Vegging Out
To all intents and purposes you shouldn’t ought to be able to do what Barry Burne, Joe Tylee, Vicki Boakes, Chrysler Goodley and Bruce Bickerstaff have done with their varying practises and philosophies. For a start, the most unfavourable aspects of it are that it suffers from: imperfect drainage, slow permeability, is easily compacted causing slow infiltration and it’s easily eroded by the wind.
We’re talking about Central Hawkes Bay soil, Waipukurau’s where I live in particular. It’s susceptible to pugging and compaction when its wet and wind erosion when it’s dry. As a feature it’s thin (eroded) air fall volcanic ash over loess with cemented pan. It all sounds more like a recipe for disaster than for the absolutely startling results that Barry, Joe, Vicki, Chrysler and Bruce have achieved.
You could be forgiven for thinking that Central Hawkes Bay is capable of becoming the next ‘Land of the Giants’ (LOTG). In a blast to my childhood and by way of an explanation for younger readers, “LOTG was an American Sci-Fi between 1968 and 1970. It’s set in the then-future year of 1983, the storyline tells the tale of the crew and passengers of a sub-orbital transport spaceship called the Spindrift. In the pilot episode, the Spindrift is en route from Los Angeles to London via the ultra-fast route of a parabolic trajectory.
Just beyond Earth’s boundary with space, the Spindrift encounters a strange space storm or wormhole, and is transported to a mysterious planet where everything is twelve times larger than its counterpart on Earth. The Spindrift crew calls the inhabitants “the giants” because if an average Earth human is about six feet tall, an average ‘giant’ would be about 72 feet tall. Everything on their planet is built to their scale — buildings, cars, animals infact the whole kit and kaboodle. The Spindrift crashes on this planet and becomes inoperable.” That’s the short version but you get my drift.
Back in Waipukurau, we seem to be having a ‘growth spurt’. Barry Burne has a seriously LOTG’s sunflower on his hands, he planted it in November last year so it’s really just a 4 month old babykins yet it stands a whopping three metres tall! His secret is not so much worm hole in the horticultural sense but a trench dug around the rhubarb next to the sunflower and filled with good ol’ horse manure. That’ would account for the hands height of the thing! Or the anthraquinone derivatives of the rhubarb acting as an anti-fungal and molluscicidal agent. Whatever the reason, it’s standing a good hands and shoulders taller than I’m sure even he imagined it would!
Six year old Joe Tylee on the other hand planted his giant marrow just before Christmas and its now 44 centimetres long and VERY fat. he attributes the growth spurt of the marrow to worm juice and water, typical boy! And he has a plan, he’s going to scoop out the seeds and fill it with mince. He’s a bit of a dab hand now at gardening because he also grows beans, broccoli, strawberries and courgettes.
They grow ’em young here in Central Hawke’s Bay because eight year old Chrysler Goodley who lives in the next town at Waipawa is the proud grower of a giant Scallopini. A Scallopini is a disc-shaped squash with scalloped edges and white-green rinds. Scallopini are part of the summer squash family and like others of that kind ought be picked well before they’re full sized. Whopper scallopini aren’t to die for interms of eating (in fact the little ones can lack in flavour too) but their flying saucer fruit are a fun novelty.
They’re bushy growers, unlike many of their viney cousins. They’ll bolt to a size that isn’t useful the moment you take your eyes off them so you need to get harvesting them before the rind hardens. They have the same requirements as all cucurbits: plenty of water, food and sun.
Vicki Boake like Joe Tylee has grown a variety of vegetables but it’s her silverbeet (beta vulgaris) that’s a real head-turner. It’s classic kiwiana. There’s nothing fancy about silverbeet, even the name, Beta vulgaris, is suitably phlegmatic. Silverbeet is amazingly easy to grow. I personally, enjoy them most as a soup coupled with walnuts. They’re a particualrly harmonious couple! Vicki’s secret? An old run that used to house chickens and pigs.
Now I’m a huge fan of home-grown beefsteak tomatoes. They’re utterly flavoursome and you’d be hard pressed to find a fruit that’s more mistaken for a vegetable than the humble tomato. Bruce Bickerstaff from Waipawa found a tomato weighing in at a hefty 500gms in his garden. His secret? Mixing his own compost and plenty of TLC. My take on Central Hawkes Bay? Well, I think it’s the next BIG thing!
