My Madagascar Beans

Last year on the Permaculture course I attended, I learned about Madagascar beans. Their shape and taste are identical to what I know from my home country, Taiwan, as "Emperor Beans" (皇帝豆）, but come in a different, more attractive colour. I was thrilled to discover this variety here.

Having learnt about them being a perennial, edible deciduous vine, I finally found my perfect pick for the shading sulotion outside out big west-facing French window. Three beans were planted in late spring last year. After more than half year's wait, I am picking some pods every week now in our subtropical winter.

Some pods didn't fill out properly before they shrivelled up. Not sure why; perhaps uneven water supply. Out of these 19 beans shown in the photo, which is a random selection, six didn't make it to full size and one moulded in the recent wet weather.

Some say Madagascar beans rarely fruit in the first year, but looking at mine I don't know what to say. They have filled the entire 1.8m trellis to shade my western French window, getting only afternoon sun, very occasional water to rain and near none fertiliser. The growing medium was from a few simple no-dig layers, with dried leaves, a bit of semi-mature home made compost, and soil from a deserted veggie patch plus mulch. It was a fairly shallow bed too, so most root system must have gone far under the layers I made, into the same soil that our grass is growing in.

Definitely Look forward to seeing how much I will harvest in total.

Autumn roses

Iceberg was probably not bred for cutting. Most of the year, my garden does not provide the right conditions to grow Iceberg roses on stems long enough for cutting - I need at least a small "handle" to go in the vase. In the Autumn, especially after it rains, they tend to grow faster and have bundles of joy for a country looking display like the above.

This year, Brisbane experienced a dramatically hot and dry summer. Most plants in my garden suffered. Roses, for instance, were not flowering in flushes like they should. The blooms were small in both number and size. The healthy, reliable Tiger rose had only a few sickly looking flowers, and its canes did not grow much during last summer. Pink Brindabella Bouquet (the only pink open flower in the photo) had virtually no flowers at all! I thought that it was my less frequent fertilising pattern that made the difference.

Apparently, it wasn't all human fault. By the time autumn arrived, the temperature lowered and the rain finally was here. All the roses flowered at the same time, at near-exploding rate, giving gorgeous, large, numerous (on some) flowers I've ever seen this year. They have all had great vase life, without extra water treatment - I didn't even change water regularly, only topped it up as needed.

It is high time to appreciate these beautiful and fragrant roses, both in and outside the house, before the Winter hits!

First experience with 'White Icicle'

Having never grown any type of radishes before, I am impressed by these oriental radishes - 'White Icicle'. Being a small version of the more commonly used Chinese radish, they are ready for harvest in just over three weeks.

On its seed package, all the radishes line up nicely in even sizes, unlike mine. Mine taste just as good. The reason they haven't looked great for me? I grew them in a no-dig garden, which means there is little ground preparation before sowing anything. These radishes are up to 15cm long, were growing in a spot where there used to be some bok-choy about 4 months before. The strong roots of bok-choy did all the digging required to grow these radishes. While this spot was not being used, it always had some mulch protecting it from being dried and hardened.

There are many ways to use oriental radishes. Being a Taiwanese, I like to use them in soups. Tonight, this fresh harvest made their way to a pot of beef stew along with onion and carrot. It makes the dish naturally sweet and has an up-lifting flavour!

Mini Compost Stations

I have a few "compost stations" around my edible landscape. They are low, around 0.5m diameter mounds, which hide well in little spaces between plants.
The materials I dump onto these little piles are a little different from those I put in my ordinary compost bins. To keep them discrete and decompose quickly I put:

• softer waste like tip pruned bits and rotted/damaged fruits,
• cut up longer items,
• no weed seeds (ideally no any seeds at all), and
• some water when I am watering the garden to help with decomposition. 

Usually these stations only receive small bits and pieces at a time. Occasionally, when larger amounts of new materials are just added to top of the heaps, it may look a bit messy. However, in almost no time - a day or two - the green turns brown and blends well into the mulched surface.

I find these little stations quite handy. When I just have a quick browse through my vegetables and find small things to pinch off, I just pick and dump them onto these mounds within arm's reach. Because they decompose right next to some planting, there is no nutrient loss during decomposition time. They feed my plants right there, all the time!

Mulching eases battle against nutgrass

Getting rid of nutgrass is an almost impossible job for every garden. It requires not only patience but also strategy. Today, I had a new experience in weeding nutgrass, which came as one of many benefits of using mulch - When reading about mulching to eliminate weeds, I doubted that mulch would do much help with nutgrass. What I have just experienced proved this to be true - just not as immediate as killing other kinds of weeds.

The mulched area is in the pathway of my vegetable garden. The constant moisture required when growing vegetables meant the soil under the mulch remain soft. After two-days' rain, the soil was like a sponge mud cake. It required little effort to dig to the depth where most nutgrass' root systems extend.

a "string" of nutgrass

Tools

When digging nutgrass, I like using a narrow, pointed propagating hand trowel. I found it better than a normal weeder as the trowel allows loosening soil around the roots before pulling - which is important because nut grass has thin and fragile roots that separate from the leaves easily and stay in the ground when the soil is compact.

Strategies

Instead of pulling nutgrass one at a time, I often track along the long roots to the next clump, loosen it out and keep tracking carefully without breaking as far as I can. If I am lucky, I will reach the end of the entire system. (The end is often showing a partially developed white shoot.) Without digging the entire system out, it only takes a couple of days for the leaves to come up again, and extend further in their root system.

new shoot on a "nut" that
marks the end of one plant

Benefit from mulching

With digging being a big part of getting nutgrass out of the soil, having soft soil around their roots reduces a lot of hard work. There was a significant colony of nutgrass within the lawn, which was very difficult to kill as the ground was too hard to dig even one nut out.

13 months ago, this area was converted from grass to a shallow no-dig-garden with roughly 10cm of organic layers on top of the original sod. Extra layers of newspaper/cardboard and sugarcane mulch have sometimes been added when necessary, ie. where some grass was still actively growing, or the layers needed a top-up due to heavy traffic and washing-out.
The above-ground result has been little fertiliser (I got so busy with children that I hardly had time to remember to use any fertiliser!) but still having strong and healthy crops growing. Underground, it has become so soft that 90% of the nutgrass could be dug up without loosing their roots. As I dug, I saw nutgrass shoot through half-decomposed newspaper layers and out through the mulch - all soft materials to handle.

soft soil under a patch of
well-mulched nutgrass

As I think back about how mulch was said to have the power of eliminating weeds, I now have to agree with it. The annual weeds I have around certainly die down as soon as mulch is on, thick enough. Nutgrass doesn't die just like that, but in a few months when the soil under the shelter of the mulch becomes so beautifully fluffy, nutgrass then finds no where to hide its roots.

The wake of the cycad

This cycad grows in the dark SW corner of my garden. It had been asleep for roughly two years. You can see this from the empty layer between the new and old growth. The story is that some new leaves were emerging about two years ago, but they didn't make it. I was of little interest to find out the cause. 

This year, I saw the low-hanging bottlebrush tree above it was almost tipping itself over, so I gave it a pretty hard prune. Then the magic was done to this cycad - a beautiful new group of leaves quickly opened up and stretched upwards. Though in the recent heatwave, the tips of new leaves look a bit burnt.

Touring 7 Nov 2014

A good rainfall yesterday meant the watering schedule is naturally done. I took this opportunity to have a little tour around my vegetables and take photos of notable things. Most of these crops are my first trials.
Coriander vs. Italian Parsley flowers/buds

Parsley flower heads, compared with those with coriander, have more buds in each cluster.

Coriander flower heads. The leaves that appear on the flowering stalk look similar to carrot leaves. 

 

Coriander flowers are like little dainty stars and highly scented. They attract bees.

Butterhead and Iceberg lettuce flowers

Butterhead

Iceberg

To me, they look almost identical. Iceberg seems to have a more loosely formed bunch of flowers. They both have little bright yellow daisy-like flowers.

Fruiting Eggplants

I tried trimming my eggplants to three main stems this year. At the moment the three plants each has at least 4 fruits growing.

We ate two eggplants last week, each around 15cm long. It looked like they were picked at a good time, with no tough seeds and the flesh was juicy and tender.

The long producing Chilies

To either side of the cloth are two hot chilli plants that I have had for the 6th year. They have been over-productive for our household use, and as they are supposed to slow down in production as they get older, I am perfectly happy to keep them.

Bush Tomatoes 

'Beef Short'

'Health Kick'

Before I knew much about growing tomatoes, I failed for two or three years. As I was about to give up, I decided to study up and give it another go. 

This year, I am growing two bush tomatoes. There have been no disease noticed, and I am very happy with that.

About the varieties: The 'Beef Short' cannot be found anywhere online, but presumably it is a bush type of beefsteak. These are fruiting at a height of about 40cm, much shorter than the height they are said to reach, which makes me wonder if the pot they are grown in might be too small?

Crowded Celery

When these celery plants were transplanted, we didn't have enough space in this area, hence the crowdedness. They have grown a bit taller recently and I am hoping they will still be ok for a normal harvest. 

The occasional Corn

I didn't expect my corn to perform well. I was merely growing them to suck up the extra nitrogen in my soil. They are skinner and shorter than ones of serious growers, but nevertheless, they are still giving me some sweet cobs! As can be seen at the back of this picture, there is another lot gone in recently and I hope to plant some heat-susceptible greens once the corn get bigger.

Capsicum, hopefully?

Similar to my tomato failings, I failed two capsicum plants for unknown reasons. Their health went downhill from the time they were transplanted. Since I had some great harvest in this plot earlier in Spring, I am more confident about this year's soil and have decided to try again. This plant currently have two developing fruits.