Turmeric flowering

I haven’t written anything here for a while, because, well…….summer was very depressing, with too many ultra-hot days which scorched the fruit on the trees and cooked the tomatoes on the plants and kept me busy just trying to keep ahead of the weather.

On top of that it has been dry and I mean dry. I recorded rain on only three days in January, even though the total was a good 60 mm (compared with Melbourne’s January average of 46 mm), including a good fall of 32 mm on the last day of the month. Since then there has been zilch……none at all in February and here we are nearly at the March equinox and still not a drop. The three tanks (one 9,000 litre and two 4,500 litres) are all down to a quarter full. I’ll be watering out of the mains if it doesn’t rain soon. It will take 4 inches (100 mm) of rain to fill them all. That’s 2 months of normal rainfall here. I can’t see this year being a normal rainfall year.

Everything is stressed, even the native plants. Some non-natives in the food forest have died outright, notably Pineapple Sage and Mexican Sage. Ordinary culinary sage would probably have gone too, but it is being watered. I’ve let the larger, older  tamarillos go….they were past their best anyway and I’ve planted a dozen smaller seedlings which are getting watered regularly. It means no tamarillo harvest this winter. The citrus trees are stressed, with dull and curling leaves and I’ve had fine sprinklers going on them for a day at a time, trying to keep them from going past the point of no return. The soil where they are growing had been introduced (by a previous owner) and it is heavy compacted clay which the roots haven’t penetrated to the depth that would make the trees more resilient, so I have to put water in slowly, hence the fine slow sprays. Being on a slope as well, means if I stand and hold the hose, the water is running off after a few minutes. It just won’t penetrate.

So all in all, there’s not a happy garden out there.

But I’ve just noticed something to gladden the heart. My turmeric is flowering for the first time! I’ve been growing it in large pots in the polyhouse, because I thought it wouldn’t survive in the open garden. When I potted on the tubers after the harvest last year, I had a couple of spindly-looking ones left over and no spare pots so I stuck them in a second-hand bath in a batch of chook poo compost and other rotted stuff. I was surprised when they actually grew leaves and even more surprised that they survived the summer heat, although it was a fairly shaded location and was watered regularly.

And then I noticed this:

Having never seen a turmeric flower before, I had to check that that’s what it really was.

Here’s a really good blog about plants in Hawaii, with some good close-up shots of the flower and useful information about growing turmeric :

The writer says:

Inflorescences arise from the center of the leaves. They are cylinder-shaped and made of loosely open bracts that are very white or tinged pink at the top of the cylinder and green at the base of the cylinder. The true flowers peak out from these green bracts and are tube-shaped, usually white with a yellow center and have two “fangs” that point down from the mouth of the tube. Fruit are never formed, even though the flowers do have male and female parts.

My turmeric flower also has the true flowers inside the bracts at the base, but they were a bit hard to photograph.

So something has managed to survive and do its thing despite the weather.

I did get plenty of tomatoes, though; lots of cherries and regular sizes which I’m still eating, although I pulled out all the plants last week. Most of the cherries have been dried. I had only two eggplants in again this season and so far there are 3 fruits coming. I picked lots of cucumbers too, and some reasonable feeds of climbing beans. Pumpkins were a dismal failure, yet again. I don’t know why I keep trying with them. They never produce male and female flowers at the same time and if they do manage to produce any fruits, they don’t mature before the season ends and the downy mildew kicks in.

So not much else to report. I’ve put a few broccoli seedlings into wicking boxes and early-sown silver beet is just starting to be pickable, but that has to be shared with the chooks, since the self-sown New Zealand Spinach they usually eat at this time of the year has all died back too.

Just waiting for the rain.