The members of our local book club were sitting in the hall last weekend, eating homemade hummuus, the best flatbread ever and lemon coconut cardamom cake (our book club could be renamed 'the happy food and local news club') when someone mentioned they needed to buy cosmos seeds.
Buy cosmos seeds? Every gardener at the table looked appalled. "Race outside and pick some seed heads," our leader ordered. "And some zinnia seeds too. You can't kill 'em. They even come up in the rocks along our driveway."
Seed heads from summer flowers are rich in ripe seeds just now, fresh and free. I need to harvest the seeds from our dead dahlia flowers before the wallaby eats them.
Almost (not all) flowers and fruit produce viable seed, though if your plants are hybrids their seedlings won't come true to type. In fact if you haven't grown exactly the same colour and variety, your flowers will have had an interesting love life and their progeny will be unpredictable, but almost certainly good.
Gather your seed heads now. Fresh seed has a better germination rate than the older seed in packets, plus if the parent plants have done well in your garden, the seedlings should flourish too.
Somehow the plenitude of flower seeds just outside the window triggered a "we will never starve because we have..." conversation.
It appears that all the members of the book club have Jerusalem artichokes growing, delicious knobby roots that are best baked with a touch of olive oil and garlic, or pureed to make a creamy soup. Jerusalem artichokes are delicious, but tend to have a loosening and flatulent effect on the bowels if you eat too many.
Plant one Jerusalem artichoke any time from winter to late spring, and next autumn and winter you will have 20. From then on you will always have them. Even if you are positive that you've harvested them all, more stems inevitably appear in spring, with a host of yellow blooms in autumn to remind you where to dig up the ever increasing harvest.
Our two patches of Jerusalem artichokes have gone through drought, floods, feral goats, wallabies... and we still have enough to feed the community. If the valley inhabitants ever need to resort to a Jerusalem artichoke-based diet, avoid us. A baked bean diet can't compare to the pungency of someone who has overindulged in Jerusalem artichokes.
At the moment I'm trying to give away chokos and tamarillos. Actually I've given up trying to give away chokos. Most people will take a couple of tamarillos - the red, kiwi fruit-like slices look beautiful on pavlova, cakes or in salads or fruit salads, but they are fiddly to peel, and the peel is bitter. Two tamarillos are enough for most people. This leaves roughly 600 for our fruit bats, but they are too full of medlars to bother with tamarillos yet.
I expected our medlar tree to give us too much this year - medlars taste like richly fragrant pears - but sadly the flesh looks like dog droppings, which makes them remarkably hard to give away. Last week the tree was loaded. The next morning not one fruit was left. Unless wallabies have learned to fly, the fruit bats have been feasting.
Our 18 walnut trees should produce far more than we can give away too, but it turns out that 18 trees produce exactly the right amount for a couple of days of munching by a mob of cockatoos.
I watched the mob fly down the valley a fortnight ago, the sentinel bird first, making sure the white goshawk wasn't around, then the rest of them, flying silently into the walnut grove like stealth bombers.
I did try to deter the cockatoos years ago, trying noise guns, models of white goshawks, imitation brown snakes on the branches, and computer tape which someone said cockatoos hated. Possibly the noise annoyed them, but not enough to abandon the walnuts. I then spent two years picking the nuts while they were still soft to make vast amounts of pickled walnuts.
I stopped trying to outwit the cockatoos during the 1978-83 drought. They needed the nuts more than we did. Somehow, after that I found I had grown attached to the cockatoos. They don't stay long. The white goshawk arrives a couple of days after they do, and the cockatoos leave - usually with one less cockatoo than had arrived. They don't return till the next walnut harvest, but the white goshawk sticks around. It's one of the reasons there is never a bunny to be seen at our place, though we often find rabbit fur in owl pellets. Owls sensibly cough up the fur, bones and feathers of their prey. The best cure for a rabbit plague is goshawks, eagles, Little Eagles and Powerful Owls.
As for other excessively generous crops: it's extremely hard to give away rhubarb, possibly because the clumps get bigger year by year, and while rhubarb is tasty, it's also fiddly to de-string and chop. It also becomes mush if you cook it too long.
MORE JACKIE FRENCH:
Most avid gardeners grow kale, too, and almost all spend late winter unsuccessfully trying to give their kale away. Frilly and curly kale are ornamental. It's also reassuring to have something so lush and productive in the garden, but few people eat much of it. At least we will never go short of green veg when there is kale in the garden.
Grapefruit also falls into "we'll have two and no more, thank you" category. Not even marmalade makers want more than one bag of grapefruit. As a mature tree can give you six boxes of fruit, finding victims to offload excess grapefruit is a necessity, as neither fruit bats nor chooks will eat your surplus grapefruit.
Thankfully, there are also winter harvests that everyone loves: winter sweet navel oranges, juicier and more tangy than the Valencias that mature in spring, even though navel orange juice turns bitter after an hour or so. Always juice them fresh.
There are Tahitian limes, Malabar limes, finger limes and Eureka lemons, late apples like Lady Williams and Democrat and Sturmer Pippin, and avocados if you have a warm, sheltered spot. There is at least one fruiting avocado tree in Canberra suburbs, possibly protected by the outdoor pizza oven that sits next to it.
This is also the time for a profusion of blooming camellia bushes. If you are patient, camellia bushes turn into camellia trees. Ours have even spawned seedlings, though none of the seedlings have bloomed yet, so I don't know what colour they'll be. At the moment we have a fabulous clash of pink camellias and purple bougainvillea over the wood shed, and bush after bush of varied camellias bursting into bloom overnight.
El Nino may be coming, but just now the is soil moist and the garden fabulously overgenerous with flowers and tucker.
