If you have the right climate and a sunny well drained spot, growing turmeric might be worth a try. It is a relative of ginger, and grows to a similarly attractive clump of lush leaves, which die down in Winter to leave a crown of tasty rhizomes.
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Black radish seeds seemed like an interesting option from the seed merchant, so in my spirit of adventure and finding what grows best for us here, I bought a packet. They were something different from the usual, and worth a try. When I started pulling them, I was wondering if they would be consigned to the experience bin, but with a few tasty crops and recipes tried, I’m a convert.
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Jicama first came to my attention through Jeremy Coleby Williams‘ excellent blog on subtropical gardening, and segment on Gardening Australia. I had also been intrigued by Matthew Kenney‘s raw food recipes, where he uses thinly sliced jicama as a layer in nori rolls. Jicama is another food that is not widely used or available in Australia, so I was keen to try it myself. In early Winter my jicama plants were looking a bit end-of-season, with some purplish leaves, so I had a go at digging one. I had thought I could…
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The celery of the lettuce family is called celtuce. It’s been selected for its stems, rather than the leaves, but the young leaves are also good for salads. Sowing seeds too thickly is a common error, especially for me, but fortunately with lettuce you can salvage the situation by thinning them out and using the thinnings for salad. We have been having celtuce as a salad lately, and also for cooking, as I thin out my lettuce bed in favour of standard lettuce.
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Black capsicums are eye-catching, and they are often commented on by visitors as they sit on our kitchen bench, looking lustrous and mysterious. I bought the seeds for that reason, as part of an assortment of capsicums and chillies, lured by the colour. After a season of them though, I don’t think I will persevere. What’s wrong with them? They fruit well enough, producing a steady crop, but that doesn’t translate to table. Some didn’t progress past tiny fruit, some stayed deceptively green until they were overripe, but the main problem…
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It was encouraging to see a post by Penny Woodward in Organic Gardening Magazine (Australian) where she writes that she used to think she couldn’t grow carrots, but then found the tricks (and made the beds) that give her successful crops. A lot of sources just say ‘Carrot growing is easy, go grow them!’ in a very encouraging way, but actually I have found them tricky too.
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The famous line from Ecclesiastes has many metaphorical applications, but it has very literal value in the garden. Sometimes when a plant is hard to grow it can just be down to daylength or temperature, not soil quality or the other things we try to get right. Things are perhaps a little more straightforward in cooler climates where you just need to ‘plant after last frost’, or catch the last warm days of Autumn to get winter crops established. In the subtropics the seasons are long and the planting times ambiguous.…
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Wom Bok, chinese cabbage, napa cabbage; whatever you call it, it’s a great vegetable to grow. It’s super quick and trouble free if you can keep the caterpillars off it. And on top of providing delicious greens for stir fries, soups or steaming, you can keep it and transform the flavour by making kimchi. Autumn is a good time to sow wom bok here in the subtropics. The plants reach picking size very quickly. I don’t leave them too long, as they will flower in the warm weather before they…
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Seed saving is important for all sorts of reasons. There is the worthy argument that you are preserving heritage cultivars and sticking it to multinationals, but a more practical reason is that it gives you the opportunity to try out as much planting as you care to. My two star performing hibiscus relatives, okra and rosella, have just provided me with more seed than I could use. The okra pods are in the main photo. The plants had grown more than two metres tall and had given us a massive…
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Ronde de Nice is a fine zucchini cultivar for the home garden. The seed catalogues say it is too easily damaged by handling to be a commercial crop, but for picking and using within a couple of days, it’s a winner. Picked about the size of an orange, the fruit are tender and have a beautiful flavour – think steamed and buttered, rather than chargrilled as you might with a black zucchini with its denser texture. Mine grew very well, sown direct from early Spring (we have no danger of…
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