Smashing success: repotting my curry leaf tree

I didn't think I'd be doing a detailed "how to" involving a hammer and a sharp knife when I woke up this morning, but here we are anyway (and it was a smashing success I might add). 

I have more than one curry leaf tree growing in my garden, and quite some time ago I had promised to give my one-metre tall potted curry leaf tree to my good friends Jolanda and Paul.

They used to have a productive curry leaf tree in their garden, but while they were away travelling for several months in 2019 (lucky them!) the tree didn't survive, so they needed a replacement. The problem is that my potted tree really needed repotting before I handed it over to them, so "now is as good a time as any" became a very good reason to repot the tree this Monday morning.

Here's how it all went ...  

I do like terracotta pots for many reasons, but this shape is all wrong. Leaving the existing tree in there too long meant that it had filled the bulbous centre and just won't come out by pulling it out. It's stuck in there!

 

The existing pot is 28cm wide and 28cm high

So I found a perfect replacement that is 33cm wide and 33.5cm high, bigger the than old pot all round and offering room to grow, but only one size up, not too big. And it has the right shape, so in future years if the tree needs repotting, it can be pulled out easily.

Just one gentle tap with my hammer produced the perfect result. Away fell one full half of the original pot, and the rootball lifted out easily. I know, seems like a radical thing to do, but I don't have much inclination to hang onto badly-shaped pots. 

If you think taking a hammer to a pot is a radical manoeuvre, then wait till you see me perform surgery on the rootball with a sharp knife. The rootball was fairly tight at the base, and so I made several vertical slits in the most tightly packed sections then lightly teased out the roots.

Now the roots will happily start moving their way into the fresh potting mix that will surround them in their slightly bigger new home.

The new pot is bigger than the old one, so how much potting mix to add to the bottom, before adding the rootball? I just did a test fitting of the rootball into the new pot, 10cm short.

So I added about 10cm of new mix in the bottom, before sitting the rootball on top.

That worked out fairly well, so I carefully added new mix to fill the gap in the sides. Shaking the pot gently helped to settle the new mix into the gaps.

Ideally, never add much potting mix on top of the existing surface, as there are lots of "feeder roots" right at the soil surface. However, I spread a super-thin layer on top to even out some bumps.

After all the trauma of surgery by Dr Gardenamateur, my curry tree will be a bit stressed, so I made up a seaweed solution and gave the plant a good watering with that. This product is called "eco-seaweed" and I have been using it for years. It's a competitor to Seasol in the market, isn't as well known but does just as good a job. It comes as fine desiccated flakes that you add to the watering can (I add one teaspoon to a 9-litre can of water). 

Finally, to help conserve moisture and suppress weeds, I added a layer of mulch to the pot, making sure to keep the mulch away from the trunk itself.

As a tropical plant, our curry trees don't like Sydney winters at all, and they often lose some or all of their leaves by the end of July. As an annual thing I always prune back the tree a bit, then by early spring the whole thing is sprouting new leaves and greening up rapidly.

So the curry leaf tree is ready to be handed over to Jolanda and Paul. They can leave it in its new pot for a couple of years before planting it out, if they like, or they can put it in the ground straight away. Whatever suits their plans ...

Meanwhile, my "bonsai" curry leaf tree actually provides me with all the curry leaves I need in cooking. It's still covered in leaves, they're a bit down on tropical green-ness at the end of winter, but generally the plant itself seems healthy. 

Last of all, here's a photo from about 10 years ago, of our original backyard curry leaf tree. We originally had it growing in a pot, but then one day its roots got too big and strong and it cracked the pot. So we put it in a bigger pot and a few years later it cracked that one, too.

So maybe Jolanda and Paul's plan to get their new tree into the ground is the best idea. If you grow these things in pots in Sydney, they love our warm wet summers so much that eventually they'll start causing some kind of headache for you ... but along the way they're an elegant addition to any Sydney garden, as well as a delicious addition to so many South Asian and Southeast Asian dishes.

 

Small beginnings for a little bonsai

I'm not an especially spiritual person, but I do believe in the power of coincidences to affect your life. Here's a simple gardening example ... there I was watering the garden (and that means making sure to water the pots in particular) when I looked at my potted curry leaf tree and felt a sense of regret that I hadn't ever got around to growing it as a bonsai, which I had promised to do on this blog about a year ago. Within one year it had grown too big for bonsai ... another plan that didn't happen.

A few hours later I opened my email inbox and there was a very nice email from a reader, Rehana, asking whatever happened to my curry leaf tree bonsai project. It was meant to be. Another coincidence working its magic. And so here is Day One of the curry leaf tree bonsai project! Thank you Rehana not only for your enquiry but also your exquisite timing.

Doesn't look like much at the moment, but patience is required. I have decided to raise my bonsai tree from seed, and keep it bonsai-sized from a very early age. Under the potting mix are two ripe seeds, hopefully doing their thing.

The potted curry tree is full of ripening seeds now, and unfortunately for the environment, these seeds need very little encouragement to sprout. Birds eat the seeds, then crap them out over bushland several kilometres away, and we have an environmental weed problem that gets worse the closer you are to the curry leaf trees' preferred subtropical climate. In Australia, these trees are becoming a problem on the NSW North Coast and into coastal Queensland.

This is our too-big potted curry leaf tree. Healthy and happy, it's already too big for its pot but I don't want to encourage it by putting it into a bigger pot. What I plan to do is cut the tree back fairly hard in early spring. Curry trees don't like Sydney winters, but they love our spring and summer, so if I cut it back in early September it will put on a lot of new growth in the months after that.

I'd hate to give you the impression that I know what I'm doing here. I don't really. It's all likely to be a big, mistake-filled experiment that might work out well, or might not.

All I know is that curry leaf tree seeds sprout very reliably and easy, which is why they are regarded as a weed. This is our second tree. We had our first one for many years in a pot, and it just grew and grew, and when its berries dropped to the ground they sprouted without any help from me. I pulled most of them out of the ground and composted the seedlings, but I also gave away one or two potted-up babies and they are now in friends' gardens, looking great and doing well.

So for this bonsai I hope the seeds will sprout. I will pick the healthiest of the two seedlings, and regularly clip it back and keep it small. My "starter" bonsai pot is too small for the eventual bonsai, so I will look around for a nice "big" bonsai style pot in the meantime. The challenge will be to clip back the bonsai plant both top and bottom: leaves on top and roots down below. Now I've made a start, I will post the occasional update on how it's all going. Wish me luck!

Curry leaf tree, the second generation

There we were at our friends Jolanda and Paul's place enjoying another great meal out in their backyard. In one corner of their very nice garden a young curry tree is doing really well. It's such a graceful, delicate tree, and useful in the kitchen too, where both Paul and Jolanda create many superb Asian meals. 

We used to have a curry tree, had it for a dozen years, but in the end it just got to be such hard work keeping it happy in its pot, and so we removed it.

Since then we've missed not having one here, and sitting there at Jolanda and Paul's recently both Pam and I realised we just had to get another curry tree for our garden. And so this is the story of what we plan to do with our second-generation curry tree. 

However, to start things, the best thing to do is just enjoy the beauty of this leafy, small, subtropical tree from Sri Lanka and other subtropical parts of southern Asia and southeast Asia.

A few years back Pammy did a beautiful botanical
illustration of the leaves and seeds of our curry tree.

And here's the original, first-generation
potted curry tree in its prime. I bought a
little white stone Buddha statue to sit at
the base of the tree. He had a lovely view
of the rest of the garden from that spot.

Our old curry tree even was the perfect spot
for two orchard butterflies to engage in a bit
of baby-making, captured in this photo by Pam.

The leaves of the curry tree have the mildly spicy flavour that
gives it its name, and its uses in the kitchen. From my various
recipe books, it seems to be used in two different ways. One is
as a fresh herb, chopped and added to the pot usually towards
the end of cooking. The other way to use it is to toss a whole
stem of leaves into hot oil at the very beginning of cooking
a curry, to flavour the oil. As far as I know, the berries aren't
used (or at least I've never seen a recipe using them).

One important little thing to note about curry tree berries is that they sprout very readily indeed, and they are also very attractive to birds. The downside of this is that in the right climate (usually subtropical) the curry tree can become a weed that invades bushland zones. Birds eat the seeds, poop elsewhere, and another tree grows. Certainly in our backyard, we were forever pulling out curry tree seedlings that sprouted from these fallen berries.

So now we've decided to grow another curry tree, but this time round I have some plans to keep things a bit more under control. Here's the new baby, or should I say, babies.

Baby curry trees, by the way for Australian gardeners, are now starting to show up in nurseries, as now is a good time of year to plant one. The one I bought had two stems, and when I unpotted them, they fell apart easily as two completely separate plants, with hardly any entangled roots. I repotted them as separate plants and will grow these on for a month or two and keep the healthiest one, and give away the second place-getter.

Curry trees are easy to grow here in Sydney. For a pot all it needs is a biggish pot, good quality potting mix, and lots of sunshine. Also put the pot up on pot feet so excess water can drain away. Slow-release fertiliser is ideal for all potted plants, and I just scattered some of the stuff made for citrus trees around my curry tree.

Your main problem is likely to be excessive happiness (not yours ... the curry tree's). Our first curry tree is the only plant I have grown which actually cracked the sides of its pot by growing too vigorously. The pot just fell apart, and you could see these muscular curry tree roots poking out the sides once the ceramic slabs fell away. So I repotted mine into a bigger pot, and it grew like mad again. These are such vigorous plants when happy!

I dare not put one in the ground in our small garden, however, as they will eventually grow into a tree 4-6m tall (14 to 20 feet), and we don't have space for something that big.

And so, like Blackadder's loyal sidekick Baldrick, I have a cunning plan. I am going to treat our second generation curry tree as a rather large bonsai.

For this year and the next, I will let it grow on until it's happy in a larger pot than the current one. However after that, I plan to remove our happy little curry tree from its "final" sized pot and cut its roots back, cut some foliage off the top, then repot it into fresh potting mix – but keep it in its "final" pot. I think spring will be the time to do that. I guess I'll eventually find out whether it will work.

My plan is to keep it down to about half the size of our original curry tree, which was about 1.75m tall (from top of potting mix to the top of the canopy of leaves) and it lived in a large pot 60cm across at the rim. If all goes according to plan, we'll have all the curry leaves we need for the kitchen, and a much smaller potted specimen for the garden in a pot that's about 40cm across, with a plant less than 1m tall.

At the same time, I'm planning to do exactly the same thing to our potted bay tree, another fabulously useful plant for the kitchen, but also another vigorous growing thing that needs a lot of taming, root trimming and repotting if it is going to stay here for many years.

Wish me luck! 

So much happening

I am in awe of those garden bloggers who keep on slogging away, doing a posting every day. Me, I'm down to one posting a week at best, but at least I never seem to run out of things to write about and photograph. (I'd quickly run out of things to post about if I had to do one a day!)

However, right now, I could do a blog posting every hour, because there is simply so much happening in the garden right now. And don't be surprised if, over the next few weeks, I do individual blog postings on each of the plants I'm about to show you.

Just to make things easier for me to wrap my little head around the topic, I've divided this "so much happening" post into little categories.

First up, the NEW ARRIVALS

Not one but two new curry trees. I bought one
pot and realised it had two plants in it.
Fortunately their roots weren't entangled so
potting them up was easy. Expect a curry
tree blog posting soon, folks.

Our good friend Jolanda has a superb little
patch of mint bush by her front steps, and we
loved its purple spring flower show, so we have
planted three of these behind our geraniums. 

Pammy brought home a Pieris japonica in
flower a few weeks ago. We left it in its pot while
it was bloom, and now it's in a bigger pot and,
judging by the new growth, is happy enough.

Hardly the most exciting purchase, two punnets of blue flowered
salvias, but about two months from now they will start to flower
and they won't stop till autumn is almost over.

next, the FOOD GARDEN GETS GROWING

Lebanese zucchini, the light green, chubby smaller ones. So far
so good, with the first flower buds (boys only) showing.

A miracle! Our unproductive passionfruit vine, now into
its third summer, has for some reason decided to produce
quite a few flowers lately. Could this be our first decent crop?

Here's last season's crop in action. Yes, folks,
one flower and one - just one - fruit. This has
been my biggest dud of a food growing story
in 25 years, but I am determined to see this
thing finally produce a decent crop.

Just had to include this fragrant, lovely thing.
The more I water my potted rosemary bush,
the happier it seems to be. While in the ground
it's a classic "waterwise" plant that can survive
on rainfall alone, in a pot it's a thirsty sook.

Another miracle! Our Serrano chilli bush has
somehow survived winter. I gave it the mother
of all cutbacks five weeks ago and for a while
it didn't look like it was going to bounce back,
but now it's producing foliage and flowers,
and so I think it's a red hot goer for this summer.

And the first strawberries of the season are starting to appear
and colour up. As is a tradition in our garden, our strawberry
plants come up as "volunteers" out of our homemade compost.

Finally, FOLIAGE AND FLOWERS

The Louisiana iris is slowing down, but there
are still new blooms to enjoy every morning.

One of the greatest concentrations of onion weed and oxalis
in the Southern Hemisphere – our succulent patch – has been
cleared (temporarily I am sure) of the weeds and a new (and
prettily ineffectual) layer of pebble mulch has been spread.
At least it will look very nice for at least the next month!

Just like our sooky, thirsty, rosemary plants, our supposedly
waterwise trailing pelargoniums absolutely love a drink.
It's an Australian thing, I guess, once someone arrives in
Australia they just seem to start drinking more ...

Be careful if you are buying pots of Lamb's Ears (Stachys).
This is what one 3-inch pot planted in Spring 2014 has
turned into, without any encouragement from me. This lovely
grey beauty looks like it's about to flower, and from previous
experience seeing it in flower in other gardens, bees love this
plant's flowers in a big way, so I am hoping it will attract a
zillion bees that will then fertilise all my passionfruit flowers.

And last but definitely not least, what I like to
think of as "Pammy's office garden" has survived
the winter and is now ready to enjoy the summer.
Why "Pammy's office garden"? Well, all the
plants here have done too well inside the house in
Pammy's studio/office, getting too big for their
pots, and so when that happens they are retired
out here, where they are then cared for by me.

As I mentioned long, long ago at the beginning of this posting, don't be surprised if you find yourself reading another posting on these individual plants over the coming weeks.

I never go out into the garden thinking "gee, what am I going to blog about next?". I never know in advance. Something just catches my eye, or happens, or doesn't happen and most of my blog postings just write themselves, and are mostly already written in my head before I ever head back inside. But this morning it was a simple case of "so much is happening" that I realised I had a good dozen or more blog posting ideas all at the same time.

Spring is like that ... so much happening in the garden. It's wonderful.

Raindrops

Beggars definitely cannot be choosers, and as a gardener who only recently begged Huey for a bit more rain I can hardly complain that he/she has left the tap running. Our average rainfall for February is 117mm; it's Feb 8 and already we have had 141mm. Hardly a deluge, but it's plenty. This morning there was a gap in the rain and it all looked so pretty that I whipped out the camera and came back with some snaps a few minutes later, because it had started raining again.

The berries on my curry leaf tree are turning black, and I really should get out there and remove them all, as these trees are gaining a reputation as a weed. Birds eat the berries, fly a few kilometres and while in some native bushland, leave a berry behind as birds naturally do. But right now it's too wet to harvest berries, and besides, they look so pretty.

The native floating fern called nardoo, which is thriving in my potted water garden, holds onto raindrops in much the same way as nasturtiums do – as if each droplet is a little pearl.

My goldfish, John, Paul and George don't care much about the rain, but I do worry a bit when the water level in the pot gets right up to rim-level (they're frisky little fellers), and so I bail out a couple of inches of water each morning.

Most people understandably think of succulents as dry-climate, waterwise plants, but these are often at their prettiest when wet. This is Agave attenuata.

And I'm not exactly sure what this person is. I suspect it's a 'graptoveria' but it could be an echeveria, maybe a graptopetalum. Frankly, I don't really have a clue, but its light blue colouring looks lovely in the wet morning light.

The potted cumquat tree is covered in white, gently fragrant flowers and green baby fruits, not to mention glossy green leaves. And raindrops.

The soil's getting the good soaking it badly needs, I've enjoyed a weekend of rest because there's nothing to do out in the garden, and all the plants are loving the deep drink. If anyone up in heaven reads blogs, please remind Huey to turn off the tap over Sydney. We've had our fill, thanks, but surely there's somewhere else which is bone dry and needs a good drink right now.

Spicy niceties

No matter where you do your gardening, you'll have to come to grips with the fact that there are just some things you cannot grow in your part of the world, due to your climate conditions. For example, my warm temperate spot here in Sydney is too hot for growing peonies, clematis, cherries and raspberries, for example, and I can live with that, with some regrets, especially the raspberries.

But sometimes it really irks me that I can't grow my own spices. I'd love to have trees producing cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg and mace but I'd have to move 2000 km closer to the equator to do that (not to mention getting a much bigger backyard). I love spicy food and cooking with spices, and yesterday was one of those days completely consumed by the glorious aromas and flavours of spices. So I thought I'd celebrate spices for a moment, and finish with the recipe for one of the spicy dishes I cooked last night, a stir-fry of spiced mixed vegetables.

Here's what started the whole spice thing rolling yesterday. The Indian spices section of my pantry. As some of them were up to their use-by date, and stocks of others were running low, I bit the bullet and decided to toss out the lot, head for the Fiji market on King Street in Newtown, and splurge on a completely new set of spices, all with a use-by date June 2012. It was like a cleansing, only spicy.

Shopping at the Fiji market is wonderful fun for noses. As is common in Sydney, food businesses calling themselves 'Fiji' are usually run by people of Indian heritage, and so all the essentials of Indian cuisine are available there. After shopping myself silly on spices, I then spent about two hours emptying the jars, replacing the contents, snipping off the labels from the packets and sticking them on the jars. I like the higgledy-piggledy look of all the odd collection of jars and labels.

Out of this collection, alas, there's only a few I can grow here in my garden: chillies, curry leaves, coriander (pictured above, in flower at the moment, so I can later collect the seed). And turmeric, too, but I tried that and while it was a handsome tropical-look foliage plant it proved to be an aggressive weed. So no more turmeric for me. And as I mentioned in a recent blog, my cardamom plant thrives here but has never flowered and probably never will. But that's about it for home-grown spices for me.

And so I just content myself with a couple of spices, and leave it at that. Maybe I over-compensate in the kitchen? Who knows, but to conclude this blog I thought I'd share one of the recipes I cooked last night, which at least used some of my home-grown curry leaves.

This is my potted curry leaf tree (Murraya koenigii).

It's just coming into bloom now, and the the combination of the recent wet weather and flowering has drained the leaves of their healthiest dark green hue, and so I gave it a feed this morning of blood and bone, plus some cow manure, and I hope it appreciates it!

Now, the recipe I'm including here is mildly spicy but very aromatic, as it includes one of my favourite Indian ingredients, panch phora. My Indian cookbook tells me that 'panch' means 'five' in Hindi, and so panch phora is a blend of five seeds: black mustard, cumin, black cumin (nigella), fenugreek and fennel. They're whole seeds, and the first step of the recipe is to heat some oil in a pan (I use a wok) and fry together the curry leaves and the seeds. Both pop and sizzle and flavour the oil as they do so.

The full recipe is at the end of the blog, but this is one of those recipes where you spend 15-20 minutes chopping the vegetables and 10 minutes cooking them. After popping the panch phora seeds and curry leaves in the oil, you toss in crushed garlic, chopped ginger, chopped chilli and ground turmeric and fry it another minute or so, then, as pictured here, add in a colourful mixture of vegetables cut to a similar size for quick cooking. Here, it's carrots, green beans, red bullhorn chilli (large, and mild as capsicum) and asparagus, but you could use any mix of vegetables that are either in season, at a good price, etc. Cook the vegies for 5 minutes, tossing well in the spices and oil to coat them with the spicy flavour.

Then you add finely sliced Chinese cabbage (called wombok, wong buck here) and stir-fry it for another five minutes. Once the cabbage softens and wilts, sprinkle over a couple of tablespoons of fine desiccated coconut, cover the pan/wok with a lid for a minute or two more, and there you have it: Spicy Fried Vegetables. Here's the recipe, which is kind-of from my Asian food bible, 'The Complete Asian Cookbook' by Charmaine Solomon, except that I have changed it by dropping one or two ingredients and adding one or two others.

Spicy Fried Vegetables

3 large carrots, cut into matchsticks

250g (8 oz) green beans, cut into small pieces

1 punch asparagus, cut into small pieces

1 red capsicum, cut into small chunks

1/2 Chinese cabbage, finely shredded

3 tablespoons ghee or oil

1 teaspoon panch phora

8-10 curry leaves, chopped

3 cloves garlic, crushed

3 teaspoons grated fresh ginger

2 whole green chillies, chopped

2 teaspoons turmeric powder

1 teaspoon salt, or to taste

2 tablespoons desiccated coconut

1. Prepare all the vegetables, garlic, ginger, chillies and set aside in bowls ready to add them as per the recipe below.

2. Over medium heat, heat the oil in a wok or pan until hot, then add the panch phora and the curry leaves, and watch out! It can pop and sizzle, but try to give them a stir to encourage popping of the seeds.

3. Add the garlic, ginger, chillies, turmeric and stir-fry for only 30 seconds to 1 minute, as you don't want to overcook the garlic and burn it.

4. Then toss in the all the vegetables, other than the Chinese cabbage. Stir well several times to blend all the flavours, and let the vegetables cook for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.

5. Add the shredded Chinese cabbage and stir well to combine. Let it cook for 5 minutes, until it softens, then sprinkle with salt and give it one more stir.

6. Sprinkle over the desiccated coconut, stir well. Put a lid on the pan, turn down the heat, and let it cook for just 2 minutes more.

I served this with a pilau-style spiced rice, plus a South Indian sour fish curry flavoured with tamarind (damn, another tree I can't grow here!).