When times get tough, the tough get gardening.

I heard a throwaway comment on National Radio last week that when economic times get tough, people turn to drinking, gardening and for the life of me I can no longer recall what the third activity was. I stopped listening after gardening. It is certainly true that when life was tough in the late eighties, gardening boomed. Cottage gardening, to be precise. Back in those days there was a sharp differential between prices charged for easy to grow perennials and much more difficult and slow to produce woody trees and shrubs. So perennials were perceived as cheap and good value. These days any differential has all but disappeared and you pay the same for a good perennial, most of which are just divided up and grown for a season, as you pay for many woody plants which can take considerable skill to propagate and which then have to be grown for two to four years before sale. Cottage gardening fell from popularity too, as people discovered that it is not an easy care style which looks after itself, but is in fact a great deal more labour intensive than using permanent trees and shrubs.

But I digress. We are certainly seeing a return to gardening on a scale few foresaw, although at this stage it is all about vegetables and fruit. Every man, woman, their dog and their child has a patch of potatoes and a few beans in. It is great to see and the advantage of growing vegetables is the quick turnaround with positive reinforcement. It is most satisfying to walk straight through the fruit and veg department of the supermarket without stopping because you have all you need of these at home.

However, while vegetables and fruit feed the body, I doubt that there are many gardeners who find that they feed the soul and please the aesthetic sense. And should I whisper that while I love the fresh produce that Mark obligingly provides every day, I am getting just a teensy bit bored with only reading about growing vegetables and what to do with surplus in all the gardening media. I know it is all the rage, but I have yet to see a veg garden which makes my eyes light up or which holds me in awe at its charm or beauty. I am hoping that all those people who trek into the garden centre to buy little brassica plants or carrot seed are going to cast their eyes a little wider and to consider that a garden does not have to be totally productive and utilitarian. There is a place for both and I don’t mean potagers or edging in buxus hedging (which, by the way, harbours snails and sucks the goodness from the soil with its competing strong root system). I am hoping that a whole new tribe of garden converts will come to realise that the ornamental garden (possibly interspersed with some curly leafed lettuces and parsley) can give all year round form, interest and colour for little purpose other than to bring you pleasure.

As I look out my window, I see the delightful flowers on Cyclamen hederafolium. Cabbages and carrots are not going to make me smile and look again because of their sheer fresh prettiness. While we are a little shocked here at how quickly summer beat a retreat this year, at least the change in weather gives the message to a different range of plants that now is the time to leap into flower. The earliest nerines are already flowering, moraea polystycha (lovely blue flowered form of the peacock iris) has started its long flowering season and the mats of ornamental oxalis are starting to feature.
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Mark is beginning to worry about his rock melon crop. Finally he achieved what he expected to be gardening nirvana – a large, fully producing rock melon patch where he managed the timing just right. He planted several different varieties. The earliest one set an abundance of fruit but we have juiced most of them because they do not reach the sweet and tropical sensation of a really good rock melon. The heirloom variety has all but succumbed to mildew which is a disappointment and gives lie to the theory that heirloom varieties are all healthier and more robust because the neighbouring modern hybrids have remained perfectly healthy. The later fruiting varieties (in other words, they need a longer growing season to reach maturity) have set an abundance of fruit. Our mouths were watering. Now we fear that early onset autumn may prevent them reaching perfect ripeness. Mark is threatening that his planned new veg garden may end up being a collection of covered houses – one for rock melons, another for tomatoes, a pineapple house, banana house and goodness knows what else. Come back, Sun, and warm and ripen the rock melons.
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If you want to see more of the Christchurch Ellerslie Flower Show (and Mark Sainsbury’s coverage on Close Up was extremely limited), you can catch it on TV1 tomorrow morning at 9.30am. While the little we have seen so far suggests that the supreme award may be a case of the emperor’s new clothes, Christchurch has introduced new energies to this event and it deserves to be a huge success. Early indications are that the trend in gardens is not only sustainability and productivity but also a return to the value of recreating something that is more natural than the contrived formality that has dominated in recent times. Don’t worry if you like your formal garden. These fashions seem to go in cycles of about five years duration. Remember when all we ever saw were outdoor spaces dominated by rocks, scleranthus and sanseveria or a yucca? What goes around comes around but at the moment, naturalism seems to be new flavour of our time. Not to be confused with naturism. I don’t think society is quite ready for that at Ellerslie yet.

March 6, 2009 In the Garden

·         If you have outdoor grapevines which you have not yet covered, get the bird netting on as a top priority if you want any crop at all. The birds will eat them at an earlier stage than you and will completely strip the crop or open up the fruit for wasp attack.

·         A reminder to prune the fruited canes off your raspberries, if you have not yet done so (and we haven’t). If they have borne fruit this year, they are now redundant and merely clutter the place up because next summer’s fruit will be set on this season’s fresh growth.

·         Do a feeding round now on fruit trees, both deciduous and citrus. Feeding deciduous trees such as apples and plums now gives them time to take up the sustenance before they go dormant. If you are avoiding ready mix fertilisers, rich compost can be used but don’t build the layer up around the trunk.

·         March heralds the start of autumn. While we can expect a very long and mild autumn in our climate, getting the winter vegetables in should be a priority so they can do all their growing done and then most will just sit and hold in the ground when the cold weather comes. Winter vegetables take in the brassicas, winter spinach, peas and root crops such as carrots, swedes and parsnips. Sow the root crops first because they need longer to grow and it is getting late for them. It is the late winter and early spring vegetables which are the most expensive to buy so successional sowings now will save money later.

·         Gardeners in colder, inland areas should be starting to think about a pruning round on hedges because the plants are happier if they can make a small amount of fresh growth before colder temperatures stop them from growing until spring. The trick is to get the timing right so that growth is just a neat fresh flush and not a full on growth which will look untidy in winter.

·         A buxus expert we spoke to this week tells us that buxus blight (which turns the plants brown in big, spreading patches) is made a great deal worse by feeding and watering. Plants which are grown in drier, harder conditions will stay healthier. She also thins her plants to keep air movement. If you want to try and hold buxus blight at bay, don’t let your plants get too dense. She confirmed the advice we gave readers earlier: if you have a bad infestation, burn the plants and replace them with something different. Long term, there is little chance of beating buxus blight so the sooner you bite the bullet, the sooner you get other plants established.

·         Henry Mitchell, the deceased garden columnist for the Washington Post, wrote as recently as 1998: “There is a dangerous doctrine – dangerous because it precludes endless gardening pleasures – that every plant in the garden should be disease-free, bug-free, hardy to cold, resistant to heat and drought, cheap to buy and available at any garden centre.” Nothing has changed in the past decade, except that the plant is now expected to be low maintenance as well as all of the above.

February 28 2009, In the Garden this Week

  • Gardeners who prefer ornamentals to vegetables will be pleased that the heat of summer is disappearing and we have had some rains because it means you can get back into the garden. The summer rest is almost over. You can be dividing spring and early summer flowering perennials at this time, but if you dig up entire clumps, water them back in. Perennials do much better in well cultivated ground and when they are not too congested and solid. If you are a novice and wondering what a perennial is, they are the clumping plants without woody stems and trunks which build up below ground with many growth points – plants like begonias, bergenias and most of the daisy family.
  • Get on to lifting and dividing spring bulbs now because many are starting to put out fresh white roots.
  • Deadhead agapanthus as they finish flowering if you have plants bordering streams or reserves. They are such a significant part of our summer landscape that we would be the poorer without them but some seed alarmingly and we don’t need them classified as a noxious weed, as in Northland.
  • • If you have plans for laying fresh lawns this year, start work on them now by levelling and getting rid of weeds. It is too early to sow seed or lay lawn but the effort made now to drastically reduce resident weed seeds will pay dividends when you do get your lawn in.
  • Do not think you will green up dry, tired looking existing lawns by sprinkling fertiliser at this time. You are more likely to kill the remaining grass. Wait for the rains to come and then get out the fertiliser if you must. Using a mulcher mower means that you don’t usually need to fertilise. You can deal to flat weeds in the lawn at this time, either by hand (an old carving knife is a good tool) or by selective sprays if you are still using them.
  • In the vegetable garden, it is time to be a busy beaver getting in crops for winter. Sowing a few cabbages, cauliflower and broccoli each fortnight is better than doing one big hit because you want them to mature in stages. You can also be planting winter lettuce (which is leafy not hearting), Florence fennel (truly the most versatile of vegetables), beetroot, peas, green beans and carrots. It is nearly the end of green bean time so give these priority.
  • Sow micro greens in a tray if you want a delicious quick turn around of salad veg which would cost you a great deal more to buy. At this time of the year, it is only a matter of weeks before you can start harvesting tender leaves.
  • If your monarch caterpillars have stripped your swan plant supply, you can raise the larger sized caterpillars on pumpkin. Watch where you are walking because they will migrate in search of more food and they will also chrysalis sooner when faced with the threat of starvation.

It being harvest time for sweetcorn, the Curious Gardener’s Almanac tells us not only that sex is good but not as good as fresh sweet corn (!) but that if you lack kindling wood, the stalks of sweetcorn plants when dried and stored make excellent firelighters.

In Praise of Kay Baxter's Work

We have a great deal of respect for Kay Baxter and the work of the Koanga Institute she founded in Northland. More than anybody else we know of, she brings a wealth of practical experience to the whole field of organics and self sufficiency. I can’t think that we have ever met her, although He of the Elephantine Memory recalls that she was on the student executive when we were at Massey in the early 1970s. They were heady days to be a student. We were a highly politicised generation at the time of the Vietnam War when the nuclear threat was also at a peak. Many of us chose to explore alternative lifestyles (variously described as communes, communities, ohus, counter culture, self sufficiency, The Good Life and even hippies). We opted for a largely self sufficient lifestyle on three acres in Dunedin. But whereas most of us became diverted by other goals in life, Kay Baxter stayed true and she now has nearly forty years of experience which she shares with passion and generosity.

The Koanga Garden Guide is one of the references we have at hand when we compile In the Garden each week. It is quite simply the best book we have found on organic gardening and all those readers and enthusiasts out there who espouse organic principles should be getting their own copy. There is a great deal more to organics than just doing away with sprays and chemical fertilisers. Kay Baxter brings critical analysis and rigour to the process, avoiding the flakiness and woolly assertions which can be off-putting to hardened old cynics such as us. For the learner gardener, there is a month by month guide as well as details on a full range of crops while experienced gardeners may find her information on carbon content of compost, nutrient density, no-dig gardening versus double digging and the like give food for thought. Mark’s one criticism is the lack of an index at the back but this will apparently be rectified in future editions.

One can’t mention Koanga and Kay Baxter without adding in heirloom fruit and vegetables in the same breath. Many pay lip service to the importance of retaining bio-diversity and keeping old seed strains and good performing old cultivars going but it does tend to be along the lines of: “My, don’t the apples on that old tree taste great. Why doesn’t somebody propagate it?” Kay Baxter does. She has spent years gathering together the old varieties of edible crops in this country and they are being maintained and dispersed through Koanga. We would hesitate before going so far as to say old varieties (when they are old enough they become heirloom) are invariably superior in performance, taste, nutrition and health to modern cultivars but in an era of increasing industrialisation of global food production, it is really important that a whole range of different genetic material be maintained. Kay Baxter also points out that you need to find the heirloom crops which are local to your area. There is absolutely no guarantee that heirloom tomatoes from Italian sourced seed will be as good here. Last year when we put out a call in this column for good performing apricot trees in Taranaki, readers responded with about four different trees. Based on that info, we now have Apricot Fitzroy, of which we have high hopes. It is a shame none of you offered up good performing fruiting cherry trees this year…. But, yes we can certainly understand that true heirloom crops may be very localised and there is a great deal of trial and error required to find what performs well. We think Kay Baxter should be given a medal for the work she and her colleagues have done in this whole area.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma is a best seller by American writer Michael Pollan which is a must-read for anybody who has concerns about the directions of food production and the quality of food which they put in their mouths, let alone reducing one’s personal carbon footprint. I will never buy corn fed chicken again. The information on the industrialisation of mass organic food production will remove the virtuous glow you feel when you reach for the organic products at the supermarket. I have to admit that I only read this book by proxy. That is to say Mark is a caring and sharing sort of reader who likes to discuss all the interesting bits. And there were a lot of interesting bits in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Our discussions set the scene for Kay Baxter’s latest book, Change of Heart, the Ecology of Nourishing Food, co-written with her partner, Bob Corker.

When the copy of Change of Heart arrived, at first glance I wondered if I should be reviewing it for the food pages, not the gardening pages. It is ostensibly a book of recipes, but not your usual stand-alone ideas for something different for dinner. Overall, it is a collective recipe for a major change in lifestyle. The authors synthesise a number of different movements which often run parallel but separate to each other, including organics, sustainability, seasonal eating and sourcing local food. Their purpose is to address what they see as a loss of nutrients in modern diets and to show how it is possible to redress many of these issues in the family kitchen at a practical daily level but strongly based in past traditions.

The result is a very interesting philosophy. Mark and I have spent countless hours in the last few weeks discussing this whole approach to food production, diet and lifestyle. We are still debating it, analysing it, critiquing it and sorting out where the concepts fit with our lives. Much of it is controversial and turns conventional wisdom on its ear. The authors have turned their backs on vegetarianism and strongly advocate the use of traditional fats and oils, actively debunking the negative role currently assigned to animal fats. While modern nutritionists may shudder at the return to eating and cooking with animal fats, this can not be taken in isolation from the whole diet which is dominated by whole foods produced by traditional methods along with soaking and fermentation, including lacto fermentation of a whole range of different foods, some of which you may never have thought to ferment. I was particularly pleased to see that my frequent use of broths is soundly based but those whose diets are very high in beans, pulses and grains may find some of their current practices challenged. The reservation about soy-based products is interesting (as The Omnivore’s Dilemma is interesting about corn).

If you enjoy having pre-conceived notions challenged or are looking for alternatives, this is a thought provoking book based on keen observation and decades of learning at a practical level backed up by some wider research. While the authors personally practice self sufficiency, it is not a pre-requisite for this change in eating habits, though it is a corollary and an affirmation for readers who are aiming for a high level of self sufficiency.

Kay Baxter’s books are published privately through Body and Soul Publishing. If your local bookshop can’t help (though with their ISBN numbers, they should be able to), you can mail order from the Koanga Gardens Centre for Sustainable Living (www.koanga.co.nz).

The Omnivore’s Dilemma is an international best seller and probably in every library and many bookshops.

Koanga Garden Guide ISBN 978 0 9582894 0 5
Change of Heart ISBN 978 0 9582894 5 0

February 20, 2009 In the Garden

• The spring flowering bulbs we have been lifting from the garden are resolutely dormant but the pots in the nursery are already showing fresh white roots. This is because the nursery is under irrigation and it is the advent of autumn rains which triggers most spring bulbs into growth. The message is clear – don’t delay on lifting garden bulbs that you plan to divide. The early March rains are likely to send them into growth and you will damage the young roots if you leave it too long. This includes bluebells (do these first) and daffodils.
• The rain bucketing down here today has been greeted by Mark’s usual response: “Good news. There will be no drought this year.” But when the fine weather returns, keep up daily watering on container plants and don’t be forgetting to top up the goldfish pond if you have one. Fish get stressed when the water is too warm.
• In the height of summer, lettuce, rocket and mesclun tend to bolt to seed before maturity. With cooler weather just around the corner, it is safe to return to planting these crops with a reasonable expectation of a harvest.
• It is time to be getting in the late autumn and winter crops. Leeks are the most urgent crop to get in. Root crops such as carrots, parsnips and swedes if you fancy them can still be sown from seed now. The brassica family and Florence fennel will give the winter greens and can all be planted. Some people recommend getting broad beans in this early though it is usual to leave them until April. Dwarf beans can still be planted.
• While seeds are considerably cheaper than plants to buy, you can be even more economical and save seed of many crops. Clean the seed as you harvest it and store it in recycled envelopes with the date and variety written on the outside. Make sure the seeds are kept dry and, above all, away from anywhere the little autumn mice can locate them. Mark is using an old fridge (switched off) for this purpose. Any plants which are labelled F1 hybrids will not come true from seed but most crops can be grown from home harvested seed. The original seed packet will tell you if it is an F1 hybrid.
• Those of us who raise our eyebrows at the hyperbole of some people’s garden descriptions may enjoy Edward Augustus Bowles who wrote in 1914: “How magnificent it sounds! That is the fun of writing of one’s garden: a steep bank can be a cliff, a puddle a pool, a pool a lake, bog and moraine sound as though a guide were needed to find your way across them, and yet may be covered by a sheet of the Times. My Dolomites lie within the compass of my outstretched arms.” Mark has always been of the view that by definition a lake is a body of water sufficiently large upon which to water ski. Anything smaller is a pond.