Tag Archives: Abbie Jury

In the Garden: May 28, 2010

The banana crop this year was particularly disappointing. Mark took the teasing in good heart and blames a few severe frosts last year at a time when we were overseas

• It is time to batten down the hatches for winter. If you have frost tender plants you need to get under cover, don’t delay. Mark spent the better part of the weekend building a Rolls Royce protective shield for his fruiting bananas, so determined is he to get a good crop through next summer. Reduce watering of house plants and move sensitive plants off window sills. Never let them sit in water (the fastest killer of African violets) and remove saucers from beneath outdoor container plants.
• Valiantly eating my way, mostly singlehandedly, through the feijoa crop, I can report that the fruit from the old fashioned Coolidgei is a great deal tastier than the more common Unique. As the fruiting season finishes, you can get in and do any pruning you think is required. This is an optional activity but I did notice in our Urenui days that the row of four very large plants on our boundary which were mostly shaped to a single leader with a canopy made gathering the fruit a great deal easier than our current bushier plants. If you only get pathetic little fruit, you probably have seedling grown hedging. You will need to buy a named variety if you want good sized fruit in the future. To extend the harvesting season, you will need to plant early, mid and late fruiting varieties – check www.feijoa.org.nz for recommendations. Most named varieties are self fertile.
• Mark is pleased to still be harvesting fresh corn and green beans. It has been a bit of a close-run thing on whether the last sowings will get through in time but there is no doubt that you can extend the season by successional plantings. We would be harvesting yams at this time, had they been planted last spring.
• Think garlic and shallot planting for the veg garden along with broad beans. It is the optimum time for all three crops. Garlic and shallots like really well cultivated and enriched soil but incorporate any animal manure and compost a few weeks in advance of planting to give it a chance to settle and mellow.
• Generally speaking, the next major planting push in the veg garden will not happen until August when temperatures start to rise again. Wise gardeners will try and keep weeds under control in the interim but you have basically left it too late for sowing green crops.
• Queen’s Birthday weekend is coming up soon – this is traditionally rose buying time when garden centres take delivery of new season’s crops. The timing of rose pruning is flexible. While gardeners in colder spots will want to delay pruning until later in winter, in warmer areas it is fine to prune any time from now through to the end of August.

Flowering this week: Backhousia citriodora

The lemon fragrance from Backhousia citrodora has to be experienced to be believed

I would be the first to admit that the creamy fluffy floral clusters of this small(ish) tree are not showstoppers though they are pretty enough in their own way and make a change for autumn flowering. Nor are the long narrow leaves eye-catching though the red-brown velvety new growth is very tactile. In fact, the visuals of this plant are remarkably modest especially when you consider it is an Australian from the coastal rainforests of Queensland and northern New South Wales. The knock-you-dead aspect is the lemon fragrance when you crush or even brush past a leaf and the flowers also exude wafts of lemon. It has quite the most delicious lemon scent of any plant I know, bar none. This is apparently because Backhousia citriodora, commonly referred to as the lemon myrtle, has higher concentration of citral (lemon oils) than many other plants, including lemon verbena. In fact it is harvested commercially for lemon flavouring. I have to admit that I have not tried it in a culinary context but I will do so. You can apparently use the leaf whole (like a bay leaf) or chopped and it will give a lemon flavour without the problems of curdling, even in milk puddings. So I have read.

While not overly hardy, if given some protection when young, the backhousia should be able to grow throughout most of our area. I have seen it in a protected valley in Canberra Botanic Gardens where apparently it can survive frosts of 8 degrees. It is a member of the myrtle family and it can be clipped. This may be a plant to put alongside a bay tree in the vegetable garden or plant it by a path so you can pluck a leaf to sniff when you pass.

Getting the best from bananas in marginal conditions – step-by-step with Abbie and Mark Jury

A step by step guide by Abbie and Mark Jury first published in the Taranaki Daily News and reproduced here with permission as a PDF.

New Outdoor Classrooms are uploaded fortnightly.

A Worm's Tale

Presumably called tiger worms because of their stripes, not their size or ferocity

Mark has been having fun with tiger worm jokes. Tiger worms are what you commonly have in your worm farm and they are voracious devourers of vegetative waste. But we found in Radio New Zealand’s archives an interview from last year where Kim Hill interrogated her gardening guest on a range of topics including aforementioned tiger worms. Said guest was badly out of her depth although she knew a smidgen more than Kim (who is clearly no gardener) so she survived on a degree of bluff. But the suggestion that you want to try and keep your tiger worms in your worm farm and that if they escape to your garden they may eat your root vegetables (as in, they may have eaten Kim’s missing radishes) had us snortling in derision. Yes snortling – that is a combination of snorting and chortling.

Mark has taken to issuing warnings. Round up your tiger worms now and corral them back to the worm farm. Tiger worms are so-called because they have jaws with sharp teeth. The reason why you should never put meat in your compost is because the tiger worms develop a taste for it. Haven’t you heard about the elderly gardener who tripped and fell by her worm farm and all they found was a skeleton after the tiger worms had finished? Licences are about to be issued before you are allowed to have tiger worms on your premises and an inspector will ensure that you have them suitably housed and restrained.

The bottom lines are that while tiger worms are entirely suited to worm farms, they can be found elsewhere in the garden. Worms only process dead and decaying matter, not living plants. They have no teeth and jaws to chomp into your root vegetables. Slugs, snails and weevils will attack your plants but the faithful garden worm will not. There are many different types of worms and some, like the tiger worm or Eisenia foetida, are designed to accelerate the process of composting. Others prefer to live deeper in garden soils and these are the ones who help to aerate the ground by burrowing. A garden full of worms is a sign of good soil health and to be valued. If you spot the somewhat striped tiger worm in your garden soils, it is more likely to be an indication that you have a humus-rich layer of mulch on top.

I am sure it is a hard enough life being a worm without being accused of eating the vegetable crop. It is, by the way, apparently a myth that if you cut a worm in half, both halves will survive. They merely wriggle and die. While a worm can survive losing a bit off the end of its tail, it is not quite as resilient as many of us were brought up to believe. Oh dear, I wonder how many humble earth worms we gardeners sever in their prime or are we liberating them from life’s mortal coils?

The perils of the monochromatic colour scheme in gardening

A random stranger in blue beside the blue and purple border at Sissinghurst

Back in the days when I first started writing this column and we were in the grip of seven day a week retail and mailorder plant supply, I used to despair at the numbers of well-heeled women in search of plants for their white garden. Mostly from Remmers, dear, and most had been to the ultimate white garden – designed and planted by Vita Sackville West at Sissinghurst in England. It was seen as the benchmark for restrained style and class and all wanted to emulate that standard. So all plants had to have white flowers and preferably be scented. Yellow stamens were permitted and cream was allowed but no other colour in the flowers. Fading out to white fell short and white flushed pink flowers were usually rejected as impure.

There were rules for foliage too. Green was fine, silver foliage even better. Variegations were acceptable as long as they were white and green with no yellow or red.

Apparently the secret of the white garden is revealed at night when all those pure flowers light up under moonlight to glow with ethereal beauty. Experienced gardeners realise instantly that this means it needs to be a summer garden because who wants to go out in winter or early spring to see the glowing white rhododendrons and camellias but not many white garden devotees of the early nineties were experienced. I recall reading a critique at the time that far too many of the white gardens were thrown together solely on the basis of colour. As long as it was white, it could be included. Gardens were criticised for the lack of thought given to planting combinations and inappropriate conditions for many of the plant subjects.

When we finally visited Sissinghurst, I was excited at the prospect of seeing the ultimate white garden put together with skill – where plant composition, shape and foliage combinations rule supreme, without the distraction of colours beyond white and green. Alas I was underwhelmed, disappointed. It rather looked to me like plants selected solely on flower and foliage colour bunged in together. So much for setting the standard. It may well have been different in the original days of Vita Sackville-West but in 2009 it didn’t quite cut the mustard.

Colour and flowers hide a multitude of sins. The purple border at Sissinghurst was far more successful on the day we were there and that in part could be attributed to the huge range of tones in blues and purples. There is not a lot of variation of hues of white and cream so it is harder to get visual oomph.

I suspect that monochromatic garden schemes are often the refuge of less experienced gardeners but in fact they require considerable knowledge and skill to get them looking good. They are not actually monochromatic because gardens have green as a base colour but that is generally treated as colour neutral. If you garden only with foliage or with foliage and only one additional colour, then form and texture are your tools and the plants you chose to complement each other and to fill the picture become critical. At its best, it is a restrained and disciplined approach to gardening which can be very restful to the eye. More often, alas, it is a hodgepodge – sometimes a pretentious hodgepodge – or downright dull.