The sweet spot

Stepping out into the garden this fine late November morning, I was struck by what a sweet spot the garden is in at the moment. Everything is growing well, all the vegie crops are already being picked and producing more every day, and all the woes of a Sydney summer seem like they're an eternity away. Late spring is just about the perfect time of year to be a gardener in this part of the world.

As is my custom, here's an iPhone "Panorama" shot taken 10 minutes ago of all the happy campers in their park.

I'm often struck by how different the human eye is from a camera. From inside our house, looking out, this big yellow star of a zucchini flower is what catches your eye. It said to me "if you don't come out with your camera and take a photo of me, you're missing out". And yet in the panorama above you can barely notice it.

This is the first year I have grown Lebanese zucchini, and they're different from the more conventional 'Blackjack' zucchinis which I tend to grow most years. For one thing, as you can see here, the plants are very susceptible to powdery mildew, but this doesn't affect the crops. In fact, this light dusting of mildew almost looks nice. I'm sure it'll end up being much worse, and I'll pull the plants out prematurely in midsummer, but right now, in this late spring "sweet spot" I can live with spotty leaves.

Zucchini flowers don't last long, but they are fun, and besides, you can always fill them up with ricotta cheese and herbs, coat them in tempura batter and do some fancy dining with them.

The reason I'm growing these pale green Lebanese zucchini is mostly just to try something different, but also because I think these smaller zucchinis have a better flavour than the bigger, dark green ones.

"Lebanese" this, "Lebanese" that: it's an accidental theme this year, and here's my Lebanese eggplant looking young and healthy. Lots of flowers but no fruit yet. They'll appear in summer.

But wait, there's more! Lebanese cucumbers, too, climbing up my frail, spindly teepee of skinny bamboo. These things don't merely "crop", they "glut". We've already harvested several and have given a few away, but fortunately Pammy loves snacking on little bits of chopped up cucumber, so she's my main customer. 

It's taken a while to turn a dozen or so tiny little mixed lettuce seeds into this delicious salad starter pack, but the idea of having a nice mixture of salad greens in a pot that's within a few steps of the kitchen is working out nicely.

I haven't grown silver beet in years, but by chance I ended up with half a punnet of seedlings and in just a few weeks here they are, very big ready to go. I love cooking Indian food, and so a lot of these leaves will go into things such as a lamb or chicken saag, or a vego palak paneer.

I suspect this whole crop won't be here in two weeks' time, but right now they are looking splendid.

Call it a portent of summer pests to come, but here's the only problem popping up during this gardening sweet spot. I suspect it's slugs, because I can't find any snails nearby, but someone is munching on my pot of basil and they're having a delicious old time of it, too.

I've moved the pot to another spot and I'm on the lookout for culprits. So far no luck, and more leaves eaten last night. 

Maybe it's caterpillars? In that case, in my current sweet mood of spring gardening contentment, I am adopting the benign policy of feeding our garden's future butterflies some tender young Genovese basil, and I hope they appreciate its flavour.

Small starts

Last week, for just a few moments I almost succumbed to a ridiculous thought, but common sense intervened and I changed my mind. 

What was the ridiculous thought? I momentarily felt guilty about starting off some new crops from seedlings, and for just a minute or two headed for the seed stands at the garden centre, instead of wandering outdoors to where all the seedlings were.

Fortunately, a cluster of sensible brain cells rallied and told me to stop being a fool, go buy those nice, healthy seedlings and save yourself four weeks of fussing over seeds in punnets. And that's what I did. I bought a punnet of four Lebanese zucchini seedlings, and a punnet of four Lebanese cucumber seedlings. And now they're planted and they look great.

Growing crops from seed is fun, but you should never feel it is compulsory. I enjoy doing it partly because of the pleasure of growing something from seed, and also partly because the only way to grow rare or unusual varieties is to start them from seed. Your basic average garden centre has an extremely limited range of seedling varieties to choose from, while an Internet full of online seed catalogues has hundreds, sometimes thousands, more seeds to choose from.

Fortunately for me, I like the smaller, light green Lebanese zucchini very much, and there was a perfectly healthy punnet of four of the things just begging to be planted. As many people like to say these days, it was a no-brainer.

Planted 60cm apart into soil enriched with compost and chicken poo. A layer of mulch, some seaweed solution to water them in, and the job was done in no time.


However, the next photo shows a bunch of baby seeds coming up, and that's because this is the best way to grow some plants. This one is yet another crop of chervil, a delicate herb that looks a bit like downsized parsley, with a lightly aniseedy flavour that goes beautifully with vegetables such as zucchini.

Chervil is a relative of parsley, and like parsley it prefers to start life in the garden as a seed sown directly where it will spend its life. Chervil, parsley and several other common vegie and herb crops absolutely hate being transplanted from a starter pot to the ground. It can be done, and is regularly done, but the plants are rarely happy about it.

Speaking of plants which are related to each other, this Lebanese cucumber seedling does look remarkably similar to the zucchini seedling at the top of this page, and that's because both plants are cucurbits. There are almost a thousand cucurbit species, and the best known other cucurbits to ordinary gardeners are all the pumpkins, melons and gourds. 

Cucumbers like to twine and climb, so I have used five slender bamboo stakes to form a teepee for the cucumbers to climb up. The bamboo stakes were quite long, and they all poke about 15 inches (38 cm) down into the soil. The first really windy day will test how strong the structure is, I guess.

I have planted all four seedlings, which is too many, so I plan to let them race up the teepee, and whichever seems the healthiest plant will be the one that remains.

And so here we have some small starts, two from easy-peasy seedlings, and one crop from seed. It certainly is much less work than getting all three crops started from seed ... a much more sensible way for an old gardener to go about a bit of amateur backyard farming.

2015 - The Gardening Year in Review

As far as years go, I'd be the first to admit that 2015 has not been a "biggie" in the scheme of things. We didn't set any growth records, we didn't redesign the garden, storms didn't destroy it, bumper crops were not harvested ... in fact it proved to be a perfectly normal year all round. Phew!

Yes, there were successes and failures, lots of fun with plants and plenty of fascination with nature, plus a little sadness, and so there remains but one more thing to do before we pop the champagne and declare "Happy New Year" to friends and neighbours: and that's to hand out some awards to the deserving. Now, if Pammy could hand me the envelopes, let's begin the 2015 Garden Amateur Awards!

Plant of the Year/Blog of the Year

And the winner is a happily resettled refugee! Pam's former potted office plant, this delightfully spotty Begonia maculata, was forced to move from its original home simply because it had outgrown the space. It has now settled in superbly into its new outdoor home under the murraya bush (still within view of Pam's office), where it shares the moist shade with other former residents of Pammy's verdant office, some maidenhair ferns. The big suspense surrounded the begonia's chances of surviving its first winter outdoors ... and it not only romped it in — it kept on growing. 

Now, this begonia is a bit like those Hollywood blockbusters that take out all the prizes on Oscars night, because as well as winning POTY (Plant of the Year) it also took out the prestigious BOTY (Blog of the Year) award for the most-read blog posting here at Garden Amateur. It seems lots of people wanted to know about what does well in a shady spot.  

Wildlife of the Year

The winner of WOTY (Wildlife of the Year) is Mr and Mrs Native Paper Wasp, pictured here building their new creche just outside our kitchen window. Much maligned by the ill-informed anti-insect crowd (the Taliban of nature lovers), paper wasps are beneficial insects which are nowhere near as cranky as the Taliban says they are. 

Idea of the Year

Turning little punnets of supermarket sprouts into crops has proved to be a runaway success, and deserving winner of the IOTY (Idea of the Year) award. Pictured here is the chervil sprouts loving life as thriving crops, and elsewhere in the garden the same idea has produced great crops of both flat-leaf parsley and coriander. 

Crop of the Year 

Though they are small in size, the little Lebanese zucchini takes out the 2015 Crop of the Year (COTY) award through its production of healthy flavour in good, steady numbers. These tasty little fruits just keep on coming, despite the fact that their foliage growing overhead looks like a hospital ward of powdery mildew disasters. Doesn't bother the little workers down at ground level, they just keep on producing.

Surprise of the Year 

After more than 20 years of being quietly green and very fragrantly leafy, our false cardamom plant decided it was time to be flowery, which makes it the standout choice for SOTY (Surprise of the Year). However, big questions remain to be answered in 2016 (which might put it in line for Suspense of the Year): Will it flower just once every 20 years? Will it flower every year from now on? What in the hell prompted it to start flowering? Does it know something about climate change that we don't know? Stay tuned...

Fish of the Year 

This special one-off award has been inaugurated purely to honour the passing of our little goldfishy mate, Paul, who passed away late this year, just a few days short of his sixth birthday. Most little goldfish never achieve much in the way of internet fame, but at least Paul has been read about by hundreds of readers of this blog, and he also has been immortalised artistically in this lovely painting by his honorary mum, my slightly biased pick for Artist of the Year (AOTY), Pamela Horsnell. RIP Paul, you did great.



And so that's it for our 2015 Awards Show here at Garden Amateur. Pammy and I and all the regulars here at the Garden Amateur blog would like to say a big "thanks" to everyone who has visited our blog, left a comment or just accidentally found us while looking for something else. We'll be back in 2016 but in the meantime, have a happy and safe New Year and we look forward to continuing to share our love of gardening, nature and anything else that we fancy all through the coming year.

Lebanese flavour

Here in Australia, and in my part of Sydney in particular, we have a sizeable Lebanese community, and they're wonderful, hard-working people. As is the case with many established Anglo Aussies (like myself) and migrant communities (such as the Lebanese) where we first get to know a bit about each other is in our shops and restaurants. 

Pam and I love Lebanese cuisine. As well as their famous kebabs and koftas, their many vegetable dishes are superb. Our supermarkets always have in stock big piles of Lebanese cucumbers, Lebanese eggplant and Lebanese zucchini. These vegies aren't just sold to people whose family's roots are in Lebanon. Everybody buys them, and that's because the Lebanese people have bred over the centuries a wide range of vegetables that presumably suit both their climate and their palates. 

And so this year I'm having a go at growing the little pale green Lebanese zucchini, and so far the results have been delicious. I prefer them to the prolific, larger, dark green 'Blackjack' zucchini which I have grown here in previous years.

Here's two zucchinis with the flowers attached
picked this morning. These aren't as prolific
in production as Blackjacks, but they keep
well. So, after washing and drying, I pop them
in a plastic container. After a few days we
have enough for a delicious side dish.

Here's the plants in the garden, with the mirror
on the shed wall making the plot look a bit
bigger. And no, they are not a special variety
with variegated foliage! Sad to say, they have
powdery mildew on the leaves, and nothing I
am doing is really helping much at all.

The powdery mildew is quite aggressive, and though I am
regularly spraying plants with an organic treatment, it doesn't
seem to get rid of existing mildew. All it does is slow its spread
to other zucchini foliage. I'm also careful when watering to
keep water off the foliage and direct it to the roots, so I can't
think of anything else I can do.

This is the product I am using. eco-fungicide.
It's organic, a powder that you mix up in a
spray bottle and spray all over the foliage, on
top and on the underside. It's based on
potassium bicarbonate.

In previous years I've tried the other well-known organic treatment of milk sprays, and they were even poorer in performance than the eco-fungicide. Pictured below is the healthy foliage of the other Lebanese zucchini plants which haven't yet succumbed to the powdery mildew. This is a much better result with the eco-fungicide than anything I ever achieved with milk sprays, so I am sticking to the eco-fungicide.

There's one or two faint spots of mildew on the
leaf on the right, but the foliage still looks good.

The good news is that the powdery mildew, while it slowly harms the foliage and the plant, isn't instant death or anything like that. The foliage on one plant has looked crappy for a few weeks now and the plant is cropping away happily. So mostly the powdery mildew weakens the plants, probably brings the cropping to an early end, and certainly looks very dodgy!

I've always said that the baby little zucchinis you get attached
to zucchini flowers in restaurants and supermarkets have a
much better flavour than the fully grown zucchinis that are
sold without (the short-lived) flowers. Well, it's the same with
the small Lebanese zucchinis. These never grow to any great
size anyway, and they are best harvested when only 3-4 inches
(75-100mm) long, and they taste great, whether you steam
them, fry them or cook them any which way.