I have recently started reflecting on where plants in our garden are originally from, because people often ask me the same question about myself. Most of our flowers, fruits, veggies and herbs in the garden are from other countries. I have started writing a series of blog posts to explore some of our favourite flowers and edibles we have grown over the years which are from overseas. In this post, I would like to cover plants we have grown in our garden that originate from North America. Sunflowers Every summer, I look forward to growing sunflowers in our garden. When I first started gardening a decade ago, I grew the very tall ornamental branching varieties which attract bees and help to pollinate veggies. In the past few years, I have become increasingly interested in flower farming, so I started growing sunflowers which are bred for the cut flower industry. These flowers produce only a single stem with one head. They are also pollenless. Usually, varieties suitable for picking tend to be hybrids. If you save seeds from your plants, they might not necessarily come true to type. The seeds also tend to be a lot more expensive than ornamental sunflowers. You can usually pick up a packet of these seeds for a few dollars from garden centres. Here are some cutting varieties I grew last summer. Rudbeckia Two years ago, I discovered rudbeckia, which are a rather charming flower in the same family as sunflowers. I purchased a packet of seeds on special from a large NZ mail order supplier called Kings Seeds. Every month, they have discounted seeds on their website, reduced by 40%. At $2.37 for a packet of seeds, I felt that I didn’t have anything to lose by giving it a try. I scattered the seeds in some punnets filled with seed raising mix and covered them with a light layer of the same product. I did this in mid-December. I left the seeds to germinate inside our greenhouse, but placed the punnets inside a plastic Sistema crate. I left the crate open during the day but covered it with a lid at night for extra warmth, as it can still be quite temperamental even at the start of summer. I kept the punnets moist by spraying them with the hose on the mist setting. Once the seedlings germinated and grew a bit, I moved them into our patio to grow a bit more before transplanting them into seedling trays, which you can see in the picture below. Once the plants were large enough, I planted them in plastic troughs outside once our marigolds finished flowering. By that time, it was late summer and the plants flowered in autumn. Blueberries When I set up our mini orchard in 2017, I planted quite a few different blueberry varieties in large containers. Prior to that, when I first started gardening, I did pick up a couple of blueberry plants on clearance at the garden centre and planted them in the ground, but they ended up dying. My theory is that the soil was too alkaline for their liking. Blueberries thrive in acidic soil. There are certainly things you can do to change the soil conditions where they are planted, such as adding pine needles. But this is of course an on-going task as any matter added to the ground will gradually decompose and fresh material will need to be added. For that reason, I wanted an alternative. In the past, Mitre 10 (a NZ hardware store with a garden centre) held a garden club evening around October. On one occasion, a sales rep from Tui, a large gardening company which makes a range of products, attended and gave a talk. He said that blueberries can be grown in containers filled with an acidic mixture called Pot Power, which is made by Tui. After having a chat to him after his talk, I decided to plant our blueberries this way and they have all done really well. The plants are much smaller and less productive than if grown in the ground under the right conditions, but are well-suited to an urban homestead like ours, where space is limited and the soil conditions are not naturally ideal. Pumpkins Every summer, I enjoy growing pumpkins. Here is a picture of the pumpkin Atlantic Giant, which I grew one year. It is an ornamental pumpkin that is used for entering pumpkin growing competitions. They are not as common here as in the US, which is a shame because I think they are fun and a great thing for young people to get involved in. There are so many temptations for youth, including recreational drugs and binge drinking, which aren’t good for your health. Pumpkin growing competitions are an example of good, wholesome fun that the whole family can be involved in. Contests bring together all the growers as part of a community, which is also nice. Modern society can be very individualistic. People can sometimes feel a bit isolated and lonely. I have recently written a blog post containing some tips for growing pumpkins, which you can read here.
Miners lettuce Every spring, I sow miners lettuce. As the name suggests, it was consumed by miners to prevent scurvy. It has a lovely flavour. You can pick the leaves as they become ready. As the weather warms up towards the beginning of summer, the plants start going to seed.
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Here’s a round up of developments in the garden. Harvesting pumpkins and butternuts My pumpkins and butternuts died off the vines quite early this year so I harvested them and stored them inside. The butternut variety that we grew this year was called Chieftain. We also grew Spaghetti Squash and the following pumpkin varieties – Blue Hubbard, Jarrahdale and Queensland Blue. All of these are known to store really well. Harvesting okra Our okra is starting to become ready! This season I grew four varieties: Gunjan, Emerald Green, Clemson Spineless and Burgundy. I planted my okra in 9 litre square black plastic containers (around the size of a household bucket). I have 193 plants in total. Every two days, I keep an eye on them as they mature quickly. It’s best to harvest them while they are young otherwise they can start to become too tough. Planting rudbeckia seedlings My marigolds that were planted in large plastic baba troughs had just about had it, so I pulled them out and replaced them with some dwarf rudbeckia seedlings that I raised from seed. This is the first time that I have grown rudbeckia and I am very pleased with the results. They are very easy to grow from seed and required little effort on my part. Potting up seedlings I have been busy working in my nursery. I have been potting up lettuce seedlings (including the wonderful variety Degli Ortolani from Italian Seeds Pronto), Pak Choi, Silverbeet, Kale and Spinach. When they have grown a bit in the seed raising trays I transferred them to, I will move them into the garden. I expect this to be in March some time. Next steps
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