- Cut the spent flowers off your hellebores to stop the likely infestation of aphids, which find them a pleasant home, and to prevent them self seeding.
- You still have time to start your own summer veg from seed but don’t delay with tomatoes, cucumbers, melons, aubergines, capsicums and the like. These are all started off sown in trays or pots for planting out in the garden later next month. If you only want one or two plants, it is probably just as cheap to buy the plants as packets of seed but sowing seed gives you the chance to be generous and share plants with friends and family.
- Mark will be starting his corn in baby pots here. It is too early to plant out in the open yet but this being his most favourite vegetable of all, he likes to maximize the season and to get an early start with established plants.
- Cloches come into their own at this time of the year. They will warm the soil more quickly, so allowing earlier planting out. They will also protect young crops and keep rain splash off micro greens.
- In the ornamental garden, dahlias can be lifted and divided.
- Feed roses if you have yet to do so. They are in full growth now so will have maximum uptake of fertiliser. If you are laying mulch around your roses, keep it well clear of the rose crown near the ground.
- Kumara can be chitted, like potatoes. Place them on damp sawdust, straw or even crumpled newspaper in a warm, dark spot to encourage them to start sprouting. Kumara are another crop that needs maximum growing time, so the timing of planting out is important.
- Get a copper spray onto deciduous fruit trees as they break dormancy. This is a key application to prevent problems later and is the single most important spray of the season.
Tag Archives: vegetable gardening
Grow it Yourself Vegetables, by Andrew Steens.
In that great surge of garden books on growing edible plants, it is a relief to see one from an author who is doing more than just documenting his or her first year of trial and error, or relying on other people’s research. Andrew Steens brings experience, enthusiasm and qualifications right across the spectrum of gardening and horticulture, focussing in this case on growing vegetables. Readers of the Weekend Gardener will recognise him as one of the panel of fortnightly contributors charting activities (of the fruit and veg persuasion) in their own home gardens. That level of hands on experience does shine through. He has written a book which will pretty much tell you what you need to know about how to grow vegetables and which crops to grow and how to manage your productive garden in a sustainable way. Unusually, he has also given his personal picks for top performing selections by name which is helpful.
On the downside, it is by no means the sharpest designed reference book I have seen. It is a little busy and cluttered which makes it harder to use. There were times I felt that more rigorous editing would have sharpened the writing and cut out some of the extraneous detail which includes preaching to the converted. The author’s recent experience is from Point Wells, north of Auckland. Writing a book to cover all of NZ, which has huge climatic variation, is a big ask. He has made a good fist of it, but I think that southern gardeners may pick more holes in it than we spotted. The big problem that Mark noticed immediately is that the diagrams showing sowing times for marginal crops are way out. If you sow your melons or aubergines in December and January here, you won’t get a crop. They need a long growing season. This appears to be another design flaw. If you read the detail of the text, Steens is absolutely correct when he says they need to be sown from seed and started in small pots well in advance for planting out when the soils have warmed. But that is not what the dinky diagrams on each page tell you because they fail entirely to differentiate between sowing seed direct into the garden or using plants that you started under cover two months earlier.
Despite those reservations, this is certainly one of the better recent publications on the topic full of practical advice and a useful reference.
(Published by Bateman; ISBN 978 1 86953 761 6.)
Separating the genuine enthusiasts from candyfloss fashion gardening
Christmas must be close. The New Zealand garden book market has sprung into life and vegetable gardening is still red hot. Two titles landed simultaneously, both veg garden guides and both by younger women who represent the new face of gardening in this country. Auckland landscaper Xanthe White gives us a month by month guide for the novice vegetable gardener while Auckland food writer and keen vegetable gardener Sally Cameron gives us the Tui version of the famed Yates Garden Guide, though focused only on vegetables and herbs.
The NZ Vegetable Garden is a solid book, designed to be used repeatedly (good PVC plastic cover). Yes it is sponsored by Tui but that is generally unobtrusive. The text avoids the cult of the personality so the book may well have some longevity on the shelf because it is a genuinely useful guide to growing vegetables and herbs at home. It contains most things you are likely to need to look up on both individual crops and on the wider management of the edible garden. Of course one can go through and pick holes and criticize individual details but the bottom line is that this is a pretty comprehensive, well organized book with good layout and helpful photos. It is a reference book and it avoids dumbing down or over simplifying the subject. There is a bit of crossover into the kitchen which is entirely appropriate – handy instructions on sprouting your own beans and one tasty but practical recipe per vegetable or herb. Sally Cameron’s last book, Grow It, Cook It, was a more personal effort. As I recall, I commented at the time that it was better on the recipes than the veg growing side. I wouldn’t say that about this book which we will be keeping on our own garden reference bookshelf.
I have one pedantic niggle. Last time I looked, the adjective from fungus was fungal, upon occasion even fungoid. Fungous is something that has the transitory nature of a fungus. So the useful chapter on fungous diseases should really be on fungal diseases. But they can change that on a reprint and this book may well prove to be worth its salt as a useful reference and therefore run to reprints.
Organic Vegetable Gardening has the look of a book dreamed up by the publishers. I am not sure how long the lead-in time is but I am guessing eighteen months to two years. So if you imagine up on the top floor of Random House Publishing, the editors and managers met and the conversation may have run as follows:
“Item 5 on the agenda: Christmas 09. Wot’s gonna be hot for 09?”
“I have a list here. Home mechanics. Making new clothes from old. Surviving the property crash. Return to floral art. Organic vegetable gardening…”
“That’s a good one. Organics are hot. Vegetables are hot. Great idea. Now who can we get to do it and give us a fresh face which appeals to both Gen X and Gen Y?”
“How about Xanthe White? Good designer. Young, trendy, lovely smile. Won a silver gilt at Chelsea, don’t you know. Now the pin-up girl for motherhood. Smart too, and can write.”
“Great. But does she know anything about growing vegetables?”
“What does that matter? If she doesn’t know anything, she can do it on the run and record progress as she goes. I can see the press release now: walk alongside Xanthe as she learns…”
“Hasn’t that been done already? Don’t Lynda Hallinan and the gals at The Gardener have that area pretty well sewn up?”
“Well, yes and no. They are moving on. They are hardly novices any longer. No, there is going to be an empty space there. Let’s give Xanthe the role.”
“But how about the organics side? Does Xanthe know about organics?”
“Look, what is Google for? Besides we are all organic at heart, aren’t we? Organics is as much about what you leave out (the toxins and chemicals) as about what you actually do.”
“Great. All go. Sign Xanthe. Now what sponsors do we have for this book and what sponsors is Xanthe likely to be able to bring on board with her?”
The result is learn how to garden one step behind the charming Xanthe, who is undeniably somewhat glamorous in a wholesome new age sort of way, but a book driven by the cult of the personality, intrusive product placement, and superficial, with no depth of experience in either organics or growing vegetables. So we have advice such as that on digging. “Never dig any deeper than 10cm unless preparing for a very specific need, otherwise you will upset the natural structure of the soil.” Pardon me, but didn’t I just read about Xanthe gardening in raised beds with soil mixes (Daltons Lawn Mix, shipped in from Matamata, no less) and composts brought in from elsewhere? Where is the soil structure she wants to protect? And if you garden on poor soils, are you not trying to alter the soil structure for better outcomes?
I am not confident about the advice on composts either. Do people really need to be told not to put metals or plastics in their compost bin? Let alone painted timber. “No, Phil, you can not put the old weatherboards in the compost bin. Hire a skip.” And if you are going to put a blanket ban on adding any manure from animals which eat meat, this rules out Grunt, the ever useful pig compost, ZooDoo, and chook manure. Poultry are not vegetarian. But honestly, how many new veg gardeners from Ponsonby and Grey Lynn are going to pile the kiddies into the people mover of a weekend and drive out to the country to slip a few dollars into the hands of some friendly farmer (just look for the one wearing an old straw hat, chewing on a piece of hay and speaking in the thick accent as befits Friendly Yokel) just so they can buy some wholesome horse or cattle manure for the compost heap at home (page 61, I kid you not).
There has been some heavy criticism here of the claim in the book title to be organic. It is fine to write a book aimed at young women from St Heliers and Grey Lynn who probably drive SUVs but want a potager and a home orchard. It is not fine to reduce organics to the same level. We are keen to see organics demystified, separated from the flakey side which confuses faith and good practice and given some clarity of thought. Alas this book reduces organics to cliché.
But spare a thought for poor Xanthe. Presumably the crop of books for the 2010 Christmas market is well underway already. Odds on Sally Cameron will have been given the topic of a manual on caring for the home orchard. All those multitudinous fruit trees sold over the past couple of years will be needing some attention by then. The topic should sit well with Sally’s style and Tui’s sponsorship. And Sally can do splendid seasonal recipes to go with harvests.
I had already predicted that Xanthe’s allocated topic for next year would likely be the low maintenance productive garden, notwithstanding the fact that vegetable gardens and easy care are mutually exclusive concepts. The October copy of the The Gardener magazine arrived, in which Xanthe has a page where she solves readers’ design problems. There is the letter: “We live on a lifestyle block with four young kids and don’t have much time for gardening. But I’d love to have fruit trees and veges. I want a funky, colourful, edible jungle … but it would need to be low maintenance.” Funky? Colourful? Edible jungle? But low maintenance? Xanthe is a professional landscape designer with an established reputation. I sure hope she is paid well to deal with this type of candyfloss fashion gardening.
The NZ Vegetable Garden, Sally Cameron (Penguin, ISBN 978 014 320228 8)
Organic Vegetable Gardening, Xanthe White (Godwit, ISBN 978 1 86962 1551)
Tikorangi The Jury Garden 