So we finally harvested our first banana bunch back at the end of January.
This particular bunch didn’t receive any special treatment at all. No frost protection, no artificial fertilizers or sprays (just mulch, chop and drop, household compost, occasional horse poo bag), and we didn’t bag the fruit either (helps prevent damage to the fruit from sun, cold and birds). We wanted to set a benchmark for what an outdoor grown banana bunch would look like in coastal Buller, with just good site selection (sheltered from wind and full day sun from mid-morning onwards) and well prepared soil.
There’s plenty of improvements we will try next time, such as we have barrels of fermented weeds up next to the banana patch that we can pour on during dry weeks (last year we missed a lot of good growing weather because we couldn’t easily water the bananas up there). Already I can tell this fermented weed tea has made the banana patch grow almost twice as fast. Similarly we will try with a banana bag as well to see how that affects the fruit.
The banana patch was was planted in late 2020, and are NZ Misi Luki variety.
I think the flower formed about last May or so, so about 8 months or so to ripen. Some of the bananas are cracked (they were still half edible), but most fruit are in good shape.
The fruits when they ripened were sweet (although not as sweet as other New Zealand bananas we’ve tried) and had a very dense texture, more so than other New Zealand grown bananas I’ve tasted. Crucially, there was no woody core (the inside of the fruit goes hard like a stick), which was something we were concerned about as cold weather is generally considered a risk factor.
The back side of the banana bunch, showing no blemishesThe front side of the banana bunch, showing rather bad cracking of the fruitA plate of our banana fruit that are now ripe, showing the inside of the fruit.
So here’s a little post about eating Torreya californica seeds.
Torreya (aka ‘nutmeg yews’) is a small genus of conifers native to Asia (mostly China and Japan) and the United States. All Torreya seeds are highly edible and species such as Torreya grandis have been cultivated in China for at least 1500 years (!) for their edible nuts.
Torreya nucifera has a similar long history of cultivation in Japan, and the wood is highly sought after for traditional uses.
Torreya taxifolia is “native” (it’s functionally almost extinct there) to Florida and is one of the most interesting case studies in glacial relict species. It is able to reproduce with ease 500km to 1000km North, and so makes a strong case for assisted migration.
Unusually for a conifer, Torreya seed is produced singly per fruit, and ranges from 2cm to 4cm long. For the kiwis, it looks a bit like a miro (Prumnopitys ferruginea) fruit, which is also a conifer that produces a single-seeded “fruit”. Torreya fruits turn from green to purple when ripe.
Torreya californica fruits
All Torreya are slow growing evergreen trees, and thus are an investment in time to grow. However they are very pleasing trees with beautiful foliage.
Torreya californica foliage
Torreya californica is as the name suggests, is native to California. It’s a rare tree there, isolated to a few mountain refuges. The seeds are about 3cm to 4cm long.
In New Zealand, Torreya are very rare trees. There are perhaps less than 10-20 fruiting specimens in the whole country (even that might be a great over exaggeration). I was able to locate a small planting of mature Torreya californica thanks to a tip-off from a friend, and hiding in the weeds underneath was a number of well-preserved seeds. Hopefully these will become many healthy saplings in time.
Two 100+ year old Torreya californica in New Zealand
I could not find any written articles on the internet describing how to eat Torreya nuts, and what they taste like, despite many sources saying that they’re delicious and edible, so that’s what I have done here. The majority of the seeds I collected I have sown, but in order to get people to want to grow these seedlings, some seeds had to be sacrificed to produce this taste report.
So first of all, I lightly cracked a few seeds by hitting them with a rock while they rested on the concrete . The shells cracked rather easily. I took these inside and put them on a plate, and then using a butter-knife, I prised apart the shell fragments.
Cracked open T. californica seeds. These ones are slightly over 3cm long, but these were the smallest nuts as I chose the biggest ones for planting.
I was at first concerned that the seeds were rotten after a year outside, but then remembered they have very long viability (3+ years outside), and so they should be okay. I found a photo of a freshly chopped Torreya taxifolia which confirms the brown edge is present on fresh seeds:
Photo of chopped Torreya taxifolia seeds reproduced without permission from Torreya Guardians
Then I chopped the Torreya nut pieces into slivers. I ate a few raw to sample the taste. The raw taste was not particularly impressive. It was a bit gritty, reminding me of shredded coconut without the coconut overtones. Occasionally an earthy flavour was present (likely stronger because the seeds were at least a year old). There wasn’t too much flavour to the inside, but I could tell it was oily by the mouthfeel. There was a very subtle piny taste sometimes, but barely there (again maybe because these seeds were a year old, the flavour was muted).
Chopped T. californica nuts
The rest of the slivers I dry-fried in a pan. I did accidentally burn them a little bit in my excitement, but the flavour on the bigger pieces was definitely much improved.
Now the gritty texture was gone, and it was replaced with a classic toasted nut flavour, an undertone of toasted pine nut and the earthy flavour had completely blended into the toasted nut flavour. The texture was much smoother as well. Much more enjoyable, and would eat again, especially given how easy they were to process because of their large size.
In conclusion, Torreya californica nuts are large, easy to open and process by hand, and once cooked have a delicious nutty flavour with an undertone of roasted pine nuts.
If you have gotten this far, then I am always interested in buying/trading for more Torreya seeds from readers, and plants will be available from the nursery in the future 🙂
It’s been a productive few months for plant detective work, something that not all readers may be aware I spend a lot of time on. This might sound like something that isn’t an important job, but I would argue it’s very important for agroforestry in such a climate as the West Coast, where there just aren’t that many safe choices. That work to find more safe choices hasn’t been done yet, and we can’t just copy other regions, as e.g. what might be a safe choice in Canterbury such as apricots, might not work at all on the West Coast (apricots indeed do very poorly on the West coast). There are also a lot of plants that don’t seem to do particularly well in other areas of New Zealand that do extremely well on the West Coast (e.g. yangmei is growing very fast for us with very healthy dark green growth), and trialing is really the best way to find these things out.
In the interests of finding ‘new’, highly suited plants for our unusual climate, I have to track down plants that may be in New Zealand, but are very rare. Usually these plants are not in active cultivation. Sometimes it’s possible to re-import these plants as seeds, and sometimes it isn’t (in which case tracking it down becomes a lot more important as there isn’t a usable pathway to legally add new species to import into New Zealand). There are enough ‘cases’ worth of investigation here to fill a series of posts, so we’ll give it a go.
First in the spotlight is Island mallow (Malva assurgentiflora). Before I discuss this plant, let’s just look at it:
Malva assurgentiflora flower
Malva assurgentiflora leaves
Stunning, isn’t it? Island mallow (Malva assurgentiflora, formerly Lavatera assurgentiflora) is a beautiful plant in the Malvaceae family. A large percentage of this family is edible as leaf and flower crops (abutilon, hibiscus, hollyhock, linden, okra – to name a few). They’re often very beautiful as well. I’ve been expanding the number of species from this family we’re growing as a result. The concept of growing edible ornamentals is sometimes called ‘edimentals‘ – something the brilliant Stephen Barstow came up with. Abutilons are definitely ‘edimental’, and grow very well for us, but their flowers are the real crop – the leaves are a bit too fibrous. Would be nice to have much more edimentals (these are a great ‘gateway’ to getting more people to grow edible plants), so that’s one area we’re actively researching.
One of the ways in which I look for new plants is to look at particular climates that match well with the New Zealand climate. For example, some parts of Eastern Australia, Western Chile, Western United Kingdom, Western United States & Canada are fairly similar to the current climate of the West Coast of New Zealand. However, this is a rather surface level analysis. To look deeper, we need to consider that plants (in general) haven’t evolved much at all and haven’t moved too far within the last (e.g.) 100,000 years – but within that timeframe they have passed through ice ages (also see this relevant xkcd). As a result, to find suitable plants, we don’t consider just the current climate the plant is located in, but also the previous climates the plant has been through. Some ‘desert’ plants for example are really just forest plants that became stuck and had to adapt over a long period (millions of years) to desert life, and they still contain within them the genes to succeed in a wetter environment (e.g. carob – which grows very well on the West Coast surprisingly). Some plants that are found in tropical environments are also stuck there and do much better in places that are much cooler (bunya, Torreya taxifolia). This is such a crucial and important concept that I will be writing at least another whole article on this subject – stay tuned.
So to get back to the chase, I have been looking for these plants that are adapted to a wetter & cooler climate, but are perhaps trapped in some place unsuitable. One place I looked to find interesting plants is the Channel islands. No, not the Channel Islands in the English Channel, but the Channel Islands off the coast of California (did you know California has islands?). Coastal California is home to some of the most successful exotic species that grow in New Zealand, and what’s more – these plants are now rather poorly adapted to California and are often endangered to some degree. It’s hard to believe, but Pinus radiata is one such species – in California it is endangered – in New Zealand it’s one of the most invasive exotic species that we have. Macrocarpa (Cupressus macrocarpa) is considered vulnerable in California yet grows incredibly well in New Zealand (cypress canker notwithstanding). Coast redwood – similar story. Notice a pattern? Endangered plants in coastal California, are often highly adapted to New Zealand conditions, because they’re actually wanting to grow in a cooler & wetter climate and did so for hundreds of thousands of years (at least), but have become ‘trapped’ in a rapidly desertifying California.
So on the Channel islands, off the coast of California we have a look for interesting species. Malva assurgentiflora pops out as one interesting plant on the list – and it’s ‘Critically Imperiled’ in habitat. Pretty much every Malva species is edible, so that’s a given. It definitely looks very beautiful in photos. The next step is to see if this species can be imported or otherwise exists in New Zealand. Well it turns out that not only does it exist, but it has escaped cultivation and is growing in coastal Christchurch! This is exactly what we predicted from the patterns we identified from semi-endangered coastal California plants – that it would be well suited to New Zealand conditions. There don’t seem to be any nurseries selling plants, so it’s off to search for Island mallow it is (I could’ve imported seeds in this specific case, but that’s not as fun of a story, is it).
The next stage in the story is to try and track down these Island mallows somewhere in Christchurch. With Caleb B, we were able to locate the patch quite rapidly:
Malva assurgentiflora growing outside in Christchurch
Malva assurgentiflora outside in Christchurch
Having located it, it was time for the taste test. As I mentioned, since it’s a Malva, it’s practically guaranteed to be edible, so I had no concerns. The flower was the first thing I tasted. Hmm, it wasn’t sweet like an abutilon and was also a lot chewier, and definitely not that good (not worth coming all the way for!). Hmmm… well better taste the leaf then… wow! It’s delicious!
The leaf was far tastier than the flower, being slightly crunchy (possibly an adaptation to store water in a drier environment?) and with a distinct lack of fibres (unlike abutilons). They tasted very nice and were possibly even a little sweet. They are probably among the best tasting of all Malvaceae leaves I have tasted, and may even take the top spot.
Rumours of this plant escaping cultivation are highly exaggerated however. Both patches we found were very near to older cultivated gardens, and there was practically no seedling regeneration at all (I found only 3 seedlings in total). The few plants we found were extremely healthy though, large sprawling shrubs with bright green leaves and no sign of damage (nothing from salt, cold or insects). These plants had clearly been living for a few years – Island mallow is a longer term perennial unlike some of the other Malva species commonly found in New Zealand which tend to die after a few years. What was self-seeding profusely was Malva arborea, which grew within a 1 metre distance and had dozens to hundreds of seedlings, but by contrast all of these M. arborea seedlings had yellow leaves with fungal infections.
Well, we gathered some seeds of Island mallow. Possibly I have already germinated a few dozen already, but I’m not 100% certain yet as the soil I put the seeds into while collecting would’ve contained many other weed seeds.
It still remains to be seen how Island mallow would grow on the West Coast, so the story is definitely not over yet. But that will be a later update. Plenty more plant detective stories to come 🙂
One of our favourite group of plants is the Pouteria genus. Ever since we first tasted fruit of a delicious lucuma, we were captivated. In that time we’ve gathered many Pouteria species to work on breeding and selection work, including lucuma seedlings from 7~ different sources. Lucuma we have found grows excellently for us so far, with most seedlings having no trouble at all during Winter. In fact we can probably grow lucuma better than Citrus on their own roots! (Citrus is the commonly used benchmark for whether you can grow lucuma or not)
The next most hardy Pouteria species available to New Zealand growers after lucuma, is green sapote (Pouteria viridis). There are fruiting trees of green sapote in Auckland and Northland that we are aware of (we have just sprouted some seeds of one Northland green sapote). We initially treated our green sapote seedlings as we did for lucuma – just leaving them outside over the previous Winter, unprotected other than being in a sheltered location protected from wind and basically frost-free (we will write future articles on the merits to this approach, but the tl;dr is the smaller cell sizes of outdoor grown plants are much more resistant to frosts, and the stress wood grown by plants exposed to wind prevents them from snapping in high winds, unlike more brittle indoor-grown plants). However the sheer amount of cold and wet conditions over the previous Winter took their toll, and these few green sapote seedlings defoliated and had the growing tip die. 2/3 did survive however, and eventually began to regrow – but the regrowth was very slow and relatively late. At this rate it would be 2 steps forward, 1 step back for many years to come. Surely there must be a better way…
Well we decided to experiment with grafting green sapote onto lucuma rootstocks, since lucuma is so hardy for us and seems to start growing in cooler temperatures than the green sapote. There are older reports from Florida of mamey sapote being successfully grafted to canistel, which gave us a great amount of confidence to proceed. We can already graft avocados, so why should Pouteria be any more difficult? Well Pouteria have a trick up their sleeves… when cut, they release a white milky latex, which quickly seals off any wounds and prevents cambium contact – this makes grafting them quite difficult (a friend reported about a 3% success rate using standard cleft grafts…). There are supposedly ways around this, but they are not particularly easy or a high success rate (a problem when you have limited scionwood as well). Instead we turned to a very old and somewhat underutilized technique – which is approach grafting, in order to surmount the latex problem. We just used a standard approach graft, and there are many good articles on how to do this already – so I won’t cover the technique in detail.
This particular green sapote was grown from seed imported from Hawaii, sown in early Spring. It grew very well – thanks to the Summer being so warm and a favourable spot. The approach graft we performed in December 2021. The two plants had to have their stems aligned (thanks to the help of a cinderblock, this was possible). Two long cuts on the stems were made, about 4cm long, and then the wounds matched together and tightly bound with grafting tape and garden twine. The plants remained outside in mostly all-day sun after this, since they both had fully functional root systems.
Some time in February 2022 I removed the bandages and checked for signs of a graft union – thankfully it appeared to be healing. The first sign was that the two plants didn’t spring apart – they had been tied together under tension. I re-applied new bandages and left it again. In late February 2022 we began the slow process of detaching the green sapote from its original roots. This involves making an incision through the original green sapote stem underneath the graft, and deepening this cut every few days (eventually the cut is all the way through), and watching for signs of water stress. It’s very important to note that the smallest sliver of attachment between the graft and the original roots can provide a lot of water – don’t be hasty removing the last part. My final cut gave the plant a fair amount of water stress – the leaves wilted significantly, and I had to bring it inside, chop some leaves off and mist it for a few days until this was resolved. It’s now been over a month with the grafted green sapote being outside, most of the days being quite sunny, and the green sapote is back to growing again (albeit slower than at the peak of Summer as we move into Autumn).
I will probably protect this plant over Winter (bringing it inside when necessary) until next Spring, as the green sapote part of the plant isn’t woody yet. There’s still of course a possibility of delayed graft failure – so it will need to keep being monitored. The reports of mamey grafted onto canistel said delayed graft incompatibility didn’t appear to be a problem after a few years – so we are confident it will be okay.
That’s about it for this research update. If you are interested in collaborating with our Pouteria research project – please send us an email. We welcome inclusion of extra materials and ideas. 🙂
Green sapote (Pouteria viridis) approach grafted onto lucuma (Pouteria lucuma)
I’ve just published the new article on the Local Nitrogen Cycle related to forest gardening. It’s taken me quite a while to get it right, because there is a lot of complicated information to boil down into something simple enough while still being accurate and up to date. The interactive nitrogen cycle graphic took some time, as did the simulator. I think it’s one of the better introductions out there on the nitrogen cycle for forest gardeners – others tend to overemphasize certain irrelevent details (e.g. lightning sourced nitrogen), and exclude pertinent details (denitrification, whether you sell/give away food from your forest garden or poop into the sewer system).
Other than that, we’ve been growing seeds and working on some longer term breeding projects. It looks like we’ve had excellent germination of sweet chestnut (Castanea sativa) and so either next year or perhaps towards the middle of Summer – we’ll be able to put some up for sale. Avocados have germinated well, but we’re still working on grafting them.
The forest garden has not seen too much planting yet, still a lot of preparation to do regarding soil building and erosion work. We’re trialling some nitrogen fixers to see what will do best here – so far the Turkish alders have shot away quickest. We’ve also started a banana trial and will have some Misi Luki banana pups available for sale locally.
We have opened the shop with a bit of a soft launch. For now we will only be selling seeds, but in the near future we will list plants as well and tools/equipment/services.
The seeds we’re selling now are intended for NZ climate. Some of them are experimental and won’t be suitable for all areas of the country (ask if unsure). Once we are more established we will offer more seeds from our own garden and sourced from the West Coast.
Your purchase helps us to continue supporting agroforestry, food forests, and related fruit/nut research with a focus on the West Coast – thank you! Feel free send us any feedback about the shop, and what you’d like to see for sale. 🙂
Wow. A lot has happened since the last update. We moved permanently to New Zealand in November 2019, and spent approximately 2 months visiting as many gardens, Tree Cropper events and member’s homes as possible, and learning what is growing in Auckland and Waikato. Then we moved to Charleston in late January, and began work on our forest garden. The first [and so far only] tree was planted – an Araucaria bidwillii.
I’ve finally finished the 3rd article in the modern nitrogen fixing series, which is about poplars and willows. I’m excited to share this information out there. There’s also a special mention of the disease fighting properties of willow mulch – something we’ve not even touched the tip of yet. There are many reasons to grow willows and poplars.
Both of these plants are occasionally used in forest gardening / permaculture / agroforestry situations, but it’s relatively unknown (outside of the fields of forest ecology and horticulture, respectively) that they both can fix significant amounts of nitrogen. The picture of nitrogen cycling has changed a lot in recent decades, and over the coming weeks I will be trying to adapt this knowledge for a forest gardener audience so that we can be more effective in our work. As a result, I won’t make sweeping generalizations until the bigger picture has emerged – but for now, know that nitrogen fixing in nature is a lot more common than previously believed and the next few articles will hopefully make that amply clear.
