Gardening advice, including mine, is usually pretty repetitious. How many different ways can you say, "Mulch, mulch and mulch again or your soil will turn into concrete or wash away"? After 30 years of gardening writing, is there a new way to explain the control of fruit fly or how to battle snails?
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So here are the not-top-10 tips – the ones gardeners rarely think about, but that I have gleaned from hard-won experience.
1. Beware of falling fruit. Do not grow pumpkins in a pot or hanging basket on a second-storey balcony in case they hit passers-by below when they drop. Do not grow bunya trees where their falling nuts might crush a Volkswagen, or the noggins of passing pedestrians. Also avoid chilacayote melons if there is anywhere inaccessible they can climb, because if there is somewhere they can climb they will, and the fruit will drop in mid-winter – hard.
2. Do not use a garden fork in flip-flops, bare feet or sandals, because if your aim is off by a few millimetres, the fork might go through your foot, as well as into the garden. Note: most gardeners will experience something similar once, and then invest in boots.
3. Gardening in the nude does not bring harmonic enlightenment, but scratches, stings and encounters with unexpected rose bushes. Also, wear gloves when pruning rambling roses, unless you wish your hands to look as though you have been ravaged by a short-fanged vampire.
4. Roses grown over an arch will slump after rain or even in a good growing season, usually 10 minutes before a two-metre tall guest arrives. Choose thorn-free roses such as banksias or climbing Iceberg to grow above the path up to the house.
5. You do not need a heated seed-bed. Place your seed-raising pots on an old towel on the dashboard of your car in a hot car park, and see the seedlings perk up like the lawn after rain. If pot theft is not an issue, place the pots, again on an old towel if you value your Duco, on the roof on the car while it sits in your driveway.
6. Speaking of perked-up lawn, your grass will turn brown this summer, unless you give it obscene amounts of water. It possibly already has. Do not panic. Brown is temporary. Grass does it just to have a rest. Twenty-four hours after a rainstorm, you'll see green shoots again.
7. Birds get tangled up in bird netting. So do flying foxes and tiger snakes. This is not a good thing for either wildlife or the gardener who tries to remove them. Drape your trees with fruit-fly netting instead – a white, tightly woven cloth that looks as though it will stop fruit ripening, but actually protects a little against frost and drying out, with luscious ripe – and fruit-fly free – fruit below. The easiest way I've found to apply it is with a friend. For smaller trees, use the two-person making-a-bed "sheet throw" or with three or four people each wielding a long pole or broom – a broom is best with the broom part upwards. If you can't reach the tree top even with a broom, accept that the highest fruit is "rent" for the birds. Birds were here before we were, or at least the non-feral ones were.
8. You cannot train a cat not to use the sandpit as a loo, especially if it is next-door's cat. Drape the sandpit with bird netting when not in use. Birds and fruit bats are not interested in sand – or not in sandpits, anyway – so they wont get tangled up in it. But when the cat tries to scrape sand, its claws will be slightly impeded. Cats do not like being impeded in any way and the cat will get the huff, but if the cat then turns its attentions to the soil in your rose bed, don't blame me.
9. Spring means just that. You can almost hear plants sproinggg!!! Many will do 80 per cent to 90 per cent of their year's growth in spring, if they have enough food and water. Water young trees and bushes well now, then mulch.
10. Wisteria, honeysuckle, jasmine and potato vine are part of a conspiracy to take over the planet, starting with lifting off your roof, strangling your trees and collapsing your fences. Do not even sit and read a book next to them in a good season. Wisteria can be tamed, with a sharp eye, sharp secateurs and steady determination, but the others should only be grown along fences far from houses, sheds or trees where you will either mow on either side of them, or preferably, where their only neighbours are hectares of concrete and bitumen.
PS: Also, don't forget to mulch.
This week I'm:
* Gazing fondly at the giant pile of wood chips that were white poplars a few days ago, but are now, thanks to the expert chainsaw wielding of the tree loppers, the mulch for this summer, spread lightly so as not to stop what rain does fall from reaching the soil, and possibly, hopefully, depending on time available, a scattering of hen manure, either from our chooks or pelletised, on top.
* Exclaiming "Magnolias!" and wishing I hadn't planted them behind the lemon trees, where we have to peer around fruit and foliage to see them.
* Watching the first spring roses bloom, which this year aren't the banksia roses, but old-fashioned Maiden's Blush clambering up the lemon trees and over the pineapple salvias.
* Not quite getting around to picking large bunches of thryptomene, which always means early spring to me.
* Simultaneously cursing and admiring the lyrebirds as, tails magnificently up, their giant feet uproot my newly watered thyme bushes, then stand on the garden railing and yell at me when I shoo them off.
* Seeing the eucalypts on the mountain outside my study turn thin topped, the peppermint gums more flowers than leaves. It's been a nicely damp winter, with almost average rainfall, but despite damp soil, those trees are preparing for heat. And so are we.
Recipes
Stuffed monkeys
No monkeys were harmed in the making of this biscuit. I found a reference to "stuffed monkeys" in an old Mary Grant Bruce book, circa 1930s. It took me three years to find a recipe, which I've slightly updated. A stuffed monkey is a bit like a squashed fly biscuit, but better.
2 cups flour
2 eggs
100g butter
2 tbsp castor sugar
Filling:
1 cup seeded raisins or chopped dates
1 cup sultanas
1 tbsp mixed peel or 2 tbsp grated lemon and/or orange zest
1 tsp ground cinnamon
jam, as needed to hold it together, or to taste
extra milk and castor sugar
Mix flour, eggs, butter and sugar. Roll out and cut into squares or rounds.
Mix filling and place teaspoons full on the pastry. Fold one side of the pastry over on to the other and pinch edges together. Brush with a little milk and scatter on caster sugar. Bake in a preheated oven at 200C till golden.
Genuine Turkish delight (not like that red jelly stuff that pretends to be the real thing)
OK, this means work. A lot of work. But it smells divinely of fruit and roses, and is one of the most glorious sweet things you can eat. It's also much lower in sugar than most sweets, as it doesn't entirely depend on the sugar content to hold it together. I have slightly changed the original recipe – or at least one of the versions of the original recipe, as this sweet has ancient Persian roots.
Do not let the length of these instructions put you off. It's not nearly as complicated as you might think once you start making it, but it does take a lot of beating time. Put on music you love or even a good DVD while you make it. The result will be nothing like that red jelly stuff that is sold as Turkish delight, usually covered in not very good chocolate. It lasts for months in a cool place.
PS: Your first attempt at making this may be a bit softer than Turkish Delight made by an expert, and stretch a little as you lift squares to your mouth, but it will be just as delicious and I have come to prefer the slightly gooey version.
4 cups castor sugar
4 cups dark grape juice or pomegranate juice or cranberry juice – each gives a different flavour, but still a superb result
juice of 1 lemon
1 cup maize cornflour
4 tbsp rosewater
¾ cup of icing sugar (not icing mixture)
¼ cup cornflour
Take two saucepans. In the first one, place the caster sugar, one and a half cups of juice and the lemon juice. Stir until the sugar dissolves, then turn up to high and boil and stir. Boil until a little sets into a soft ball in a saucer of water. Take the pan off the heat.
In the next pan, place one cup of cornflour and half a cup of juice. Stir to a paste, then add two more cups of juice. Simmer on a low heat until thick, stirring all the time, then pour the still hot syrup into the thick cornflour mixture, stirring all the time.
Now simmer on a very, very low heat for about an hour. Stir every now and then. You don't need to stir it all that often until near the end of the operation. But be ready to begin stirring if it begins to get thick or looks like sticking. Then stir like mad – and keep stirring vigorously, getting the wooden spoon into the edges of the pan.
It'll get thicker … and thicker … and very, very, very thick ... but don't give in. Keep stirring! It'll be almost solid by the time it's ready.
When it's really, really, REALLY thick and you are quite sure it can't get any thicker and, anyway, your arm is about to break, take it off the heat and stir in the rosewater.
Pour on to a greased tray. Leave uncovered for about three hours. Lightly oil a knife and cut into squares.
Now mix three-quarters of a cup of icing sugar and a quarter of a cup of cornflour. Roll each square in this. Store in an airtight container. I place baking paper between the layers, but with the cornflour, the squares shouldn't stick together.
Eat with extreme pleasure.
