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TOP & FLOP CROPS

Lynda Hallinan’s regular report card on the best and worst seasonal harvests from her Hunua vegetable garden.

- Lynda Hallinan’s most – and least – successful crops this month.

Someone clearly forgot to tell the weather gods that summer was supposed to end months ago, as my ‘Sweet 100’ tomatoes are still cropping their hearts out. I’m also picking the last beans and ‘Iznik’ cucumbers from mildewy vines.

It’s the Murphy’s Law of vege gardening: the crops you most like to eat always prove to be the hardest to grow at home – and vice versa. Take silverbeet. No-one likes it in my family, which explains why it grows like a weed. At least it’s easily shredded into soups, bacon and egg pies, and casseroles, enabling consumption by stealth.

Ditto quinces. I have five trees, which is at least four too many. Every autumn, every one of those trees produces hundreds more fruit than anyone – even a professional quince jelly maker – could ever need. I palm them off on anyone who will take them (by the banana box-load) but even so, hundreds eventually end up rotting on the garden paths. And nothing rots as slowly as a fallen quince: some of the mummified carcasses from last year’s crop are still visible under the trees.

Chillies, anyone? Although my children are slowly developing a taste for spicy food, we’d probably use a single chilli a week at most. That’s 52 for the year (I freeze them whole). A single healthy plant produces way more than that, so why did I feel the need to put in four ‘Wildfire’ chilli plants, plus an extra two ‘Habanero’ plants?

Meanwhile, the four ‘Sweet Conical Red’ capsicums (a Zealandia Grow Fresh variety similar in shape and size to ‘Cornos Red’ Italian bull’s horn peppers) that I planted beside my chillies have produced precisely one large fruit each. All that effort for so little return is frustrating, especially as my husband loves raw red peppers, forcing me to swallow my pride and – sigh – buy them each week.

Common or winter mint

I sometimes suspect my patch of mint is triggered by daylight saving. All summer long (when I want it for salads and cocktails), it struggles for survival in the dry heat, until there’s barely a sprig to be seen. As soon as the clocks go back, it pops back up in lush, rust-free abundance. Mostly because I don’t need it; all the new potatoes have long since been eaten as it’s officially ‘Agria’ season now.

‘Candy Cane’ capsicums

I feel robbed! I grew these cute cream and green striped capsicums for their novelty value, only to discover that they ripen to plain red! For small plants, they’re pretty good croppers at least, and I shouldn’t complain because they are the first capsicums I’ve ever successfully raised from seed sown indoors in winter. (To be clear, I have no problems raising the plants, but I usually start too late to get them to a fruiting size before the end of summer.)

Feijoas

My feijoa hedge had no fruit this year and I don’t care. It’s what you get for planting in deep shade (under a huge old pin oak) within reach of our farm’s boundary fence (and the neighbour’s grazing cattle). I don’t care because it means that, first, we have no issues with guava moth larvae causing the fruit to prematurely drop and rot and, second, I can gratefully accept friends’ offers of free feijoas while palming off some of my quinces in return.

It’s a race to beat the birds – and rats, pheasants and our Labrador, Cricket – to the autumn seed harvest. Cricket has developed an uncanny ability to sniff out and fetch fallen almonds. I wonder if we could train him to find truffles, too.

Edible flowers

Ironically, none of the edible flowers I grow to add colour to our salads – including borage, nasturtiums and calendulas – appear to be edible to rabbits. They leave them well alone, which is helpful as they’ve all self-sown in the gravel on the other side of my rabbit-proof fence. (Self-sown Echium ‘Blue Bedder’ has also survived the bunnies.)

Barley grass

Sadly, the same can’t be said for the field of barley grass (Hordeum vulgare) my husband Jason sowed. He had plans to reap the grain to make his own whiskey, but the rabbits had other plans and ate every blade as fast as it germinated.

I still have fond memories of the barley lawn I grew in my former city garden, so at the same time as Jason was hoeing up a horse paddock, I sowed a 2m x 2m bed of barley in our converted equestrian arena garden. I watered it dutifully and covered the bed with a heavy duty wooden-framed wire netting cloche.

As Jason’s crop vanished, mine grew vigorously, flowered profusely and spawned a fine crop of whiskered heads of grain. Then a bloody rabbit burrowed under one corner of the bed – and the cloche – and chewed the tops off most of the stalks. (At least I’m hoping it was a rabbit, because, given the size of the mound it excavated to dig its way in, the only other possible culprit would be have to be a giant rat. Or the dog, chasing a giant rat.) I only managed to salvage enough for a decorative hand-tied bouquet.

Fennel seeds

I’m never in a rush to clean up and cut down old crops and flowering annuals in my vege garden, as it’s a joy to share the end-of-season seedy spoils with the birds. Every morning, at least a dozen wax-eyes (Zosterops lateralis) flock in to feast on the bronze fennel and self-sown cosmos in the herb garden by our back door.

Wax-eyes, aka silvereyes, are my favourite quasi-native birds. According to DOC, “the silvereye was first recorded in New Zealand in 1832 and since there is no evidence that it was artificially introduced, it is classified as a native species. Its Māori name, tauhou, means stranger or more literally, new arrival.”

I’m yet to warm to the pungent aniseed flavour of fresh leaf fennel – I mostly grow it for its stately flower stems, which feed beneficial insects as well as being useful in vase arrangements – but the seeds have a lovely mild sweetness. Add a teaspoonful of fresh fennel seeds to the batter next time you bake a stewed fruit sponge, a batch of peach muffins or a spiced apple cake.

‘Monovale’ almonds

Ten years after planting an experimental almond nuttery, I’ve cut all but four of our trees down. It’s a shame that only the hard-shelled ‘Monovale’ trees were worth keeping (as these nuts are a devil to crack), but there’s a stressrelieving joy in smashing them open with a hammer, one by one, to release the plump, marzipan-flavoured kernels.

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2022-05-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-05-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

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