Garden Share Collective: March

This monthly writing assignment for the Garden Share Collective has been very good for my gardening concentration. Instead of just muddling through, like an absent-minded gardener, I've been paying much closer attention to what's going on out there. And what's going on right now is Fruit. So March is officially fruit month in the Five Course Garden.

Most of the fruit is happening in the front yard, formerly a weed and ivy bank, and now a fruit nibbling garden. Nibbling really is the right word here. We do not grow what would qualify as "crops". Some days we might just pick a single plum. Or a shiny cluster of six currants. No matter how small the harvest, it's delightful.

From a distance, it still looks a bit like a weed and ivy bank. But if you walk slowly, and pay enough attention, you can eat all sorts of things on your way up or down the path.

MARCH HARVEST
Chilean guavas.  In the bed right at the front just behind the fence, the Chilean guavas are ripening and putting out the most gorgeous toffee smell.

These guavas are only the size of peas, and to be honest, they look poisonous. They have a leathery looking skin, the birds never touch them, and they never have a bug near them. They start out a really dark red, and go pinker as they ripen, which also seems backwards and slightly suspicious to me. But pop one into your month, and it's like a rose + pineapple lolly. Sweet, tropical, floral. Fabulous. We eat them fresh -- there aren't really enough to cook, but they can be stewed, added to jams, and I suspect they would make a worthy addition to an apple crumble.

Peaches. Also in the front border, in among the Chilean guavas, there are two dwarf peach trees, which have been pickable for the past couple of weeks.

There have been maybe 20 small peaches from both trees. There is nothing quite like standing on the path, with juice running down your chin and hands, having just eaten a warm peach from your own tree. I also love casually reaching down into the knee-high canopy, pulling out a perfectly ripe peach, and handing it to an innocent by-stander. Makes me feel like a magician.

Crab apples. The crab apples are just blushing up now, so it will be jelly time later on in March.

The crab apple tree sits right in front of the shed on the front border. It has done incredibly well there. I think we planted it two and a half years ago, and it was just a stick insect of a tree. Last year I did get what would qualify as a crop from it. 1.5 kilos; enough for a few small jars of jelly. This year I bet there will be three kilos. The branches are laden. I've been putting crushed egg shells around the base of this tree because last year the fruit was quite brown inside. It was still OK to cook with, but that's a sign of calcium deficiency, and egg shells take good care of that problem.

Blackberries. On the left side of the front garden, as you're looking up from the street, there was a clapped out old fence and years of weeds. We planted a hedgerow there, which is a glorious tangle of hazelnuts, roses, and blackberries -- with quite a few other edible plants joining in the party.

Right now it's the blackberries' time to shine -- only a handful at a time, but what amazing taste. I would love to get enough for some blackberry jelly. It's one of my absolute favourites. Perhaps I could get close to it by squishing some of these beauties onto hot buttered toast.

Passionfruit. Here's the wild card from the front garden. Passiflora Antioquiensis, red banana for short. I wrote about this glorious apparition last year, and explained in my totally absent-minded professor-ness why it would never set fruit in Wellington, namely because we don't have hummingbirds in New Zealand. Made perfect sense at the time! But take a look at this.

Real live passionfruit. This plant really seems to have hit its stride this year, with heaps of leaves and flowers, and now fruit. I can't wait to see what colour it is inside, and what it tastes like. Exciting.

Damsons. I've always loved these dusty blue plums, for their colour and intense taste. I did have big plans for making damson jam this year, but I only squeezed this tree into the hedgerow two years ago (there's always room for one more), so it's still young. I think it did an amazing job producing 30-odd plums so soon.

And out the back, there's even more ripe fruit.

Lemons and an orange

These are the last three citrus fruits on the four potted trees, leftovers from last winter. I can't bear to pick them. They give me so much pleasure every time I walk past and give them a little affectionate scratch to release their amazing fragrance. Last week there was also one lime and one grapefruit. But they dropped off their trees.

The lime found itself floating in a sea of soda water. The grapefruit is still sitting on the counter, getting its daily scratch. I need to juice it.

Blueberries. The blueberries are tangy and plentiful this year. It's become a bit of an Olympic sport to beat the birds and the dog to the perfectly ripe ones.  The humans are winning, mostly.

They look a bit like mini-damsons. I do love having blueberries in the garden. They are real troopers, producing fruit year after year, and wanting no more than a bit of rose mulch or pine needles, and the occasional water.

MARCH PLANTING
I'm going to plant some seeds in small pots because I've got no spare space in the ground at the moment. I'll plant them out as I pull out the spent tomatoes. I plan to plant:

• Fava beans (or broad beans, but I like their Italian name way better)
• Peas -- edibles and sweetpeas
• Green beans -- just an experiment to see if they'll cope with the mild wet winter.
• Green onions -- read Green Onions 101 for the basics.
• Salad greens and spinach -- now that it's cooling off, they will get happy and lush again, and not spend all their energy going to seed. 
• Beets -- I just plant the stripey chiogga beets because I never see them in the shops, and they look so amazing shaved in this root vege salad.
• Radishes -- because I'm having a craze on them in salads at the moment.

That's probably going to be enough.

MARCH CHORES

Ripping it up. March is the month to toughen up and start ripping spent plants out of the raised beds. I really do love the lush, overgrown tangle of tomatoes, fennel, mint, oregano, and strawberries, but before winter I need to have a tidy up, put some compost into the soil, and get the beds ready for winter growing.

Mulching. Before winter sets in, I'll put a layer of compost and some bark mulch on all the plants in pots, and around all the fruit trees out the back. I just make sure I do that twice a year, and the end of summer seems like a good time. We don't get frost here, but I think it's good gardening practice to tuck your plants up for winter. Seems like the decent thing to do.

Enjoying the last of the evenings outside. I don't light the outside fire during the summer, but I do really love having a fireside dinner or two when the nights get cooler toward the end of March and into April. It's that lovely time between feeling a bit brown and sun-kissed, wearing straw hats, and starting to feel the tug toward thick wool sweaters and beanies. Lighting a fire is not a chore, by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a great way to end a day of full-on garden clearing.

As always, ask any questions you like and I'll do my best to answer them.
Happy happy gardening everyone.