Kia Ora Members,

Seed processing is the order of the day. Today we’ve been cleaning quinoa and beans.

The garden that looked so amazing only a couple of weeks ago is turning into a freezer full of cleaned seed!

Christina has moved on, her partner had to leave the country and return to his homeland Chile and she’s gone with him. We’ll miss her in the garden and we really appreciated her working so hard and being such a great part of the team while she was here.

I’m cleaning the seed with the help of Woofers at the moment and over the next month will be deciding on my apprentice for the next growing season.

The tomato growout was particularly interesting this year. None of the tomatoes in the trial tasted as good as those we are already selling but there were some very interesting characteristics in amongst them. We now have two orange NZ Heirloom tomatoes that we know of. Interestingly neither of them are heavy producers or very disease resistant , however orange tomatoes contain the highest levels of Lycopene which an important part of the nutritional value of tomatoes and I’m guessing they’ll be used to cross with other  excellent tasting, high producing disease resistant varieties to come up with an ‘ideal tomato”

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We trialed four different tomatoes that turned out to be the same. Maisie’s Marvel, Daly (as in Dalmatian) Oxheart and Acid Free. This is an out standing variety which is unknown in many other parts of the world. It’s obviously come here with the Gum Diggers from Yugoslavia and is well known up here in the North. It is a large acid free, heart shaped tomato that has very few seeds and is not at all watery. It is excellent for pulping and saucing but it is also a great slicing tomato.  To keep them cropping they need weekly feeding (liquid comfrey) because they crop very heavily. If they are not fed well enough they’ll set a couple of trusses them give up until the fruit is picked them they’ll set more.

Waimana is another tomato we trialed this year along with a whole series of others that look and taste similar; Peron, Lucia Stokes, Hammond, Bennett’s, Ron Ellis, and Dawn Ross. They are all very disease resistant, probably 9 out of ten in this really terrible tomato year! They are a round medium size beefsteak type tomato which a lot of people like however the flavor is not as good as many of our others, still far better than shop tomatoes! With 50 varieties to choose from one gets very fussy about what one prefers!

We grew the first NZ Heirloom red and yellow stripy tomato I’ve seen. The plant grew in a very deformed way obviously the plant the seed was collected from had been drifted with 24D last season. We’ll need to grow it out again to see how we feel about it.

Another very unusual one was called Riesentraube. These tomatoes had racines of flowers with hundreds and hundreds of flowers on them and they set enormous huge bunches of small – 2cm- tasty tomatoes, some yellow and some red-. with a very pronounced pimple on the bottom. Larger than Humboltii and more disease resistant.

Another notable one was called Marist Bros. This is a tomato that was keep alive by the New Zealand Marist Bros and it was notable for the size of the fruit and the number of fruit. Usually vines that set and carry such large fruit do not set very many. These tomatoes bore huge crops of huge fruit! They were very disease resistant and tasted above average!

Another interesting one was called Lebanese. A flat red tomato with definite segments in the shape with a good flavor and disease resistance. IT looks similar to an overseas heirloom I’ve grown the past called Rouge de Marmande.

Yet another surprise was the one called Pineapple, sent to us as an old Dalmatian variety. This was a huge flat one with red orange and yellow blotchy coloring. Overseas this one is called Rainbow Beefsteak. I was not aware we had it here as our own Heirloom as well.

We did another growout this year of the favorite beans from our bean trial last year. We grew out Yellow Pole, Emu, Hunters, Market Wonder, and Blue Lake Runner.

I would definitely have to say that yellow Pole and America are my new favorite beans. They are both huge flat long beans, very productive, crop over along period and tasted great. All of these beans will be in the July Catalogue.

The best surprise was the hollyhocks! We have been sent a collection of seeds from an elderly woman gardener down near Muriwai when she died. The seeds were old, in old tins and we didn’t think we had much chance of germinating them. They came up and they flowered in the same season, which we didn’t expect either, and they are stunning. All different shades of pink with frilly edges on many of them, really old fashioned subtle colors!

There will be loads more surprises in the July catalogue, for now we’re focusing on getting the gardens into winter compost crops.

I’m looking forward to having our new apprentice begin in a month or so.

For more information se the monthly newsletter on the shop website www.koanga.co.nz

Arohanui Kay