A Summery Summary

Time flies. The Summer's long finished and so, nearly, is the Autumn. Before having a look at what's going on at the moment I'm going to do a bit of a review of the Spring/Summer season and talk about the spectacular successes and the... er... other things.

The Good
Well you've probably already seen all the good stuff here. The corn was spectacular, the potatoes were tasty buried treasure and the sweet golden beetroot like jewels in our Summertime salads.

The world's cutest corn cob

 The carrots continued to provide orange, yellow and purple crunchiness and the early Summer lettuce crop was also wonderful, with the Australian Yellow Leaf variety in particular outyielding everything else in sight. The sunflowers were enormous, with only one mysteriously beheaded and the others slightly munched on by cockatoos, but not before the neighbourhood had a good chance to stop and admire them. The yellow-stemmed chard powered through its second summer, providing more than we could eat. I also planted a small trellised bed with frost beans (more on that when I finally get around to writing "Beans Pt 2") which was very productive.

Pretty frost beans dried for storage.

The mysterious goings-on in the as yet unseen back yard have also been very fruitful but I'll keep you in suspense on that one too for now..

The Bad
The tomatoes were a disappointment this year. Had I pulled out the volunteer "Tommy Toe" plant that sprung up in the wrong bed we would have had very few on our plates. The ones I actually planted were very slow to get going then started to wilt and look miserable just as the fruit was coming on. I have a few ideas about why, one of which is that the weather basically sucked. I shouldn't feel too bad though, because I'm not alone. From what I've heard and read just about everyone in Eastern Australia had tomato problems this year. Fortunately that one volunteer plant did very well, and kept us in tasty tomatoes for a few months. This year I tried growing some "Crystal Apple" cucumbers and they were pretty nice, but unfortunately we got maybe 6 or 7 before the plants dropped dead. The basil just didn't seem to get going at all, and the tiny plants sat there sulking until early Autumn before finally deciding to grow. Likewise the first round of rocket produced some unhappy, spindly plants as they bolted to seed in the hot weather.

The Ugly
The much anticipated fig bonanza failed to eventuate. The fruit was a little slow to appear, probably due to the big prune I gave the tree last year. The scale that was left after the prune was sprayed with white oil twice, so all was looking good for a bumper season. I even bought some netting to stop, or at least reduce, the losses from the nightly visits by a couple of hungry bats. But it was all to no avail as the tree was practically skeletonised one leaf at a time by wave upon wave of leaf beetles and their larvae. It went something like this:

1. Leaf beetle appears, it's this innocuous looking brown beetle.
2. Many leaf beetles appear, then go on feeding frenzy, feasting upon the new leaves as they shoot.
3. Leaf beetles lay leaf beetle eggs.
4. Leaf beetle eggs hatch into vast numbers of icky leaf beetle larvae. Sort of like green and black caterpillars.
5. Leaf beetle larvae reduce leaves to leaf skeletons in short order.
6 Did I mention that there vast numbers of them?
7. Leaf beetle larvae turn into leaf beetles. Goto 1.

Damge from leaf beetle larvae. That black blob in the centre is a fig covered in them.

Spraying white oil, "mechanical" removal and general harassment of the blighters had little impact. As a consequence, there wasn't a whole lot of fruit. I think we actually ate maybe half a dozen and left the rest to the bats. So it looks like a rethink is required for next season. There will be further pruning to try and get the tree to a more manageable size. Possible severe pruning. Also further research is needed into the best way to rain merciless death upon deal with the leaf beetles. I also tried to get in a late crop of "Parisian Pickling" cucumbers as well, but they dropped dead before producing anything but flowers and aphids.

The Verdict
The source of most of my problems this year was the weather. December was nice, but January and February were very hot and dry. We had 7 consecutive days with tops over 33 degrees. One night I went outside at midnight and it was still over 30 degrees. Nuts! The heat no doubt caused a few things to bolt to seed early and generally knock everything around a bit. Then March and April were wet. Stupidly so. March had about 50% more rain than the long term average, April more than double. With all this moisture it was party time for bugs, mildew and other damp-loving nasties. The mildew killed off the cucumbers, the beetles got the figs and I suspect it was some sort of fungal wilt or nematodes that bothered the tomatoes. So for next Summer I'm preparing a new bed for the tomatoes, in which I'm currently growing mustard as a biofumigant to kill off the nematodes and other soil-bourne baddies. This will be dug in and left to decompose for a while before the tomatoes go in next spring. The cucumbers will go in much earlier so they're fruiting well before the serious humidity arrives. Apart from that it's just a matter of accepting that when trying out new varieties, or trying to sqeeze in a filler crop a bit later or earlier than normal, some things are going to fail. It's all part of the fun and a good lesson in why diversification is a good thing.

Sunflower #2

Last year's sunflowers were a big success and much admired by passers by. In fact so admired by one individual that they felt the need to take one home with them. All part and parcel for anything within grasping range of a public footpath I suppose, but still disappointing.

This year we'd planned to plant more, but with only six out of ten seeds germinating, then two plants uprooted when small, we ended up with four once again. This was all right, because thanks to more careful soil preparation this year, they got kind of huge.

It also helped that they were planted a bit earlier and the soil in that part of the garden has been raised up by 20cm or so, meaning they're less shaded by the wall as seedlings. With the soil level being about 50cm above the footpath, they tower over passing pedestrians.

 

 Sadly, there's still someone in our neighbourhood who doesn't know how to share. This year it was sunflower #2 that was brutally beheaded sometime between 7:30am and 5:30pm yesterday.

It's obviously not the work of the big white bat, ratties or especially hungry caterpillars, but rather something with two hands, opposable thumbs and significant psychological problems. After a few seconds of disbelief followed by a minute or so of anger, I resolved to put that aside, have a good think about the situation and not let it ruin my day. It was after all the beginning of my holidays.

Today I'm feeling better. You see there are a few lessons I've learnt about growing things: the need for patience, persistence, close observation and making adjustments when required. Adaptability in other words. And having some humanoid rip off sunflowers is no different to suffering damage from under-watering, over-watering, too little sun, too much sun, the wrong soil, nematodes, fungus or fruit fly. It's just another of those unavoidable factors in need of consideration when choosing what, when and where to plant.

Staring down the street at oncoming pedestrians.

Sadly, there are no (legal) organic remedies for large mammalian garden pests. And my initial thoughts of attaching razor wire or electrodes to the stems would probably spoil the sunflowers' cheerful appearance.

So for now I'll have to be content to enjoy them while they last and plan to grow them somewhere else, out of arms reach, next year. Either that or install a Buddha statue with motion-tracking head and laser beam eyes.

Sunflowers

We normally plant a few random flowers around the vegie garden. I'm not too big on growing flowers myself, being the son of a florist and having enjoyed the delights of de-thorning roses and lugging around lots of heavy, wet things in my teenage years. But whatever, they look pretty and people passing by really like them.

This year we planted a few sunflowers for the first time and they certainly attracted a lot of attention. A little too much attention from someone (or something) in the case of sunflower #3.

It vanished without a trace one day, apparently ripped off by an admiring member of the public. One gentleman whose English was not the best, was trying to tell me an alternate theory:

"It was the bat! The bat ate it!"
"The bat?"
"Yes, I grow them once, I see bat come down and take them! Eat them!"
"A bat??"
"Yes, the big white one!"

It dawned on me at this point that he meant a bird, a white cockatoo in fact. Quite plausible actually, but since I hadn't seen (or heard) any around for a while, I still suspect it was some form of human.

We'll grow some more next summer.