Cheese and Whiskers I'm a clever, clever Rat!
Sadly they're not all so cute. In fact I was talking to my dad the other day about Native Rats, "they're quite different you know" and I can here Kerry saying "But it's still a rat!"
Why rats?
Hi Guys,
I just wanted to provide you with some feedback regarding my recent purchase of your Magic Square Garden.
Love the garden, it looks great with it’s rustic / recycled charm! Perfect size to plant plenty of veggies and the best thing is that I don’t have to get on my hands and knees to do so. It’s height also keeps my children’s little fingers from picking off leaves. A great selection of veggies were delivered to plant in the box also.
Your service has been fantastic, everyone I have dealt with has been extremely efficient, friendly and helpful. The box was delivered within it’s expected time frame and you came back a second time to deliver the possum dome for me.
Thank you so much, I love the box and are most grateful for your friendly service.
Cheers Kirsty
So I replied and Thanked Kirsty for her lovely note and asked if I could use it as a testimonial:
Feel free to use my feedback.
I have a puzzle for you also.
About a week ago I had your possum net set up because 70% of the vegies you delivered disappeared. Cauliflower, broccoli, silver beet & spinach gone!! Coriander, spring onions, parsley & chives around the backyard eaten to the roots. Even the leaves of carrots and my well established celery. So I put up the netting (only on the veggie box) to test my possum theory. My neighbour 2 doors away has the same plants, no issues at all.
After putting the netting up, planting a new crop, they were gone again.
So I have concluded it must be rats. I put a rat block bait into the veggie box within the netting, gone in the am! Did it again the next night with the thunder storms, nothing. Did it again last night, the bait was gone again & it had attacked a lemon off my dwarf lemon tree. I am guessing that the rat is able to climb up inside the bottom of the netting around the box.
So frustrating when my neighbour 2 doors away does not have this issue at all!!
Any long term suggestions apart from loads of rat bait?
Cheers Kirsty
I casually raised rats in gardens in the lunch room and we had an entertaining discussion around rats and their ability to get into anything and everything and their appetite for rat baits as well as garden vegetables. It was widely agreed that rats like vegies. Mark was adamant that they collect baits and take them away, supply enough bait and wait and you are likely to find a very smelly corpse somewhere unwanted.
I've done a little Googling and found quite a lot of information very quickly. There are a range of traps available, some lethal some humane... but what are you going to do with a live rat? Baits are readily available but make sure you set it in one of those enclosed 'bait stations' to prevent pets and children finding the bait. And don't forget that rats are communal creatures, there will rarely be just one to remove.
Damn near 25 years doing this job and still learning new things every day. Gotta like that but it also makes you wonder if I'm a bit slow. Last year we re-introduced Grafted Tomatoes and Grafted Eggpant to our product range. We did this because we found a supplier willing to supply us with young grafted plants. A brilliant product on their part, requires huge skill and equipment. There won't be many competitor's in this space. I'd also like to point out that they produce a beautiful product with a very strong graft with only the rootstock's roots in the soil. (If that raises another question, there is more than one way to graft Tomatoes. One method leave the roots of both the root stock and the scion in the soil. The superior graft and much more difficult requires removal of the scion roots altogether. Done well it is both stronger and more effective at giving the benefit of the root stock to the scion plant.)
We wanted a Grafted Tomato on our list to complete the basket of products on offer to ensure our customers didn't have to go to our competitors for this essential product. That's not the best reason to grow a new plant but the crop of grafted Tomatoes served it's purpose, sold moderately well and we dumped very few. Here's the interesting bit, when we introduced the Grafted Tomatoes last year we were immediately asked if we grew Grafted Passionfruit. Now I didn't make the mental jump from Tomato to Passionfruit but as it happened the same supplier offered a grafted Passionfruit so what the hell, let's have a go. That attitude get's me into trouble at times when Mark and the growing team have to deal with my horticultural inquisitiveness. Any way I ordered 3 batches in about the same quantities as I had ordered Grafted Eggplant plugs, as good a guess as any.
Labels for our various Grafted Vegetables had been held up a little. We released the first of the Tomatoes and Eggplants with stock labels from our label manufacturer, these plants really couldn't wait. The Passionfruit on the other hand were going nowhere so we just allowed them to grow bigger and hardened them off quite thoroughly outside. Our labels arrived last Friday so I took a quick photo with my phone, let you know about them on my newsletter and prepared 6 pots each for Di and I to show off on our spec runs....
We have sold all of the first two batches and effectively pre-ordered all of the third and final batch! Passionfruit was not even added to our availability list and I have been roundly ticked off for failing to fill some of the first orders. I have never seen anything like it.
Once again I have to thank our supplier Highsun for the beautiful starter plants they supplied, the grafts are very neat and close to the roots, minimizing (if not eliminating) the number of buds on the rootstock. The trick now is to guess how many to grow next season.
Sadly I can't say the same for Choisya ternata. Great shrub for hedges and sunny positions. I think we have grown them perfectly well but we just can't get the season or the presentation right. The poor things just will not sell. I have about 1000 x 200mm pots I'm happy to sell off at $2.00each (Ex GST) plus freight (unless you pick them up), minimum order 50 pots. I don't think we'll grow any more Choisya.
As a Melbournian I love our weather. The variability is essential to the magic. As a Melbournian I can rail against our changeable weather too, that's my right. Any uppity Sydneysider dares to criticize Melbourne weather, watch out!
It's the same with seasons. We have wonderful distinct seasons. I have been bemoaning (winging if you like) that our retail industry is so keen to move on to new season stock that we ignore the peak of our Pansy and Viola season. The past couple of weeks has heightened my frustration as I have carried absolutely stunning Pansy pots around on my customer visits only to have them ignored or worse... "it's a bit boring isn't it"! Well seasons change quickly, this week we have all sort sort of fresh new products on offer. See, when it suits me I can change with the wind.
Among the fresh offerings is the Passionfruit pictured above. Look closely and you can see the little plastic grafting clips where the desirable "Norfolk Island" black passionfruit scion has been grafted to the vigorous but frankly weedy and less tasty Banana Passionfruit rootstock. These are very neat and strong grafts, nice and close to the soil level to minimize the number of dastardly rootstock buds that can escape and overtake the less vigorous Black Passionfruit. Make sure you rub off or slice away any shoots developing below the graft.
You might also notice in the pic above that these plants are growing happily out side. Not quite full sun, we have hail net over them. There would be nothing worse than hail pitting all that beautiful foliage at this stage. Tough plants ready for garden planting.
By the way, this is our new Grafted Passionfruit label. Please look out for them.
The end of an era, a sign of the times or a colossal misjudgment? This is our whiz bang, high tech super efficient seedling transplanter all dressed up and ready to travel to Cowra. This machine required a massive investment 6 or 7 years ago and in that time the industry has changed so much that for us it has become nothing more than an expensive stereo system. Yes it does include a rather impressive stereo.
What has happened? Well for us.... this
Our focus is now bespoke, not quantity and no matter how cleaver the robotics a machine can't produce these. Don't get me wrong we won't make a living out of 5 hanging baskets but they make great displays that encourage sales of other products. That's not an approach that's ever going to cut it in a retail chain store and guess what, we are all enjoying our work more.
Mind you I haven't given up on automation altogether. The funds from the sale of the transplanter are being turned into a spiffy new seeding machine. Of course that's the other path the industry has taken.... we grow so many more vegetables now and the girls are sick and tired of poking individual seeds directly into punnets. I'll send a pic when our new Italian baby arrives... she's red!
Robert asked "Why don't Tomatoes taste like I remember them?" Apart from the damage cigarettes and beer do to your taste buds the answer is we just don't grow them ourselves any more.
Growing at home has two distinct flavour advantages: Vine ripening and Breeding.
Sugar levels and "complex flavour components" develop in the last week to 2 weeks of the Tomato's ripening process. Commercial tomatoes are picked as soon as the grower knows the colour will develop fully, problem with this is the colour will develop but once picked the flavour development stops. I have read that the acid level of Tom Grosse Lisse develops so far in this final stage that it's best to manage the process by picking this variety a little early. I'm personally sceptical of "vine ripened" Tomatoes in supermarkets, and I know that growers keep a few plants for themselves that are not harvested until the fruit is properly ripe.
And breeding? Here's a favourite frustration; Truss Tomatoes. All Tomatoes grow in trusses! Truss Tomatoes at the supermarket have been breed specifically to produce an attractive truss that presents beautifully in plastic wrapping. Flavour is a secondary consideration. If you are looking for trusses, try Tomato Riesentraube. The translation from German is "giant bunches of grapes", now that might lack subtlety but it certainly is a truss. Heirloom and heritage varieties lack the disease resistance and shelf life of modern hybrids, the fruit might crack and they are often more difficult to harvest mechanically but they are popular because their flavour is the reason they were selected in the first place, all the other stuff is incidental.
Now all I have to do is work out a way to distill all that information into some easy to read posters.
