Tag Archives: Taranaki gardens

Tikorangi notes: Friday 25 May, 2012

Latest posts:

1) Reviewing our mixed borders (and why the old fashioned activity of reading books can have quite an impact).
2) Iochroma grandiflorum (blue tubular trumpets non-stop for the past seven months or more).
3) Grow it yourself: rosemary
4) It has not been a good year for monarch butterflies in the garden – our garden diary from the Weekend Gardener.
5) Revisiting garden mulch options in Outdoor Classroom.

I can’t think I have ever written about maples (except maybe Acer griseum which is notable for its superb bark). Part of the reason could be that I have never got to grips with names of the cultivars we grow here. I recall Mark and I taking a tour of the British Hardy Plants Society around the garden one time. They were a knowledgeable crew but they also collected plant names as some collect autographs – it didn’t matter if they could never grow the plant in the UK. Every plant had to be recorded. Between us, Mark and I could name everything except… the irises and the maples.

At this time of the year, the maples come into their own. Some have lovely autumn colour. Most have a lovely form which comes into sharp relief as the foliage colours and falls. They are pretty in fresh growth in spring, and fit in very well over summer (as long as they are well sheltered from wind), but it is the bare form that I like the most. They clean up very well with a little pruning and grooming to make excellent skeletons in winter.

Plant Collector: Cyclamen purpurascens

Cyclamen purpurascens seems to be in flower pretty well all year

Cyclamen purpurascens seems to be in flower pretty well all year

We are big fans of the species cyclamen and C. purpurascens is starring as a garden plant. Astoundingly, this patch in the rockery flowers almost twelve months of the year and doesn’t go dormant. Most of the species cyclamen are from Southern Europe through to North Africa and are therefore used to distinct wet and dry seasons and often poor, stony conditions. C. purpurascens has a far wider distribution into Northern Europe where it is more of a woodland plant, often found growing naturally in beach forests.

It appears that we are quite lucky that our form of this cyclamen is good, clean cerise colour as it is sometimes found more in muddy pink shades but like most species, the colour can vary across the spectrum of pinks and very occasionally turning up in white.

C. purpurascens has typical heart shaped leaves, dark green mottled with silvery white markings. It grows from a round, flat tuber as do other cyclamen. Given its wonderful performance as a garden plant over several years here, the only downside is that it sets very little seed. This will be why you don’t see it around much. The common C. hederafolium sets seed freely and naturalises readily if given the chance whereas we have to be vigilant to spot the occasional seed on C. purpurascens. If you can find it, give the tuber cool, moist growing conditions which are rich in humus. Moist does not mean permanently wet – which may rot out the tuber. We have it growing on the shady side of the rockery.

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

Differing shades of organic gardening (akin to the sliding scale of vegetarianism)

Anything but organic.....

Anything but organic…..

I see Prince Charles feels vindicated about organic gardening, pointing out that when he first started talking about it, he was the subject of much derision. There is no doubt that the prince is a very keen gardener and he has been a flag bearer for organic techniques in the ornamental garden as well as the kitchen garden. I just recall some discussion about him advocating talking to one’s plants which still seems perilously close to being flaky in my books.

But Prince Charles is absolutely right about home organics. In fact the chemical approach to weed and pest control is comparatively recent, dating back to about the 1950s, as is the routine use of manufactured fertiliser. It was the result of war technology. We’ve been getting steadily better but the intervening decades were not gardening’s finest hours and some pretty dodgy practices and attitudes linger on.

We never describe ourselves as organic gardeners because we are not. We do, however, follow many organic gardening practices because they make good sense in terms of gardening in harmony with nature and enhancing the environment. This is not true of all gardening, much of which has to do with imposing human will upon nature.

As a result of this, we spend a fair amount of time on a quest for reliable information. There is an awful lot of puffery around organics, from flaky thinking to fervent faith, but that does not mean the underpinning principles are wrong. It just means it is a little harder to decode some of it. We’ve still come up short on good information regarding nutritional density, but given time, I am sure we can find that out.

In the meantime, it may help readers to think of organic gardening running a similar line to vegetarian diets – there are a whole lot of points on the continuum where you can find your niche. Starting from one extreme, you have the old fashioned eater whose dinner plate is 50% meat (usually red), 35% spuds and the remainder in consolation green veg. This gardener sees nothing wrong with pouring on insecticides, fungicides and herbicides, along with chemical fertilisers. We won’t dwell too long on this 1960s model.

The realisation of heavy carbon footprints and lack of flavour in food which saw a return to seasonal eating, and then to eating locally produced foods may be analogous to the home gardeners who suddenly decide they must have raised vegetable beds on the quest for self sufficiency. It matters not that they are filling the beds with compost mix sourced from the garden centre, trucked considerable distance and packed in heavy plastic bags. Nor does it matter that any resulting produce will be extremely expensive. They have made a start and they claim it is organic because they are not using sprays. At this point, organics has more to do with what is being left out rather than a change to the way we garden and it tends to be the domain of the enthusiast who is not always particularly well informed or indeed experienced.

Move along to the partial vegetarian movement (which seems sometimes to extend to the genre of foraging and wild foods). We belong around here – two or three meals a week which are vegetarian and always seasonal using our own produce. Gardening organically at this point has much to do with sustainable practice wedded to pragmatism. We factor in issues such as plant and seed selection, plant heath, soil health, maintaining ecosystems, composting, mulching, and lawn management to avoid needing to spray or feed. But we want to be able to get crops of tomatoes through and we are yet to be convinced you can do that organically in our climate. We make relatively well informed choices in food and gardening.

Genuine vegetarians usually underpin their diet choice with philosophical beliefs. Many will eat dairy products and eggs, some even fish. But others will shun any dead animal products including cheeses made with animal rennet, even leather shoes. Being a certified organic gardener tends to come parallel at about this point. It is much more rigorous and prescriptive while offering the security of rules to follow.

At the far end of the spectrum are the vegans, probably matched in gardening by those who operate closed horticultural systems (with no external inputs) and biodynamics. While there is a tendency to accord these extremes the mantle of purity, the higher moral ground, in practice they are usually more faith based than science based. Neither a vegan diet nor a closed growing system is complete in the long term without supplements.

So organics is not a hard and fast set of rules, unless you are after accreditation. What is really interesting to us about Prince Charles is that he is serious about having a beautiful, traditional garden, all the while applying organic principles at every level, not just to his cauliflowers. It is looking increasingly like common sense these days. We just wish we could afford the prince’s eighteen garden staff to help us towards greater purity in gardening practice.

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

Grow it yourself: aubergines

GIY – aubergines

Goodness knows why these are described as eggplants – some varieties are egg shaped? The texture can be a little like an over-boiled egg in its shell? Aubergine is a much more attractive name for what is widely seen as a sophisticated vegetable, showing up ever more frequently in modern NZ recipes. The problem with aubergines is getting your timing right because they need maximum heat all summer long. Essentially you need three to four months of warm weather to get a worthwhile harvest and, being a plant from warm climates, it will succumb as soon as temperatures drop in autumn. For most of us, this means starting the plants in pots under cover so they have some size before planting them out when soil temperatures rise in November. You can either buy a few plants from the garden centre or start from seed. If you choose the latter, you may do better if you go for quicker maturing varieties with smaller fruit.

Aubergines are solanums along with potatoes, capsicums and tomatoes but they are not as easy to grow. They like humus rich, friable soils in full sun. Once you have planted them out, treat them like a capsicum or even a tomato. They may need staking if they start to fall over. They will benefit from early pinching out of new shoots to encourage them to be bushy. They will need watering in dry summer times. But the bottom line is that you don’t have established plants in the ground by the beginning of December, you have missed the boat.

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

Tikorangi Notes: Friday 11 May, 2012

Monarch butterfly on Dichroa versicolour

Monarch butterfly on Dichroa versicolour

1) Garden diary – in praise of cheering pink sasanquas and being grateful for living in a mild climate.
2) Step by step instructions on how to prune raspberries – Outdoor Classroom revisited.
3) Passing the sniff test – fragrant and scented plants.
4) Metasequoia glyptostroboides Such a difficult name for a magnificent tree. It is no wonder it is oft referred to as the dawn redwood (a living fossil).
5) Grow it Yourself – cape gooseberries or, more correctly, Physalis peruviana.
6) Nothing to do with gardening, but there are new reviews on my book site (http://www.runningfurs.com) including three cookbooks – Jax Cooks, Dulcie May Kitchen and Nadia’s Kitchen – and assorted children’s picture books including a couple of exceptionally good ones.

I have an admission to make – the monarch butterfly was in fact dead. They’re easier to photograph that way and we have an alarmingly low number of live monarchs this year (blame the wet and cold summer – more on that topic later). There were not enough fluttering around for me to snap with the camera. In fact we still have an abundance of swan plants which are now interplanted with stinging nettle. Why stinging nettle? Because we are besotted with butterflies and we won’t get the beautiful red and yellow admirals in the garden unless we have their host food which, unfortunately, is stinging nettle.