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

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

My top crop this month is the same as everyone else’s: weeds. As soon as the soil warms up, the weed growth speeds up – and there’s no stopping these invasive interlopers. The good news is that most of the weeds in my vegetable garden are actually edible, not that I’m particularly fond of salads of onion weed, dandelion, chickweed, fat hen, oxalis (aka wood sorrel) or the sky-blue flowers of self-sown borage.

To be fair, many of my favourite vegetables could also be classified as weeds. Over the years I’ve grown potatoes in several locations around my country garden, and spuds still pop up all over the place. Jerusalem artichokes are definitely weeds, and yams can become as weedy as every other type of oxalis if you don’t harvest every tiny tuber. I didn’t grow any yams last summer as our Labrador stole my basket of sprouted tubers while I had my back turned to prepare the soil. He won’t get away with that again this year.

Watercress

Watercress comes a close second to rocket as my favourite peppery salad green. Although it grows wild in our farm streams, I’m not game to go foraging as I can’t be sure our waterways haven’t been contaminated upstream. Instead, I’m growing watercress in an old enamel kitchen sink (pictured over the page), which I regularly refresh with clean water. I bought a plant from the ‘Ready to Eat’ range and submerged it just deep enough for the foliage to float on the water’s surface. Within two weeks it had doubled in size and formed a mass of swimming roots. Then the poor thing froze solid in the polar blast, but thawed out just fine.

This season I’m planting three types of oca, better known in New Zealand as yams. As well as the red and yellow varieties, I’m putting in a bag of gourmet dark purple yams, having spotted them for sale at a local fruit and vege shop.

Celery

In September I celebrated celery as a top crop but I definitely didn’t do it justice with only the briefest 67-word skite. Twelve months after planting out a spare punnet of ‘Tendercrisp’ seedlings (from Zealandia’s Grow Fresh range) in my flower garden, these fine specimens are now half as tall as an 11-year-old boy. My eldest son Lucas, who actually likes eating celery as well as posing with it for photographs, let out a “wowsa!” when I used his Dad’s sharpest fish filleting knife to cleanly cut a whole bunch.

Unlike their siblings in my vege garden, which have been yanked to bits for soups, stews and Bloody Marys, the plants in my flower garden haven’t been touched so have reached their full potential. I’ve never grown such spectacular celery. It’s not just as good as the storebought stuff, it’s better!

I wouldn’t usually pick the entire plant at once (I only did this so I could photograph it in my op-shop vintage Beswick ware serving dish) and it’s not an experience I’m keen to repeat. When I brought it into the house and cut the stalks off, two dozen baby cockroaches crawled out and started running in every direction over our kitchen bench, leading to squeals (from me) and a squash-fest (from my less-squeamish children).

Self-sown par-cel

Given my celery success, I have no need for the herb par-cel (a parsleycelery hybrid that does double duty). So I had to laugh when I spotted a rash of self-sown seedlings popping up in our driveway, no less. My original plant, in my raised herb bed, clearly did a fine job of shedding viable seed.

‘Savoy’ cabbages

With cabbages fetching a whopping $9 each (!) in our local fruit shop, I had high hopes for my ‘Savoy’ crop this spring. Just to spite me, they bolted to seed before hearting up. Sigh. At least the bees appreciated their nectar.

Potatoes & buckwheat

I planted my seed potatoes in midSeptember, figuring they wouldn’t pop up before the last late frosts. But I hadn’t figured on October’s polar blast, which not only blackened their tender tips but totally trashed the pretty underplanting of beneficial buckwheat I’d sowed around my spuds. At least I should have enough time to resow before the Franklin Hospice Garden Ramble on November 12-13, as I’m opening my new cottage garden (just up the road from my home at Foggydale Farm, next to Camp Adair) for the first time. For tickets, see franklinhospice.org.nz. The unseasonable polar blast that brought snow to the South Island in the first week of October also made a frost-mashed mess of my early potatoes.