From rain to raspberries

It’s been three months since we’ve had any useful rainfall so thunderstorms in November are my last chance to re-invigorate the garden with that magic that only real rain can work on growing plants. With lightning crackling all over the sky, interspersed with sudden intense showers, yesterday was a day spent in the shed doing odd jobs.

Immediately (it seemed) the raspberries chose that moment to ripen their heavy burden of fruit; these will be added to fruit salads, morning muesli and the freezer for fruit ice-cream throughout the year. Raspberry harvest will continue for the next month.

Up in the kitchen the rest of the family is baking more than three hundred ‘Stollen’ (German Christmas cakes) using the family’s secret recipe, passed down for generations on the cook’s mother’s side. This money-making enterprise is destined to grace the family stall at the Christkindlmarkt in Hahndorf a week or so before Christmas, right around that critical moment when three generations celebrate birthdays: 60 (soon-to-be Oma), 30 (soon-to-be father), 0 (soon-to-be grand-daughter). Just the usual chaos…

For the gardener, now working single-handedly to sort out all the usual Spring chaos, danger flares with this rainfall; grapevine fungal diseases such as powdery and downy mildew love these conditions of high humidity, 10 mm of rainfall within 24 hours, and wet leaves. As this is an organic garden, I avoid chemical sprays. The best I can do at short notice is to trim off low-hanging canes that are most likely to be infected by rain-spattering of zoospores from the mulch up onto low leaves. Now I wait.

Ah well, I’d hate the table-grape crop to fail, but it will be a bumper year for peaches and those fabulous raspberries…thunderstorms are a one-way blessing for them.

Grapevine grief

Pruning time, and I’m only just in time!

Sunny Sundays in mid-winter are the perfect opportunity for hand-pruning the dozen grapevines in our small orchard.

It’s a job that I enjoy, particularly as I grew all of these young table grapevines from cuttings.

Yet I soon discover that I’ve been too slow removing the tough plastic cords that I used to train the young vines up to the wire; these have cut deeply into the trunk where they were fastened at ground level three years ago when this small vineyard began.

This is also the likely reason I had such a poor crop this past summer – sap and nutrients would have been struggling to reach the canopy from the root system through this man-made bottleneck.

So after the pruning is done I get down on my hands and knees – a serious penance for me – and carefully cut away the original ties to allow the vines to recover.

I go to my bed a humbled man.

Giving peas a chance

It’s a dry weekend in mid-winter and cook and gardener need to trade services to ease major sticking points on each others ‘to-do’ lists; pruning   is to be exchanged for some weeding.

The neighbour’s chestnut and fig trees have been driving the cook crazy – leaves, sticky fruit, prickly chestnut shell cases and possum scat have been making a mess of the driveway for years and the clean-up effort is costing more labour than the trees repay in nuts and figs. So the gardener undertakes the heavy work of chainsaw pruning and cleaning up afterwards.

In exchange, the smaller, lighter and vastly more flexible cook undertakes some much-needed weeding in the pea patch, a job that’s been a thorn in the gardener's eye for a month now. There, winter weeds have smothered the pea seeds planted to provide a late winter green vegetable crop and an early Spring soil improver.

In among this woody chaos lies an answer to the light-deprived pea crop that has now been cleared of smothering competition but is sagging all over the ground after failing to get to grips with the trellis under which they have been row planted.

How so?

Well, it just happens that twiggy chestnut prunings are ideal for just the sort of support that the small tendrils of pea plants can grip to hike themselves up to the trellis wire. So the gardener prunes these directly from the heap piling up on the driveway, leaving the remainder for the woodheap and shredder. The ends of these twiggy forks are pruned at a sharp angle to allow them to be pushed into the soft moist soil. The pea plants are then lifted off the soil and draped over these forked sticks out of reach of soil-based pests while heading for sunlight, air and that distant trellis.

By sunset Sunday evening both jobs are done, the fire is lit and the family are coming for dinner. Just a few more months and pea soup will be on the menu.

Harvesting ‘bamboo’ for use in the garden

‘Giant Cane’ – Arundo Donax – is an ornamental plant that lives life on the edge of being declared a noxious weed because of its invasive habits along disturbed riparian (riverside) environments as far afield as Europe and California. While its origins are obscure, some claim that it comes from India or perhaps from Mediterranean regions.

In South Australia ‘giant cane’ is just called ‘bamboo’, because that’s what it looks like. It has been cultivated here for many decades by the old Italian market gardeners who grew it for use as tomato stakes and bean poles, among other things. Many of the old homes that had big gardens out the back – including this one – had this cane growing in some obscure corner of the yard from where it was cut at intervals.

In our garden it has grown for the past twenty years behind the old chicken shed; here it has formed an impenetrable thicket growing out of a woody invasive root system that seems impossible to dig out or kill off. The only way to get at the canes is to cut them at the base with the electric chainsaw and drag the long strong hollow poles out of there to be processed somewhere where there is more room.

These poles are 2-3 cms in diameter, light, smooth, strong and up to 3m tall. At the end of each summer they produce feathery flower heads high up, though growth always seems to be via the root system.

The leafy tops  are cut off with heavy-duty loppers and any remaining stray side leaves are pulled off by hand. This pile of leaves and twiggy or broken malformed canes is put through the shredder to be recycled as mulch. The mulch goes back under the fruit trees, as it’s splintery stuff and not much fun to walk on.

Arundo donax canes don’t last as long as real bamboo staves but will be good for a year or two before they become too brittle and liable to split when handled. Canes are stored by standing them on end in a corner out of direct sunlight. Leaving them on the ground over winter hastens rotting.

 

 

 

 

The poles themselves are cable-tied to steel droppers to form a smooth ‘tomato wall’ along either side of my young tomato plants. For many years I built tepee trellis’ or tied tomato plants onto individual jarrah stakes, nipping and pruning the tomato vines in the hope of greater yields. I’ve become convinced however that simply touching tomato plants starts the diseases off that they seem so prone to. These smooth cane fences minimize friction while preventing the vines sprawling into the mulch, while saving much labour in tying and training.

How to pickle olives

Winter is well along in southern Australia, yet we’re still enjoying our summer crops – some from the freezer, but also all those things the cook has pickled so that they last well in storage for the lean times in late winter and spring – pickled cucumbers, kimchee, sauerkraut and olives.

I had never set out to grow olives, but nevertheless, an olive tree grew. Perhaps I threw an olive pip into that piece of garden, or perhaps a bird brought it. However it got there, this olive tree grew so well that the darn thing was starting to cut out our winter sunshine and push aside orange and plum trees. And yes, it had olives on it, but now they were so high up only the birds could reach them. So the cook placed all the usual pressures on the gardener (knowing full well the action of water dripping on stone) until neither tree nor gardener stood a chance. One proviso got though the negotiations - that the last crop of olives from this one tree would be salvaged rather than wasted. In due course, the olive tree was felled and cleared away, pickled olives appeared, and harmony was restored between cook and gardener.

Felling a big tree like this can wreak havoc, so it needed to be dropped in exactly the right spot; this was accomplished by tensioning a nylon rope from the tree top along the line of travel to a stake set deep in the ground, then the chainsaw did the rest.

Once down, olive harvesting was much simplified. A week later, the chainsaw and wheelbarrow took care of the wreckage and the olive pickling process began to appear all over the kitchen table and cupboards. I missed most of it, but here’s the cook’s recipe, garnered from the old Italian lady over the road, who still thinks in pints and cupfuls rather than litres and kilograms: -

Soak olives in fresh water for two to three weeks, changing the water daily – this soaks the bitterness out of the olives. When that’s done, immerse the olives in six pints of water, one pint of white vinegar, one cup of salt, a bay leaf and fennel seeds and bring the lot to boil. Simmer for ten minutes, let cool, sterilize jars then fill them three-quarters full with olives and this fluid. Add garlic and chillies to taste. Keep the olives immersed by covering them with vine leaves, then clip on the jar lids. Let stand for two to three months.

It appears that there are alternative ‘experimental’ recipes to the one described above – these involve  salted water and letting the lot stand for six months, and an even rarer method involving olive oil instead of vinegar. But those are tales for another day. In the meantime, home-grown olives are appearing for the last time in among the gardener’s meals…

Chainsaw pruning and possum damage

It’s tough times for the oldest fruit trees on the property, exacerbated by neighbours’ demands, old age and possum damage.

The two trees at the centre of these separate dramas have probably clocked up several hundred years between them; they date back to the pioneering years of early settlement on the Adelaide Plains, when what is now the suburb of Magill was first established with vineyards and orchards to feed the white settlers. These remnant trees – an almond and a Satsuma plum – have somehow managed to survive urbanisation and the decimation of the old gardens in the district as the developers moved in and razed everything on these large historical blocks to build townhouses and units.

That these two trees survived, where their sisters did not, owes everything to the fact that this land was largely vacant until this house was built on the remnants of the Penfold orchards in the early 1950’s, then passed from the original old couple who built it to myself – another gardener.

The plum tree has rotted out with age, but hasn’t been helped by the invasion by brush-tailed possums that have systematically eaten off each year’s shoots during winter, distorting the tree’s growth. These possums have reached pest proportions in Adelaide gardens of recent times, aided and abetted by the installation of cable television and power lines that provide an aerial network of pathways that allows them to move easily above ground level (away from dogs) and to nest in safety in our roofs and dense trees. Modern fence lines also provide easy passage to fruit trees and vegetables in backyard gardens. Being Australian native animals, they are protected by conservation laws; it is illegal to trap them and move them, let alone kill them as the aboriginal population once did to provide winter furs.

My only solution has been to block their passage onto this property by placing spiked sections of slit PVC tubes onto power cables to keep them off our roof, offering some relief from their early morning snarling and hissing and giving the fruit trees a chance to come into full leaf during Springtime.

The almond tree was causing a different problem entirely, although it also suffered extensive possum damage and kept our neighbours awake with their nocturnal territorial squabbles. This almond tree is entirely on my property, but the neighbours – like many others in Adelaide – wished to install solar photovoltaic panels on their roofs to offset rising power costs, helped by Government rebates. So this tree needed to be lopped to allow them solar access.

In both cases however, I’ve been able to extend the lifetime of these historic trees by encouraging sucker growth (in the almond) and grafting winter budding material from higher up the old (plum) tree to the trunk lower down. These younger shoots will build new trees upon the root systems of the old, and I’ll be able to keep those early varieties alive for another generation.

All this effort is easily accomplished using an electric chainsaw – a far more reliable tool in an urban garden than my old petrol-powered chainsaw, which required endless effort to keep it serviced and running. Seven dollars is all that is required before each major job; this buys me a new chainsaw file with which to sharpen the teeth.

Winter weeds and winter pruning

Once again, the long haul down from Germany to southern Australia, and from high summer to deepest winter…

In the vegetable garden, chaos.

The down-side of rich soils and the coming of the winter rains is the coming of the prolific growth of nettle seed, swamping all other crops. All my carefully planted onions have been submerged in my five week absence, and their rescue requires painful and careful weeding. Only just in time too – seedlings are severely weakened by this sort of shading.

The most frustrating aspect of these long plane flights is the jetlag; it has taken all of two weeks before I can function well enough to tackle the more difficult task of pruning almond trees and grapevines.

These young grapevines are essentially only a year old, having born their first ‘Isabella’ table grapes last summer before running riot. That chaos is apparent now that the leaves have fallen off; its time to train these youngsters onto the two-tier cordon wires and to strip away all those extra canes.

Reading books on how to prune things makes my head spin; the neat and tidy shapes found therein belies the utter confusion facing the gardener when confronted with real plants. So I’ve been pretty brutal this winter, and have chopped these young vines back hard to a double-T; from each trunk, one set left and right onto the lower cordon, and one set on the upper. Some of the long canes I retain but wrap them in another direction or at a different height. All the rest is cut off.

Once upon a time I would have put all these cut canes aside and fed them through the shredder at a later date. Today I just cut them into short lengths and drop them on the ground where I’m working.

Fortunately, the winter days are short and I get off early to sit reading by the fireside. Now exactly what have I done with all those pruning books?

‘Summer pruning’ of peach trees

Although only a month of autumn remains ‘down-under’ in Australia, the failure of follow-up rains to fall, following the break of the season, has meant that our soils have stayed warm and that deciduous fruit trees have remained in leaf. So summer pruning still remains a very real option in gaining control of next year’s peach crop.

 

 

That pruning is necessary at all, following such a spectacular peach harvest, comes about because of the sheer magnitude of the damage done to the trees; branches broke under the weight of dozens of peaches despite my best efforts to tie and prop them up. They had gone unpruned in the previous autumn while I was away in Europe for four months for the family’s sake.

Whereas ‘winter pruning’ is useful for getting control of a tree’s shape, ‘summer pruning’ of peaches allows me to control next Spring’s vegetative growth – I need to restrain the amount of light-weight fruit-bearing shoots that the tree produces. Specifically, I’m looking to grow fruit only on stubby limbs of the tree that point upwards; these tend to bear the weight of fruit better than those longer ones that already hang somewhat downwards.

 

And because these trees are inside the netted orchard, unless I get control of their height this autumn, they will punch up through the net next year and damage it. So two months after harvest, with no rain in sight and while the tree still has a chance to use its energy to heal the saw cuts, the pruning saw and secateurs reshape the tree to this purpose.

Meanwhile, up nearer the house, my espaliered peach is easier to prune – I just use secateurs to prune it back to a set height while maintaining its basic chalice shape. Some of these cuts take the shoots back to last year’s wood, but others merely take out half of the vertical risers. Not only does this keep fruit at a respectable height for picking by the cook, but it allows the winter sun to reach into the kitchen over the coming months when it is most needed.