Growing Perilla Purple (Red shiso) in New Zealand

Spring has come to New Zealand, and I started on this year’s vegetable garden.

One of plants that I am really looking forward to harvesting is Red Shiso, or Perilla purple.

Red Shiso: A Great Traditional Japanese Herb

In Japan, people like making sour, pickled plums called Umeboshi.

They are such a bright red in color, despite of young plums being green or pale yellow.

The reason why they have such red color is because, plums are pickled with additional ingredient: red shiso (Perilla) herbs.

Red shiso herb has purple pigment, which turns very bright red when mixed with acid.

So when red shiso is used in combination with sour ume Japanese plums (that have very acidic juice), it produces that bright red color.

Red shiso themselves have very nice, original fragrance that matches well with Japanese dish, raw sashimi or rice.

So I wanted to grow my very own Red shiso in my garden, hoping that I will be able to harvest my own red shiso to use for cooking.

Red shiso is called by various name. See this wikipedia page for Shiso herbs. –>  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiso

They are sometimes called Perilla red or Perilla Purple.

Growing Perilla purple from Seeds: Watch out for birds!

So I picked up some Perilla purple seeds from Trademe.

In general, Perilla plants grow very well in full or half shades, and are not very picky on soil conditions either.

They do prefer well-drained soil, though.

They are energetic and supposed to be quite easy to grow.

However, their seeds take a while to germinate; approximately 10 days ~ two weeks for germination.

Germination requires exposure to sunlight, so you cannot bury seeds too deep and cover completely with soil.

You need to sow them shallow, and cover them with only a thin later of fine soil.

This sounded rather tricky for me, so I decided to let seeds germinate on wet tissue papers, then plant them into small pots once they start germinating.

Two weeks waiting and watering seeds for germination is very long….  especially compared to my cabbages and beans sprout really quickly only after 2-3 days!

It took nearly one month for perilla seeds to germinate and produce small new leaves.

I decided to bring pots outside, now that seeds have started to grow 2-3 cm tall ….. but this was a BIG mistake.

One morning when I came out of the house, many Perilla purple seedlings that were growing in my pots all disappeared!

Did they all die and melt down over night…. ? No.

It is most likely that bird outsides ate them all.

Even in Japan, birds like sparrows love Perilla seeds and sprouts.

I mean, even humans eat Perilla leaves and seeds, so they will be some delicious treats for wild birds.

Come to think of it, I did hear many birds jumping close by the window this morning…..

So my first attempt to grow Perilla purple from seeds, failed and I wasted a whole month….. orz

Trying again!! Growing Perilla Purple!

So I decided to try again.

Perhaps this time, I will grow them to be a larger size plant indoors first, then take them outside.

Perilla purple seeds germinating on wet tissue papers; it takes two weeks to get to this stage.

Some main new leaves starting to come out…. 2-3 cm tall.

Plant size reached 10cm… Leaves are much larger now too!

Too early to relax just yet, but I replanted the into larger planter.

Planter is placed under our room where we regularly hang washings and put other outdoor items, so hopefully birds will not come near it.

Perilla plant is still young and small, but when you pinch an end of a leaf, you can smell its characteristic fragrance…. yummy smell!

When plenty of leaves are ready for harvest,  I may use the to make Shiso-drinks (Perilla tea), or perhaps salted-perilla red flakes that tastes great on rice.

I just cannot wait for them to grow larger and start producing more leaves for harvesting!

Spring Gardening with Children: Best Vegetables to Grow with Kids

Every year, we plant some vegetables in our garden at the start of spring.

Even when we only had a small space in our garden, we had in our garden to place planters and pots, to grow some vegetables.

Children love sowing seeds and watering. They love it even more when plants start to grow day by day.

And they get a real excitement and a sense of achievement when vegetables are harvested in their own little vegetable garden!

Growing your own vegetable is the best way for children to learn values of food AND get them to start eating more vegetables!

But looking after a large field of vegetables can be  a hard work at the same time as looking after little children.

So I chose below a few best plants I like growing with children. These can be grown in a small space and are easy for beginner gardener.

Choice 1: Radish

Radish are perhaps the easiest and fastest grown garden vegetables.

Small red radish can be harvested in 30 days after sowing seeds in warm season.

You do not need much space to grow these radish; a long planter can accommodate two rows of radish easily.

After sowing seeds, they start germinating after only a few days, and they grow fast day by day.

Because they grow so fast, children do not get board of watching and watering them everyday.

One thing to be careful though, when the base of the radish plant start to become round, children get more and more urge to pick them.

So when they start to say “I think they are ready, can I pick them!?!?”, you have to stay firm and tell them to wait.

While growing radish is a real exciting experience, not many children would say “I love radish! Radish are my most favorite food!”.

One of the best way to eat radish with children is to cook them in a miso soup. You can wash and chop up both radish root and leaves, to eat the whole thing.

You can also make a pickled radish by slicing radish root and marinating them for a few hours in some sushi-vinegar. (Sushi-vinegar is mild and sweet so many children can eat pickles using sushi-vinegar).

Mixed radish from our vegetable garden last autumn.

Choice 2: Cherry tomatoes

Growing vegetables in your garden costs some money for fertilizers and seeds. So often it is cheaper to buy vegetables rather than growing them.

But out of many vegetables, apparently tomatoes are easy to get the value back.

This is because tomato plant if grown right, bears many fruit over the summer and the retail price of tomatoes being more expensive than many other vegetables.

Especially easier tomatoes to grow is cherry tomatoes.

Their fruits are smaller and faster to mature. It is fun to watch them flower, grow in size and start to change color in the sun.

Growing well! Pot-planted cherry tomatoes.

You can grow cherry tomatoes from seeds, but they can also be grown from seedlings.

Some grafted tomato seedlings are very strong against disease and especially easy to grow.

So you may like to buy grafted tomato seedling from a local gardening store; better seedlings to start with, easier and more successful it will be for beginners.

Note that some type of tomatoes grow like a tree or mini-bush, while others will stay pot-sized.

Depending on the space available in your garden, you should choose the type of tomatoes or cherry tomatoes to raise.

Choice 3: Strawberries

Kids love strawberries. If you plant them, you can enjoy pick-your own strawberries in your very garden!

Strawberry flowers are white with round petals, yellow in the middle. So they are very nice to watch.

As flowers will bloom one after the other and it is a great fun for children to watch the middle part of strawberry flower enlarge gradually, eventually starting to turn red.

They are easy and fast to mature, so children will not get bored; instead, they will be checking them every day, saying “are they ready yet!”

Strawberries are grown from seedlings that are available from local gardening stores.

You can grow them on a field, or in planters and pots.

In New Zealand, you can enjoy strawberry fruits growing from spring till summer.

If you plant one- or two- strawberry seedlings, you will not have enough strawberries to feed the whole family, but will be enough to enjoy watching them grow.

If you want to get more serious and grow enough to eat, you apparently need 5x plants per person in your family.

I found the following website useful for learning how to grow strawberries.

 https://www.palmers.co.nz/top-10-tips-for-growing-strawberries/

Finally, if growing strawberry yourself is not right, how about picking your own strawberries in a farm?

There are many ”Pick your own strawberry" farms throughout New Zealand. They usually are open to public people to pick their own strawberry over the summer.

Choice of Tree: Citrus (Orange, Lemon, Mandarin)

If you want to grow a fruit tree, easy and highly recommended are citrus trees.

They are relatively easy to grow, and once the tree reaches certain size, they will bear many fruits.

Some fruits trees like blueberries require two or more of different types of trees to be planted together to bear fruits. But this does not apply to citrus.

Citrus flowers are white and small, but very cute in appearance too.

If you plant lemon tree, you can make lemonades with children using lemon they picked themselves.

Or you can just eat it fresh if you plant a mandarin or orange tree. Either way, children love picking fruits off the tree!

Small seedlings are weak against insects, so do look after them properly when you just planted a seedling.

Once my friend had a mandarin tree completely stripped off leaves by voracious caterpillars.

Small citrus trees for planting are available from local gardening stores.

Make sure to purchase a seedling tree from proper gardening store; grafted seedling grown by professionals start bearing fruits much earlier than a random seedlings that have grown from fruit seeds.

Spring Gardening with Children＊Summary

So above are my favorite and recommendation of plants for gardening with children.

• Choice 1:Radish
• Choice 2:Cherry tomatoes
• Choice 3: Strawberry
• Choice 4: Citrus tree

I think the key points for picking what to plant when you are trying to enjoy gardening with children are:

• Easy to grow = kids can help, less chance of sad failure
• Fast to grow = kids do not get bored watching plant grow
• Edible and Easy to eat =Good education for kids to learn where food come from

I also grow some herbs in my garden. While I personally love them, herbs all look the same “green” and this does not interest children very much.

Sometimes I pick them and let children smell, and they say “nice smell!!” but that’s about it.

＊Sponsor link:　You may also like＊

Yates Garden Guide 79th Edition (NZ Edition)

Grow. Food. Anywhere.: The New Guide to Small-Space Gardening

Spring is here in NZ! Snails are here too! Snail & Slug pellets work really well….

Spring is here in New Zealand; temperature is getting warmer, day-light saving started and we have a lot longer sun!

It is a start of season when we can sow some seeds and see them grow.

Our children love growing plants in our garden. They water them and enjoy watching vegetables grow on them.

Unfortunately we had snail invasion in one of our vegetable garden….. there are some pictures of snails below, so be warned if you don’t like watching insects.

Enemy of vegetable garden: Snails and slugs

At the end of winter, we planted some seed potatoes in our home garden.

Potatoes are very easy to grow in home vegetable gardens. If you plant them late winter or early spring, they will grow fast during spring, and you can start harvesting in early summer.

Our potatoes were growing pretty well, until this happened to one of our fastest growing plant….

Noooo!! Being eaten!!

There are only stems left with hardly anything left of the leaves. We really should have done something before it gets this bad.

We have not spotted any worms and bugs that eat potato leaves yet, so we suspected slugs and snails to be the culprit.

It will only get worse as the temperature becomes warmer, so we quickly headed to a gardening store.

Purchased Snail and Slug pellets!

At our local Mitre10, we went to the gardening section and purchased Yates Blitzem pellets for killing slugs and snails.

The reason why we chose this product was because it was recommended to us by a friend, who grows and sells vegetable seedlings.

Yates Blitzem：A famous product!

For 500g, it was about 5 dollars? It was reasonably priced.

Content looks like this. Blue-green colored small pellets.

These pellets contain poisons that attracts snails and slugs, and kills them when they touch or eat these pellets.

Because these are poisonous, you do need to be careful so that small children and pets will not touch them.

According to the instruction on the box, you place them on the soil about 5cm apart between each pellet.

We often grew vegetables in our garden, but this is the first time we use slug & snail pellets like these.

Snail & Slug pellets are so effective!

Following day after placing Snail and slug pellets in our potato garden…. it is really effective. How do we know that? well….

There are many snails laying in our potato garden floor! They normally hide pretty well so we cannot spot them.

Like these snails… there are many of them, here and there…

Are they dead after eating the snail & slug pellet? So we had a closer look…

This one is upside down, cannot move well and bubbling!

EEEEEEK! Gross & scary! I feel so bad for them!! (although I tried to get rid of them)

We removed these intoxicated snails from our vegetable garden and buried them on a corner of our lawn.

There were about 10 snails just for this day. We were surprised how many there were, because we normally cannot spot them.

We were very impressed with how well these snail & slug pellets worked.

What is the active ingredient in Yates Blitzem？

The snail & slug pellets were so effective that I became worried what kind of ingredient is in them.

Specifications about Yates Blitzem are easily found on Yates official website below.

https://www.yates.co.nz/products/pest-control/snails-and-slugs/blitzem-snail-and-slug-pellets/

The main active ingredient is…. 15g/kg Metaldehyde

This “metaldehyde” is a compound frequently used for killing snail & slug, but also used sometimes as fire starter fuel for camping.

Refer to：Wikipedia　

There are a lot of information about metaldehyde on the internet, like this one.

“metaldehyde damages the mucus cells causing the creature to produce masses of slime and dehydrate. If not killed outright, it’s immobilised and unable to retreat to its daytime shelters”

引用元：http://www.slugoff.co.uk/killing-slugs/

Dehydration and paralysis!

So that’s why those snails were rolling on the ground after using snail & slug pellets…. Scary!

Of course these are toxic to human and other creatures too, if ingested. There are many reports of pets intoxicated after ingesting metaldehyde containing pellets. Even some cases of children as well.

After finding this out, I became concerned about using them on vegetable garden… do they get absorbed by vegetables that we are growing there?

But apparently, metaldehyde is used widely for protecting vegetables and crops from snails/slug all over the world.

Some say that these pellets are better than other spray-on insecticides that are directly applied to the plant.

Metaldehyde containing snail/slug pellets are also used for growing potatoes too.

参考：http://www.desangosse.co.uk/news/2015/02/23/potato-growers-urged-to-switch-to-the-better-metaldehyde-pellets-for-effective-slug-control

Tips for using Slug & Snail pellets

So some tips for using slug & snail pellets safely is as follows:

• Do not let these pellets directly touch vegetables you are growing.

• Place one pellet per 5-10cm as instructed on the package. Do not use more.

• Do not sprinkle from above vegetables – place them directly on the ground.

• These baits contain chemoattractant that attracts snails and slugs.

• You could place pellets on a flat stone/dish next to the plant (not directly touching the floor) and let snail/slug come to it.

• Place pellets near but outside of planters and pots. This way snails/slugs will be lured out of pots and planters to the bait.

• Remove slugs/snails that ingested pellets and are found on the ground immediately.

• You can also set up a trap by setting up “hide-place” for snails/slugs and place baits there.

Taken together, keeping a safe distance between your pellets and precious vegetables would assure that your vegetables will not be contaminated.

You do need to stay extra cautious that your pets and small children will not touch them.

It is probably a good idea to do this once at the beginning of spring ~ summer to kill off majority of snails as you should not use them when your crops are close to harvesting.

Go potatoes! Grow!

Summary of Snail & Slug pellets

So I was very impressed with how effective these Yates Blitzem snail & slug pellets are.

It almost works too well that it gets me worried about chemicals inside.

But when you start thinking about it, you are not sure what kind of insecticides and chemicals people may have used for the commercial vegetables.

Regulations are in place, but it is up to the growers how carefully to use these chemicals.

We are better off in New Zealand because most vegetables are home-grown and I am sure we can trust our local farmers…

I can also understand how some people love organic vegetables.

But since I cannot afford to always buy organic vegetables, I guess I will wash our leafy vegetables really well.

Anyhow, if you have concerns about snails and slugs attacking your precious vegetable garden or flower garden…

as you can see above, snail & slug pellets work really well.

Yates Blitzem Slug and Snail Control 500g