By Beatrice Hawkins
FREE TIMES gardening columnist BEATRICE HAWKINS talks up the humble spud this week and also shares some interesting tips and trivia…
POTATOES: A wonderful vegetable, so versatile, so much a part of healthy diet and so easy to grow.
I planted some earlier in an effort to break up the heavy clay soil so I could then plant shrubs.
They were doing very well until the dreaded caterpillars moved in!
Before I knew what was happening they had eaten all the leaves from the plants.
“Well,” I thought, “that’s the end of that!” I didn’t think the potatoes were far enough advanced when the damage happened to produce anything.
So this week I thought I’d dig up the area and plant the hydrangeas and azaleas that I wanted there. Imagine my surprise when I started turning up potatoes of all sizes.
I ended up with a two gallon bucket almost full of all different sizes. Tiny potatoes boiled, then a little butter and fresh chives added, yumm! and enough to give away.
That’s what I like about vegie gardening – sharing surplus with friends and neighbours.
The rockmelons and watermelons are setting fruit so I am looking forward to them maturing in a few weeks. The cucumbers are fruiting well. The first lettuce are finished and the next crop progressing.
The beans are flowering so bean salad and potato salad will be on the menu soon along with coleslaw from the savoy cabbages that somehow escaped the caterpillar onslaught.
Spinach quiche, fresh tomatoes and beetroot and the meal is complete, all from my small garden.
The hydrangeas and azaleas are now in the ground and doing well.
It is a spot that gets morning sun, afternoon shade and is protected from the wind.
It will be the view from the windows of two bedrooms so I hope they do well. Should be an improvement on the current view of a high Colorbond fence!
I had also cut the petunias back because they were becoming very straggly. I felt mean doing it as they were still flowering well! However, they have been well fertilised, watered and mulched and are all sprouting from the base again. With a little care I should have a good display again for Christmas.
Some garden trivia to amuse and inform us
Fact 1: it is believed the first potatoes were cultivated in Peru approximately 7000 years ago and brought to Spain in the 1500s by Basque sailors and to Ireland by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1589.
It took only four decades for potatoes to spread across the rest of Europe.
There are about 5000 varieties, mostly originating from South America.
Fact 2: Tomato juice is the official beverage of the state of Ohio honouring A.W. Livingston of Reynoldsburg, Ohio, who played a large part in popularising tomatoes in America in the late 1800s. Tomatoes were erroneously considered poisonous by Europeans for more than 200 years and by many Americans prior to the civil war.
Fact 3: Small pockets of air inside cranberries cause them to bounce and float.
Cranberries, which like to grow in swampy areas, are harvested by flooding the area, agitating the water to release the berries from the bushes, containing the floating berries with a boom, and scooping them up with front end loaders.
Although cranberries are not grown in Australia there are riberries or “rainberries” as they have been renamed, a native rainforest berry similar in flavour and colour to cranberries.
They are grown organically and marketed from the Sunshine Coast hinterland.
Fact 4: Bamboo is the fastest growing woody plant in the world. Some varieties can grow as much as 35 inches in a day.
There are 91 genera of bamboo and more than 1000 species from small shrubs to large timber varieties.
Last week I said watch this space for further trips to be planned by the Horticultural Society.
While I realise it is months away, planning is already well underway.
The Society is claiming the date: Saturday July 8th 2017 as they will be taking a bus to the Queensland Garden Expo at Nambour.
Put the date in your diary and plan to join us for a very interesting and enjoyable day out.
*This is an old article that has been digitised so our readers have access to our full catalogue.
