The turmeric is flowering, such gorgeous flowers. They’re hidden deep within the foliage, but the plant is very good looking anyway.  At least in summer.  It doesn’t work so well as a decorative plant because it dies right back in winter – a period of yellowing daggy looking leaves, followed by bare ground with not a trace of the bounty underneath.

But for a little while, in midsummer it’s the perfect plant – lush green leaves a metre or so tall, these gorgeous bromiliad-like flowers nestled inside, and the fragrant, spicy rhizomes to dig whenever you want.

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I live smack bang in fruit fly territory.   Bactrocera tryoni – Queensland Fruit Fly.   They seem to be getting, if anything more prolific as the climate heats up, and I think over the years I’ve tried every known method of control, short of spraying, which I can tell without  trying it wouldn’t work.

The pheromone baited traps catch lots of male flies, but it makes no real difference to the infestation. It probably just breeds dumber fruit flies.  The protein baited traps catch lots of fruit flies of both sexes but there is so much rainforest fruit around, and other people’s gardens, that  there’s a nearly infinite number where they came from.  Pruning trees low and covering with a mosquito net works if you get the net on early enough, and it has no holes and goes all the way to the ground. But nets only last one season in the weather, and pruning means you have a small tree without a lot of fruit. Bagging each fruit with cloth, mesh or paper exclusion bags works if you get the bags on early enough, but it’s a huge amount of work.  And if you can’t see through the bag, it’s hard to know when the fruit is ripe.  Predators work, especially spider webs and insectivorous birds, but they just keep the population down, not out.  Planting varieties that fruit very very early – October – used to work but seems to be less and less effective.

These days my best strategies are:

• Give up on the things that are really fruit fly prone – it’s just not worth the effort.  So I’ve been cutting out the stone fruit trees, leaving just the tough skinned seedling peaches that have some resistance.  I plant one or two rounds of beefsteak type tomatoes like Brandywine early, but for mid and late season tomatoes, I go for Roma and cherry types that are fruit fly resistant.
• Love spiders.
• Enjoy the fact that for home consumption, you can just cut fruit and eat the good half.  It’s sometimes hard to tell from the outside.  These cherry tomatoes, for example, all looked fine, and most were, but if I had been aiming to sell them, this one fruit fly infested one would have made the whole lot unsaleable.  My peaches are often stung but I can cut out the stung part for the chooks, and put the rest in the fruit salad.
• Allow chooks, ducks and geese to forage below fruit trees.  They clean up fallen fruit and like the fruit fly infested ones best.  Pick fruit fly infested fruit and feed to the enclosed chooks.  This breaks the breeding cycle, but there’s an infinite supply breeding in the native figs and wild fruit, so it doesn’t make any serious impact on populations. It does, however, turn a waste into a resource.

So breakfast for my chooks today was a bucket of stung Bishops Crown chilis and a bowl of stung tomatoes, and breakfast for me was toast with the one last of the brandywines, miraculously unstung,  and everyone is happy.

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The thing I love about snake beans is that you pick all these today, and tomorrow there’s the same amount again.

And the other thing I love about snake beans is that they don’t mind heat, even extreme heat like we’ve been having.  So long as they get enough water, they’ll keep bearing and even supply some shade and air conditioning to less tropical neighbours.

And the other thing I love about snake beans is cutting them into finger lengths, lightly blanching, and dressing with a garlic-olive oil-balsamic-soy-honey dressing while they are hot.  Or with an Asian style lime cordial-fish sauce-sesame oil dressing. Or in a Green Bean and Mango salad. Or waiting until they are mature and shelling them to use like adzuki beans.

All in all, a lot to love about snake beans.  Joy, in the Comments, asked where I got my seeds.  These are a brown seeded variety I have been saving for many years.  If you are gardening in a warm enough climate and you’d like some, I shall send some to the first 10 people in Australia to ask for them in the Comments.

After the shockers of days this last week, yesterday and today are cool and wet.  It has dropped 12 degrees and we got half an inch of rain last night and I could hear my garden sighing with relief.  We aren’t predicted to go back into the heat wave conditions this week, and there’s rain likely next week, so I could cross fingers and toes that we’re through the worst of it at least for this year, at least here.

My garden came through it pretty well, considering.  I don’t have many leafy greens in this time of year normally – they’re just too vulnerable to this kind of weather, and the grasshoppers are around, and they have a tendency to bolt.  But gardening is for ants who live in imagination not grasshoppers who live in the present.  The seasons creep up on you. We’re already past the summer solstice and the days are shortening again, nearly imperceptibly so far but in another fortnight we’ll pass Lammas, the point at which the shortening days start the steep downhill run through Autumn.

It’s still a bit early for brassicas.  The cabbage moths will still be active for another four months or so here.  Except for brussels sprouts.  Shall I bother with brussels sprouts this year?  I am in a very marginal climate for them at the best of times and it’s not the best of times.  If I’m going to plant them at all, I have to plant now and nurse them through the cabbage moth season, but even so we probably won’t get enough cold weather for them to sprout nicely.  They’ll just bolt to seed without yielding a crop, like this one did.

I’ve planted lettuces of four kinds – Rouge d’Hiver, Brown Romaine, 2-Star, and Liz’s.  I’ve planted another round of flat leaf parsley and I would have planted curly leaf this time except I’ve run out of seed. I’ve planted coriander and dill and chives,  and lime and Thai and sweet basil.  I’ve planted silver beet of two kinds (Fordhook and Lucullus), and radicchio.  I’ve planted Nigella (though really it’s the seed I’m after, not the leaf).  I’ve planted leeks, and I’ve planted some celery though really it’s a bit early for it.  I would have planted amaranth and aragula except I have both self seeded in the garden.

All in polystyrene boxes of home made seed raising mix that is a mixture of creek sand (fine gravel) and old cow pats shredded by mowing them, with just a little old compost.  As they come up, I’ll transplant into individual pots with a much richer mixture of creek sand, compost and worm castings, so the germination mix can be used over and over and lasts for ages.  The polystyrene boxes work well all year, but especially this time of year when seedlings in punnets can overheat and dry out in a matter of a couple of hours.

I hope you are getting some good garden weather at last too.  The heat wave will have wrecked havoc with commercial crops as well, so a productive garden may well be a lifesaver in the months to come.

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