#75 - March 2024 - Garden Stuff - © Sandy Lang - slang@xtra.co.nz REACH FOR THE SKYFeb/Mar: Late summer, early autumn. Hot, dry, Level-3 water restrictions? Let your lawn brown. Keep precious plants alive by hand watering from a rainwater tank or use domestic wastewater - sink dishwater or machine rinse water (dishwasher, washing machine) but not their too-detergenty wash water. Sun-loving plants: Many Eastbourne gardens are too shady to grow much. Or are they...? An earlier article ‘Shade Veggies’ www.mulchpile.org/62 told of sunshine-hour maps, and what you can grow where. With only 4-6 hours sunshine /day you can only really grow leaf vegetables. But what if you don’t have the sunshine hours and are fed up with cabbages and lettuces. You want to grow sun-loving fruiting veggies - tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, pumpkins? Up for sunshine: We know there’s more sunshine if we go up (see ‘Light & Shade’ www.mulchpile.org/20). Let’s look at the ‘up’ strategy, as used by the climbing plants. Runner beans quickly twine up a string, easily climbing to 2 or 3 m where the sunshine hours are much more than at ground level. The problem with most fruiting veggies is they are naturally low-growing scramblers that branch often, grow up, then flop down under their own weight on top of other low-growing plants and smother them. They don’t naturally climb. But we can make climbers from scramblers by overriding their natural growth form by pruning and training. Phytomer: First a bit of plant morphology. Plant stems are made up of a series of repeat units (phytomers). Each phytomer is a length of stem (internode) with a bulge (node) at the top. From the node grows a leaf (or a pair of leaves). In the angle (axil) between the leafstalk and the internode is a tiny bud. In a climber this bud stays dormant, so no branch. Prune: In a scrambler, many of these axillary buds grow to produce a branch. To stop branching prune off (scissors) any tiny branch before it gets too big. Then growth will be concentrated at the top of the primary stem and the plant grows tall, not bushy. Flopping: Stop the flop by tying the stem at each node to a string or cane. Climbers do this by twining (beans) or tendrils (peas). But tie loosely as the stem will be garrotted later, as it thickens. Steps: There’s much more sunshine 2 m up but you’ll need a stepladder to harvest your fruit...! ___________________________________