Aphid invasion!

Never in my life have I had an aphid invasion like this one!

Aphids have been thick on my savoy cabbages, coating the leaves with their greyness and hiding away in the folds of the forming cabbages.

The other day I decided to make a garlic spray and hit them hard.
I didn't note the quantities of the garlic spray I made up but it went something like this.

Garlic Spray

2 cups water
3 large garlic cloves finely cut up
a tiny little dash of olive oil

Pop water and garlic into a saucepan and boil up. You can kind of smell when the water has taken on the garlic odour. Cool a little before straining into a pump spay bottle. Add the olive oil and shake. When the mix is cool spray offending aphids.

Red Drumhead and Mini Wombok

Yesterday I checked to see the results and yay, hundreds, thousands of dead aphids! (I didn't take a photo unfortunately, so you'll just have to believe me.)

Now, one more problem to solve... how to get them off the cabbage. I decided on a hefty spray with the hose - just as well we have had plenty of rain lately otherwise I would hesitate using precious water in this way. This seems to have worked.

Bizarrely, it is only the Savoy cabbages that have been affected. I have Red Drumhead, Mini Cabbage and Mini Wombok in addition to the Savoys in and they are all clean. So what is it about Savoys?

As for my other brassicas, they are all doing well except for those within beak reach of the marauding chooky girls. I have lost three immature cauliflower plants to their ability to peck thru wire mesh!

How do you deal with your aphid issues? How are your cabbages?

aphid-free Savoy cabbage ( minus bloom)

Spring sum up

It has become a habit of mine to do an end of season sum up.  This is really so that I can work out what the successes were so I can plan for the next season. Also to note things I have learnt. Here is my spring sum up.

Pickings
The early spring pickings were:

• cauliflower
• broccoli
• cabbage
• snowpeas
• celery

These were really my late winter crops maturing in early spring. All these were second or third plantings. The caulis were smaller than earlier in the year and also a little yellowish. The broccoli heads, with the warmer weather I guess, matured faster that the earlier planting, meaning that if you didn't keep an eye on them, they quickly developed past my preferred stage - tight flowers. The cabbage were wonderful and arguably more flavoursome that the earlier season ones? And the snow peas - well they were fabulous and trouble free - but I always find them that way.  I realised I planted far more celery than I needed and as a consequence many went on to seed before I really got to them.

In later spring these crops were coming on:

• radish 
• beetroot 
• fennel

I love the look of all these vegetables - the fat red-purple of beetroot, the bright red orbs of a baby radish and thick green-white bulbs of fennel.

Pests

• stink bugs -  I got onto these quite early , while they were still at their green and orange stage and thus they caused limited damage only
• aphids - these were a bit of a problem on the late broccoli
• snails - hiding in between pots they had regular might feats on my lettuce

What I learnt

• attack your stink bugs early and you will win
• attack them well protected
• fennel, if  harvested by cutting off at the roots, re-sprouts and yields multiple heads of the one root mass
• your brassicas that you plant early and the ones you plant later really do perform quite differently
• transporting plants in the back tray of a ute is not a great idea
• what wind burn looks like
• eggplants aren't as tough as they look
• zucchinis are tougher than they look
• Currawongs are very amusing birds

Special pleasures

• Currawongs - everything they do, even their tanties
• Holbrook poppies
• bright new radish
• blueberries

Big changes
This spring was the last season in my Sydney patch. This small patch has provided such joy. It has been my solace, my quiet time, my distraction and excuse, my place to get dirty, my refuge after a long day at work and the first place I went to after being away from home. A place of secrets, a ritual of forgetting and the occasional tear. Thank you my Sydney garden.

Late this spring we moved to our new patch in the bush.  It will bring so many new challenges - tackling new vegetables, fruit beyond citrus and nuts. There will be things to learn about the land and the very special plants in our protected box grassland. Exciting and daunting at the same time.

Potting, raising, inspecting

The weather here has been a bit crazy lately.  We went through a patch of beautiful spring-like days in their low 20s and then, last week, that changed.  The wind blew in and brought winter back, trees came down and the new seedlings that had emerged during the warm spell, shivered in their soil.  They did - I could see them moving and could see their goosebumps too!

Across Sydney trees came down and branches snapped off and leaves blew. We had no damage here, but I hope other Sydney bloggers kept their trees and electricity. While it's still coldish today, the wind has dropped and the forecast says we are to return to warmer sunniness.

Today I potted up, raised seeds and inspected the progress.

Potting up 
I potted up some mint and some curled parsley. I also moved some self-seeded violas around.

I always have violas in the vegetable patch.  I just think they are so pretty and, because they self-seed so easily, they just keep coming back sometimes in slightly different colour combinations than last year.

The self-seeded violas invariably pop up in odd places -  little corners and cracks between the patch boarders, in the patch pathway, or in the middle of the patch where you'd want to plant your veggies.

So digging them out and moving them around or potting them up becomes pretty essential.

I must say that one of my favourite things to do in the garden is dead head the violas... strange hey?  There is something very meditative about removing the spent flowers to make sure the flowers continue. Do you like dead heading?

Raising seed
I also started raising some basil, long cayenne chillies, lemon balm, dill and zucchini.

I must say I have grown fond of zucchini (is that a pun?). They can take up a huge amount of space and can be almost scarily productive, and you can wonder what to do with them... but last summer I decided to get into finding  zucchini recipes I liked and had some success ( and it wasn't that hard).

I am kind of looking forward now to the next zucchini glut so that I  can make make those recipes again and perhaps find others I like (any suggestions of your favourite zucchini recipes?).

Being such an easy vegetable to grow, once you do find things you like to eat with the glut, for me including them in the patch becomes essential. But I know others feel differently.

Inspecting
I also looked around the patch a little... things are happening.

The espaliered Tahitian limes are flowering like crazy.  I can see that, if some of the limes don't drop off, I am going to have to take some fruit off.

My relatively recently purchased blueberries first fruit are starting to swell.  The bees love these plants and are doing a good job of pollinating!

And the pests are turning up -  sorry for this blurry photo, but amongst the blur you can see the black aphids on my chives. I spent some time squashing them with my fingers.

That's where I am up to, what is getting going in your patch - fruit, flowers, pests?

Summer summary - '11-'12

Always grow sunflowers

With summer drawing to a close, here are some of my reflections on the season.

On La Nina

• It was unusually wet and cool for a Sydney summer, it came as a huge shock after many many years of drought.
  
• Dorathea McKellar knew about El Nino and La Nina long before  they had terms to describe them (I love a sunburnt country a land of sweeping plains, of ragged mountain ranges of droughts and flooding rains...).
• La Nina is to be celebrated -  it saves my skin from added skin cancer risk and more freckles and  it fills the tank and means that you dont have to get the hose out and water!

On paying attention

•  My oft commented upon eggplants have been a slighly lighter colour purple this year and have had a soft light and fluffy flesh with few seeds.  I wish I had paid attention to their particular variety -  I want to grow them again. Or was their fluffy seedless flesh because of the plentiful rain?

On pest control  

zucchinis are not pests

• Eradicate the stink bugs when they are green babies and destroy them imediately! Even better, search your citrus for their lovely clear eggs and smash them before they can emerge.This way you might have a lime crop.
• Wear goggles when destroying stink bugs I got sprayed in the eye late last year and had to go to the optometrist to make sure I wasn't in some serious trouble. Tip -  irrigate your eye imediately if you get sprayed and you will save your eye.
• Hosing the aphids off the backs of the leaves of your cucumber works!  It uses a lot of water but it's better than spaying with other things and it's a La Nina year so I have lots of water.
• I now know what red spider mite looks like. I dont know what to do about it...
• Silvereyes (they are very sweet little birds) are great early season pest controllers in your tomato patch.  They search your tomatoes for green grubs and feed them to their babies. They also sometimes take a little nip.  Welcome them with open arms. Even if they nip your fruit. I can share with lovely birds.
• Glue traps work for reducing fruit fly. I love them!
• No matter how many glue traps you have, you will still have fruit fly.

On zucchinis

• Plant one zucchini and one zucchini only. Pick them young and eat them quick while they are at their best and have a miriade of recipes.  I have really enjoyed the ones I have used this year and no longer consider the zucchini a pest.

On tomatoes

• Pick your fruit before it rains lest it split!
• Learn how to eat split fruit in a La Nina year.
• My brown berries are more fruit fly resistant than the red varieties.
• Give up on growing large tomatoes in Sydney -  fruit fly is too much of a problem.



make lemon tarts

• Prune your plants a little in a La Nina  - this will help to ripen the fruit.  Don't prune  in a El Nino, your fruit will get sunburnt. Same goes for your skin really!

On chillies

• Grow them, love them, preserve, pickle, freeze, jam and eat them. They are one of life's great pleasures.
• Next year grow padrons, pick them, fry them and eat them with salt washed down with fino.

On lemons

•  Make lots of Lemon Tarts

On parsley

• curled parsley doesn't like La Nina as much as Italian.

On beetroot

frogs love La Nina

•  Dont be afraid of pickled beetroot.

On sunflowers

• Always grow sunflowers, always.

On frogs

• They like La Nina better than El  Nino.

The last of the zucchinis

Picked

some of today's eggplant pick

• 8 eggplant

 Pulled out

• 3 tomato plants
• weeds
• 1 cucumber plant that was too aphid-covered to save 

Other

• potted up the finger lime
• turned in the sugar cane straw that mulched the three tomatoes and added 1 bag of manure
• hosed off the aphids from the cucumber plant that wasn't so infested

I pulled out two sugar lumps and one broad yellow ripple currant tomato plant today -  they were getting sad as previous posts said.  The space left had few weeds due to a good mulching and I dug the sugar cane mulch in along with a bag of manure. I will let it sit for a while before planting -  probably fennel and a quick crop of radish and rocket?  We will see what I feel like when I get to it. I have plenty of seeds of both of these anyhow.

I also decided to try to do something about the massive aphid attack on the cucumbers.  One plant -  the older one -  was too far gone.  The other, a younger plant I deemed savable and used a technique I read once in a Jackie French book -  hosed the damn things off from the underside of the leaves.  This is something I wouldn't normally do... but I don't normally have such an aphid attack.  Perhaps it is as a result of La Nina? Lots of sappy growth to tempting for aphids to resist?  In which case then La Nina is the solution as well -  use the plentiful  tank water  to give them a blast!  Let's see if that improves things.  Where are all the lady beetles when you want them?

The extra heat and sun of the day pushed 8 more eggplant into pickability. It will have to be a serious week of eggplant eating to get thru the stash that is occupying  the crisper draw of the fridge.
 
The last of the season's zucchinis were eaten last night in a summer salad that I love. I didn't take a photo of it so you have to look at yet another picture of my eggplants!  I cant resist their purple plump beauty.

Zucchini and fennel salad
This recipe comes from Gourmet Traveller Annual Cookbook 2011 page 171.  I haven't put the exact amounts here for the vinaigrette, I rarely use them anyway going with my palate instead. * from the garden.

plump purple perfection

3 zucchini* (I used 5 small ones)
1 young  fennel bulb
1 spring onion* (the recipe says two but I think one is enough)
fennel seeds
Ligurian olives (I have tried this with other olives but the Ligurian have just the right flavour for this salad)
parsley*
chilli flakes
olive oil
red wine vinegar
lemon* juice

Dry roast the fennel seeds and chilli flakes and then lightly pound in a mortar and pestle. Put in the salad bowl and make a vinaigrette that suits your taste with the oil, lemon juice and red wine vinegar. Add the vinaigrette to the bowl and mix.  Take a mandolin and thinly slice the fennel bulb putting it in the vinaigrette as soon as you can, toss thru.  (I am having a bad week with my hands -  I manged to slice my thumb open while using the mandolin! That added to the chill burns of earlier in the week... I should be banned from the kitchen.) Thinly slice the zucchini and add it to the bowl along with Ligurian olives, torn parsley and spring onions. Toss and serve. This is yummy -  enough to get enthusiastic about zucchini.

We had this with some fillets of my favourite fish in the world -  Flathead.