Shallot And Garlic Harvest for 2025
Hello friends,
Today I thought I'd share with you my recent shallot and garlic harvest, which happened in the third week of December in 2025.
All the way back at the end of May in 2025, I sowed shallots for the first time, along with three garlic varieties, Printanor (which I sow each year), Creole, and Fire. Every single year in early December my Printanor garlic gets rust, because in early December our spring weather pattern changes from sunny and dry conditions, to cloudy and damp conditions, which last until after the new year has begun. So in May 2025 I decided to grow two new garlic varieties, Creole, and Fire, with the hope that one of those varieties would be less likely to contract the garlic rust fungus, and give me a better garlic harvest for the season.
The first task was to harvest my shallots. It was my first time growing them, and they were very easy to grow. By the time I harvested them they had all flopped over, with each sown shallot producing 6 - 7 new harvested shallot bulbs. None of the shallot plants showed any sign of rust, even though they had grown side by side with the garlic varieties all throughout the winter and the following spring.
Next up was harvesting the three garlic varieties, which all had contracted the rust fungus in early December. The Creole garlic plants had the least amount of rust on their leaves, but they also had the smallest garlic bulb harvest.
The Fire garlic variety had contracted the worst case of garlic rust fungus on their leaves, but they also gave me the biggest garlic harvest.
And finally, the garlic variety Printanor contracted a moderate amount of garlic rust fungus on their leaves, but they also had a moderate garlic bulb harvest despite the fungus infecting the plants.
All in all, none of the garlic varieties were spared from being infected with the garlic rust fungus in early December, but the Fire variety of garlic did grow the biggest garlic bulbs despite the infection. Unfortunately this means that I haven't found a garlic variety yet that will resist contracting garlic rust in early December, but I can harvest a decent crop of garlic from the Fire and Printanor varieties at least. Garlic plants infected with garlic rust are safe to eat, but they do not store well, so the garlic bulbs have to be processed in other ways to preserve the harvest.
As a bonus while harvesting my shallot and garlic plants, I also harvested a rogue potato plant which had grown in the same garden bed, and we had enough potatoes harvested from this to feed us that night for dinner (and for leftovers afterward). It was our first potato harvest of the growing season, and we enjoyed the boiled new potatoes with a sliver of butter for dinner.
And as for deciding what to do this coming autumn at garlic planting time, first, I think I'll go hunting for some more new garlic varieties to try, and second, I'll grow the Printanor and the Fire varieties again with the hope that maybe, if I'm very lucky, this year my plants will be spared from the dreaded garlic rust virus.
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
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Harvesting, Cooking, And Then Eating A Dahlia Tuber
Hello friends,
Yes, I finally did it. I finally had the opportunity to try harvesting, cooking, and then eating one of my dahlia tubers.
I've been growing dahlias from seed this year as part of my dahlia breeding program, and a lot of the dahlias that flower just don't have the characteristics I'm looking for in a great seedling. Either they're single dahlias, or they have very plain and boring colours, or their flower heads are weak (and they droop), so I pull them out of the ground once I'm sure I know what sort of dahlia they are like.
I plant my dahlia seedlings very close together for spacing reasons, and when I decide that a dahlia is not what I'm looking for, that's when the dahlia seedling is pulled out of the ground, giving more space for other dahlia seedlings to grow in the garden bed.
All ornamental dahlias are edible, particularly the tubers, and their taste apparently is reminiscent of a potato crossed with celery, depending on which dahlia variety you harvest and cook. Dahlia tubers contain inulin (a prebiotic carbohydrate), other carbohydrates, have four times the amount of potassium than bananas have, and are high in fiber, making them a great food source if needed (Dahlia nutrition information (Nsabimana and Bo Jiang 2011).
With all this in mind, the next time I had to remove an unwanted dahlia seedling, I decided it was the time to try cooking and then eating a dahlia myself. The seedling dahlia donating its tubers was Dahlia SR 11, a boring single apricot dahlia variety that had flowered a few times, but its flower hadn't improved at all...
I dug the dahlia out of the ground, removed the stems and leaves, and then washed out as much dirt as possible from the tubers and roots. After bringing the root system of the dahlia into our kitchen, I cut off the small tubers the dahlia seedling had begun to grow. Small dahlia tubers we thought would be less fibrous, and more easy to cook with, compared to older and bigger tubers.
After giving the tubers another wash to remove all the dirt, I peeled the dahlia tubers as was suggested on the internet by other sources. With them now clean, I put the tubers into a small pot containing water, and added a bit of salt (similar to when boiling potatoes).
We brought the pot of water up to a boil, and let the dahlia tubers simmer for 10 minutes. At that point we tested the tubers with a knife and found them to be al dente, which was what my research suggested meant that the dahlia tubers were ready for eating. We cut one of the dahlia tubers up into thin slices and ate the slice plain...
The dahlia tuber was okay to eat, and did indeed taste like a potato crossed with celery (and it was a little earthy tasting too, a bit like beetroot). A bit plain, but okay. We sprinkled a little salt on top of the dahlia tuber slices, and it definitely improved the taste.
Wanting to explore eating the dahlia tubers further, we decided to pan fry the rest of the cooked and sliced tubers, to try out other flavor combinations with them, using ingredients we already had in the kitchen...
Here are the dahlia tuber flavor combinations we tried:
- Chilli and Garlic - Definitely more tasty than plain, the flavor was improved by sprinkling a tiny bit of salt on top to finish.
- Parmesan and Salt - Super tasty when fried plain and then sprinkled with parmesan and salt at the end.
- Basil and Olive Oil and Salt - Quite pleasant, but not as nice as the Parmesan and Salt.
- Fried in Butter with Chilli and Lemon Juice and Garlic - Definitely my favorite. The chilli and lemon and garlic combination made the dahlia tuber super tasty. We think it would've been better with lime juice instead of lemon, but we didn't have any available at the time.
With all those flavor combinations completed, we were out of dahlia tubers to eat, and that was perfectly okay for ending our experiment in dahlia cooking and eating.
I think that doing this experiment in dahlia cooking and eating was a good experience to try once. It was okay to eat, but if it came to a choice between eating potatoes and eating dahlia tubers, potatoes would be my choice every single time. If it ever came to a point that there was no choice but to eat dahlia tubers to survive (like during a zombie apocalypse), I would very happily do it, as long as I didn't need to eat any of my precious named dahlia varieties to do so. Those are sacrosanct, but they would make great seed producing dahlias, and those seeds could then go onto produce seedling dahlias tubers which I would happily to eat in the long term...
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
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I'm In The December 2025 Issue Of The New Zealand Gardener Magazine
Hello friends,
An exciting opportunity happened a couple of months ago when the New Zealand Gardener magazine contacted me and wanted to chat about my blogging adventures in growing, harvesting, and processing my own sugar beet, as part of a wider article about kiwi gardeners growing their own sugar in various forms (including sugar cane and sugar maple).
I was quite happy to do this as I'm a big fan of the magazine (I buy a copy of it each month), and New Zealand Gardener is such a great source of local news and advice for New Zealand gardeners.
They used two of my blog posts as a guide for growing and harvesting sugar beets, as well as photos of mine for their article, along with a phone interview I did with them in early October 2025. If you want to read more about growing and processing sugar beet plants from these blog posts, here is where you can find them:
1. Making Sugar From Homegrown Sugar Beets
2. Harvesting My Own Sugar Beet Seeds
If you're on the hunt for sugar beet seeds so you can try growing your own sugar, sadly Kings Seed no longer stocks the seed, but I grew sugar beet plants from the last of my sugar beet seed stock, and waited two years until they had flowered and set seed, to harvest my own sugar beet seed earlier this year in autumn 2025.
I have some of those sugar beet seeds available for sale in my online store Hearth & Oak. There is a limited amount for sale, as I've sowed a lot of the seed in my own garden this spring. It would be good however, to have sugar beet seeds in the hands of more New Zealand gardeners, so we don't lose sugar beet seed stock in New Zealand.
As for me, I'm quite chuffed to be included in my favorite gardening magazine, and I never thought a couple of years ago when I started blogging about growing sugar beet in my backyard, that it would lead to this opportunity...
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
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Harvesting and Processing Tea From My Camellia Sinensis Plant
Hello friends,
I drink a lot of tea, and especially flavored black, green, and white tea, usually for breakfast and alongside a piece of toast. And of course since tea comes from the plant Camellia sinensis, growing my own tea plant, and then harvesting tea leaves from it, has been high on my list of things to do over the years.
Camellia sinensis, aka the tea plant, is in the camellia family, so if you can grow camellias in your garden, you can grow a tea plant of your very own. Camellia sinensis
thrives in conditions with part shade, and needs to be protected from strong winds, in acidic, well-drained, and organically rich soil. Consistent moisture is needed for the tea plant to be happy, especially during dry spells and leaf production, but it also doesn't like waterlogged conditions either. Here in Mosgiel where we live, our winter temperatures drop down to -6˚C, and in summer they rise up to 35˚C, and my tea plant happily survives both of these extremes without needing any frost cloth or extra watering.
The first challenge in growing my own tea plant was getting hold of a Camellia sinensis plant of my very own. The easiest time of the year to track down tea plants is in the spring, but when I hunted for one in autumn, I was able to find one for sale online. Once it arrived by courier, I planted it in a spot on the south side of the house, where it gets periods of both sun and shade during the day, and it lives beside my blueberry bushes which also like acidic conditions.
Ever since I bought my tea plant, I've been patiently waiting for it to be big enough to harvest the leaves for processing. Tea leaves are harvested by plucking off new buds and the first two leaves from the tip of the plant in spring for the highest quality tea. After doing some research on how to process tea at home, I decided to wait and see how big of a harvest I got before making a decision about which tea type to process. Well, it ended up being a very small harvest, a total of 8 grams of tea leaves this year, so I opted to go for the simplest tea processing method, which was making white tea.
The process of making white tea involves only two steps, and they are both very easy to do at home. The first step was to pluck the tea leaf tips off the plant and then lay them out to dry for 48 hours, in a stage they call withering. During withering, tea leaves begin breaking down, and the biochemical processes inside them leads to a tea which is fruity and floral and sweet, with reduced astringency and a sweet aroma profile.
I harvested tea leaves in the morning, as was suggested in my research, and then laid them out to wither on a tray in the sun for 48 hours. As it's been quite windy this spring, I couldn't lay them outside, as they would very easily blow away, so I set them up inside our glasshouse for two days.
At the end of this step, it was time to dry the tea and stop the break down process. For white tea, you dry the withered tea leaves at 180˚F/82˚C for 15 - 20 minutes, or until the leaves are crispy. For this step I decided to use our dehydrator on its highest setting, which ended up taking 1 hour of drying time at 80˚C.
When the tea leaves were dry and crispy I removed the leaves from the stalks and then popped them in our coffee/herb grinder for about 10 seconds to break the leaves up smaller. The resulting leaves were only big enough to make two cups of tea.
All that remained was to brew my own cup of tea, so I placed 1 teaspoon of white tea leaves into a strainer and added it to a tea cup. I heated water to around 85˚C, and then added it to the cup and let the tea steep for 1 minute.
The resulting tea was just wonderful, despite some of the tea leaves escaping the strainer while steeping. The white tea flavor was light, sweet, delicate, and had a slight floral taste, along with a pleasant grassy scent. It was very drinkable and much nicer than white teas that I've bought commercially.
Now knowing how easy it is to make my own white tea, I'm very much looking forward to harvesting and brewing my own tea each spring. Hopefully as my tea plant continues to grow bigger, I'll get bigger harvests so that I can try brewing other types of tea.
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
Want to discuss my post? Feel free to chat with me on Instagram or Mastodon or Bluesky.
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