Autumn Abundance and an Unexpected Star - Vanilla Passionfruit

Autumn is such a special time of the year, especially if you are lucky enough to be connected to a garden like we are. Sunlight takes on a magical quality - on our land we get beautiful shards of hazy glowing morning light shining onto the Rata forest as it wakes up, and on a clear evening we see intense purple hued orange sunsets as the sun settles into the Tasman Sea.  

The tones of colour intensify in the food forest too – iridescent purple fluffy salvia and bright red pineapple sage glow in the corners of the garden beds, and deep purple figs, earthy pink Chilian guavas and gold and ruby helenium flowers add to the jeweled effect. 

Autumn is also a time of bountiful harvests, and this is the first year that the feijoas we planted have fruited in absolute abundance. By abundance, I mean buckets and baskets and more buckets bursting at the seams with the sweet fragrant fruit. We are all quite excited by this and it is leading to a lot of experimentation in the kitchen. I have discovered a way to make a (relatively) healthy feijoa & coconut caramel sauce which tastes divine, and I am presently working out ways to incorporate it into homemade ice cream. I am developing a feijoa granola recipe using blended up caramelised feijoas as a base, and all my feijoa skins are getting frozen so they can be added to breakfast smoothies for a bit of tartness now that the berry season is over.

This was also a cracker of a season for pears, and even our young espaliered trees fruited this year, giving us a dozen or so luscious fruit. This wasn’t enough to consider doing much with other than enjoying them fresh, but luckily we were given access to a neighbour’s large Beurre Bosc pear tree. We managed to forage enough to fill plenty of Agee jars with sweet cinnamon infused preserved pears, and I’m glad I made lots because they are going down a treat with my teenage son who eats them with cornflakes for breakfast and dessert most days – who knew teenagers could eat so much!  

An unexpected star in the garden this season has been a vanilla passionfruit vine that we have been pampering for some time now. It was originally planted a few years ago at the bottom of the citrus zone with the intention of training it across an old metal bed base, but like all plants it knows where it wants to grow, and it has decided to use the bed base to propel itself upward towards the herbaceous driveway border. Here it has happily woven its tendrils through large grasses and purple salvias to settle amongst the delicate branches of a juvenile kowhai tree. It thrived in this position over summer and blessed us with giant pink flowers, and now that it is Autumn we have multitudes of pendulous yellow fruit hanging from the kowhai, giving the illusion that the fruit is growing from it rather than the vine planted 5 or 6 metres below. The fruit itself looks like it’s more invasive cousin banana passionfruit, but where banana passionfruit is acidic, vanilla passionfruit is anything but. It is just beginning to ripen and we have a family consensus that yes vanilla passionfruit is definitely the most sumptuous, sweetest and “pudding-like" fruit growing in our food forest, meaning that the sweet tooth boys (and Brett) love it. I generally like tart fruit, so I prefer the more traditional purple passionfruit, but I appreciate the fact that this vanilla version is yet another incentive for our kids to eat fresh fruit straight out of the garden. 

Harvesting: Feijoas, Granny Smith apples, and Chilian guavas. The limes are just starting, and there is a huge amount coming on. The zucchini are just finishing up after succumbing to powdery mildew, the butternuts and Triamble pumpkins have all been picked, and the basil and tomatoes are still going strong in the tunnel house. I'm also harvesting Italian parsley, spring onions, cavelo nero, Red Russian kale, purple, yellow, white and orange carrots including a variety I have never planted before called Paris Market. The purple sprouting broccoli that was planted many months ago is still producing spears, and I have lots of coriander which I am cutting about twice a week . The silver beet, chard and spinach are just beginning, and I am harvesting the odd beetroot leaf for salads too. Poblano chilis are being picked green, sliced and added to a pot of slightly sweetened vinegar and water to make pickled hot green chilis – yum, especially with nachos or loaded potato wedges! Thai chilis are ripening, plus another fruity delicious unnamed chili variety that was given to us. Also coming on is a late chili that grows well outside in Karamea, even ripening and maintaining good health right through the winter. The fruit are large and round with ridges, and are not for the fainthearted as they can get very spicy. The chilis start off green, but quickly turn purple before going a deep orange colour.  

The figs are still ripening and are being eaten straight off the tree, and of course we are getting lots of tropical fruit off the vanilla passionfruit vine. 

Sowing and planting: late broad beans are about to go in, and the elephant garlic has been planted. Last season's crop of regular garlic got the most debilitating case of rust, however I managed to harvest enough bulbs for eating, but none large enough for sowing. This year we have decided just to plant elephant garlic as none of that variety developed any rust, even though it was growing alongside the regular garlic which did. Once again though I am crossing my fingers and toes for a successful garlic season!  

Coriander seeds are being sown every few weeks as they like growing during the cooler months, silverbeet, cauliflower, broccoli, winter lettuces, and beetroot are all being planted too. We have just transplanted a couple of figs that we had growing in large copper containers – figs love rocky hard ground with slightly rich soil, and I tipped a bucket of ash into each hole before we planted them to help with future fruiting. One of the varieties we planted was a Brunoro Black. This is my favourite fig because even though the fruit are quite small, they are abundant, and their flavour is very rich with loads of depth. The dark purple fruit are a beautiful deep crimson colour inside and if you eat them when they are perfectly ripe they really are unparalleled in depth of flavour. The other variety of fig we have is the more common Brown Turkey. The fruit on this tree is much larger and lighter in colour, with almost a honey sweetness to it. If you are looking at planting figs, I recommend both of these varieties as because they taste quite different, they complement each other nicely.  

Growing:

The early sowing of broad beans that I planted in February are now waist high and flowering, so I'm hoping we will begin to get a harvest in winter rather than the usual spring broad bean glut. The leeks are very slow but are finally beginning to show signs of getting larger – they were planted later than I would have liked, and I can definitely tell the difference! Hopefully this late planting doesn’t impact on the end result too much.  

The citrus trees are all laden with fruit, especially the lemon, lime and mandarin trees, and for the first time we have a grapefruit on our small grapefruit tree. 

Other garden happenings: 

The asparagus ferns are almost ready to be cut right back - I will wait until they go completely brown before cutting and composting the stalks, and then I will give the whole bed a good weed and sprinkle ash from the fire over the soil, before mulching with muck and straw out of the chicken coop. It may seem odd to feed the asparagus straight after it has died back, but I like to give it a good dose of nutrients now, followed by a warm blanket of mulch, to help set it up for next season and to give it the best environment to over-winter in. It actually doesn’t stay dormant for too long in our garden, usually springing back to life in late July, so I find it needs a good feeding now, before giving it another feed of fine well-rotted compost in August. 

Speaking of compost, we are in the process of making a large 3 x 1 metre garden bed at the bottom terrace of our land, so this is where I am making this seasons compost heap. Making a large pile of compost where you are planning a new garden is a simple and effective way to give the ground a head start and fast track the addition of valuable microorganisms into the soil. All I do is dig out any noxious hard to get rid of weeds, such as dock and buttercup, before laying down cardboard where the new garden is to go. I then begin to make the heap, usually starting with cut up corn stalks, flower stalks and small twigs, and then I layer organic waste on top, thinking about following each green nitrogen layer (grass, manure, garden waste, food waste etc) with a brown carbon layer (brown stems and brown garden waste, straw, hay, woodchips, and leaves). I also water well in between each layer and addition. I build the heap gradually as I find the materials for each layer – over autumn and winter there are a lot of spent crops being removed from the garden, so I find I don’t have to look too hard.  I usually layer the heap until it is almost as tall as me, then I top it with straw and cover it with a tarpaulin to rest for the winter.

Last seasons compost is now nice and broken down and ready to dig into the garden