Spring has arrived in all its beauty and with it a renewed desire to grow our own food. Now, the quarter-acre section of years past is a fading memory for many Kiwi families, as properties are divided and subdivided to make room for more and more homes (and increase someone's pocket money, too, I suspect). We're thankful to have a third of an acre but it seems that half of that is driveway. Besides, it's not really set up for a huge orchard or vegetable garden, but with the warmer weather causing the blood to course through our veins, we're eager to grow something we can eat.
Not that an orchard is exactly a foreign concept to us. We've been growing our own fruit - or at least attempting to grow our own fruit - since we were married. Over the years we have grown feijoa (along with every second household in New Zealand), plums, plumcots, and walnuts (not a fruit but belongs in the orchard nevertheless) and with varying degrees of success, passionfruit (the first vine was a prolific bearer, the subsequent ones disappointing, although we blame the dogs for that), grapes (the birds get to them before we do), brambles (no success so far but we're ever hopeful), strawberries (the grandchildren would eat them before they were even ripe), citrus (all the plants suffer from disease but seem to still fruit - apart from lemons which we have only managed to grow for the first time this year), nectarines (suffer from leaf curl but it looks as if we might get a smallish crop this year), and apples (better success since we espaliered the trees even though they were mature).
As for vegetables, we've really only dabbled with growing a few for the satisfaction of being able to pick the occasional one for the dinner table, but with the ever-increasing cost of fresh vegetables (seriously, who pays $7 for a cabbage or $14 for pumpkin), we've decided to extend our usual repertoire of tomatoes (yes, I know, technically a fruit but no one puts them in fruit salad so let's include them here with the vegetables), capsicum, spinach, beetroot, radishes, and the lettuce that always gets ignored because it's easier to grab a pack of twice-washed leaves from the supermarket.
This year DH has decided to try his hand at kumara. We have thirty or more slips and if they all produce an average of 3 kumara each, that should be enough to keep us in kumara for a year. However, we have to wait five months until they'll even be ready to harvest, so we're not holding our collective breath around here.
Some of the Brussel sprouts that I planted back in autumn look as if they are finally doing what they should have done months ago - that is, producing small compact heads of sprouts. In the meantime, we have discovered that the leaves of said plants can be used in much the same way as cabbage and so even those plants that are still more leaf than anything else have been at least justifying the space given to them in the garden.
We also have Queensland Blue pumpkins planted and I'm really hoping that they produce as they are my favourite and impossible to buy in the shops. And, besides, even the common supermarket variety of pumpkin has pretty much become a luxury item, so unless we can grow them, goodbye pumpkin soup and pumpkin risotto next autumn and winter.
I'm also giving zucchini some space in the garden although we must be about the only people in town who cannot grow this vegetable. Come late summer, most people we know have zucchini coming out their ears and are having nightmares about them, while we are lamenting the fact that yet again our plants all died without producing anything. (What I can't understand is if it grows so well here why are we importing it from Australia at exorbitant prices?)
Gardening, and particularly vegetable gardening, is a lesson in patience, perseverance, planning, frustration, and resignation. You have to know that in five months' time you'll want kumara, to plant them now. Or that each night it's necessary to get outside and water and squish bugs and tie up the plants and resist any temptation to pick them too soon. Or that the birds are going to eat all the yummy stuff and leave you with the wormy bits. Or, that just as your plants are producing, everything is suddenly going to be dirt cheap at the supermarket.
It's enough to make one throw up their hands in defeat. But then we wouldn't get to enjoy our spring fling.
Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation. Habakkuk 3:17-18, KJV
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