Seedling Update & First Orange

Seedlings sure move fast once they get started!

The beetroot seedlings are looking healthy and growing fast. The top picture is of the remaining cylindrical beetroot seeds, which are basically little dried seed pods.

The transplanted beetroot seedlings are doing fine in their new coconut coir bed.

The Crystal Apple cucumbers are doing well, too. There's a new seedling visible, which seemed to just appear overnight. It's a lovely yellow.

And the original seedling is going strong. You can now see the two leaves inside the seed husk starting to unfold.

The Cherrie Sweetie tomatoes are starting to appear as well. Most are still folded over, like the first picture, but one's leafy and going for it.

Bush basil seeds that I sowed the day before yesterday - they've absorbed water and swollen up, and paled from dark grey. Also, you can see a tiny root sprouting!

I also planted out more seeds at the same time. The Scarlet Runner bean and the Paris Market Carrot just arrived and look pretty amazing. I've hidden the runner beans around the garden, as well as planting them in seed trays.

They've already started sprouting! The runner beans have started to crack open (they're hatching!) and the tiny carrot seeds have little roots.

I also got to harvest the tiny orange from the dwarf Navel orange (I think it's a Best Seedless).

The cat wasn't very impressed.

So I made my own cat, who was wide eyed with citrus-y wonder.

And then I ate it (well, I shared it). It was actually really nice. I left it on the tree for about a week after the last green vanished, and that seems to be about right.

Seedlings Sprouting

My winter seedlings have started sprouting from my windowsill so I wanted to capture the very first to show up.

Stevia in a peat pot. This is quite expensive - I only got five seeds in a pack, compared to 50 or so for tomatoes. It also only lives a couple of years or so, so I'll have to try cuttings and things. If it works, it'll be a fun, useful pot plant, and would make a nice gift if I have spares.

Beetroot - the fastest to come up by far. The seeds were little clusters with multiple seeds, but I've only had two pairs and one single seedling. I haven't planted all the seeds yet, as there were only five (they were a free sample from a seed company, Gardenstuff).

Turns out that you can very gently pull the extra beetroot seedlings out (just don't hold it by the leaves!). There's an awful lot of root in there! I replanted them in another tray, just in case.

Crystal Apple cucumber! I actually thought that I hadn't put the seed in properly at first, before I realised that the plant was pushing it out.

You can't really see the seedling with the naked eye, but a really good close up photo with the flash on shows it really clearly.

Alpine Strawberry Arrivals

My second delivery of alpine strawberries arrived. This time it was a mixture of varieties from The Fragrant Garden.

They were a mixture of healthy and yellowing, some with fruit, and some without. None were named (of course), but were apparently yellow and red creeping and clumping types. And one 'cream' colour (that was just listed as yellow on the label, so who knows what it will be?).

A red alpine strawberry. WITH ACTUAL STRAWBERRIES.

Why yes, it is possible that I did eat the berries
 right after. Why do you ask?

It was very windy and rainy today (we had a strong easterly which is quite unusual - it blew my borage entirely the wrong way and the main stalk is now damaged. There's now an impressive patch of bare earth standing testimony to its mulching abilities). So I only planted out a couple of the strawberries, the rest are waiting in their pots.

 One went in with the Honey Babe peach, another went round the bag under the annoying shady tree that nothing much grows under, and a third joined the previous ones in the apple tree bed (the one with the fruit - one berry fell off as I planted it, so I ate it. And then I ate the other one. Despite the white on the berry they were definitely ripe and absolutely delicious).

Yellow Alpine in Colander

By far the happiest of the plants were the three yellow alpines I bought via TradeMe. They were big, happy, healthy plants and two have gone into the garden, with the third in a nice, big colander. This one also has a flower! 

The flower seems to be bigger than the remains on the smaller ones that arrived today. I'm not sure if this is due to the variety, the size of the plant, or the fact that it's difficult to compare them at different stages in the flower fruit cycle. I guess I'll be finding out!

One lovely strawberry flower...

So sometimes TradeMe gardeners are actually better than nurseries. They cost slightly more, but they were worth it.

But what do they taste like?

Fantastic. I'm trying to find non-cliche adjectives, but 'sweet', 'intense' and 'flavourful' keep springing back up into my descriptions like weeds.

They are like concentrated strawberries. The berry is gone in an instant, but the strength of the taste left behind seems like you just ate an entire larger strawberry. They're slightly sharp and sweet and perfect.

Delicious strawberries...

The yellow and white varieties are supposed to be mellower, or pineapple flavoured, but that may just be the colour affecting people's perceptions (nobody seems entirely certain on the difference). I look forward to blind taste tests. You know, FOR SCIENCE.

Yep. I am extremely pleased with my decision to go alpine-strawberry-mad. I am now going to start collecting them and seeing how many I can raise from seed. This will be difficult, as it involves not eating all the berries.

I don't want to divide them, as apparently the berries get bigger when the plants are bigger. Also, it's apparently easiest to grow them from seed if you just plant the entire berry (as there are multiple seeds, and obviously it's the best environment for them).

Buying the Strawberries

I have seen references in articles to being able to find them in the herb section of garden centres, but most of those articles are three or four years old. I certainly haven't seen any anywhere - though I don't exactly tour garden centres across the country. It's certainly something I'll be looking out for, though.

But so far, my options have been hunting down plants for sale online.

I've only found a couple of other sites that sell them (other than TradeMe), and they are small, difficult to contact businesses (one is a single person, the other has a defunct website and no response to my email). And Subtropica.co.nz, which has white strawberries, but only ships during summer. I wouldn't be surprised if these gardens mostly sell via TradeMe (or in person. But that doesn't help me much as they're often in Palmerston North or even further!).

They're also a lot more expensive than normal strawberries, around five times the price per plant. This is a pretty logical result of their rarity and the relative difficulty of propagating them (runners are much rarer and less vigorous. Seeds are an option, but slow. Most plants are created by dividing clumps after two or three years, which isn't particularly quick!).

Varieties are almost always described just as 'red', 'yellow' or 'white. There may be some confusion between the last two, as some of the product descriptions claim that the yellow variety turns white when ripe. It's possible that they are all "Yellow Wonder" and "White Pineapple" but I have found no authoritative source on that, or a way to tell them apart before you buy anything. They hybridise a lot once they're in the garden though, so they could be anything by now.

With luck, there will also be mention of whether it is clumping or runnering (although that's also dependent on the conditions - alpines can be induced to runner occasionally).




Sources:

Subtropica - Northland, white, ships in summer, $3 per plant

TradeMe.co.nz - variable range and prices. I've got some of my best and some of my worst plants here, but it's a good place to pick up really cheap plants, or unusual ones that are out of stock elsewhere. Or just to diversify your plant stock a bit.

The Fragrant Garden - Palmerston North, five unnamed varieties (yellow/red/creeping/non-runnering), $5.20

Koanga Heritage Gardens - Hawke's Bay, White Pineapple (an actual named variety!, runnering) and unnamed red (nonrunnering). Order by August to be shipped in spring. $12 (unclear whether seeds or plants, and how many of each). Update: I received my strawberries in the first week of September; three small, healthy plants of each type, so $4 each.

Nikau Hill - Palmerston North, problems with website and no response to email when I tried to order, but had yellow and red for $9.90 Update: New website online in Sept, '14

Heavenly Herbs - Wellington, private grower. Red. Contact by email for availability and payment, $5
Haven't tried.

More about alpine strawberries:
Strawberry Store: Alpine Strawberries (US based. Good for information, but can't be shipped into NZ)

Worm Farm is Working

A quick update to confirm that my worms are alive and starting to chow down on a full bucketfull every couple of weeks.

I bought the worm farm just over a month ago, and added the worms maybe three weeks ago. It's mostly full of compost, with a layer of food scraps and then a thick layer of newspaper.

The Hungry Bin
(read about this worm farm here)

I run the odd half bucket of water through it every few days, to flush out the leachate and dissolve some of the good worm castings. This then drains into the tray underneath, which is filled with coconut coir. The coir then expands, turns into magical potting soil without me having to wait and mix it up when I'm actually planting, and hopefully absorbs a few extra awesome nutrients.

The first bucket or so of food I put in, I just sort of hoped it would work. I was definitely overfeeding, even though I was trying to give them time to settle in. I tried to avoid poking around, but checked in occasionally under the newspaper.

The general insect life moved in pretty fast, but I didn't see any worms initially. They had a huge pile of new soil to get used to and plenty of breeding to do, as well as needing to wait until the scraps were decomposed, but I was still a bit worried as I knew there were some food scraps buried in the bin (which can be very bad for the worms when they rot).

But last week I had a look, and there were a couple of worms up on the surface enjoying the rotting veges.

The Ghost of the Melon

So I added a half melon rind, as I'd heard that worms enjoyed those. And did they ever. I found a handful of worms hanging out under it a couple of days later, and all the flesh scraped off.

This week, there's only the wax coating left, like a plasticky ghost.


So along with the melon, I added a bucketful of scraps, mashed up with a trowel (the scraps were about a week old, and I've been adding a fair bit of water along with teabags and coffee, so it was all soft and starting to rot already).

I added a second melon rind yesterday

There's already a worm under it (and some of the flesh is gone, and it's full of bugs).

The whitish plastic looking thing at the bottom is the wax from the previous rind. It's just starting to decompose now (it's edible, so it's safe for the garden). The big white thing next to it is just a badly photographed egg carton.

The Radius Garden ergonomic weeder

I know that you can run it all through a processor and things, but I'm a fan of efficiency (plus, my flatmates might revolt). Leaving it to "pre-rot" in a bucket and then chopping with my Radius Garden Ergonomic Hand Trowel seems to work almost as well.

Incidentally, a bit of fangushing over that hand trowel, and its companion weeder. I have carpal tunnel issues, and it is the best design I have ever used. The weeder works fantastically as well for pretty much any weed (including dandelion roots) and the trowel is just a decent all purpose garden tool. The handle design is just perfect and lets you apply very effective, efficient leverage without straining your hand or wrist. They're my two main tools, and I use them constantly. And the curved handle means that I can hang them off a shelf!

Anyway, back to the chopped scraps... 

This seems to have been very popular and has disappeared fast enough that it all looks the same in the bin now (I was adding food to different sections, so that I could see what was being eaten and so the worms could avoid food that they didn't like).

Citrus and onion went in as well, though when we ended up with nearly a bucketful of mandarin peel, I decided to play it safe and added that to the "real" compost bin. I know worms technically don't like acidic food, but from what I've read, it's entirely dependent on how much you give (like any well balanced diet or proper composting mix!). They've certainly gotten rid of the citrus peel so far (though some of the onion skins are still visible).

I also add cardboard and paper, though that's mostly being used to mulch weeds right now!

Hanging out in the mashed up food from a week ago
Banana skins, mandarin peel and pea pods are still visible.

The very first batch of (unmashed) food from three weeks ago. Looks almost the same as
the more recent stuff. Also note a happy compost worm and lots of tiny white wormlike bugs.

So all in all, the worm bin is working well. I can't count the worm population, obviously, but they're still alive. It seems to have a pretty healthy ecosystem, and there are no problems with bugs or smell escaping. I can't harvest any castings for a while, but I'm happy using run off for now, and it should be able to easily handle our small but steady flow of scraps.

Cheap, DIY and Recycled Plant Pots

The little Sublime lime in its DIY wastepaper
bin pot.

If you have a sudden influx of seedlings and small plants, then there are a few ways you can scrounge up extra pots very cheaply.


This is the list of things that I have been doing

• Recycle all the original pots that every plant you have ever bought came in (obviously!)
• I had a vast stack of these at one point, as everything I bought went into the garden or into a bigger pot that I had to buy new. Now I've almost run out - and I'm having to find alternatives for certain sizes.
• I have a lot of tiny seedling sized ones, though. I'm going to try growing individual beetroot and carrots in them!

• Random plastic containers around the house (just make sure to add drainage as appropriate)
• E.g. I cut milk bottles in half and use them as seedling trays
• Any bottle or container can be turned into an actual pot
• Try planting a seedling or cutting on the lid and put the jar over it for moisture

• Cardboard boxes outside (will last a while and good for temporary pots, difficult sizes and 'decomposing in place' as very cheap, modular raised beds (complete with readymade mulch flaps!).
• If you have any interestingly shaped ones such as poster tubes or long boxes you can fill it with soil and cut holes along it, then turn it on its side and plant a row of plants.

• Cheap stuff from $2 type shops. 
• E.g. Large plastic bowls and basins (punch holes into them - carefully, the plastic is terrible quality). 
• Colanders are awesome for strawberries if you can find some with the right design. 
• You'll often find much cheaper hanging baskets which you can fill yourself with peastraw or newspaper (instead of getting the nice but costlier readymade coconut fibre basket padding).
• Baskets (e.g. laundry baskets and wastepaper bins) come in a variety of shapes and sizes, have readymade drainage, and often look reasonably nice. Line them with weed matting and you have an extremely cheap air pruning pot.
• These are ideal for plants that need to drain easily
• A large laundry basket is usually much, much cheaper than an equivalent sized pot.  


• Just make a rough 'fabric pot' out of double layered cheap weedmat!

• Or use a reusable bag (one of those sturdy fabric-ish type ones).

• Or just plant directly in the bag of compost - an old standby that I haven't actually done yet, because I feel like I'm 'wasting' the compost. But it's cheap (apart from the effort of hauling it home on my bike trailer - a Burley Travoy Bike Trailer , by the way, and absolutely amazing. I can carry two standard bags of soil on it easily).

Alpine strawberry plant in a sturdy colander.
If I ever want to hang it, I can easily drill holes in the handles as well!

Downsides:

The main downsides to this approach are that some of the containers will degrade quickly or require you to put them together yourself (with room for error creeping in there!).

Here we have a cheap plastic bowl to catch
run off (and keep the roots damp, as it's
a Jaboticaba) and an equally cheap wire
 basket with weedmat.

They may also look pretty ugly.

There's also the need to know a bit about the plants you're potting, as the much wider than normal variation in containers means that some plants won't do as well if you get it wrong.

Upsides:

A great deal of flexibility, both in finding pots and in customising them for the plants and location.

You can pick containers that suit different kinds of plants (such as large shallow ones for strawberries, tall ones for small trees, basket types for plants that don't like wet feet or that you're trying to keep small and air pruned, easy to hang shapes, small pots, large pots... ).

Also, CHEAP. And a great way to recycle stuff or create pots on the fly.

Examples of DIY Containers

Left: Meyer Lemon in its laundry basket. Self contained, and will drain easily.

Right: Strawberries. The large bowl at the bag has random slits and holes punched into the base. It's wide and shallow, so great for strawberries - in fact, I haven't seen any proper' pots that shape for sale at all.

 Left: Strawberry Plants.


• shop bought planters. Nice, but cost five times as much as the other options.
• cheap planters with pea straw
• 'proper' strawberry growbag (green, left)
• a colander (bright green)
• a random white basket tray with weedmat liner
• a sort of plastic sieve/colander (dark blue, top)


Right: Banana Misi Luki. The banana has been very happy in its laundry basket (with weedmat lining). Like the Meyer lemon, it needs to be contained and not get wet feet. This is also going to be easy to move, if it turns out not to work in my garden. But so far, it's doing extremely well.

Left: Plastic cover for a shop bought cake makes a good tray for a collection of chamomile seedlings in peat pots (being raised for lawn edging and eventual replacement. Vastly cheaper than buying larger plants!)

Right: Forget-me-not seedlings sprouting in their DIY basket-weedmat container (now large and healthy - the black edging is hidden under a mass of leaves.

Half a milk bottle makes a great seedling tray! 

Left: Neglected broccoli seedlings that I was slowly transplanting out

Right: Peat pots soaking in water before adding seeds (The far left is the sturdiest tray, but means that you can't use the 'handle' half. You can fit the same number of peat pots in both designs (10)

Left: Another sturdy container with readymade drainage. The broccoli in it is doing fantastically well now (see right/ this post - it's one of the first brocolli batches to flower)



Right: DIY attempt at a self watering hanging container. Half a bottle with holes inside a hanging container (the frame is from an old lampshade!). The sweetpeas and forget-me-nots haven't grown much, but nor have they died (it doesn't get enough light either - I can't reach the other hooks in that corner!).

 I've also got a few other weird makeshift pots around. I'll update with photos of them some time.

Jaboticaba or Brazilian Tree Grape

I stumbled across the Jaboticaba by chance. I automatically research any new species I come across to see if they are something I can grow (and actually buy in New Zealand!), and this is one of those weird long shot plants than I figured would be fun to try.

It has a lot of different names. The species name is Plinia cauliflora (or Myrciaria cauliflora or Eugenia cauliflora)

It's an interesting plant and rather picky about its conditions - it will grow slowly and happily for years, doesn't really care about the soil type, but won't fruit unless it's consistently watered. But it seems hard to kill outright!

Because it grows so slowly, it makes a good container plant. It also looks rather lovely. 

The trees can get pretty huge in their native Brazil, and apparently there are a lot of different varieties there. We only really get one or two in New Zealand (and only one that I was actually able to find), and they generally only grow to about 3-5m here (because it's colder and less humid. It should stay even smaller in a pot - the idea is that you just grow it up then plant it out later).

They fruit and flower directly on the trunk itself, large purplish grapelike fruit that look really impressive. They're very prolific; you get a lot of fruit off each one and they keep flowering and fruiting up to three times a year (a month and a half between flower and fruit) in the NZ climate. Four times if you're somewhere warmer. The fruit is good to just eat, or to make wine or jam out of.

I bought two seedlings off TradeMe - the only place they were for sale in New Zealand (a couple of specialised nurseries mention them, but don't really sell to the public). It seems like it's impossible to buy them any larger!

They're much easier to buy in the USA though, by the looks of things: Jabuticaba plants and seeds on Amazon

I figured that they'll be low maintenance plants that look nice around the deck, and maybe in five years I can try getting them to fruit. (...And by "nice around the deck" I meant that I may eventually repot them into nicer pots. The plants are really lovely in person, and I say this as someone who generally doesn't care for so called ornamentals).

Because I bought two, I can experiment with the best pot type. They like it moist, so one is in a normal plastic pot, but I also think that air pruning pots seem to be a good idea, so the other is in a DIY pot (wire basket and weed mat lining).

Both are sitting in a plastic bowl to catch the water - the basket pot absorbs it back in a lot more readily! (Same rainwater, same amount of time, half the amount of water in the bowl).

The reason the water is so dark is because of all the soil that washed out with the rain! (Now there's incentive to put a bowl under pots).

More info:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabuticaba

http://www.crfg.org/pubs/ff/jaboticaba.html

Also a quick update on two of the natives:

The Red Kaka Beak is growing really well.

(Compared to when it first arrived!)

This little manuka Huia is somewhat smothered, but absolutely covered in flowers. 

In my defence, that ground was bare earth in summer - the winter rains (and me disturbing it) have been a massive boon for the weeds!

99 Bottles In The Ground

One buried milk bottle under the borage, and practically
on top of a dwarf manuka plant.

Behind it is an alpine strawberry and the curled parsley.
Behind that you can just see the chives around the Blush Babe apple.

The bottom right corner is a
wool mulching blanket from Country Trading.co
around the columnar Ballerina Polka. The rest of the mulch is
 pea strawand needles from the Norfolk Pine.

I've been looking for a better way to water everything that didn't involve lots of money or digging up my entire garden (because summer is coming, and I have twice as many plants now!).

The best quick DIY method I've found is just burying a bottle with a few tiny holes or slits in. This both acts as a slow distribution water storage tank that won't evaporate and delivers the water deeper under the ground directly to the roots.

I haven't needed to actually test them yet, because it's still winter and rainy, but I've started adding them to bare ground, or when I plant stuff.


Problems:

- finding enough bottles! We generate very little recycling which is really holding up my plans for a recycled garden empire (I've been trying to do a bottle tower for ages and never have enough bottles! Also see: the incremental rate of mulching for new beds... I'm almost ready to go raid recycling piles on recycling day).

- burying the bottles. They have to be quite deep, so it's tricky to add them around existing plants. The best time to add them is when planting something new.

- difficult to judge the right bottle size or slit size (it always comes out much faster than expected!). I've got some much smaller ones in the containers and the bigger 2 litre bottles in the garden.

Considerations

- may be worth adding a filter over the opening to stop things falling in

- may need to add sand or something similar to slow the rate of water seepage

- could be an interesting way to disperse fertiliser directly to the plant roots (e.g. something that will dissolve like Blood and Bone or compost teas)

- they look a bit ugly, but should be covered up by plants over time if you put them in the right place.

- you probably need at least one per large plant or tree, so that can add up to a lot of buried bottles.

- can just not bury them and have them slowly drip down from the surface but I like the idea of getting the water in as deeply as possible.




More info
http://www.providentliving.org.nz/bottle-drip-irrigation/
http://www.chicagonow.com/chicago-garden/2009/06/pop-bottle-drip-irrigation/
http://gardenandhome.co.za/article_t2.aspx?id=50568