Garden Favourites in Summer

Happy New Year!



A couple of old favourites have bobbed up again this week. By chance Kerry proudly showed me a couple of Tomato plants I had taken home. I delivered these "spotty" plants and said I was keen to see if we could out grow the bacterial spec once the plants were in the ground. The Boss has done the rest very successfully and very simply. Cleaned off the infected foliage and top dressed around the plants with about a shovel per plant of Chook litter (litter, not raw poo). They are growing vigorously now, about 1m tall each. That's it! I'd prefer this wasn't an issue but I'm still getting questions about spots on Tomato leaves so it's nice to be able to say there is a practical solution.

The other favourite is

I was just wondering if you have any idea why I rarely ever get any female flowers on my pumpkins?  Is there a particular nutrient that produces female flowers?  I get plenty of male, but they're not that useful without the females!

Warmest regards

Sherilee

I checked with Dangerous Don who confirmed this is a common and inconsistent problem and recommended we just wait. I also checked back on my previous Newsletters and discovered I have written about it previously! Any way I had delayed answering Sherilee about a week and by the time I had suggested "pruning" the Pumpkin tentacles, 6 female flowers had appeared of their own accord. My theory is Pumpkins and other Cucurbits wait for a check to their growth before deciding it's time to reproduce. That could be the weather getting hot or someone amputating a few limbs.

Best wishes for a safe, prosperous and Happy New Year.

Take care with mulch

Last year we tried growing pretty much one of every Tomato Scotsburn produces in 250-300mm pots at home.  They grew beautifully until they started to set fruit.  Then the combination of their advanced size, hot weather and voracious appetite knocked them over, we really didn't get much of a crop.

This year our Tomatoes have gone into the front garden much to Ben's horror.  Kerry keeps the garden and not unsurprisingly it's essentially cottagey with Roses, perennials, annuals and the odd vegetable plus a rather handsome Lemon Scented Gum. This year the front garden has looked stunning, Kerry had a weed blitz over winter, added fertilizer (Seamungus I think) and a layer of mulch. Our wet winter/spring has finished the job just nicely. Now I think the Tomatoes have blended perfectly but the 6' stakes seem to offend Ben. He'll get over it and they made good posts for Christmas lights (solar, I'm too miserable to pay for electricity).

Anyway the Tomatoes are growing beautifully, fruit set and just about to start ripening. Sadly we have lost two over the past week. It could be Fusarium wilt which is a common Tomato problem best controlled with crop rotation. One of the Fusarium symptoms is the bark being "stripped" from the stem just above the soil surface and this is apparent on these two plants but there is one, possibly easier to overcome problem.  Mulch. Be careful not to mulch to close to the stems of your plants. I think the bark has just rotted because there is too much wet material next to the stem.


Follow this link for a reasonably amusing and fairly thorough "mulching" video.

Magic Square Car Parks and Pommie Cricketers

'Tis the season to get silly!

Unfortunately the pic's no good but this is my pommie mate, Mark... before the Poms had collapsed to 6 for 120.

Well, what can you do?

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On Saturday I helped set up a garden in a car park. This project had been some months in planning, in fact I asked for suggestions on wicking gardens back in September. I knew a small crowd had been invited but I must admit to being completely unprepared of the day that followed.



The car park is actually one car parking space at a block of flats. This space has now been deliberately and specifically reclaimed for the envionment and we have created two productive vegie gardens for the residents to tend and consume. My thanks to Aj, Frank and friends for welcoming me so openly.

The project was challenging in that we had to guess and adapt to create wicking beds but I had plenty of willing helpers, all of whom were generous with suggestions and ideas. As a social experiment this is obviously "thinking local" but I was pleased when the neighbours showed up and joined in... neighbours Frank hadn't seen in "ages". I think that's a great start, let's hope all the residents of these flats get to participate: planting, growing, watering, harvesting or consuming. Aj's a bit of a dynamo so I'm sure there'll be regular updates.


Adapt? Possums are challenging in this environment. I started with this 4 poster arrangement but following suggestions on the day I think we could set up some very neat cloche hoops, like small, independent poly houses. I can also report that Marsha who had purchesed our very first Magic Square Gardens was one of the participants on the day. Marsha has just planted a new crop having harvested "the best Broccoli she has ever tasted"! Sadly the onions weren't so successful but I'll take the Broccoli as the greater challenge any day.

Aglio fresh and local

This is Nancy and Michele with our Garlic harvest. Garlic is a remarkable plant, easy to grow but it has given me several years of grief. I think the grief is over now purely because Kaye picked up a bag of locally grown Garlic late in the autumn.

The trouble with Garlic has been getting quality bulbs. Without proper preparation and planning we were forced to head down to the market to buy Garlic which was either far too expensive or amazingly cheep.  Of course if it was amazingly cheep it has been freighted to Australia from the other side of the world, bleached and treated to prevent it sprouting. I'm not sure, but I think this is a quarantine regulation. Anyway first Kaye then Lisa found some cloves, a different, smaller variety it turns out. Just went out an got them. Probably got so frustrated that I prevaricated (fiddled) for so long. OK so what do we do with it? There's hardly enough to pot and sell. Well they were planted into one of our Magic Square Gardens and given the winter and spring to develop. And guess what! After the latest big dump of rain the plants were looking a little poorly so I dug one up and low and behold, beautiful fat Garlic cloves. One thing to note our Garlic plants never looked stunning.  Dangerous Don the font of all horticultural knowlege (and sadly crippled at the moment) tells me that the potting media needs additional lime for Garlic. Makes sense as our general mix is relatively acid. We'll need to work out something clever before we plant in the Autumn.

Nancy got involved because she and her husband dry Garlic at home (you might remember that Nancy also cleans Tomato seed beautifully... Oh and makes fantastic Bruschetta and Pizza and...) We'll hang this little stash up in the shed to dry, then pot up individual cloves perhaps in February. Of course we'll have to keep a small bag full to plant out for next year's crop. Considering our industry it's remarkable how little really seasonal growing we do like this. I'm very proud we have grow our little Garlic crop and I'll be very proud to sell this as Genuinely Australian Grown Garlic.

Just as an aside we also were given about 4 Elephant Garlic cloves and the same quantity of Egyptian Walking Garlic. I'll treat these a little differently and try to collect seed. They're interesting plants in their own right so I give them more detail at a later date.