Unusual Plants Growing In My Garden
Hello friends,
Today I wanted to share with you some of the more unusual plants growing in my garden. Either they're plants that are on the edge of being able to grow in Dunedin's climate, or they're plants that I want to do experiments with, in terms of harvesting and processing them.
First up is my Camellia sinensis plant, aka my tea plant, which I've already discussed in a previous blog post where I harvested and processed my own white tea.
Next up is the Wasabi plant I recently bought from my local garden center. The plan is to grow my Wasabi plant for three years, and then harvest the root so I can make my own Wasabi for eating with sushi. Wasabi requires full shade and damp conditions, and I have the perfect spot in my garden to give it a home. It is sensitive to frost, so I've been spraying the leaves with liquid frost cloth this Spring for frost protection. It has only been growing for about a month, and it's already growing strong in its shady spot.
I have also been growing my own pomegranate plant for the past year in a large pot in my patio over the summer, and in my glasshouse during the winter. This pomegranate variety, "Wonderful" by Incredible Edibles, is a deciduous variety which can handle up to -6˚C frosts in winter, which makes it perfect for Dunedin's climate. In it's first year growing, last year, it even managed to flower before winter, but unfortunately it didn't set any fruit. Once the frosts are over this spring I plan to plant it in the south side garden alongside my blueberries and tea plant. I can't wait to harvest my own pomegranate fruit for turning into pomegranate juice in the future.
And finally there is my Marshmallow plant, Althea officinalis, which is the ancient source of making the marshmallow confectionery we know today. The marshmallow plant is a perennial which dies back each year over winter, and it grows again to a height of over 1.8 meters in summer, producing long stalks of white and pink flowers (which is where the marshmallow confectionery these days get their colours from). All parts of the marshmallow plant have medicinal uses, and its dried root is the original source of mucus for making marshmallow sweets.
My marshmallow plant is growing in the garden so that I can one day try making my own marshmallow confectionery from scratch, but I forget to dig it up in winter to harvest the roots. If you want to try growing your own Marshmallow plant, Kings Seeds in New Zealand stocks the seed.
Do you have any unusual plants growing in your garden?
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
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Side Garden Project - Planning and Building Raised Garden Beds
Hello friends,
After we had taken down the old aviary/berry cage, it was time to get to work turning this space into garden beds.
The first task was to weed the area, tidy up the fence line, and move two concrete pavers. Once I pulled out all the weeds and then tidied the fence line by putting old pieces of wood up against it for protection, hubby and I maneuvered the pavers into the space next door, where I have my worm farm located.
With all that done I ordered macrocarpa sleepers from our local garden centre for creating the new garden beds. The sleepers are 1.8 m long, which was the exact size we needed for that space.
The next step was to first put up some old trellises for our raspberry bushes, so we could train them along the fence line. We then create 90 cm wide beds using the macrocarpa sleepers, with 50 cm pathways in between for easy access to the garden beds. It was a lot of hard work considering there was a lot of river pebbles in the area. We transferred those river pebbles into the pathways between the garden beds when we were finished.
Once all the beds were in place, hubby did the hard work of digging over the garden beds and adding compost. The first bed closest to the garden shed was set aside for the strawberry plants I had put into pots in the glasshouse before the aviary was removed.
The next garden bed was set aside for my natural dyeing plants including Madder, Woad, St John's Wort, Tomentil, and Lemon Sorrel, which I had squeezed in another garden bed down the side of the house. While transferring the plants I was able to harvest some of the madder roots for natural dyeing. I have enough space leftover now to put more natural dyeing plants in the other half of the garden bed this spring.
Garden beds 3 and 4 are currently empty, and they still need to have compost added, before being prepared to a fine tilth for spring.
My plan is to grow Linen and Japanese indigo plants in bed 3: I have my own homegrown flax linen seeds in storage from last year, and I bought Japanese indigo seeds from Growing Textiles last autumn with the intention to grow my own indigo plants for natural dyeing, and also for indigo seed production.
In bed 4 I want to start my own breeding experiments with dahlias. I've wanted to do my own plant breeding for ages, and I now have the space to start this. I have dahlia seeds set aside from last year's plants to do this. I'm very excited about this project and can't wait to get started in spring.
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
Want to discuss my post? Feel free to chat with me on Instagram or Mastodon or Bluesky.
Our New Backyard Garden Plan and Buying All the Plants
Hello friends,
Six week's after the garden consultant came to our home, we received the garden plan back for our backyard. Overall I was pretty happy with it, but the garden consultant had forgotten some of the shrubs he said to remove, and I was a bit overzealous about which shrubs were to go.
This is the garden plan and plant list I was given, and in the following pictures I'll show the tweaks I've made to the plan so far, as I had time to think about what else I wanted to do with the space. The thing to note about this plan, was that the garden consultant hadn't included the dahlia plants already in the garden, or the small pond we have, so I had to tweak it for those as well. In this plan all the plants and shrubs and trees marked in black were pre-existing plants, and those coloured were suggestions for which ones to put in.
I traced out the plan given so I could have a clean slate, and I've coloured in the plants that we already had, and those I bought and then planted in the garden.
Starting at the bottom left corner of the back garden, I finally purchased a Little Miss Perfect rose bush for my own from Wals Plant Land. Back when I lived in Wellington I bought this rose bush variety for a friend who is also a crafter and gardener, and she sends me pictures of the floribunda flowers. It's a stunning bush with salmon petals, and many flowers. It's also a small bush rose at only 60 cm tall
Next up is space set aside for 3 dahlia tubers coming this spring. Above them is an unknown peony plant that was planted underneath the unknown magnolia further along the garden, that I transplanted.
Above the peony is the Daphne Perfumed Princess in white, that I bought from Nichols when I met with the garden consultant. I have really bad experiences with daphnes, they never seem to grow well for me, even when I treat them with kid gloves. I hope it does well as it flowers over winter which is great for bees.
Next to the daphne is an existing unknown hydrangea bush that produces lovely flowers in summer. Even though it's not in the garden consultant's plan, I wanted to keep one hydrangea in the garden. Beside the hydrangea is an unknown deciduous magnolia tree that is well established in the garden. It's flowers are white and pink.
Next to the magnolia is a space set aside for a hosta plant that is part of the garden consultant's plan. It's a dark shady and wet spot next to the viburnum beside it, but I'll have to wait until spring before shops start have them in store.
Along the left side fence line is an unknown grape vine which produces delicious dark purple grapes. Underneath the grapevine is 4 empty spots to be filled in in spring, along with another unknown peony I had to transplant from elsewhere in the garden.
In the back left corner was where one of the rhododendrons was. As I had taken that out, I decided to fill that space with one of my wish list plants, which was an evergreen evergreen blush Fairy Magnolia.
Beside the fairy magnolia tree in the back corner, is space for two columnar apple ballerina trees. They only grow 30 cm wide, but they grow 3 meters tall. They were supposed to go into the back right part of the garden, but I decided to put them in full sun. The two ballerina apple varieties I chose were Waltz and Flamenco, one is a eating and dessert apple, and the other is a cooking and preserving and dehydrating apple. Between the two of them we should have all the apples we need. The Flamenco variety is already in the ground, but I'm waiting for the Waltz variety to arrive from Mosgiel Garden Place.
Next to the apple trees is a small dahlia I moved from another part of my garden, Keith Hammett Mystic Sparkler. It's a beautifully bright pink and yellow small dahlia that is small in form. I bought this dahlia in Wellington, and before we moved back home to Dunedin I posted this dahlia and others to my sister during winter. She planted them in her garden for me, and then the next autumn once we had a home down here, I dug all my dahlias up, and moved them into our garden.
To the right of the Mystic Sparkler dahlia is another wish list shrub, Mexican Orange Blossom. I've wanted one of these for ages, and I was so pleased when the garden consultant suggested it.
And finally in the middle of our back garden fence, was the space that our maple tree was in. After it was chopped down due to our back fence neighbour on the left blackmailing us, I wanted to replace it with another maple. The garden consultant and I mulled over which variety to get, and he convinced me to invest in an Acer griseum, the paperbark maple. It grows to about 4 metres height eventually, and has bright orange leaves in autumn, and a beautiful cinnamon covered trunk that peels like paper. It's really stunning. I managed to find one out at Trees of the World, and at 2 metres high already, it barely fit in our car on the way home.
On the right center of the back fence we start with the shrub Eriostemon Bournda Beauty. It's a waxy green shrub with thousands of tiny white and pink flowers in winter. This shrub is usually covered in honey bees in late winter and early spring.
Beside it we have the red-stemmed dogwood (Cornus alba Sibirica) that I bought when we first bought our home. It's red stems are stunning in winter when there's nothing much else going on in the garden.
Next door we have a replacement camellia. The previous camellia was an ugly red colour, and it was squishing and blocking out light to my feijoa bushes. I was in Mitre 10 and came across Camellia Avalanche, which is a slim camellia (only 1 m wide) with absolutely beautiful white flowers. It was flowering when I bought it, so there has been some colour in the garden over the last month. As it is slim and tall it won't interfere with my feijoa bushes. I think this camellia would look great in a row as a hedge.
Beside the camellia are my two feijoa bushes, Unique and Kaiteri. Unique has smaller feijoa fruit which are sweet and not grainy, and Kaiteri has huge, sweet feijoa, and it's a very heavy cropper. Whenever I have visitors in the garden in autumn, they are stunned by how big and wonderful the fruit are. They usually go and buy a plant of their own after trying our feijoa.
Next to the feijoa bushes was the space that the two apple trees were supposed to go. When I talked with the garden consultant initially I brought up the idea of getting an pear tree, but it wasn't included in the plan. With this space now free, I decided to go ahead and get a pear tree. After much pondering, I decided to go with the dwarf pear Garden Belle. It only reaches 3 meters in height, but I think I'll keep it trimmed smaller than that. The variety is supposed to be mostly self-fertile, but I know of another pear tree down the street, so it's close enough for bees to cross-pollinate it on their travels.
Next to the pear tree is the stump of a wild elderflower tree. The tree arrived in our backyard from birds eating nearby elderflower berries, and leaving a deposit, and it's so good to have one of our own in our backyard. We had to chop it back hard over summer as it was growing huge, but luckily it survived, and is already budding shoots. From now on I'll take better care of it. It's not in the best spot, but I won't turn down a free tree.
In the back right corner of our backyard is an unknown Robinia tree variety (Black Locust), it's not in the healthiest condition, and it was pollarded by the previous owners. We've never seen it flower, and it causes quite a big mess to clean up in autumn. I'm not sure if I'll keep it, but I'll leave it there for now. Eventually over spring I'll be under planting it with shade plants.
Next to the Robinia is Pseudowintera Red Leopard, which likes light woodland conditions, which is what it gets underneath the Robinia tree. I like the speckled red and green evergreen leaves in the dappled light.
The next shrub along is our Viburnum opulus Sterile shrub aka the Snowball tree. I've always wanted one of my own, and the snowball flowers look wonderful in spring.
Beside the snowball tree is one of my damask roses, Duc De Cambridge, and I bought it for collecting scented flowers, which is used in rose oil and rose water production. Damask roses are hard to get in New Zealand, and it took me two years of searching before I could buy one.
Above the damask rose is our unknown Syringia/lilac tree variety. Lilacs are supposed to be shrubs, but our lilac has turned itself into a tree, and is about 3 metres high. It has beautiful fragrant purple flowers in spring, and I'm very happy with what it's decided to be.
Underneath the lilac tree is our small solar-powered water feature which is enjoyed by both bird and cat life alike. And behind the water feature is our Banksia rose "The Pearl" which runs along the side fence, and you can read more about it in this recent blog post.
Beside the water feature is my other damask rose, Isaphan. I also plan to collect rose petals from this shrub too. As a bonus it'll block out our new neighbour.
Next up is another new plant, Westringia Wynyabbie Gem. It' s a frost hardy evergreen which has beautiful star-shaped blue flowers in spring and summer, and gets to only 1 m tall.
In the bottom right corner of our back garden is our three year old Syrmna quince tree. Last year it produced it's first fruit, and the 5 quince were great poached, and eaten with vanilla ice cream. My plan is to try and keep it to about 3 meters tall so it doesn't get too big.
And finally, next to the quince tree is another plant suggested by the garden consultant. I bought the David Austin rose Gertrude Jekyll, and is tolerant of partial shade conditions, and reaches about 1 m in height with bright pink flowers over spring and summer, which should brighten up that corner of the garden next to the berry cage.
All along this right side of the garden is space for many smaller plants, including dahlias, bulbs, annuals and perennials. I already have 3 dahlias in the ground, which I've had for years: Protegee, Pink Magic, and Arthur Hambley. I've ordered more dahlias for the backyard, but they won't arrive until spring.
I can't wait for spring to arrive, so I can finish planting the back garden. I've already started seed sowing for spring, and it'll continue well into spring. I hope you've enjoyed this rather long blog post, and to see which plants are now in my garden.
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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