45.8 Degrees Celcius

That’s what the temperature hit in Sydney today – 114.4F – the hottest day ever recorded. As you walked outside the heat hit you violently and even the grass was too hot to walk on.

I watered the garden deeply in the morning, yet at lunchtime many of my plants looked like they had given up.

The new growth on the citrus was frizzled

 

The silverbeet had melted

And the daikon was suffering.

I hope there is no lasting damage. A friend of mine in the mountains (where it was 46.5C/115.7F) lost a number of plants today, but i’m hoping mine will pull through.

Luckily we were safely in the air conditioned house, but I really feel for those (particularly sick and elderly people) with no way to keep cool.

Last summer we had only two days over 30 degrees. The difference this year is staggering, and much more like the years I remember from my childhood, although with more extremes.

I hope all the other Sydney gardeners coped OK today and that the weather in other parts of the world has been kinder.

Slowing the summer bolt to seed

I’ve been musing about something I’ve noticed over the past 2 years about green leafy herbs. Specifically, parsley, coriander and basil.

A few months ago I sowed a few separate patches of continental parsley at the same time. One was in full sun on the south-most corner of Bed A. The other was right up against the house in Bed B, getting only a few hours of sun per day. I would have expected that the parsley in full sun would be more prone to bolting to seed, but quite the opposite has happened.

Here is the patch out the front in full sun.

And here is the patch in part shade. It’s bolting.

The difference is water. The one out the front gets water from the tap when it drips, whereas the other only gets the rain (and when I think to water it).

I observed the same thing with my potted coriander. Going along quite happily until it dried out for a very short time, then wham! Off to seed.

So my new theory is this (probably bleeding obvious to those who have a clue about these things):

Stress of any form (heat, water, transplanting, lack of nutrients etc) will cause bolting. That’s why coriander seedlings also fail – transplant shock sends them straight to seed.

Has anyone tried growing coriander in a self-watering pot? Do you get longer out of it? I think I’ll try it, and also be sure to keep it well fertilised. I’m getting confident that I might be able to grow coriander more successfully in summer that way.

A great summer for chillies

With all that rain last year I struggled with chillies, but this year it has been hotter and the plants are thriving.

My Tobago Seasoning chillies are prolific and much hotter than last year. Who needs a Christmas tree when you have gorgeous ornaments like these?

Most of the chillies are habanero-esque like last year,

While others look more like Liz’s scotch bonnet (or bishop’s crown).

My old faithful bird’s eye is going through its green-black-red sequence

The jalapenos are producing amazingly well and my long red thai chillies (retrieved from my restaurant curry) are starting to produce now.

Also enjoying the heat are the lebanese eggplants, which are approaching first harvest rapidly.

 

And I’m happy to report that the fruit fly have been far less destructive this year, although number are increasing now.

Happy Summer everyone! Hope you are enjoying the tennis

Update from a lapsed blogger

Well it’s the day for it, isn’t it? New year, resolutions and all that? Actually it’s just that today is as good a day as any for an update on what’s happening around here.

In October I had more demands on the family front and decided to switch off the computer in the evenings. I started playing jazz music after the kids went to bed, took up competitive canasta with P and enjoyed a few months of down-time from the Internet. Our end-of year is always crazy with 5 family birthdays, our wedding anniversary and all the usual Christmas events so the timing was good. This year I’m back but I’ll be blogging more ‘sustainably’. That is, at a schedule I can maintain rather than pushing myself to update every Monday on harvests (and the like).

I’ve still been gardening and harvesting, but I admit that I have dropped the ball a little over December. So first the walk of shame:

I killed one of my Nellie Kelly blueberries! I let it carry too much fruit and it dried out one day in the summer heat. The rest are OK, and I’ve harvested almost a kilo of blueberries so far this year. The lesson I’ve taken from this is that I really need to thin the fruit, because the fruit size seems to be inversely-proportional to the number of fruit set. My younger plants with less fruit are producing enormous blueberries.

And my tomatoes. They look terrible.

The ones in the main bed have suffered terribly from fungal disease and lack of nutrients. Despite this they have actually fruited well. I’ve used them fresh and even canned a few bottles for a later date when I don’t have an excess.

I’ve discovered a new variety that I love – Speckled Roman.

I pulled put my dwarf mulberry tree because it was getting too big and donated it to friends who have more space. Now I have an ugly gap that I need to fill, but I’ll probably just space out the dwarf citrus trees that are already there.

And my banana:

Strangely the flower stopped descending, but the bananas themselves are still developing.

But there are highlights too. My caper bush is loving the hot weather.

The apple trees have been really productive. I’ve lost no fruit at all to fruit fly, even the ones that I didn’t bag. I guess the eco naturalure trap has helped with that.

I let about 30 fruit develop on the trees this summer and most of it has been quite sizeable.

The Golden Nugget pumpkins are sprawling across the front lawn as usual preventing proper mowing.

And the chillies are really exciting. My tobago seasoning chilli has set loads of fruit

I also have many young plants, such as the mini mana capsicums and scotch bonnet chillies grown from seed from Liz and the jalapenos grown from seedlings this year.

I managed to kill my old reliable bird’s eye chilli over winter, but my friend Vincent gave me an established (that’s understatement) plant to replace it.

This variety first came from Sarah, who gave small homegrown chilli plants to some of her friends for Christmas. They ripen from green to black and then red, and we’ve all loved this variety ever since. He’s is one of the ripe bird’s eyes with the tobago seasonings:

I’ve had dreadful trouble with broodiness in the chickens. It’s common for us to have 4 of them broody at once, and it really impacts the egg production. But they have still managed to keep us supplied with eggs, albeit with no excess for gifting.

And on the preserving front – I reestablished my supply of bottled tomatoes with my friend Emma in November when we processed a large tray of fresh seconds from a tomato farm local to her in-law’s place. I’ve been topping up my store a few jars at a time when I have a small glut in my home grown ones. I’ve also canned applesauce made from my home-grown apples and made loads of Liz’s bread and butter cucumbers.

And just today I’ve pickled 2 jars of jalapenos from the ones I picked today. The plants are loaded with young jalapenos too, so there should be more jars to come.

Well that’s what’s happening around here. Now I’m off to see what everyone else in the blogging world has been up to over the last 2 months.

My Dwarf Banana is flowering!

There was all manner of terrible titles I could have given this post. Please appreciate my restraint.

It is a good indication of how distracted I’ve been over the past week when I say that I noticed this last Saturday

A banana flower, 20 months after planting the tiny pup. This is a dwarf cavendish banana, and it was sold as a ‘cool climate’ banana in Bunnings.

Over the week I’ve been checking the progress daily as the flower petals unfurl to expose more hands of tiny bananas. This is what it looked like a week ago:

And today:

It looks like some of the bananas have been bruised in the unfurling process. I read that they are extremely delicate at this stage and even leaves brushing against them in the wind is enough to damage them.

At first I was very worried about the angle of the flower and whether it was going to grow over (or right into) the side fence. Luckily it seems to have turned downwards fairly quickly.

P estimates that I might have somewhere between 150 and 200 bananas on the bunch. Should keep us in smoothies for a while!

New Growth

I love spring for all the rapid new growth that plants put on. When it warms up, but not so much that the plants are stressed.

My Australian native finger lime is loaded with flowers 

My new baby caper bush is actually putting out leaves

The overwintered capsicums have all woken from their slumber

If only just…

And the rhubarb is rapidly growing more and more monstrous.

The challenges are that the weeds are doing the same thing. The summer weeds, dormant in the cold are now springing back to life too.

Now is the time to be getting your mulch ready to suppress weeds and protect the plant roots from the soaring heat of summer.

Meet the new additions

As mentioned in my last post, I’m constructing a wall of espaliered citrus varieties.

We trekked out to Dural (North-West Sydney) today to buy the trees because they have specialist citrus grower Engalls out there.

I have a very understanding family!

In the end I only bought one of my trees there because the trees were all a bit too good! I plan to start my espalier quite low to the ground, so it was important that the trees I bought were still pretty young and whippy. If they are too established then they won’t be ‘bendy’ enough for me to manipulate them into the shape I want. Engalls sold beautiful established trees – too strong to bend to my will.

I’m planning on using the KNNN method championed by Bob Magnus. Thanks to Bek for the link.

Bob says I need to use dwarf trees for the KNNN method. I like breaking rules, and given the low-light situation a bit of ‘rapid growth’ might be just what I need.

I had a chat with the lovely and helpful guy at Engalls, and he quickly shot down the idea of a grapefruit. Apparently you really need a full-sized tree to support fruit that size. He also tried to dissuade me from a mandarin because their structure doesn’t suit espaliering very well. He said that I should absolutely get a Tahitian lime because they are the best suited of all, and a Meyer lemon because they are close behind. Apart from that, oranges are also well suited.

I mostly listened to him, but ended up pushing my luck a little.

So I bought:

A Tahitian Lime and a Meyer Lemon

An Imperial Mandarin and Eureka Lemon

And a Nagami Cumquat and a Tarocco Blood Orange

According to the expert, I’m going to struggle a little with the cumquat and the mandarin, but I’m willing to take a risk. I can always transplant out to another location (maybe even where the mulberry currently lives!)

So I spread them out along the fence to get an idea of placement. Gosh – that backyard is a mess!

And I’m struggling a little with the decision. The trees at the right will get the most light. I think the first 3 from the right will do pretty well. The last 3 will be under the tree and will struggle more. So, should I give the most promising varieties (Lime, Meyer Lemon, Eureka Lemon) the prized positions and let the others struggle, or do I give the ones that are more likely to struggle the most light, and perhaps fail at the lot?

Next step, sledgehammer. The beds are coming out!

And once the banana fruits, it is too.

Dwarf Mulberry – An Error

My dwarf black mulberry tree is planted in the ground at the side of my front yard. I planted a number of my fruit trees there in March 2011 – it was a hasty decision brought about by the theft of a number of my trees from pots.

All of these trees are dwarf, but what I didn’t realise when I planted them out is that dwarf is a relative term, and that a dwarf of one tree may end up much bigger than the dwarf of another.

This brings me to my dwarf mulberry. You can see here that it has grown way beyond the proportion of the other trees.

It has been pruned heavily many times, but comes back with a vengeance and fruits prolifically again. The trunk has gone from the tiny stick it was 15 months ago to a monster trunk that gets fatter daily.

At the moment it is carrying a heavy load of fruit

And it is ripening at the moment

The nursery I bought it from said that I could keep it pruned, but I realise now that while it’s growing in the ground I am not going to be able to sufficiently contain its growth. It is going to overwhelm everything around it, and become more unwieldy every day.

So I realise that it has to come out – back into a large pot. But the question is when?

Ideally, I would move a mulberry in winter during dormancy. The problem is that I’m sure the root system is already getting large, I don’t want to wait until then and find that I can’t get it out of the ground.

I think I’m going to wait until this current crop ripens then attempt my transplant. If any fruit tree can survive such a violent operation, I reckon it’s a mulberry.

Do you think I’m mad? Got any tips/suggestions for me?

Busy Busy

Must blog about that…

I’ve thought that so many times this week, but too many competing topics and not enough time. Most of these thoughts have now disappeared from my head, never to be thought again.

Last week just kinda disappeared. I missed Harvest Monday, Tuesday Night Vego (and all the other stuff I normally blog about), mostly because I’ve been following a moving fountain around my house.

Little D is toilet training. I made him his own reward chart (took me aaages) with Thomas and Friends stickers to match. The first day was a complete loss, then on day 2 he worked it out and had only 1 accident in the whole day (during dinner). Since then however he’s worked out that he can do it if he wants to… but he just doesn’t wanna.

I’m ready to strangle him.

Baby T is developing a personality, but he has been a little demanding. He doesn’t much like sleeping during the day but he makes up for it by sleeping through the night, and he’s been doing that for a while now. I don’t think I’ve posted a picture of him since he was born, but here he is – getting nicely chubby.

Today P pressure washed all of the hard surfaces in the front yard – the paths, driveway etc. It looks so much better and this was after he spent several hours in the backyard deconstructing stuff so we can move towards a bit of landscaping. I’m really grateful, because it’s stuff I can’t do on my own. I hereby show my appreciation by deleting the photo I was going to post of him actually doing the pressure washing.

I constructed a cucumber trellice today. I have planted the cucumbers on the south side of the bed, and the trellice goes diagonally up, so the cucumbers will grow up towards the light, hang down for easy picking, and still leave room underneath for me to plant other stuff. It isn’t the sturdiest structure, but it should last the season.

I’m growing National Pickling Gherkin this year, and I planted out the seedlings this afternoon once the trellice was complete.

Apart from that , I’ve been slowly preparing beds and planting out the summer crops. The tomato seedlings have been pricked out and planted into larger pots, still waiting to get larger and the beds to be ready for them.

The first of the strawberries are ripening, but the first ones of the season are always small.

The apples trees are in full flower and I’m thinning fruit every day as they set.

I picked the first ripe mulberry today, and I bought some eggplant seedlings from the nursery yesterday. Eggplant is one crop I find difficult to raise from seed. It germinates just fine but doesn’t reach sufficient size to crop before late Autumn, by which time it is starting to get too cool. I find it is much better to buy established eggplant seedlings at about this time.

What has been keeping you busy?

Seasonality – A conspiracy theory

It is spring and the supermarkets are currently extolling the virtues of eating seasonally. Recently I’ve been paying a bit more attention to these promotions and getting frustrated. According to Woolworths, in September the pick of the seasonal produce is Delite Mandarins, Kent Pumpkin and Solanato Tomatoes. Really?  The mandarins are plausible, but surely it’s a bit too early for any tomatoes (unless they’re from a greenhouse), and where are they growing pumpkins that are ready to harvest in September??

I know that our country is vast and variable. It’s clear from the differences between the Melbourne gardener bloggers and my own garden that timings vary, and I imagine that amazing things are possible in far North Queensland in winter, but surely pushing the boundaries of what is possible, shipping the food thousands of kilometres then calling it ‘seasonal’ is a bit cheeky?

I wonder if there is something downright dishonest going on here. Through this misinformation people seem to have lost all track of what is truly seasonal produce, and it isn’t just the supermarkets at fault.

One of my neighbours caught me in the garden in July and stopped to ask me for some tips about her unsuccessful veggie garden. It just wasn’t working and she couldn’t work out why. I asked her what she was trying to grow. Eggplant she said. In July.

I suspect that a beginner like herself didn’t start the eggplants from seed, so some nursery somewhere (or big green barn) had quite happily sold her eggplant seedlings in winter. Seedlings that had obviously been raised in a greenhouse somewhere and shipped out to an inevitable fate.

And it goes further. I have an Australian ‘seasonal cooking’ cookbook that lists chokos and melons as spring produce. Again – in what climate does this occur?

And now that the vast majority of people have lost track of what’s in season, the supermarket can charge out of season prices for seasonal produce at its peak. Apples are no longer cheaper in winter and people will buy rock hard strawberries in May, pathetic pears in January and doomed eggplant seedlings in winter.

Is it just me, or do you think people really are as clueless as I fear?