By Beatrice Hawkins
About the Garden this Week …
I am at home again and my garden has not fared too badly while I have been away thanks to the ministrations of a lovely neighbour.
I have been mowing, dead-heading and cutting back and things are much better than I feared they might be!
I couldn’t resist a trip to the nurseries and came home with some lovely beefsteak and grosslisse tomato plants and some “blackberry” vinca plants. After the great show the vincas gave last summer and the amount of self-seeded plants that are appearing, I thought this spectacular – almost black – variety would give a nice contrast to the white, pink, red and purple ones I expect from last year.
I also found some black and white muscat variety grape vines and think I am going to have to find a spot for them. Black Muscat grapes are my all-time favourite table variety and so hard to get with the public’s current liking for seedless varieties. They are the variety I grew up eating from an uncle’s vineyard at Mudgee in NSW. My uncle used to send them down by the case on rail to the coast for us.
On the coast we could only grow Isabellas and in comparison to Black Muscats, they hardly qualify as table grapes, although were acceptable when we didn’t have anything else!
As a child I used to enjoy the way I could hold them, squeeze slightly and have the flesh of the grape “pop” out of the skin and into my mouth!
Fun memories from a carefree childhood.
*This is an old article that we’ve digitised so our readers have access to our full catalogue.
