With the heavy rain last weekend and more forecast, we have resumed planting but only of herbaceous material, not woody trees and shrubs which will get stressed when we next dry out again. Herbaceous material is quicker to establish itself and to get its roots out and it responds much faster to watering if necessary. I have been digging, dividing and replanting an enormous clump of Ligularia reniformis (the tractor seat one) – but cautiously. It is within reach of a hose just in case.

• If your potatoes are showing signs of blight (dark brown wet patches on the leaves), you have to be in really early with a fungicide spray to stop it. If the foliage is already collapsing, it is too late. Dig the potatoes immediately and you may save some of the crop. Delay and the blight will also infect the potato tubers. You have to remove all the diseased foliage and tubers to try and stop the fungus from remaining. Either burn the affected plants, put them out in the rubbish or hot compost them. Don’t just throw them in a heap or cold compost them. It is this blight (Phytophthora infestans) that caused the Irish potato famines.

• On the grounds that a few phone calls asking the same question may indicate a landslide of curiosity out amongst the readership, I found the rolling compost maker shown in Outdoor Classroom last week at Mitre 10 Mega in New Plymouth. This is not to say that other outlets do not also have it in stock – I did not look further.

Plant Collector – auratum lilies

Auratum lily Flossie - one of Felix Jury's hybrids

Auratum lily Flossie - one of Felix Jury's hybrids

I don’t cut flowers to bring indoors very often. When every window of the house looks out to a garden, it doesn’t seem necessary. But as soon as the auratum lilies start to open, I reach for the kitchen scissors and head out. They are just the perfect cut flower – one stem can have up to ten flowers (sometimes even more) and put in a tall, slender vase they not only look superb, they can spread their delicious scent through an entire room.

Auratums are known as the golden-rayed lily of Japan – how lovely does that sound? The flowers are the largest of the lily family, often more than 20cm across, and they are a mainstay of our January garden. Felix Jury adored them (probably for all the same reasons that we do) and dabbled with breeding them, naming several selections. This one is the very large flowered Flossie. The upshot is that we have a lot of auratums in the garden and generally they are quite happy with benign neglect, growing in both full sun and semi shade. They prefer soils with good drainage and plenty of humus but not too rich.

The bulbs are large – fist-sized even – and we tried to get around all the plants last winter to dig and divide them. They haven’t had any attention for many, many years but when the clumps get too congested, the tops tend to fall over if they are not staked. The freshly divided patches are mostly standing up like little soldiers without any assistance. Some of the taller ones can get over 2m high and they need some support though often I will intertwine them through neighbouring plants.

You can sometimes find lily bulbs for sale in garden centres in winter. Make sure you avoid any dry, shrivelled specimens – they do not like to be dried out completely even when dormant. You may be lucky and find some auratums but they are not widely offered on the NZ market despite their spectacular summer display.

Tikorangi Notes: Friday 21 January, 2011

Auratum lilies - a mainstay of our summer garden

Auratum lilies - a mainstay of our summer garden

LATEST POSTS: Friday 21 January, 2010

1) Mid summer is the time for auratum lilies – Plant Collector this week.

2) Garden tasks for the week.

3) In Outdoor Classroom this week, we take the first of a two part look at making compost – simple options.

TIKORANGI NOTES: Friday 21 January, 2010

The auratum lilies are a highlight of summer here. We have yet to master the classic summer herbaceous borders but we can do the auratums well. Divinely scented, big, bold and impossible to ignore, they grow well in both full sun and semi shade. Fortunately, the lily beetle which we saw in English gardens, has not made its way past border control here. That is certainly one pest we can do without.

The glory of the auratum lilies

The glory of the auratum lilies

In the Garden: January 21, 2011

Dry bulbs can still be planted

Dry bulbs can still be planted

• Saturaid or Crystal Rain can look like a good idea at this time of the year. These products generally resemble rock salt crystals when dry but absorb large quantities of water, expanding and changing to chopped jelly in appearance. Use them for hanging baskets, potted annuals or short term potted vegetables. Don’t make the mistake of using them in the garden. While they look appealing at this dry time of the year, with our high rainfall, for ten months of the year they will hold water and ensure that our free draining soils become water logged. Once you have them in the soil, they will stay for years. Longer term container plants don’t want to be kept waterlogged in winter either. So restrict their use.

• However, I am told that these water retention crystals can be very good on lawns which dry out badly over summer and turn brown. I have yet to try this myself but I will in a couple of small problem areas. Carol at my local garden centre says that scattered lightly on the lawn, they have proven very effective and there is good logic to that but be sparing in the quantity used.

• Summer prune cherry trees.

• We have pretty much stopped planting any ornamentals here now until we get significant amounts of rain. If you insist on continuing to plant, you must water well before, during and after the planting process and continuing to water over the next weeks. With water restrictions being imposed in much of our area, it is better to delay all but vegetable planting.

• You can plant dry bulbs and leave them for nature to take its course though garden centres will not generally get any of the new season’s bulbs in stock until the start of February.

• If you grow your own vegetables from seed, you should be getting onto sowing winter vegetables – brassicas, parsnip, carrots, winter spinach and lettuce, leeks and celery. If you are going to buy plants, you have plenty of time. However, starting from seed will save money and give you extra to share.

• This does not apply to Brussel sprouts which must be planted immediately, using young plants, if you are to get a crop through. They have a longer growing season and need to be big, strong plants by winter. This is assuming you eat these gourmet baby cabbages, as we do.

• The food pages of our local paper had a piece tea this week. You may be interested to know that you can grow the tea camellia easily here, as long as you do not get very heavy frosts. What is more, it is sometimes available to buy. Look for Camellia sinensis. Mark brewed the best tea from ours when he bruised the leaves and left them to ferment slightly for 24 hours – apparently closer to Oolong tea. Our home grown product has not replaced our favoured Earl Grey but it is not a bad substitute for those in search of self sufficiency or those who love the freshest of green tea.

Make your own compost hot mix, step-by-step (part two of three)


Compost part one, saw us looking at low tech, low input ways of dealing with green waste. Here we look at how to make hot compost which sterilises the mix.

1) Compost needs five ingredients:
a) nitrogen
b) carbon
c) oxygen
d) water
e) microbes.
You need to actively manage the process with a hot compost mix. The common failing of the black plastic drum as a compost bin is the lack of carbon and the lack of oxygen which means you get a soggy, sludgy mess. Carbon comes from dry, woody material – twigs (cut up small), newspaper (needs to be shredded or scrunched up), wood chips, sawdust (not tanalised), wood ash, dried leaves. As we make a lot of compost, we get much of our carbon content from the mulcher or wood chipper. Carbon content should comprise close to half the total volume of your compost and, as it is often bulkier, it creates air spaces in the mix.

2) The other half, or a little more than half, of your compost ingredients comes from the green waste (which is the nitrogen component). This includes all green leafy waste, animal manure, food scraps and lawn clippings. Compost microbes will come in with the grass clippings, or you can add some of your old compost mix (the old twiggy bits can go through again).

3) We simply pile it all in a heap until we get enough to work with. Wooden compost bins are a tidy option for the small garden. You need three – the first to accumulate the waste, the second to make it in and the third for compost which is ready to use. Make sure that you can remove all the boards from at least one side to make it easy to move the compost through the bin cycle. Each bin needs to be around a cubic metre at the least. A ring of chicken netting is the low tech method of keeping your growing compost pile contained and is probably easier to work with though less tidy.

4) When you have sufficient volume to work with, adding nitrogen in the form of fresh grass clippings, fresh animal manure, urea or blood and bone will give your compost a kick start to generate heat. Mix it all up. When done by hand, the garden fork is the usual tool to mix. We do the mixing with a baby tractor which is admittedly easier but a little excessive for small town gardens. Cover the heap from here on.

5) The heat should reach between 55 and 75 degrees Celsius within a few days. Turn the heap again – sides to middle – to get the whole lot working. You can see the clouds of steam pouring out of our heap which indicates heat. There will be no worms or insect life in hot compost mix. The heat should also kill off weed seeds and undesirable pathogens. Ideally, turn a third time a few weeks later.

6) Cover and leave the compost to cure for a couple of months or longer. The compost will now cool down and it should be light, friable (almost fluffy), clean and have no offensive odour. In our high rainfall climate, we recommend covering with something reasonably waterproof to prevent the goodness from being leached out. We use old weed mat weighted down at the base. You can also use heavy duty black polythene. Boards or corrugated iron are common on a tidy compost bin structure.

Part three – making cold compost mix.