I've grown chokos a few times over the last several years. In the upper North Island, chokos can be a rampant perennial vine and heavy cropper, but here in the lower North Island they are not commonly grown as they are very frost tender and often have barely started producing in a season before the frosts kill the vine completely. But this year I got a whopper crop, after doing things a little differently....

Chokos are easy to grow. All you need to start one off is a whole fruit, sold seasonally in supermarkets and greengrocers, or given away by fellow gardeners. In the upper North Island you can probably just plonk one or two in the ground and let nature do the rest (don't take my word for that - I've never grown choko up north!), but down here this is how I have to do it:

Because the plants are frost sensitive and also grow very fast, I want to delay the initial growth as long as possible. Therefore I store my fruits in baskets out in an enclosed carport, where it's cold. About July or August I bring a couple inside and set them on top of my fridge. The seed inside them puts out a shoot from the fat end of the fruit (opposite end from where it was previously attached to it's vine), which becomes very long quite quickly. I then choose the strongest looking one, and lay it on it's side in a large (30 litre) plant pot mostly filled with potting mix and/or compost, and just barely cover it. I add a tomato cage or an offcut of trellis to support the growing vine, and after watering well set it in a sunny spot, either next to the ranchslider inside my north-facing foyer, or in the greenhouse (on nights with hard frosts I might move it inside or cover it as even in the greenhouse sensitive plants can freeze). 

Once all danger of frost is past, I move it out to my garden, next to a trellis or fence or shed (ideally all three!) in a sheltered spot. Some years I've carefully transplanted the plant into the garden soil, but this usually gives poor results. My most successful years have been when I just set the whole pot on top of a garden bed that has been prepared with added compost, and kept well watered. The plant will grow roots down through the bottom of the pot and into the soil. 

In late summer to early autumn, the vine produces tiny almost unnoticeable white flowers, which the bees love. These turn into fruit which swell quite rapidly, assuming early frosts don't kill the thing off first. You can pick and eat them at any size you like; I tend to let them mature to a large size for storing, unless threatening frost means I need to hurry up and harvest.
In previous (good) years, I've gotten a basket or two of fruits from the vine.

Well actually this year started nearly 2 years ago. In late autumn 2018 I purchased some chokos from a market garden shop, as I no longer had any from previous crops. I started some off as above. When it came time to move the plant to the garden, it was still pretty small so I figured I should get away with transplanting it. So I did. The plant grew very slowly last summer, and by the end of the season (autumn 2019) still had not gained any significant size, nor flowered or fruited. So I decided to just dig the thing up, trim it back a bit, and put it into a pot and see if it would keep going in the greenhouse over winter. Last spring, it was this plant in it's pot I moved out to the garden, and this time just put next to the fence. Where it grew. And grew. And GREW!

​Another variable I should perhaps mention is that the garden bed in front of the fence where I placed it had been very overgrown with bindweed and couch, so I had weedeatered the lot, covered in cardboard then weedmat then bark, just as a means of killing off all the weeds for the season. There is an apple and a lemon tree in that garden; usually I grow some herbs or flowers under them in summer, but needed to get it under control. I also, before putting down the weedmat, added compost judiously, including under where I planned on putting the choko pot. When it came time to place it, I cut away the weedmat from directly under it, so the pot sat snuggled down a little in the compost. All of this would have provided a nourishing, cool, damp potential root run for the vine.

Ultimately the vine covered the apple tree, the lemon tree, sprawled over the shed roof behind the fence, and grew forward and under the outdoor table and chair set too. It was trying to take over the world in all directions! 

I was happy when I saw it start flowering, what seemed a bit earlier than usual, and then could see some fruits developing. There appeared to be a reasonable potential harvest there, but I really had no idea.....

We had had a couple of very light frosts - not yet damaging - so I was keeping a beady eye on the forecast, as I didn't want frost damaged fruit (which won't store). On the morning of 15th of April was one of these, though the overnight low had been forecast to be 7C. Now, these are always air temps, and ground temperatures are about 3-4 degrees lower than air temp, but even so, this forecast was way off for here, where the actual air temp got down to 3C, and so there was ice on the cars and other surfaces. I wondered if I should start harvesting. I checked the forecast for that night....5C. Yep, going to harvest! 

I got out a couple of large green produce trays, wiped them down and set them on the table near the vine. I started picking the fruits I could see, then started lifting and even pulling out some vine to find more. The bins quickly filled, so I found a couple of banana boxes. Kept picking. The boxes filled. Found more. Realised some of the vine had grown over the fence, so went around the other side into the paddock (where the sheep usually trim it off) and picked a few more fruit. At that point I looked in the shed, and realised the clearlight panels in the roof were literally sagging under the weight of a bunch of chokos! So I had to get a ladder, cut off the vine along the fence on one side, climb up the side of the shed on the ladder, and pull the vine towards me, then use a broom to sweep fruits towards me so I could reach them (many let go from the vine as I pulled it). 

When I was done I had 3 bins and 4 banana boxes full of chokos - I could scarely lift them. Roughly estimated, about 200kg of choko! Woweee! 

The vine, apart from the parts I cut off, is still actually growing. Turns out for some odd reason the app on my phone was showing me the forecast for another part of the country entirely, which I didn't notice, and there was no frost that night! LOL. Oh well, they needed picking anyway. I'm going to cut down the rest of the vine, and move the pot with the base of the plant back into the greenhouse, just to see if it survives to grow another year. Just in case, I'll also sprout a couple ready for next season. 

Now to try out lots of new recipes...and give away lots, and maybe sell some....
And, of course, post the good recipes on this site. :-)

Life is full of seasons. Some are as predictable as the natural seasons, and some arrive unexpectedly, throwing all our plans out the window for a time. Early last year, after harvesting a phonomenal crop of pumpkins and squash, I cleared away the vines and turned that 50sqm patch into a series of garden beds, where I planted a wide variety of crops for the winter. Then life took a sudden turn, and gardening became next to impossible for most of the last 12 months. Some of those crops got used; others didn't - at least by us; the bugs had a fair feast, and the chickens and worms eventually got the rest. Meanwhile the weeds grew more and more rampant everywhere, until that garden area was waist-high in nightshade, amaranth and a multitude of other weeds, with a lovely understory of buttercup, deadnettle and so on. What used to be my main garden area has become a jungle of convolulos, couch grass, self-sown fennel and wild parnsips. I about needed a machete to get to the washing line!

So, now that life has settled down somewhat, I find myself starting over. A back injury is also limiting my abilities, but I'm determined to get growing once again! One of the great things about a garden is that, if you've grown a variety of things in the past, and hopefully planted a few perennials, it keeps on giving even when it's neglected......

Despite my inability to deliberately garden for the last 12 months, I've picked some lovely pears, the apples are delicious, the lemon tree has a new crop forming (despite being swamped in convolulos for most of the summer) and I'm loving the feijoas. Unfortunately I completely missed the grape and NZ cranberry harvests - those parts of the garden were so overgrown I couldn't even get to them without risking life and limb, and by the time I did hack my way through, it was too late. I'm sure the birds were delighted though!

Meanwhile, some squash I had tossed into the garden when I had the chooks and ducks in there last winter had self-sown, and I've just harvested a bunch of pumpkins. Silverbeet, kale, perpetual leeks and perpetual spinach had all happily self-sown, and there are big patches of them out the front. The nasturtium, rosemary, thyme, globe artichokes, echinacea, red clover, fennel, parsley and chives have all kept on doing their thing. The yacon got pretty much swamped by the self-determined pumpkins, but there will still be some tubers to harvest and crowns I've been meaning to dig up and relocate anyway. And without a doubt there will be sufficient potatoes here and there to start some new crops. I rescued a few bunching shallots and popped them into soil in the greenhouse where they are sprouting, so I should get at least some to start a new crop with next season. And I did manage to keep some tubs of strawberries alive. 

So perhaps it's not QUITE starting over, in the sense it would be if I hadn't previously had a garden growing. But looking out at all the jungle, it feels like an even more mammoth task than starting from scratch was. On the plus side, I have lots of previously saved seeds I can use. :-) 

It's also time for me to re-imagine most of the garden. When I started my garden in 2013, I had 7 adult-sized people to feed on a limited budget, and I decided to aim to grow 1000kg of produce in 12 months. The gardens were developed over that year as I reached my goal, and more gardens added in the following couple of years. 

But now, the kids have all left home. For a time most of them were close by, and still benefited from the garden, but now most of them are not; the boys have families of their own but live hours away in opposite directions (the eldest, I'm proud to say, has his own successful garden he planted in the last year to feed his own family!), and the girls have become more scattered too. As well as not having as many mouths to feed, I also don't have any strong young helpers to lend a hand from time to time. 

I still consider it important to grow as much of our food as possible - for both budgetary and health reasons. 

I still have limited time - back then I was home educating the children; now I'm running a near full-time business from home. 

I still want and need to garden on a very limited budget. It's easy to pour a lot of money into a garden, but when it's purpose is to save us money, there's no point in doing it that way!

I still won't use pesticides, herbicides and other nasties in the garden. (Though I totally understand the desire to reach for the spray when confronted with bazillions of weeds that just won't quit!)

The garden is still vital to my own personal wellbeing - spending time in the garden is good for me physically, mentally and emotionally - as well as spritually. I've really missed it over the past year!

I still believe that the wider the variety of things grown the better - for variety in the foods we eat, the herbs and medicines we can harvest, the ability to store foods for off-season eating, to confound pests and diseases, and to attract a wide variety of beneficial insects, birds etc to the garden, as well as the pleasure in seeing lots of bright flowers and healthy food growing. Variety is also increased food security - if the weather or a particular problem means some crops fail to produce, other things should still provide food. 

I don't need to produce as much food for us. There really is only so much two people can eat. Of course, I like being able to share surplus with others, and this year I unexpectedly discovered my spaghetti squash from last season was a great cash-crop (pity I didn't grow any this past summer!) But still....I need to scale back. There's really no point in spending the time and effort to grow, maintain and harvest produce that simply isn't needed. This one is hard for me though - after about 25 years of preparing large quantities of food on a daily basis, and needing to grow, store and preserve huge amounts, it's HARD to restrain onself when planting! My brain and eyes have not yet adjusted. I'm pretty much at the opposite end of when we were first married - back then I'd been used to preparing meals for my family of 5 growing up; I couldn't for the life of me only cook enough spud for two people (it just never looked like enough in the pot)! Our Rottweiler ate very well! At least I can manage that particular sizing task now. But planting only enough broccoli for two people - well, that's a whole 'nother story! 

I'm also less physically able than I was, and there aren't others I can call upon for a hand, so I need to work smarter, not harder. 

I want and need a garden that is easier to maintain, since I also want more freedom to go visit the grandkids, for example. And I'm so busy with other things too. So on the one hand I'm tempted to remove a lot of the garden infrastructure that I had developed, and turn some of it back into lawn or paddock the sheep can maintain. On the other hand there are fruit trees etc I don't want damaged, and I will need some larger areas seasonally to grow bulkier summer crops, or perhaps crops to sell or trade. 

I've slowly been making a start over the last couple of weeks. I've been working on clearing out my greenhouse (also full of huge weeds, not to mention the grapevines and blackberry that has grown in through the windows!), and a couple of days ago planted some brassicas, celery and mesculan salad mix in there. 

I've begun clearing up the front garden, which will be my main vege patch for now (it's 50sqm), as I want to plant winter crops there. It's actually a bit late to plant a lot of things, but I have a few tricks up my sleeve! 

And as I weed and spread compost and woodchip, I'm also pausing and pondering, and figuring out how I want it all to be. It's a work in progress in my head, as well as in the garden.

And I've decided to do my best to regularly blog once again. So stick around and see what I get up to in my new and improved, somewhat re-imagined garden. (To get notifications of new posts, Like my Thrifty Kiwi Facebook page)