Lots of moaning early January 2025: coolness and wetness in many different places. Wellington and Christchurch were the biggest moaners in New Zealand – the West Coast was just lovely.  

Canterbury (after a few good weeks in spring) started getting wetter and colder as Summer commenced.  

In the garden there was no amazing speed of growth, but that rainwater reminded me of a transplantation trick to get tomatoes, lettuce, spring onions, and other vegetables really taking root!  

Transplanting in a dry garden is tricky – you would have to water the young tomato plants twice a day to allow them to survive. 

That in itself is really tricky to execute. Too little water and the patch of soil is not wet enough to make the plants spread its roots. The young plants simply struggle to develop. Too much watering makes the young plants far too wet around the roots, causing all sorts of trouble, especially fungal diseases before the plants are even 30 centimetres tall.  

This year’s cool and wet weather pattern showed me the trick to avoid transplants woes:  

Soak your soil well before you plant the small vegetables.   

That literally makes the soil nice and moist on a large scale, rather than dryish in-between the spots where you dig in the young plants.  

This year no problems with a regular watering from the heavens – we could even have a Holiday without anybody needing to climb over the fence to water our vegetable plants!  

A rather wet summer does have its problems, especially with early ripening fruits such as peaches and —in our case— apricots!  

Regular wetness on these developing fruits often causes fungal diseases that can ruin and rot your crop in a matter of a few days. Brown rot is the obvious disease that moves rapidly through your tree(s).  

If you are quick enough you can harvest that fruit and cut off the brown patches and somehow “save the day”. 

But once that Brown Rot (aka Monilinia fructicola) is in the system you’ll be too late to keep it under control.  

Prevention is the best tactic: thin out the tree after fruiting by removing branches, allowing a lot more space for next season – it will be sunnier and quicker drying too! 

When you still get some brown rot, a preventative spray with copper-based fungicides, (organic, by the way!) especially after flowering, will reduce infection as the copper will kill the fungal spores the moment these land on the tiny developing fruit.  

Follow these sprays up every 2 or 3 weeks and the Brown Rot will start to moan about the brilliant weather that still doesn’t result in rotten fruit   

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