April 2015 - SpadeRunner

Autumn colour

April 30, 2015December 30, 2015 Stephen Carlin

Autumn here is a mild season. It is accented by a flush of flowers, from orchids to vegetables, but an outstanding group of plants now is the salvias. Here our Autumn colour comes from flowers rather than changing leaves. Pineapple sage has leaves with an attractive pineapple/tangerine scent which can be used like mint as a drink garnish. It also has bright red flowers. It is forming the middle layer of a nice tiered display in our herb garden at the moment, with basil in the foreground and chia (also a Salvia) reaching for the…

Kimchi making season returns

April 30, 2015December 30, 2015 Stephen Carlin

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…

Sunflower and monarch butterfly

April 29, 2015December 30, 2015 Stephen Carlin

This was one of those nice surprises that you invite by making a garden. This monarch butterfly was far too interested in drinking nectar from a sunflower this morning to be bothered by me getting in close with my phone. The combination of sunflower and monarch butterfly was a highlight of the morning.

Okra and rosella seed saved

April 28, 2015December 30, 2015 Stephen Carlin

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…

Growing chia

April 22, 2015December 30, 2015 Stephen Carlin

Here’s a plant that I’m growing for the first time but I think I will be growing chia continually, as it’s not only attractive and useful, but hardy. Chia (Salvia hispanica) burst onto the stage not many years ago in Australia as a new wonder food, and it’s still expensive in the shops compared to other seeds like sesame or linseed. I wanted to give it a go as a potential chicken feed, in the line of trying a wide range and seeing what grows easily. Growing chia I grew mine from chia seed from the…

Zucchini Ronde de Nice

April 20, 2015December 30, 2015 Stephen Carlin

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…

Grass seed as chicken food

April 17, 2015December 30, 2015 Stephen Carlin

This morning I had an idea for bonus chicken feed. We have many types of grass here, but there is one that grows in shady spots on the forest edge, and lately it has been shedding a lot of seed as you pass it, so much that you can hear it scatter. I know that the chickens forage keenly for grass seeds, so thought I’d see how well collecting it for them works. Ideally they would forage themselves, but the grass is outside the chickens’ range. I took down a…

Mung bean final harvest

April 15, 2015December 30, 2015 Stephen Carlin

The mung bean bed at the Mid-levels got too overgrown. It was lush but crowded, and the plants were spindly and falling over each other in a tangle. What’s more, there didn’t seem an end to the flowering, with old pods spilling while new ones formed. So I figured it was time to treat it like the cover crop it was, pull it up, pick the pods, and dig the plants in. I ended up with a decent haul of beans, which the chickens loved in two feedings.

Oncidium orchids

April 14, 2015 Stephen Carlin

Oncidium orchids are great decorative plants for subtropical gardens and apartments. They flower twice in the year, Autumn and Spring, and are ideal for bringing in as a showy houseplant. I have two types; one with sweetly vanilla scented burgundy flowers on very large spikes, and a smaller one with dense spikes of yellow flowers. The yellow one is easy to divide, so I have a few pots which conveniently manage to flower a few weeks apart. The orchid world is full of complex crosses, and Oncidium is a catch-all for…

Beefsteak tomatoes

April 13, 2015 Stephen Carlin

For flavour and texture, beefsteak tomatoes are hard to beat. Their large size and fairly flat fruit make them good for sandwiches, and they have thick flesh and less seed than other tomato types, meaning the flavour is less acid.