Fruit and veg prices are rising. Thankfully the fruit and veg in the garden are rising even faster, long spears of asparagus, bright leaves of silver beet, and the mulberries almost ripe.
This is the time to invest a few hours indulging in health-giving, mediative exercise in the fresh air, absorbing free Vitamin D, and growing enough veg and fruit to feed your family for the year.
No space, you say? Do you have sunny walls? Think espaliered fruit trees, or even non-espaliered fruits, the ones that you are likely to eat most of, in our case, apples, oranges, lemons, apricots, a dwarf mulberry, kiwi fruit, grapes, lemons and limes, which will give you year-round fruit to guzzle and to give away.
Do you have eaves or a roofed balcony? You have room then for at least 20 large baskets hung at varied heights, filled with potting mix, slow-release fertiliser and veg like tomatoes, bush pumpkins, lettuce, silver beet, parsley, blueberries or strawberries. Can you plant out your footpath with rhubarb, perhaps, to share with the neighbourhood?
Do you have a driveway? Plant the middle out with strawberries. Roof space you can "borrow" at work to grow the greens for dinner? Have you asked around to see if there's a community garden where you may find space?
Fences? A naked fence cries out for covering. Try thornless blackberries or loganberries, or kiwi fruit, at least one male and female, though a male will pollinate up to six female vines. Sadly you won't get fruit the first year, or even much growth. Kiwis tend to sulk, and then grow so fast they seem to be plotting to grab you as you walk past, a kind of fruit-bearing triffid.
Grapes grow easily from a cutting but I'd wait till next winter and get your plants for free then. Grow lots.
"Nelly Kelly" or "Banana" are the best passionfruit in our climate, and a grafted plant is worth it. Feed well, and give a spray of seaweed-based foliar fertiliser once a month, and you should get fruit the first year, and masses if it the second. Passionfruit are relatively short lived - be prepared to replace them after about five years.
Think hedges instead of fences: at least six varieties of dwarf apple trees, fruiting from January to August; dwarf peaches or nectarines, growing about half a metre and usually fruiting the first year. There are now dwarf plums, quinces, pears, mulberries - every fruit you might long for in a small garden .
Strawberry or cherry guava is a compact, evergreen bushy shrub that can be kept hedged to about 1.5 to three metres. Jaboticaba will give you a neat plant for hedging, and fat plum-like fruit. You might also try a kei apple, a thick and burglar-resistant shrub with yellow, plum-like fruit that can grow to two metres in our climate but is easily pruned to a dense hedge. It fruits over a three- to four-month period, even in the worst drought or while the land around is flooding.
Only have a patio, courtyard or roof garden? All the dwarf fruits above are great in pots. The Ballerina range of dwarf apple cultivars - 'Waltz', 'Bolero' and 'Polka' - are worth considering, as they require no pruning and are suitable for pots, as they only grow one to two metres tall on a single stem.
But if you want to begin munching home-grown fruit within a couple of months, Daley's Fruit trees mail order sell a new, quick-fruiting thornless native raspberry. It shoots up to about two metres in our climate, if very well fed and watered. Native raspberries usually ramble along the ground, but this one can be trained up a trellis. It produces for months, with rounder berries than European ones, and more delicious when grown in our warm to stinking hot summers. The best European raspberries, sadly, need cooler climates than ours.
Plant rhubarb "sets" now and you'll be eating it by Christmas; plant seeds of a winter-bearing rhubarb like Wandin Winter and you'll have some by autumn. Some strawberries will grow from seed, but you're better off buying plants, feeding them like heck and munching the first fruit by December.
Add a fast growing tamarillo in a sheltered courtyard; native 'finger' limes: if the bush is knee high it will double its size by January and give you fabulous fruit by then too. Plant a choko, any choko, and at this time of year it will sprout, grow, and if well fed in autumn will give you far more fruit that you or your friends can use, either as a veg or fruit, stewed with sugar and call it pears, add vanilla, or ginger or any other flavour. You'll have a texture like apple or pear and that will turn into (almost) whatever you want to fill pies or turn into crumble.
But your best fruit harvest this summer will be melons. Go for varieties that have been bred for cold climates i.e. check the label, Mabel. The seed packet will tell you how long the contents need to mature. Mini watermelons and sweeter-than-sugar rockmelon all grow fabulously in our climate, given a sunny spot and masses of feeding.
Veg? One seed potato should give you six to eight when you dig up the crop. If you grow spuds, you won't need to buy pasta, and far less bread. A potato bed is also less work that a lawn. Haul up half the paving and plant veg and herbs.
A packet of lettuce can give you 2000 lettuce, as the seed is cheap. Scatter a few seeds once a week and you'll have all you need. Choose a variety like red mignonette or Buttercrunch and you will be crunching them in winter too. Add carrots, silver beet, no more than three zucchini plants, train a pumpkin vine over the fence or up and around the veranda railing. Grow two apple cucumber plants, 12 parsley plants and two cherry tomatoes to add to your lettuce and you have your salads. Add basil and perhaps Black Krim tomatoes and you have luxury, and the basis for pizza. Bundle up some parsley and coloured chard/silver beet and swap the bunches for eggs from someone's backyard chooks. Don't forget to grow corn. And beans...
Go ahead. Try it. Mooch around your house and garden and re-think what might become productive. At least try the veg. A $20 outlay can save you thousands in a year, as long as you eat up your vegies. And luscious slices of chilled melons. And snack plentifully on strawberries, rhubarb tarts...
This week I am:
- Declaring the 'leafless' varieties of pea and snow pea the winners. Half a metre of them is giving us a hatful of snow peas every day, far more than we can eat or I want to pick. The conventional snow peas have given us (drum roll) five snow peas so far.
- Weeding. And more weeding.
- Picking fat purple asparagus spears.
- Planting corn, cucumbers, basil, silver beet, and more carrots.
- Delighting in the first tomato flowers.
- Watching seedling tomatoes and parsley emerge from fruit and seeds dropped by last year's crop.
- Picking white and green arum lilies, mini gladioli, dark blue sage, the first pink roses, the last mauve hellebores, and the gaudy pink new foliage of branches of dwarf lillypilly, a garden show-stopper just now.
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