Grow It Cook It

Grow It Cook It, by Sally Cameron, photography by Charlie Smith (Penguin, ISBN 978 0 14 301096 8)

There is no doubt that the author is keen on her home garden and her background is as a food writer and stylist both in the UK and now back in New Zealand. But this enthusiasm is not a sure-fire guarantee of success. Trying to cover all bases and be all things to all people (there are also sections entitled Cook’s Notes and Child’s Play) was perhaps a little ambitious.

There are listings for 30 different fruits, vegetables and herbs in a somewhat random selection. Each chapter starts with a page or so of information on how to grow the subject but this cultural information is patchy. Growing lemongrass was fine but the entry on feijoas was not. And if one is going to advocate eating geranium flowers, I think there needs to be a discussion on the difference between geraniums and pelagoniums. The author’s gardening experience seems to be primarily based in Auckland suburbia and while this may be adequate for dispensing some simple advice, really she is trying to punch above her weight in the area of gardening.

Ms Cameron is far more comfortable with the recipes and cooking side of things. There are 355 recipes so the book is more than generous. The food is a jaunt through the flavours of the world but at a user-friendly family kitchen level. Rosemary Shortbread, Broad Bean and Lemon Risotto, Fresh Orange Terrine – all tasty and reasonably simple. I would wish for more consistency in the use of measures by volume – the recipes lean to listing ingredients by weight even for such items as sultanas or flour when a cup measure is much easier to use and overall the measuring techniques are inconsistent. But the greatest flaw in this book is that the recipes are grouped in chapters determined by the vegetable, herb or fruit tree that is the starting point, even though it may be a minor ingredient only. So there is no logical sequence to the recipes, although it does at least have a decent index.

Overall, it is better on the food than on the gardening and you can find more comprehensive and user friendly gardening information from many other, more experienced sources. It has a nice enough presentation without getting too excited about it, soft cover and opens flat.

The Oracle of Jury

Mark was very taken by a succinct description of what makes a good garden – “I look for plenty of plant interest and good design to lead me through.” He was watching the County Organiser assessing for Britain’s Yellow Book scheme at the time, screened on Sky television. The quality of the gardens applying for assessment can be very patchy but the calibre of the County Organisers who manage the gardens for their region is usually high.

It is not that long ago that garden design ruled supreme and plants were mere soft furnishings. In fact the designers held such prestige that they felt completely justified in advocating mass plantings of a single variety as The Only Way to good design and completely dismissing gardens which preferred variation in the form of many different plants, often planted in groups of one. Patchy, spotty, formless, some would sniff. There was little expectation that designers and landscapers would know their plants. Indeed even architects could confidently wade into the area of garden design, bringing their knowledge of space, proportion, building materials and good design but knowing next to nothing at best (and often less) about plants.

Prior to the landscapers and designers seizing the prestigious higher ground in gardening, we had quite a lengthy era when the gardens of the common populace (which takes in most of New Zealand) were all about plants and very little about design. The zenith of garden design here was captured in what is now referred to as Kiwi Hosepipe Style. That, of course, is where the gardener laid out the garden hose to get a natural looking curve or a more radical series of undulating curves which gave the lines to follow with the spade. Many readers will still have gardens firmly anchored in that tradition. In those earlier days, garden prestige lay far more in being able to proudly display rare or unusual plants, a value we took on from Victorian England where plant hunters were revered for their efforts in delivering up ever more novelties for collectors at home.

The simplest explanation is that it is only in recent times that many property owners have had sufficient money to pay others to realise some outdoor dining and entertaining visions on their behalf. When there was a great deal less disposable income, the DIY ethic was deeply ingrained. The hard landscaping required by most good design was way beyond the budget of all but the wealthiest and there was little done in most gardens. But the home gardener certainly compensated with a detailed knowledge and practical experience with plants which would shame many modern gardeners.

So what is really interesting about the County Organiser’s comment, with which I started, is that it married the two aspects of plant interest and good design as being necessary in a garden of any quality. Not only that, but good design is not treated as an end in itself but as a tool to facilitate movement through the garden space.

There are precedents for this marriage of design and plants and one of the most illustrious comes in the form of two significant Britons around the start of the twentieth century. Edwin Lutyens was an architect who also turned his hand to garden design. His houses were truly beautiful, as was his mastery of windows and light. So too were his garden designs a gifted use of space and proportion, very formal and completely dominated by plenty of magnificent stonework and bricks in walls, terraces, steps, water features and all the rest. He also gave us the Lutyens outdoor seat which is now probably mass produced in Asia but at its best is a classic and well proportioned piece of furniture.

But, and it is a huge but, having designed a magnificent formal space, he did not then fill it with clipped topiary and only five different plants laid out like soldiers on a parade ground. No, he handed the space over to his colleague, the revered gardener Gertrude Jekyll who then set about filling all the spaces and softening the hard lines with a riot of flowers and colour through the seasons. Jekyll is famous for her work on herbaceous borders with big drifts of colour and texture put together with the eye of an artist, but she was also a plantswoman using a wide range of plant material to enliven and blur the hard edges of the otherwise somewhat sterile formal design.

The Lutyens Kekyll partnership would not have come cheaply. No DIY going on there. But 100 years on, we have seen the preserve of the fine garden extend well down the social and financial ladder so that it is no longer the preserve of the wealthy upper classes. The democratisation of gardening, we might call it. Firstly through the most fundamental skills of learning how to grow and show plants to advantage, secondly through learning to value the aesthetic of good design and ways to manage this on a much smaller budget and hopefully now into the era when we successfully bring together both the plant interest and good design in the domestic garden.

So should anybody ever advise you to simplify the plantings in your garden, you may wish to smile serenely and consider, according to the Oracle of Jury, that advice is just so last century. If your advisor knew more, they may well say that your plant combinations are not good enough – that is the way you put all your many and varied plants together in the garden. Or they may mean that the design and flow within your garden is not good enough to carry the collection of plants you have amassed. But it is a cop-out or a non-gardener’s solution to say that all will be rectified by drastically reducing the number of varieties of plants you grow. Really good gardens are a blending of many interesting plants grown in good combinations and held together by excellent design. It is all a bit like love and marriage and the horse and carriage.

March 27, 2009 In the Garden

• If you see white butterflies hanging around your vegetable patch, odds on they are laying eggs on your baby brassica plants. Early intervention means you can usually rely on digital control (don’t be squeamish – squash the caterpillars) but if you let them get away on you they will either ruin your crop or you may have to resort to chemical control. Covering the plants with fine netting can keep the white butterflies away but you really need to build a temporary frame to hold the netting away from the plants and to get rid of any eggs and caterpillars already present. There is nothing more likely to discourage children from eating broccoli than coming across boiled green caterpillars in it (the voice of experience here) so it is worth trying to keep the plants clean. You can still be planting brassicas and other leafy greens for winter harvest.
• Celery and leeks are two vegetables which are better with pale stems (the greener they are, the tougher they get) so if you have them in the garden you can earth up around the stems to blanch them.
• If you are digging carrots with holes in them, the culprit may be weevil or carrot fly. Sometimes slugs will also have a go at getting in on the act. It is too late to solve the problem now and we just cut the bad bits out. You can’t do anything about weevils and dealing to carrot fly is hit and miss where recommended treatments tend to be heavy duty insecticides like Diazinon. Late plantings tend to escape carrot fly and look for varieties which are marked as resistant. Well cultivated soil discourages weevils in the longer term.
• Readers who have nice tidy hedges bordering garden beds may pale at the prospect, but rootpruning close to the hedge is advisable. This is just making a deep cut with a sharp spade to stop the hedge roots making inroads to the garden beds. It is even more important if you have a cutsie potager with small beds, because all that hedging robs the goodness from the soil. Really organised or experienced gardeners know to lay a barrier of non rusting iron or similar just below soil level when they first plant the hedge, so containing the roots. But most of rely on the occasional root prune.
• While the dry weather continues and there is some heat in the sun, get out with the push hoe for weeding and to till the top layer of soil. If you rely on spraying weeds with glyphosate long term, you end up with soil which becomes compacted and often develops a top skin of moss or liverwort. Breaking this up with a push hoe aerates the soil as well as giving a more cared-for appearance. Once the autumn and winter really set in, the push hoe is not as useful because you also have to rake up the debris (the sun isn’t hot enough then to dry it for you). Mark, who is on crutches this week and therefore developed cabin fever by the second day, is pondering whether he can attach the push hoe to a crutch and remain active that way.
• Random information from the Curious Gardener’s Almanac: the honeybee kills more people around the world each year than all the poisonous snakes combined, but the creature responsible for the most human deaths worldwide is the mosquito, by a considerable margin.

March 20, 2009 In the Garden

• We are getting back into the ornamental garden here, after the summer hiatus. No planting of woody trees and shrubs yet (wait for the second lot of good rain in succession) but replanting bulbs, lifting and dividing grasses, trimming the formal hedges and repotting some of the container plants. We are even starting the major autumn clean-up round.
• Continue preparing ground for new lawns by levelling the area and push hoeing off the waves of germinating weeds that will attempt to colonise the bare earth. Don’t be tempted to sow grass seed until we get some consistent rain that penetrates more than a centimetre or two.
• Avoid feeding existing lawns in dry weather because fertiliser will kill the grass in sunny, dry conditions. Watch the weather forecast and wait until it is certain that we are in for a wet spell before heading out with the fertiliser. As always, remember that more is not better. If you are using a proprietary product, follow the instructions and err on the mean side, not the generous one. An overdose of fertiliser can cause all sorts of problems, including burning and death.
• Delay no longer on getting the winter vegetable garden in because you are running out of time and good intentions will not fortify you against high winter fresh veg prices or the somewhat dreary alternative of frozen vegetables from the supermarket. You can still get in plants or seeds of cabbages, cauli, broccoli, peas, winter spinach, silver beet, Florence fennel and winter lettuce. Most of the root crops (carrots, parsnips, swedes etc) take longer to mature and you will only get baby specimens if you put them in this late.
• Leafy green vegetables tend to be gross feeders so if you didn’t add plenty of compost, fertiliser or manure to the garden before you planted them, feed them now to encourage plenty of growth.
• If you are using manure, sheep, cattle and horse manure can be added directly to the soil but be a great deal more cautious with chicken manure (or mushroom compost for that matter). If you want to err on the safe side, put them through the compost heap to dilute them before you use them. Chicken manure is very high in ammonia and can burn plants in its fresh state. Seaweed is another natural resource which can be used directly onto the soil or composted as you wish. It does not need to be washed in fresh water first.
• Should you have a patch of common nasturtiums, if you can be bothered gathering the seed pods, when pickled they are almost indistinguishable from expensive capers. If you are desperate to be self sufficient, you can apparently dry the seeds and grind them up as a pepper substitute.
• The quote of the week is sure to appeal to middle aged gardeners and comes from Samuel Butler: “Youth is like spring, an over-praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers, we more than gain in fruits.”
A reassuring thought to one who had an unwelcome birthday last week!

March 13, 2009 In the Garden

  • This week’s cold snap is a reminder that summer really has gone for this season and you mustn’t delay on getting the winter vegetables into the ground. You have missed the boat on brussels and main crop carrots, parsnips and leeks but you can still plant all the brassica family, Florence fennel, spinach, peas and winter salad vegies.
  • Make sure you get around to collecting your harvest of onions, pumpkins and anything else that is ready. It doesn’t do them any good left lying in the open, especially with the rains.
  • If you have spare ground in the vegetable garden, sow down a green crop for winter – lupins, oats or rye. Continually cropping the same ground strips out the goodness from the soil and digging in a green crop later is a much better approach to replenishing the fertility and improving the soil texture than relying on artificial fertilisers.
  • Sow annuals for winter and early spring flowering into trays now, if you want an early start. It is much cheaper to buy seed than plants. Annuals such as pansies, poppies and cornflowers are easy to grow from seed but you need to get them started in trays and then transplant them into the garden when they have a bit of size and a good root system.
  • It is very close to your last chance to prune cherry trees and plum trees this season. Don’t leave it any longer because winter pruning makes them vulnerable to disease, particularly silver blight.
  • It is a good time for taking cuttings of easy to root plants such as fuchsias, vireya rhododendrons, many perennials (ones like pinks and carnations which don’t clump) and even hydrangeas. All these can be rooted without special facilities. Select new growth which is firm and doesn’t snap when flexed, make a clean cut at the base, take a sliver off the bottom 2cm of the cutting (two slivers either side for a vireya) and put into potting mix, preferably one without fertiliser added. Not all plants are easy to root. In fact some are extremely difficult and without a home propagation unit (a hotbed) you are unlikely to succeed with most trees, rhododendrons, camellias and the like. Sadly, most fruit trees are budded or grafted and those that are done from cutting are not likely to root easily for the home gardener.
  • Readers who recall the story last year on the local importers of Italian heirloom vegetable seed may be interested to know that their website is now up and running at http://www.italianseedspronto.co.nz. It is the wrong season for all those delectable tomatoes, basil, aubergines and the like (these are crops to sow in spring) but they do have some interesting brassicas, radicchio and finocchio (the latter being fennel bulbs).

The quote for the week comes from the late, great American architect, Frank Lloyd Wright:

A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his client to plant vines.