We had a minor triumph here with the first bowl of home grown strawberries this week. It is necessary to cover your strawberries with netting if you want a harvest. The birds are willing to eat them as soon as a small amount of red shows so will beat you to the fruit pretty well every time. We need a little more warmth and sun to bring up the sugar levels but the first fruit of the season are pretty special when you grow them yourself.
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• Limes have a much shorter season than lemons but are excellent to use if, like ours, they are thin skinned and full of juice. A gin drinking friend tells me that you can freeze slices of fresh lime and use them instead of ice cubes in your G & T. A Chinese garden visitor told us it is common practice in Asia to freeze fresh lime slices for use in cooking. And the fresh new leaves are excellent to use in Asian cooking over the next couple of months. They are tender and very aromatic at this time of the year. If you have the space and are in a warmish area, it is worth growing both a lime and a lemon tree.
• We grow quite a bit of citrus fruit in our garden and have fresh oranges all year round. Mark’s parents discovered 40 years ago that having citrus grafted onto trifoliata stock is the secret to growing them successfully this far south.
• This is the worst time of the year for weed growth. Stop this first crop of weeds going to seed or you will rue your failure for years to come. Push hoeing is very effective on a sunny day when the sun will frazzle the weeds but you have to push hoe before the seed heads have formed or rake up the weeds to prevent spreading the seeds.
• Do not delay any longer on getting woody trees and shrubs into the ground so they can get settled in before drier and warmer conditions come (which they will). If you are in an area which dries out quickly (coastal areas like Pukearuhe and Patea), you can heel plants into the vegetable garden for summer and relocate to their final position in autumn.
• Getting the vegetable garden producing for summer and autumn should be a priority. Aubergines, melons, tomatoes, all the members of the cucurbit family (cucumbers, courgettes, pumpkins and the like), main crop potatoes, sweetcorn and kumara can go in now.
• For a fun activity with children, plant sunflower seeds. There is little to rival a giant sunflower for a sense of achievement though you do need to think ahead on how you plan to stake a 2 to 3 metre triffid because the achievement is equalled by the disappointment when littlies find their giant has fallen over or bent and snapped. Dwarf sunflowers are for adults. Give children the real McCoy at least once in their life.
• Start deadheading rhodos as they finish flowering. Apparently if you oil your fingers (olive oil is fine), you don’t get the sticky residue on your fingers.

To be honest, we won’t be doing much in the garden this week beyond talking to visitors and whipping around with the blower vac and lawnmower. Like many others, we are entering our single biggest open garden week of the year. If you don’t have your own garden open, then get out and visit some who do. Even vegetable garden fans have a selection this year in an innovative move (check out the Rhododendron Festival programme for these). What is more, the veg gardens are free or donation only. There is no excuse for staying at home this week.

• If you are tempted to buy plants (and Festival week is a big retail week) get them into the ground as soon as possible because dry and warm weather will come soon. We do not recommend teasing out the roots at planting. The only time the roots should be touched is when you can see a pot-bound plant has resorted to growing its main roots around in circles. In this case you need to liberate the roots or cut them because the poor plant will just stay with spiralling roots. Otherwise, it tends to do more damage than good to tease them out. Make sure you cultivate the ground well so that the young roots can grow out further, plant to the same level as in the pot, firm it down but don’t stamp it down vigorously and mulch it. You can add fertiliser if it makes you happy but we tend to rely on home made compost to feed the plants. Rhododendrons perform best with good drainage (never plant in heavy wet conditions), good air circulation (reduces pests and disease) and reasonable light levels (or they may not set flower buds and can get leggy). Sun for half the day is ideal.
• Now is the optimum time to fertilise most plants. They are in full growth and the uptake of the fertiliser will be most efficient. Read the instructions on quantity – more is not better and you can burn the roots by over fertilising which can result in leaf scorch.
• Deadhead pieris (often called lily of the valley shrubs) if you want good flower set for next season.
• The great vegetable plant out continues. Give priority to crops which need the longest growing season (tomatoes, melons, kumara etc) and to crops which you plant in succession to ensure ongoing harvests ( green beans, peas, corn and salad vegetables). It is important to keep your vegetable garden soils light and aerated. Quick maturing plants don’t like heavy, compacted soil. Avoid walking on beds where you can and make the push hoe your friend.
• Pumpkins can be started on a mound comprised of layers of soil and lawn clippings. The decomposing grass generates heat which speeds up germination and initial growth considerably. Don’t make the heap too big or you may cook the seeds. A metre wide by 60cm high is about the right size.
• Shun hormone spray at this time of the year if you have planted out your tomatoes or have grapevines. Hormone sprays are often used on lawns.

The quote from the week is a thought to ponder while out garden visiting and comes from American landscape architect Thomas Church:

Style is a matter of taste, design a matter of principles.

It is always great to see new businesses come to town and even more so when they bring us Italian flavours with the requisite Italian panache and style. Italian Seeds Pronto are New Plymouth based but offer a national mail order service supplying seed of heirloom and heritage vegetable varieties sourced from Italy. They kindly sent samples of pomodoro tomatoes and basil seed packets and I can’t report on the growth and flavour until the end of the season. But if you have ever been to Italy and sampled their very flavoursome fresh produce (best tomatoes I have ever eaten were the ones I consumed there in May), you may want to look at their stylish catalogue. From Italian parsley through to finocchio (fennel bulbs are a favourite here), a range of tomatoes, lettuces, radicchio, Roman cauliflower, rockets, celeriac and more are all available in seed packets.

There is a section of certified organic seed all priced at $8 a packet while the remainder at $6.90 a packet and the catalogue tells you how many seeds you can expect for your money. These seem to be very generous so you can share with friends.

Their website is not up and running yet but they can be contacted at italianseedspronto@ihug.co.nz or phone/fax +64 6 758 4190.

Labour Weekend is traditionally the big time for the vegetable garden plant out, unless you live inland in areas which get late frosts. Certainly in coastal areas, it should be safe now to get pretty well all crops and small plants out into the open. If you are taking plants out from covered conditions in a glasshouse, they may need some hardening off if by some miracle we have warm sunny weather. Give them a couple of hours in the sun and then cover them up with shade cloth or newspaper or any other light cover to stop the sun from burning tender foliage.

• You can now sow direct into the ground such tender crops as melons, tomatoes, cucumbers, pumpkin and capsicum but you will get more growth if you start them off in containers in a glasshouse. Corn can be sown straight into the garden now and repeating this fortnightly through the season will extend the supply. It is the same with successional sowings of dwarf beans, peas and lettuces. Get main crop potatoes in and start the kumaras.
• If you have veg plants in pots under cover, take care that they do not get stunted in their growth by getting dry, starved or too big for their pots. Crops like corn never fully recover from being set back and will respond to stress by bolting into flower early as small plants.
• If you are planning to plant hedges, trees or shrubs, get onto it as soon as possible so the plants have a chance to settle in and make some new root growth before we get an extended dry period. We can warm up and dry out alarmingly quickly in early November, especially close to the coast. Ensure that the root ball of the plant is wet through and lay mulch on top of the soil to slow drying out.
• All gardens will benefit from laying mulch. This needs to go on before the soil dries out, not after. A good mulch adds humus to the soil and stops it from getting parched and cracking.

If the weeding calls you, take note of Christopher Lloyd’s comments: Many gardeners will agree that hand-weeding is not the terrible drudgery that it is often made out to be. Some people find it a kind of soothing monotony. It leaves their minds free to develop the plot for their next novel or to perfect the brilliant repartee with which they should have encountered a relative’s latest example of unreasonableness.

When our good friend Tony Barnes was quoted on the gardening pages last week as saying that clivias are generally immune to slug and snail damage, he did not mean that these little critters shun the clivias… What he meant (we assume) is that they don’t eat them. However, if you have a slug and snail problem on nearby plants, you may find that they have taken up residence between the clivia leaves. A daytime search yielded up around 15 or 20 snails hiding in each clivia clump in one of our garden borders. As clivias are often companion planted with hostas, it pays to be aware that they may be daytime sleeping in the clivias and night-time feeding on the surrounding plants.

• While on the subject of hostas, you can still lift and divide these as they come into leaf. Make sure you replant into well cultivated soil. Similarly, clivias can be lifted and divided even when they are in flower.
• Mark the location of daffodil clumps which failed to flower well this spring because you will forget where they are when they go dormant. Dig and thin the patch to encourage flowering or relocate them all to a sunnier position.
• Time is running out for the spring pruning of evergreens… We are starting to panic here so if you haven’t done yours, you are not alone but don’t delay.
• If you have never seen a davidia involucrata (also known as the Dove Tree, Ghost Tree or Handkerchief Tree) in full flower, go and see the one at Tupare. They take a long time to flower but when they do, it can look as if somebody has pegged white hankies all over the tree.
• You are running out of time to get summer crops such as melons, tomatoes, cucumbers and kumaras started – all the crops which need as long a growing season as possible. You can buy plants but it is much cheaper to do it from seed. Scarlet runner beans and green beans can be started now. These are heavy cropping, easy and reliable for home gardeners to grow and should be sown in fortnightly succession to ensure continued supply.
• Earth up early potatoes as they grow. This is reputed to encourage better potato set and reduces competing weeds at the same time.
• Now is the optimum time for getting your vegetable garden producing to maximum capacity for summer crops so don’t put it off any longer.
• If you want big leeks, you can start them now from seed, either in trays or directly into the garden. Leek planting can continue through summer, depending on how large your like your leeks to be. However, it is getting late for onions but you can still get a good crop if you get the seed in now.
• We have never had much success with growing celery and much prefer Florence fennel, but if you like the former, you can sow seed now to plant out in December. The Curious Gardener’s Almanac claims that eating celery results in negative calories. Apparently it burns up more calories to eat a piece of celery than the celery has in it to start with. That is assuming you don’t fill the central cavity with peanut butter or cream cheese.