I bought a pomegranate tree about 7 years ago. It spent a couple of years in a pot and then I planted it out to a spot that gets a reasonable amount of afternoon sun. I love pomegranates but ever since I have been waiting. Waiting for even a single fruit to set. The tree is supposed to be self-fertilising, but each year the flowers appear, pretty flowers.
And I watch as the flowers end, and a week or two later the fruit drops off. Each and every one of them. I know they take a while to regularly set fruit. But I think after 7 years I should have had one….surely….at least one beautiful pearl filled fruit.
At least they look pretty I guess, especially in Autumn when their leaves change. But I want fruit, from the pomegranate but also from the feijoa in the above picture which hasn’t ever flowered let alone fruited.
I’m not sure what it’s like in other places, but Melbourne supermarkets have large gaps on their shelves at the moment due to coronavirus related panic buying. As a result I’m trying to get a bit creative – using up what I have in the cupboard and coming up with some new ideas. This is a great combination (and both carrots and white beans are relatively easy to find even with the shortages….), sweet and creamy without any dairy.
1 onion
finely chopped
1 clove
garlic, finely chopped
1 small
leek, finely chopped
500g
carrots sliced
A sprig or
two of parsley chopped
2 tblspns
olive oil
400g can
white beans (cannellini, or butter beans etc)
1.25
litres stock
Saute the onion, garlic, leek, and carrots in the olive oil for about 10
mins or until softened. Add the stock
and heat until almost boiling. Remove
half the soup and puree with half the beans.
Put back into the soup with the other half of the beans and the parsley. Heat and serve with crusty bread.
In Australia, the crops that are most commonly referred to as broccoli are varieties with large green heads and thick stalks. These types often produce smaller sprouting broccoli like side shoots once the main head is harvested.
Sprouting or Bunching Broccoli’s (usually green or purple) are broccoli’s which don’t produce a large single head, instead they produce large amounts of side shoots often on long stems. The term ‘Calabrese’ often refers to sprouting broccoli.
Romanesco broccoli is a different sub species of brassica, and is more like cauliflower in both texture and growing habit.
Broccoli Raab (also known as Rabe) is also a different sub species and tastes more bitter than standard broccoli.
Chinese broccoli (Kai Lan) is more similar to Broccoli Raab in flavour than to the other broccolis.
Broccolini is a hybrid mix of broccoli and Kai Lan.
Growing Broccoli
In theory Broccoli can be grown pretty much all year round in Melbourne provided you pick the right varieties. Having said that though I think it is far easier as a winter crop, as during the warmer months keeping the pests away can amount to a full time job. It also takes up a fair amount of space so to grow it during summer you would have to either; have a lot of space or really really like it.
For most varieties it is recommended to sow seeds between early summer and mid autumn. There are quite large variations between varieties though– I have seen varieties which you can sow as early as October and others as late as August (so pretty much all year then…) but all are able to be sown December/January so if you don’t know what seed you have try it then to be on the safe side.
Broccoli usually takes about 4-5 months to produce flower heads when grown from seed, and 2-3 months from seedling stage.
Harvesting broccoli:
Unlike many other Brassicas broccoli can be a pick and come again crop making it ideal for the home garden. Once you remove the central flowering stalk the plant will generally produce smaller side shoots which can also be harvested.
This can go on for a couple of months with the side shoots
gradually getting smaller. As a result you can get away with one mass
broccoli planting. However what is probably a better bet if you want to
have broccoli from early winter the mid-late Spring would be to sow seed in
both December and March and have some early and some late plants.
Broccoli
seems to have a large number of predators (is that the right world when it’s a
plant?). It is loved by both Cabbage White Butterflies and Aphids and I
have found many a stalk and flower head devoured by what I am presuming is mice
(or possibly rats).
Pests –Aphids:
I find
the aphids are most active in late Spring and Summer, so to avoid them
infesting the flower heads it is easiest to treat the plant as a winter/early
Spring crop. It can be nigh on impossible to remove them
from the flowerhead without some form of insecticide once they take up
residence. Although if anyone has any ideas on this it would be much
appreciated!!!!
If you are determined to grow it at other times (and I love broccoli so I understand why you would ) then you will need to inspect your plants regularly and to develop some techniques for keeping the aphids at bay (or be happy to eat them). If they attack the plant before it sets flowers blasting them off with water has worked fine for me, however they hide in the flower heads and once they get in that technique doesn’t work as well. I am always hesitant to use insecticide (even organic ones) on aphids in case I kill a ladybird (ladybirds favourite meal is aphids so if you have a lot of ladybirds your problem is probably solved) however if you are sure you don’t have ladybirds around then pyrethrum seems to work well.
Pests –Cabbage White Butterflies:
Most
active in the Spring and Autumn, cabbage white butterflies can totally destroy
your plants – particularly when they are at a young seedling stage. I
deploy two
methods for keeping them at bay.
Inspect the plants regularly. Pick off any caterpillars and dispatch them. They like to hide up the veins of the leaves so take particular care there. Also running your fingers over the leaves to squish any eggs that have been laid is a good preventative measure. The eggs look like tiny raised white/yellow lines and are a couple of mm long (funnily enough I think there is an egg I missed visible on the broccoli photo above, it is near the bottow of the photo about half way across and 2cm up from the bottom.)
Protect your plants at seedling stage by covering the plant. I use 2 litre plastic bottles (soft drink ones) and cut off the bottom and use the top section as a cloche for the plant. They look a bit silly but better that than shredded leaves from caterpillar attack.
Pests – rats and mice
Rodents seem to love broccoli and I’ve had them eat both flower heads and leaves. Keeping them at bay is a constant challenge, and I don’t have many solutions, although you can read more about my battles with rodents here.
It’s finger lime season. Finger limes are an Australian native citrus, indigenous to the Queensland and NSW coast. The fruits are small, about the size of my little finger and when cut open reveal beads of citrussy goodness. The insides can be a range of colours; white, red and green. Mine are pink.
They grow on bushy plants that can get up to 7 metres tall. Fortunately mine is still on the small size at about a metre. The plants are incredibly prickly and harvesting the fruit can be a painful experience. Sometimes I let gravity do its work and harvest them from the ground to avoid the scratches.
I haven’t had any real issues with my plant. Ironically the gall wasps (a native insect that traditionally feeds on finger limes) seems to prefer my lemon tree, and nothing else seems to bother it. My plant doesn’t even get sun in winter, it’s quite near the house which shades it when the sun isn’t as high in the sky. It seems happy enough though, happy enough to give decent amounts of fruit anyway.
Several months ago we had successive fox attacks. First our guinea pigs were taken and then the chooks. We thought we’d done a lot to protect the chooks. They’d happily (I hope) survived 7 years living in our garden. Their pen had sunken sides everywhere except below the door and they were locked up every night. But foxes are clever, and one burrowed under the door, and well you can guess the rest.
Although I loved our chooks and miss them (aside from anything else eggs are hard to get at the moment), I am trying to focus on the positive. The garden is a lot cleaner now, I don’t have to protect my seedlings, and their demise did create something of an opportunity to grow stuff in their old (heavily fertilised) shed.
So I planted a couple of pumpkins and a Zucchini Tromboncino. Fast forward about 4 months and the whole shed has been taken over by the zucchini. It survived most of its initial leaves being eaten by rodents, smothered the pumpkins and is fruiting non stop. I’ve picked some but these ones I’ll leave because I’m intrigued to see how big they will get. I suspect the chicken wire may impact their growth a little though.
