Tag Archives: Mark and Abbie Jury

Garden Lore

“It would be worthwhile having a cultivated garden if only to see what Autumn does to it.”

Alfred Austin, The Garden That I Love (1894).

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001Garden lore – rat catching

Sadly, rats are a fact of life and not an indication of squalor as I am sure many river-side residents will know. We get rats here because we have a macadamia nut orchard and processing plant immediately next door and we also have a flowing stream which can bring them in. The current tally this autumn is already 21 despatched. We have a strong preference for trapping, not poisoning these days and a trapping round is part of Mark’s daily routine. He uses small squares of stale bread spread with both butter and peanut butter as bait. The downside of trapping is that you do have to be willing to kill the rat. He used to leave this to the dogs but gave up when one escaped from them. Nowadays, he tips the trapped prey into a sack and whacks the sack on concrete. It is a quick end.
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You can buy poison across the counter but follow instructions. A regional council pest control officer once told me he despaired at the number of people who thought they knew better than to secure the bait because the rat would take it back to its nest. He had pulled out a fridge in a shed and found maybe 200 baits behind, stockpiled by the rats (which were still alive) as a squirrel stockpiles acorns. The bait needs to be secured and out of the way of dogs. We had a dog once that ate rat bait. It was a traumatic wait to see if he would survive. He did. We have also seen one of our dogs and a cat from earlier days get quite ill after eating poisoned rats. The experience of having a dying, poisoned rat wedge itself in the chimney breast (they go in search of water), there to decompose over many weeks put us off poisoning once and for all. Hence the return to trapping.

And I managed to get that far without making a joke about the Pied Piper of Hamilton.

First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.

What price public accountability and garden reviews?

We put the closed sign up late last year

We put the closed sign up late last year

We have been part of the open garden scene in New Zealand for 25 years but at the end of last season we put the closed sign up. We don’t know what the future holds for us yet but we are certainly enjoying taking a year or two out. It is interesting taking a step back.

I have long advocated that it is possible to assess gardens and that not all gardens are equal. Like any other human endeavour, some gardeners are simply better at the task than others. Whether you like a garden is a matter of personal opinion. Whether it is a fine example of gardening is, to my mind, not a matter of opinion but able to be measured by certain criteria. I can think of some very good gardens that are not to my personal taste just as there are gardens that I really enjoy, even though they are not top notch. Mind you, I shy away from the very thought of ranking gardens in a single line hierarchy, as required by competitions. I am only willing to work in broad bands or categories.

I have also advocated strongly for accurate garden descriptions for open gardens. There is a certain folly in letting garden owners write their own descriptions. Some are far too modest and fail to capture the essence of their own place, shying away from anything that might be seen as boastful. Too many, alas, are not.

So it has been interesting this week to debate the issue of garden reviews. This came up on a British gardening website (www.thinkingardens.org.uk) where the editorial policy is of honesty, sometimes brutal honesty. A contributor posted a particularly critical review of the historic garden, Rousham.

Rousham House (photo credit Grahamec via Wikimedia Commons)

Rousham House (photo credit Grahamec via Wikimedia Commons)

I have never been to Rousham which is in Oxfordshire and it is not likely to feature high on our visiting list because we prefer different gardening styles. My English garden guidebook (written by an independent, not the garden owners) describes Rousham as “the most perfect surviving example of William Kent’s landscaping….an Arcadian experience.” It dates back to the early eighteenth century, one of the earliest and best preserved examples of English landscape gardens, drawing on influences from ancient classical times. In other words, it is mostly green and architectural. It is still in private ownership, apparently run with a relatively small budget. According to the reviewer, the owners are not doing a very good job of it.

Does charging an entry fee make a garden fully commercial and therefore fair game for disaffected garden visitors? Most New Zealand open gardens are in a similar position to Rousham (though few are of any historic note). It is a rare garden here that is part of a fully commercialised set-up with cafe, craft shop, plant sales and a full complement of service staff. In fact I can only think of two such privately-owned gardens. Every other private garden I know is a labour of love by individuals where the entry fee, if charged, adds up to a minor contribution to the costs.

Would it help lift open garden standards here if there was a *robust* and public review system? The advent of the internet has made this possible – would the Trip Advisor garden section become an integral part of planning? The neo-liberal, consumer approach says yes. A comment on the aforementioned website by one such on-line reviewer defending himself read: “Being a petty, rude and generally disrespectful smart-arse is the right of those that pay money for a thing.”

We were underwhelmed in every way by this overseas garden so I prefer not to identify it or write about it

We were underwhelmed in every way by this overseas garden so I prefer not to identify it or write about it

I may be a bit old fashioned in these matters, but I think it is a privilege to be able to get into private gardens irrespective of whether an entry fee is paid or not. If I really don’t like a garden after visiting, we analyse the reasons why in private discussion. Would I write a scathing review? No, that just seems discourteous. If I wrote about it, I would try and balance out the negatives with some positives. If there were no positives, I wouldn’t write about it.

On the day we put up the closed sign on our garden, we received our first ever letter of complaint. It was unpleasant, written by an angry woman who accused us of ripping her off. It hurt. Fortunately it is the only one but we have kept it as a reminder. Of course she had paid to come in so she had the right to vent her displeasure. Just as we have the right to decide that we don’t want people like that in our garden. It wouldn’t take too many experiences like that to make us decide never to open again.

So-called honest reviewing and feedback is a fraught path.

First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.

Outdoor Classroom: Layering plants

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA1) Some plants are difficult to propagate from cuttings, even more so for home gardeners without temperature and moisture controlled conditions. If you are not in a hurry, layering a plant can be a simple way of increasing numbers or of getting a back-up plant for rare or special material which may not be available for sale. This rhododendron has layered naturally where branches lie on the ground.
photo 22) The plant needs to have low growing, flexible branches which reach to the ground. You may wish to try layering plants such as magnolias, rhododendrons, camellias, daphnes or conifers. Most woody plants can be layered over time but it is faster to do easily propagated plants like hydrangeas from cuttings.
photo 33) Select a firm branch or stem which can reach to the ground. It does not matter how old the wood is though young growths from last season may root faster. Remove the leaves from the middle if necessary. Slice a thin layer of bark off the lower side (called making a wound). You can paint the wound with rooting hormone if you have it, but this is not critical.
photo 44) Cultivate a small area of ground beneath the branch or dig a small trench. Peg the branch down so the wound is in contact with the soil. A hoop of wire is ideal for this part of the process. Peg it firmly so it cannot move. Cover the pegged area with up to 10cm of soil. You want to prevent the layered stem from drying out. Leave the branch tip uncovered. Now be patient. It will take a year for easy material and maybe as long as three years for difficult to propagate plants such as many of the rhododendrons.
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA5) When the layer has formed a reasonable mass of roots, cut it from the parent plant (think of this as cutting the umbilical cord) and either let it grow a little longer where it is or move it to some well cultivated soil – the vegetable garden is often good – so you can take care of it while it develops into a more sturdy plant.
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA6) You will usually need to stake the plant to train it to grow upwards and to start developing a good shape although you can sometimes plant it on an angle to get the main leader almost vertical.

Plant collector: Aurelian lilies

The lovely Aurelian lily hybrids

The lovely Aurelian lily hybrids

‘Tis the season of the Aurelian lilies. These are hybrids (so crosses of different species) and fall within the trumpet lily group. Their blooms are indeed shaped like trumpets which face outwards, often dropping a little with their weight. And sweetly scented, though not with the heady intensity of the auratum lilies which are just starting to open.

Aurelians are all hybrids of Lilium henryii. It is orange with reflexed petals (so they curve backwards) and no scent but it is a tough survivor. The original crosses were with Lilium sargentiae from China which is a trumpet species so brought in the flower form along with the fragrance. Now the Aurelians are pretty mixed in terms of breeding but typically flower in shades of yellow and apricot orange. Most will set seed so if you can’t find them to buy, you can at least raise seed if you know of somebody with them. These are seedlings Mark raised to build up numbers for the garden. It can take from 3 to 5 years for seed to reach flowering size.

Like most lilies, these bulbs like humus rich conditions and plenty of sun and moisture. They are quite tall – up to 180cm – so grow them amongst plants that you can prop the lily stems up against or they will need individual staking. Despite very sturdy stems, the weight of the flower heads pulls them over. The number of flowers per stem can vary from one (often an indication of weaker bulbs) up to full heads. The most I have counted is 18.

Aurelian was a Roman emperor and, of course, aureum means golden in Latin.

First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.

The answer truly lies in the soil

005 (2)Who has never complained about the absence of flavour in supermarket tomatoes, particularly when out of season? Almost without exception we laud the merits of homegrown produce as being much more flavourful, even more so if crops have been grown from heritage varieties. Very hipster these days. Many people believe that the flavour has been sacrificed in commercial crops in the quest for high production.

Things are never that black and white. For some years, we have been pondering the triggers for flavour. I cite my experience with tomatoes in Southern Italy. A taste treat beyond compare, so full of flavour were they. But it was only the first week of June so it wasn’t a hot, dry summer that determined the quality of the taste. Nor, indeed, was it the variety. In recent years there has been an explosion of heirloom or heritage seed varieties becoming available in this country. We have tried growing a fair number of different ones and, to be ruthlessly honest, while better than the wishy washy supermarket ones, they all fall well short of those I ate in Italy. That leaves the soil as the key variable.

The answer may indeed lie in the soil. Unfortunately the solution is not as simple as scattering fertiliser with added trace elements, which is the usual recommended treatment. We have taken good care of our soils here and believed that we made good, balanced compost to nourish them. I use the past tense – believed. Summer reading here is “The Intelligent Gardener” by Steve Soloman. That is to say, Mark is reading it and sharing the highlights as he goes. While some of the book drives him nuts, the underlying premises make a lot of sense. Our soils are almost certainly nowhere near as good as we thought.
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The subtitle of the book is “Growing Nutrient-Dense Food”. Nutrient density has been hovering on the periphery of our lives ever since Kay Baxter started writing about it. It is the principle that you can have two apparently similar crops but one has a much higher nutritional value than the other. Kay Baxter is the leading light of the Koanga Institute and a true pioneer of organics and the preservation of heirloom and heritage varieties in this country. She advocates the use of Brix measures to determine nutrient density. Brix are commonly used in the wine industry to measure sugar content.

It may be something of a leap to link flavour to nutrient density, but it seems logical that there may well be such a link and certainly both go back to the nature of the soil.

As a country, New Zealand has some widely recognised soil deficiencies. Insufficient naturally-occurring iodine is why we have iodised salt in this country. Prior to that, goitre was very common in humans and indeed in animals. “Bush sickness” is a widely recognised problem attributable to cobalt deficiencies on pumice soils. Selenium is deficient. At the risk of treading on sensitive ground in the Waikato, I understand that the trace element fluorine is deficient in NZ which is a major contributor to why New Zealanders have long been renowned for poor teeth. According to my father, who was a medico in the British army in WW2, they could pick the NZ soldiers at time of autopsy because most had false teeth. Correspondingly, pre-dental bleaching, all those beaming white toothy smiles of many Americans were apparently attributable to higher levels of naturally occurring fluorine.

If you are really keen on running a closed system of food production with no external inputs, it matters a great deal that you understand the exact composition of your soils in considerable detail. Even then, it is not as simple as topping up a certain element because there are reactions and inhibitors which can affect the ability of soils to incorporate additions. But most of us get our food from a variety of sources, which means deficiencies don’t usually have dire effects on human health because there is a degree of balancing out which occurs.

Mark is planning to delve further into the exact compositions of our soils. We are interested to see whether better balanced soils will give us better flavoured food. We will be watching to see if the link between flavour and nutrient density is proven. Certainly, it is disconcerting to have our existing notions about the quality of our soil and compost turned upside down. But this is not a once over lightly project which will appeal to all gardeners.

If you want to know more, the Koanga website is: http://koanga.org.nz/ The book referred to is “The Intelligent Gardener” by Steve Soloman. (New Society Publishers; ISBN:978 0 86571 718 3). Elder daughter purchased it for her father from the bookshop of Canberra Botanic Gardens. In this country, you may need to order it, in which case the ISBN number is important.

First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.