Uplifting things for a crappy time
Despite spending a chunk of the week dealing with frost damage (awful brown-grey dieback on the tops of plants), wind damage (lots of trees dropping their leaves after an icy wind), and fungal damage from too much water… my tropical banana palm is living its best life, outside, unbothered, moisturised, in her lane… look at her.
I think it has put out three leaves in the last 3 days. Phenomenal growth!
My guess is that this is a particularly dry part of the garden and all of that rain has finally given the poor thing the chance to thrive.
What I am obsessed with this week
This week we have been troubleshooting a lawn, which I thought might interest some of you when faced with Weird Damage You Can’t Explain-
Some things to note- there is almost a line where the grass and moss stops, and the weeds start, there is no sign of dead/turned out moss or grass. There is no sign of unhealthy, dying grass or moss. Just a line where it all stops.
So we started with the environment- why does all of the grass stop there? Does shade from a tree stop there? Does water flow onto one part of the lawn, and not the other? Has something ended up on this patch of ground and not the rest (say chemical, or a tarpaulin, or something? My guess is that the deciduous tree drops all of its leaves there, and they were left for too long (weakening the grass), then aggressively raked up over a period of time. This would account for the lack of moss (it was all raked up) and the lack of grass (too shady). Waiting to hear from the tenant if this is the case…
What can we see? No bug droppings. No bird droppings. The ground is compacted and not great looking.
Is it a bug, or bugs? Bugs are pretty random things. There isn’t a bug out there that would start at one end of the lawn and move, in a long line, to eat both moss and grass. I’d expect patches all over the lawn, unless it is nemotodes, which were somehow dropped on the corner and are slowly moving.. but they don’t eat moss.
Is it fungal? A fungal infection would potentially spread like this, but not affect moss.
Too wet or too dry? Yes, possibly, but it has been too mild to affect this area- the affected area is the wetter area, and nothing drains onto it (like say if a chemical was draining onto the lawn and killing all of the grass).
One of my friends (a lawn contractor) swears black and blue that it’s grass grub (Porina), but it’s winter, and grass grub in Winter….?? Too cold.
So we are waiting to hear back from the tenant, if they removed anything from the lawn, and if anything sat on it for too long.
If you are in a similar situation in the garden, remember that the thing more important than knowledge is observation.
What staff learnt about this week
On Sunday I decided, bugger it, I will commit to travelling up to Kapiti to pick up cocoa husk every weekend, and return with the goods, so that we can give as many people as possible a delicious smelling garden.
Whittakers sells off the husk of their cocoa beans, and it makes fantastic mulch. There used to be a seller who delivered to Wellington, but they stopped returning my calls and there is a different label on them now, so I’m not sure who is selling them… Palmers Plimmerton, however, always do, so up there I go.
This was some of our staff’s first time spreading it so we went through the requirements-
The ground has to be completely cleared of weeds, sticks and leaves, as anything sticking through the mulch will look bad.
The garden bed has to have a bit of a lip on it, because the mulch has to be spread quite thickly (about 5cm thick), and it will blow around in a few weeks time, so we can’t put it too close to a path.
Water it in until it changes colour twice- it will turn lighter, and then it will go a nice, dark, even brown. Cocoa husk releases a natural glue which holds all of the husks together, and that’s what we want in Wellington!
Make sure the cocoa husk isn’t up against anything which has quite weak or thin shoots, because it can encourage damp issues.
Isn’t it pretty! You can see that the mulch has stopped closer to the path so it doesn’t all blow onto it.
An interview with the lovely Minette
Minette runs Meadowsweet Herbs, which is a huge source of inspiration for me. She runs workshops, sells medicinal plants and is an extremely positive, accessible source of knowledge on social media (facebook, instagram). If only we had half of her energy!
What are you known for?
Inspiring others to soulfully garden for food and medicine. I run a small boutique plant nursery and do lots of educational workshops and writing around growing and using herbs.
My family would say I'm known for giving them some or another herby thing from the garden if they have any kind of unwellness, randomly blurting out the botanical names of plants I see in movies, and always stopping to smell the flowers.
What are you working on at the moment?
I'm just finishing up redoing my potager garden. It is a large garden - around 400sqm in my backyard which we started from bare lawn when we moved here in winter 2019. We did it slowly in bits and pieces as and when money and other resources became available, and this winter season I decided to bring it all together and fix it up. So I took out every single plant and topped up the garden beds, secured the trellising and vertical growing areas, added irrigation to every bed and mulched everything. That means I'll be starting with pretty much a blank slate this coming spring and summer. I'm super excited as this means that finally the structure of the garden is done!
I'm also interplanting my orchard with herbs and flowers in anticipation of doing a bit of a "pick your own" offering later in the season.
While the weather is still cold, in this last month of winter, I also like to plan what plants I'll be offering again from the nursery in the coming season, and start working on a planting schedule and sowing some early seeds.
What gardening thing is occupying your mind lately?
The importance of gardening for health. Not only does it give us nutritious foods, healing home remedies, but the act of gardening is a physical exercise, a creative venture, and a mindfulness act. It feeds us: body, mind and soul. It's an answer to so many modern-day problems.
What are you waiting for?
Spring!
The reality is that here in North Canterbury, spring is a fickle thing... and while I'm counting the days to 1 September, we can still have frosts into mid November, once even early December! I'm eager to see what this new season brings - aren't gardener's just the most hopeful people in the world?! I'm yet to have as fantastic a harvest on my rural acre as I had renting a small urban house while only gardening in buckets... but surely this is going to be the year!
Thanks everyone, and thanks Minette! Give her a follow on Instagram if you use it, it’s a fantastic page <3