Tag Archives: in the garden this week

Tikorangi Notes: June 18, 2010

LATEST POSTS:

1) June 18, 2010 Camellia Diplomacy to breach closed doors in China in 1970 didn’t work, but the correspondence from Rewi Alley to Mark’s parents is pretty interesting forty years later – Abbie’s column.

2) June 18, 2010 The flowers of Dombeya burgessiae make a change to the more common camellias putting on a mid-winter show.

3) June 18, 2010 In the garden this week – recommended tasks from winter pruning, cleaning up pleione bulbs to the short directions on preparing an asparagus bed. Don’t forget to plant only NZ grown garlic.

4) Our annual garden festival at the end of October is still four months off, but gardeners around the province have preparations in hand and are counting down to Festival.

Mandarins - fetching winter colour in the garden

TIKORANGI NOTES:
The winter sight of mandarins ripening in the garden here at Tikorangi never fails to delight me. My memories of my Dunedin childhood in the relatively deep south are of mandarins as a fleeting seasonal luxury to be treasured and savoured. I couldn’t believe the sight of entire trees dripping in the little orange orbs when Mark first brought me to his family home. This particular one is easy peel and productive but not the best flavour. However, it puts on a splendid visual display and combines well with the ferns, orange and yellow Lachenalia aloides beneath.

Rescuing the lawnmower from a watery slide

We are sodden here and entire days without rain are a rare treat, or so it seems after the last couple of weeks. Mowing the park yesterday, Lloyd managed to put our prized Walker mower in a slide which saw it in imminent danger of gently slipping into the stream. A chain and the tractor were called for. Roll on spring.

In the Garden: June 18, 2010

Pleione bulbs

Pleione bulbs - discard the mushy, dark ones like the specimen to the left

  • The winter solstice or shortest day of the year is nigh – this coming Monday in fact. Alas the worst of the winter weather hits after the shortest day but at least you can console yourself with the thought that the days are lengthening again.
  • Traditionalists will be out planting their garlic (ours is in already). If you don’t have big fat cloves saved from last season, then make sure you only buy New Zealand garlic for planting. The cheap Chinese garlic comes from the wrong hemisphere so is out of its seasonal cycle and is reputedly riddled with virus which threatens our local garlic industry. You also have no idea what it has been treated with so it is all round bad practice to buy cheap imported garlic for planting.
  • Asparagus is a luxury crop for the home gardener because it is a permanent plant which takes up space all year for a harvest lasting only six weeks or so. It also takes a few years to start cropping well so is unsuitable unless you are planning on staying in the same place. But for those with space and the long term commitment, heading out to pick some spears in spring is a gourmet experience. If you have a patch, now is the time to clean it up and spread a blanket of compost to feed the crowns below the ground and to suppress weeds. If you have plans to plant an asparagus patch this spring, then get in now and dig the area. Then double dig it. Add as much compost and manure as you can and dig it yet again. Then let it rest and mature before planting in a couple of months time.
  • Winter is the time for pruning all deciduous plants except for cherries (both ornamental and edible) and plums which are summer pruned to prevent silver blight getting in. Gardeners in cold, frost-prone areas are best to leave their hydrangeas until last (pruning encourages growth which can then get burned by frost). But wisterias, roses, apples, grapevines and the rest can all be tackled over the next six weeks.
  • We did Outdoor Classrooms last year on pruning wisterias and grapevines (these are on http://www.abbiejury.co.nz and on Stuff (Deb, are these still accessible on the Fairfax site?) We will be looking at pruning roses and hydrangeas shortly. Don’t cut your wisteria off at ground level if you want flowers this spring.
  • Most spring bulbs are in growth already so it is time to look at planting or lifting and dividing the summer bulbs – particularly lilies.
  • Pleione orchids are spring flowering but now is the time to clean up clumps and repot because they are still dormant. These are a most attractive and hardy ground orchid, often called the teacup orchid. If you look after them, they build up quite quickly and we find them useful for carpeting woodland margins where conditions are open. The prized yellow ones like a winter chill so will do better inland and in the south but we find the pinks, lilacs and whites are equally at home in milder areas. It pays to clean them up now (discard the soft, mushy black bulbs and keep the fresh green or red ones, trimming off last season’s dead roots) because root disturbance on pleiones once they are in growth is a no-no.

In the garden this week: June 11, 2010

Our kereru in the apple tree

  • Tuesday’s bitter cold,  coming as it did after a cold and rainy Queen’s Birthday, was a reminder of why really keen gardeners like to have both a good, weather-proof shed and a glasshouse. A glasshouse makes raising micro veg, mesclun mix and rocket in trays over winter a great deal easier. It also enables you to plan ahead, sow seed and have plants in little pots ready to go out to the garden as soon as conditions are right.
  • Sitting around of a winter’s morning drinking coffee and discussing celery (as we do here), I realised that we have never even mentioned celery in these weekly hints. That is because it can be a very difficult crop to grow well and in the combined experience of growing vegetables here, totalling about 60 years between Mark and Lloyd, both agreed that it is hardly worth the effort for the stringy green stems that result. And if you try blanching the stems to reduce the greening which makes it strongly flavoured and tough, it tends to create a lovely home for slugs. Then leaf diseases defoliate the plants.  We have long figured that it is easier to buy the clean stems from the supermarket when required even if they are hardly organic.
  • If you want the taste and texture of celery at home, celeriac gives the flavour and is a great deal easier to grow successfully.  And Florence fennel or finnochio is a reasonable substitute for the texture (and actually more delicious in our opinion). Both celeriac and fennel also hold very well in the garden, giving a longer season. You can sow celeriac and fennel seed from late August onwards, earlier if in pots under cover. If you want to try celery, you can start it at the same time for summer harvest and follow up with a sowing around Christmas for winter harvest. Treat all three crops as gross feeding, green leafy crops not root vegetables.
  • Plant garlic, shallots, broad beans and the unfussy brassicas.
  • We have a kereru (wood pigeon) which comes in repeatedly to feed from the remnant apple leaves still on our espaliered apple trees outside the kitchen window. There are always tui visible, currently feeding from the early camellias (they need to be simple, single flowers with visible stamens to feed the birds), monarch butterflies are cold but still here and ladybirds are creeping in our wooden joinery to hibernate in the folds of the curtains. We have to take care not to vacuum the ladybirds up when they fall. One of the pleasures of having a garden is the chain of nature it can encourage.
  • Keep an eye on your favourite garden centres to see what new stock they are taking delivery of at this time. It should include fruit trees, new season’s roses, strawberries, all the deciduous crops such as magnolias and cherry trees along with a range of shrubs – all suitable for immediate planting.

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.

In the garden: May 21, 2010

• I read in Monday’s paper that the average Brit spends six months of his or life discussing the weather. I wonder if that could be doubled for gardeners everywhere? Last weekend’s rain and fresh coating of snow on our mountain is a timely reminder that the chill of winter is just around the corner. Make the most of the milder autumn weather still lingering on.
• If your dahlia plants were too big, fell apart from the middle and flopped over this year, it is probably a sign that there are too many tubers. In cold climates, dahlias are lifted every year and over-wintered under cover. Here, where most of us just leave them to their own devices, often as roadside plantings, that lifting and thinning process does not happen. Be ruthless. As they die off for winter, lift and thin. You will get a much better display next summer and autumn.
• It is a good time to lift and divide day lilies (hemerocallis) which respond well to a bit of attention occasionally. If the clump is very congested, it is often the outer part which contains the greatest vigour and strength so discard the middle.
• Plant brassicas for spring eating and broad beans too. Continue sowing leafy greens to ensure regular harvests. Most of the quick maturing Asian greens can be grown over winter as well as silver beet and winter spinach. Peas can also be planted.
• Get an autumn copper spray onto citrus trees to prevent leaf drop, fruit rotting on the tree and a range of nasties. This is a critical spray to carry out if you want to protect your harvest. Mandarins are particularly vulnerable.
• Don’t let the autumn leaves build up in your fish ponds. Rotting leaves can reduce the oxygen levels in the water and even kill the fish in extreme cases.
• Keep a sharp eye on weeds. With the shortening day length, pesky cress does not bother about growing large. It just goes straight to seed, as do other weeds.
• Green crops must be sown now if they are to make some sort of growth before winter and to justify their role in nourishing the vegetable garden. Don’t put it off. Green crops develop a root system which makes the soil much easier to break up and till in the spring, particularly with heavier soils.