November 2022 Kitchen Garden Guide

 

Saturation! This last month or so will be testing your garden layout, water management and soil health. Don’t blame the weather; how your garden reacts is all about plant health, soil health, drainage and the state of the ecosystem you have had a big part in creating….. or not creating! Aphid and white fly infestations, rust, rot and root diseases as well as pollination issues can be sidestepped significantly by having a garden of biodiverse plants, including lots of Tasmanian natives, predator attracting plants, bird attracting plants and nesting sites as well as a soil packed with microbes, who have spent millions of years evolving strategies to keep the soil where they live healthy.

What to do now

1.If you have garlic rust, like I do in one patch because I foolishly planted in a low spot, push your fork well down in between the plants and open the soil up a bit, to help it dry off. I have also removed all leaves touching the ground. I am going to spray over the leaves a solution of 1 part full cream milk: 10 parts water. This is a very good fungal suppressant, as used by thousands of vineyards worldwide, in preference to chemicals because of its efficacy. Observe and learn from what you see.

2. Trees do not like to be waterlogged. Fork around the dripline, not digging, but rather pushing the fork in deep then rocking it forward and back, to let some air in. This will help relieve the compaction created by so much rain. The same applies to lawns, garden beds and even paths.

3. If your chook yard is boggy, don’t try to fix it by using something fine like hay because it may become mouldy and make your chooks sick. Instead, use something inert and coarse, like coarse straw, not too thick. Dig a few holes so the water can drain into them and fill them with gravel. If the roost floor is wet from the chooks coming and going with wet feet etc, dust with a little lime or carb soda, little and often, so as not to irritate their feet.

Grass

After 12 years of gardening here on my acre I can finally say that grass is no longer the problem that it was. Sure, nothing is perfect but I am pretty happy. What did I do? Firstly, I did not expect miracles and I have used no chemicals. Mostly I have mulched and mulched and fed and mulched and pulled and mulched and then some!

For example, I try not to let grass grow within the drip line of trees. As the trees grow, so the dripline expands and more grass is mulched over. Amongst the mulch I plant all manner of flowers, bulbs and herbs and native groundcovers too. This is fabulous for fire zones as it keeps dry mulch to a minimum, using plants as living mulch. At the same time it benefits soil microbes, little native birds and beneficial insects as well as looking pretty. Yes, it takes years but eventually you have flowers and herbs and trees and lovely garden beds with very little grass incursion. Start small, where you are, use what you have, do what you can….. and keep doing it!

Codling moth

The adult female codling moth lays approximately 60 whitish grey eggs that are about the size of a pinhead, on the surface of the leaves of apples, pears and quinces when the average temperature is over 15 degrees in spring and early summer. To reduce their numbers you must act now.

Codling moth eggs hatch after 10 days and the small caterpillars emerge to feed on the leaf surface and make their way to the fruit. They burrow into the fruit and head for the core. They will spend about three to five weeks inside the fruit feeding and putting on body mass until they are ready to emerge. This is the stage that we see, when fruit displays the tell-tale hole which leads to brown insides or early rotting when stored.

My mother’s remedy works well but annually led to her becoming embarrassed at her frequent visits to the local bottle shop every spring! She had a stash of tins, such as from tinned tomatoes, through which she drilled holes and tied string so that the tins can hang in a tree. Into each tin she put a dash of port and a double dash of water. She hung 2 or 3 tins in every apple, pear and quince tree. The male coddling moths are attracted to the port and drown in it, reducing the number of fertile eggs laid by the females. My mother topped up the liquids regularly.

There is more, information and several non-alcoholic controls outlined on the fantastic Global Net Academy website. Search for Tasmania.

November is beans time.

Add a handful of potash and a good spadeful of compost per square metre and fork them in. Sow beans into damp soil and water only once until the first leaves appear. This year I will wait until things have dried out somewhat or they may rot.

Climbing beans: Pole beans WILL blow over unless the structure is secure. I tie one end of my frame to a sturdy fence post. I especially love flat beans and have found some seeds, at last.

Bush beans: Bush beans are great for Tasmania as they produce faster than pole beans and aren’t as bothered by spring winds. There are hundreds of varieties to choose from and saving seed for next year is simply a matter of letting some of the pods mature fully and dry off before picking.

Cygnet Spring Garden Market: Sunday Nov. 13th, 11 – 3 @ The Cannery. 39+ garden stalls, 5 presentations, Cannery farm plates & bar, food vans and stalls, coffee, tool sharpening class (BYO tools to sharpen), Seed Library pack & chat, Children’s activities. Consider parking at Burtons Reserve, a 2 minute walk away. Details on FB and Instagram.
Jobs for November
Sow indoors to plant out later: Cucumbers, zucchinis (Romanesco), tromboncino, corn, pumpkins. Almost anything but it is too late for tomatoes! Sow in the garden: Beans (after frosts), salad leaves (not just lettuce!), brassicas (cover with moth netting), most herbs, salad and spring onions, beetroot, fennel, carrots, celery, parsnip, sunflowers and lots of other flowers.	Plant out frost tender seedlings, including tomatoes, late Nov. Check your hose fittings, watering cans and irrigation equipment. Share excess seedlings with friends. Check out Crop Swap Cygnet and Surrounds FB page for dates and doings. Most of all, enjoy the garden, the warm sunshine and life😊

October 2021 Kitchen Garden Guide

 I have spent hours weeding today and other days recently too. All this rain means I have also spent some frustrating days inside, watching the weeds grow! However, weeds can be your friend too, in several ways. Looking at a graph of this year’s September temperatures is enough to make me seasick! Don’t be fooled by any of the weather, there are nearly always beautiful warm, summery days, driving rain and snow and lots of wind, all the way up to Christmas!!

What to do about weeds

1.   If it is a whole bed that you want to clear, don’t bother pulling the weeds up, just chop them down with a sharp spade then cover with wet cardboard or newspaper and top with wet mulch. Soil life much prefers dampness so don’t use dry material when you want microbial activity, which is what will break down the weeds under the newspaper and mulch.

2.   Any weeds, including onion grass, weeds carrying seeds, couch/twitch – pack densely into a bin. Fill with water. You can also hang a kg or so of old manure in it in a hessian bag and add some wood ash and comfrey leaves if you want to. Cover well. Wait 2 weeks or so. Scoop a litre into a watering can, fill up with water and use as a light liquid feed.

3.   If there are no seeds or runners, feed weeds to your worms, your chooks or lay them on your paths. Even if your chooks don’t eat them, they will scratch them up, turn them over, poo on them and turn them into compost for you. Worm juice is simply made by watering the worm farm, collecting the liquid, diluting it to a very weak tea look and watering the foliage and soil of your plants. One of my worm juice making devices is a terracotta water filter from the tip shop. It lives in my little greenhouse. The worms are fed in the top section, with weeds and trimmings from the hothouse. I water it from time to time and this collects in the bottom. I use the tap to drain some into a small watering can, dilute it, then water my seedlings in the hot house. No fuss. No carrying of heavy buckets. The job takes 2 minutes. A big, worm-farm bath is outside for bigger jobs as are several worm towers. More about worms next time.

4.   In future, let your vegetables go to seed. Then some of your weeds will be vegetables that you didn’t even have to sow! Good seeds for that are lettuce, parsnips, chicory, frilly mustard, miners lettuce, corn mache, parsley, endive.

Creating a garden that provides you with seasonal food, all year round, with (eventually) very little work, is like growing a family where you spend a lot of time tending and nurturing and feeding for a couple of years then the jobs change to encouraging and managing and letting things go a little bit wild. Eventually, if all goes according to plan, you have created a beautiful base for life to grow on its own. By then you will have learnt a lot too, allowing the next child / patch of earth to evolve more easily. My motto is: start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.

Codling moth

The larvae that turn into the codling moths that lay eggs in our apples overwinter amongst the bark of your trees and the debris near the base of the trunk. Chooks are the best line of defence as they eat them for you before the larvae even get to adulthood. If possible, give your chooks free reign of your fruit trees or design your chook yard to include access to your fruit trees. My chooks even like to hop up onto the low branches of various of my fruit trees in winter, when there aren’t any leaves.

Now is the time to set codling moth traps for apples, pears and nashis to catch the adult moths before they lay eggs in your fruit. You can buy sticky, pheromone traps that lure the males in, then they get stuck to the sides and can’t escape. The girls get to remain free but unfertilised so do not produce fertile eggs (like chooks without a rooster).

My mother had a different way which almost totally removed codling moths from her garden in a few years. She lured the males with port. She hung one or 2 empty tins (tinned tomatoes, for example) in each apple and pear tree, by drilling holes and threading string through the tins so they could be hooked over branches that she could reach. Into each tin went a good dash of port and the same amount of water. Codling moth males (and many human males!) love port and died every night in those tins. After a few days she would sieve or scoop out the moths, top up the port and re-set the tins into the trees. There are usually 2 hatchings of codling moth eggs, one in mid spring and another in late spring or early summer, so the clever little things can get to the early and late flowering trees! So, don’t give up too early and the moths are not fussy, so get the cheapest port you can find!

Local Events

Cygnet Seed Library – at Oura Oura House, Cygnet: fortnightly, Sunday afternoon pack n chat sessions and monthly gardening workshops. See our website and facebook page for dates, details and fact sheets.

Cygnet Spring Garden Market – at The Cannery, 12 – 4pm Sat. Nov. 13^th: All things gardening! Stalls, 30 minute presentations, food, coffee, open bar and live music. See our facebook page and local flyers for details.

Sow in October
For transplanting later, especially in frost prone areas Any vegetable that fruits or has edible seeds: (Tomatoes – a bit late), zucchinis, corn, melons, pumpkins, cucumbers, capsicums, eggplants   In fact sow almost anything you have seeds of including flowers and herbs galore.	Outside: Leaves, legumes and roots Lettuce and other salad greens, beetroot, parsnips, carrots, peas, radish, celery, summer spinach and brassicas….. and of course lots of herbs; all of them.   Tip: If you have grass problems in your beds, sow everything in trays.

November Kitchen Garden Guide

Everyone is out in the garden, planting and sowing; dreaming of all the summer meals ahead, picked straight from the garden. My tip is to keep your tomatoes in pots until after the Huon Show (November 18^th) if you live in a frosty area. I remember the year that many people woke to find a hard frost had burnt their entire tomato patch overnight in mid-November! I find that potting tomatoes up into slightly bigger pots works really well as advanced plants suffer little when planted out, unlike the little ones planted out early.

Grass

Just looking out the window is enough to give me high blood pressure this time of the year as I can see the grass growing while I have coffee! There is grass that needs mowing, grass that needs slashing and grass that needs pulling; pretty much grass everywhere and mostly where I do not want it. Grrrrr….

1. When I first came here, from dry old Adelaide, I loved cool, grassy paths wandering serenely through flower and vegetables beds but now I am over it because grass does not keep to the paths at all and can leap tall buildings with a single bound! By covering some of the paths with wet newspaper or cardboard then sawdust or fine bark mulch, headway is being made at last. When it all breaks down I scoop it up and toss it on the beds then remake the paths.

2. I try not to let grass grow within the drip line of fruit trees. As the trees grow, so the dripline expands and more grass is mulched over. Amongst the mulch I plant all manner of flowers and herbs and native groundcovers too. This is fabulous for fire zones as it keeps dry mulch to a minimum, using plants as living mulch. At the same time it benefits soil microbes, little native birds and beneficial insects as well as looking pretty.

3. I like a patch of lawn as a space to sit and chat, have a BBQ or read but I don’t need space for a backyard cricket match so I keep the lawn just big enough to put up my marquee…. after all, this is Tasmania and it does rain, without notice! Beyond that small lawn it is ideal to have dense plantings that shade out any errant grass and keep maintenance to a minimum. My father used a small, sharp spade to cut a narrow trench around the edge of the lawn. Any piece of grass that grew into that trench was removed pronto.

Codling moth

The adult female codling moth lays approximately 60 whitish grey eggs that are about the size of a pinhead, on the surface of the leaves of apples, pears and quinces when the average temperature is over 15 degrees in spring and early summer. To reduce their numbers you must act now.

Codling moth eggs hatch after 10 days and the small caterpillars emerge to feed on the leaf surface and make their way to the fruit. They burrow into the fruit and head for the core. They will spend about three to five weeks inside the fruit feeding and putting on body mass until they are ready to emerge. This is the stage that we see, when fruit displays the tell-tale hole which leads to brown insides or early rotting when stored.

My mother’s remedy works well but annually leads to her becoming embarrassed at her frequent visits to the local bottle shop every spring! She has a stash of tins, such as from tinned tomatoes, through which she has drilled holes and ties string so that the tins can hang in a tree. Into each tin she puts a dash of port and a double dash of water. She hangs 2 or 3 tins in every apple, pear and quince tree. The male coddling moths are attracted to the port and drown in it, reducing the number of fertile eggs laid by the females. My mother tops up the liquids regularly.

There is more information and several non-alcoholic controls outlined on the Global Net Academy website.

November is beans time.

Add a handful of potash and a good spadeful of compost per square metre and fork them in. Sow beans into damp soil and water only once until the first leaves appear. It is a good idea to soak the beans overnight before sowing, to hasten germination.

Climbing beans: If you are lucky enough to grow your own hazelnuts / dogwood / bamboo / suitable willow then you can easily (and for free) make use of them to erect a frame. (Search Google images for ‘bean poles’ and see how creative you can be). But beware!! We live in the roaring 40’s!! Pole beans WILL blow over unless the structure is secure. I tie one end of my frame to a sturdy fence post. I especially love flat beans and have found some seeds, at last.

Bush beans: These produce bucket loads of fabulous beans all summer without the need for a frame but therefore take up much more room. I love the thin, stringless, French beans as well as borlotti beans. It helps to mulch with dry straw once we get into summer and there is less rain.

Bush beans are great for Tasmania as they produce faster than pole beans. There are hundreds of varieties to choose from and saving seed for next year is simply a matter of letting some of the pods mature fully and dry off before picking.

Jobs for November
Sow indoors or transplant and protect: Cucumbers (Lebanese), zucchinis (Romanesco), corn, pumpkins. Sow or plant in the garden: Salad leaves (not just lettuce!), brassicas (cover with moth netting), most herbs, salad and spring onions, beetroot, fennel, carrots, celery, parsnip, sunflowers and more!	Plant out frost tender seedlings after Huon Show Day. Check your hose fittings, watering cans and irrigation equipment. Share excess seedlings with friends. Most of all, enjoy the garden and the splashes of sunshine!