What’s been going on in my garden?

Hello!
Just a quick post today, with the latest pictures from what’s been happening and growing in my garden.
With all this talk of dust storms and gale force winds, I’ve been so busy cleaning up! But my plants have been busy too- let’s take a look

Used to be parsely and dill.

The ducks have decimated my once-robust parsley and dill, but little signs of life are sprouting up so I think they will prevail! Time to get some wire mesh and fence off the pot so they can’t get their beaks into it again.

The seedling-house is going well.

My little makeshift greenhouse/seedling nursery is doing well! Lots of sprouts have come up and are thriving in the protected semi-shade position. Currently there is tomato seedlings, jap pumpkin seedlings (yes they all sprouted!), radish plants (see below for a picture), cos lettuce, flower seedlings, beetroot seedlings, avocado seedlings, an orchid plant, and probably more that I can’t think of at the moment. If I were more organised, I’d keep a list of what plants I have and when I put them in there.

Speaking of the orchid plant!

I was told the name of this orchid when I bought it, but have since forgotten it. An orchid ID book would be a useful addition to my library, I think!

I bought this for $5 from a street-stall, from a nice old man who grew them all himself. I’m annoyed I didn’t write the name down when he told me, but he referenced an orchid ID book so it shouldn’t be too hard to find. Isn’t it beautiful for $5!!! It’s starting to send out new shoots/roots at the bottom so in a year or so if it’s big enough I think I’ll try and divide it up and then have two of them

Radish!

This is the first time I’ve grown radish from seed and am so pleased with how it’s going. The bulb of the radish is clearly visible at the base of the stem so it won’t be long until I can pull it up and see how it tastes. I’ve got a newfound appreciation of radish, since tasting the long white Daikon radishes (my local asian grocer sells them two for $1.50), and having surplus red radishes after buying the bunches and giving the tops to my rabbit. She loves the tops, and I’ve grown to love the radishes. It’s a shame I only have two radish seedlings, really! Radish only takes just over a month to grow and mature, and this site has a lot of helpful tips in regards to growing radishes. Can’t wait to taste mine

Grown from seed. Maybe that's what I should have called this blog

My little pumpkin seedling is all grown up and is now a proper pumpkin plant! It has four flowers on it, two female and two male, as far as I can tell. You can see the female flowers because they have a little bulge at the bottom of the petals (this is the ovary where the pumpkin will be produced if the flower is pollinated).

Female pumpkin flower: (from here)

Male pumpkin flower: (from here

Here’s a good picture showing both together: (from here

One of the male flowers appears spent, so hopefully the two female ones will open at the same time as the second male one so I can hand-pollinate them and hopefully get two pumpkins going.

My tomato plants are all in flower now, and the beginnings of fruits are showing up on some of the spent flowers. If all the flowers produce a fruit, then I’m expecting close to 50 tomatoes

Plenty more flowers where these came from.

And remember the poor little tomato plant that got snapped off right near the base by the blackbirds?

Aug 21st. Not looking happy.

I repotted it, and gave it some TLC and it has just grown so well over the past 4 weeks.
Look at it now!!

Sept 22nd. Such an improvement!

And what looked like this on the 21st of August:

August 21st. They're so tiny.

Now looks like this:

Sept 22nd. Almost ready to harvest.

I think I’ll put another styrofoam box in the shadecloth area with my cos lettuce seedlings, but if I can’t do that then I think using Gai Lan as a shade companion plant would be just as good an idea.

And last (for today- there is still a lot more happening here) but not least:

Coriander going to seed.

This coriander plant has served us well, and try as we might, it was always destined to be a seed plant (if you go by what the packet says) so it’s finally been allowed to bolt and I’m keen to see how fresh coriander seeds compare to the dried ones you buy in the supermarket. Some of those seeds will be replanted, and hopefully produce a true-to-form plant. Fresh coriander is infinitely better than the flavourless, overpriced, bunches you buy in the fridge section at Coles. Our local asian grocer (my favourite) sells big bunches for 40c which are market fresh and have a lovely spicy aroma, so at the moment I am happy to buy from there but it’s very convenient to have your own little plant out in the backyard.
The flowers are quite pretty, too

Coriander flowers. Similar to carrot flowers, no?

Happy gardening everyone, and off I go to wash out the last of the red-dust that’s settled all over my garden and inside the house.

Here are the flowers from my little Viola ‘Johnny Jump Up’ that I grew this season from seed:

Aren't they pretty

Potato pickers.

Potatoes ready (or overready) to plant.

Potatoes are one of my favourite foods. Chipped, mashed, boiled, baked, deep fried, there are so many ways to enjoy this starchy tuber. I’m on a mission to see just how practical growing potatoes at home is!

You know how it goes, potatoes are on special so you buy a bag or two and for some reason or other you don’t get around to using them in time and they start to go soft and sprout. With a newly aquired styrofoam box, I decided not to compost the little potatoes I had that were starting to grow and see what I ended up with. Potatoes would be the obvious answer, but the process of planting them and harvesting the end result is what I was interested to see and do.

Without getting too much into it, once the potatoes start to sprout or go green they are slowly becoming toxic (due to the presence of a nasty poisons called ‘glykoalkoloids’ that are present in the growing sprouts). You can still eat the potato after it’s started to sprout but cut off the sprouts and any areas that are green or starting to turn green.

It’s also recommended not to plant the potatoes you get from the shop, due to a number of reasons such as disease or poor crop/yield. Since this was more like an experiment that a need for food, I threw caution to the wind and planted them anyway. There is debate about whether certified seed potatoes are truly disease free and there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that potatoes from the market perform just as well as their certified cousins.

Planting the spuds...upside down?

There are a few different methods for planting potatoes. There are no-dig methods (Jackie French is a fan of this method, and it means that you can remove potatoes without ripping up the still-growing plant) and container planting and planting in well-prepared ground plots. With market potatoes, and my poor clay soil, I’ve decided on container planting to give the spuds the best growing environment and protecting the soil from any possible pathogen the market potatoes might have.
I’ve filled the styrofoam box to about 30cm (not forgetting the drainage holes in the bottom!!) with a rich mix of potting mix, blood & bone, sand, coir, and plenty of well-rotted compost. I’ve also added in some of the dirty straw from my rabbits litter tray to add extra fertiliser. Potatoes like nitrogen but I think my stinky rabbit straw is more ammonia than nitrogen. But judging from the following photos it doesn’t appear to have done any harm!

You’re supposed to plant potatoes about 30cm apart, but these are a bit closer than that. They are only small size potatoes so we’ll see how crowded it gets in there when I harvest them. Come to think of it, I did a few things ‘differently’ (aka ‘wrong’) with these spuds but it’s all a big learning exercise so I’m not too concerned about not being 100% ‘by the book’. I planted them with the sprouts facing down, mistaking them for roots I suppose, but usually the sprouts would go facing the sky.

Spuds covered with straw

I’ve covered them with about 15cm or so of sugarcane mulch/straw which will give the shoots an easy substrate to grow through and keep in the moisture.
My ducks just LOVE to get their stickybeaks into any pot or planterbox that is within their reach, so I covered the surface with an old bit of metal mesh we had lying around. The holes are just small enough to stop the beaks from getting in but big enough to let the plants grow through. It worked a treat!

Plants emerging! August 21st

This was only a month later
The mesh kept out the foraging ducks and the plants had no problem growing up through the mesh. I’ve planted three potatoes and so far only two of them have growing tops. So we wait…

One week later, August 28th

Now all the little spuds are showing vigorous signs of life! It’s all very exciting, in a nerdy kind of way. But it gets better!!

Going strong- August 31st

Less than a week later and they are growing rapidly.

They’ve been getting bigger over the last two weeks and tiny little flower-buds have appeared, but so far no flowers have come out. The flower heads seem a bit dry and when I tried to poke them to get a better look some of them ‘crumbled’ and fell off. Hmmmmm I would expect them to be flowering by now! The very bottom leaves are starting to turn yellow as well, which is a sign that the plant is winding up and getting ready to die back (but then it’s harvest time!). It would be a little disappointing if I don’t get any flowers, because I’m keen to see if I can collect some ‘true’ potato seeds. True potato seeds are the little seeds from the potato berries. They are a bit useless for most people because it takes a lot longer to grow a potato plant from seed rather than from a tuber, but with a seed you get sexual variation which can produce different strains and characteristics. I’ll take some more photos tomorrow and leave the plants for another fortnight or so. I think the life-span of potato plants is around 3 months, so there is still a bit of time left before that is up.

Either way, stay tuned for when I have the ‘big reveal’ and dig up the plants to see what they have produced!!!

Happy Gardening

Links!
http://www.abc.net.au/gardening/stories/s1983589.htm
Gardening Australia’s How To for planting potatoes

http://www2.dpi.qld.gov.au/horticulture/5231.html
Queensland Department of Primary Industry guide to growing potatoes (slightly more commercial than home-gardening)

http://www.aussiegardening.com.au/articles/growingpotatoes.html
Aussie Gardening guide to growing potatoes (no dig)

http://www.forums.permaculture.org.au/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=144
Permaculture Research Institute Forums thread on Certified Seed vs Store-bought potatoes

http://www.abc.net.au/gardening/stories/s867068.htm
Gardening Australia (because I love them so) guide to no-dig potato growing.

Much Ado About Weeding.

It is easy to get caught up in the excitement of Spring and all your long-awaited flower bulbs and perennial plants are exploding into life with the warm weather, but with the good- comes the bad.

WEEDS

lawn weeds

These little buggers are the bane of my existance. Or at least one of the banes. I hate their very presence and feel offended that they dare to grow in my garden!!!
However, they are just trying to survive and populate like the rest of the living things on earth. If they weren’t so good at it, they wouldn’t be weeds now, would they?

A loose definition of a weed is ‘any plant that grows where you don’t want it to’ and following on from that you can add ‘populates spontaneously and in great numbers’. A broad definition like this can encompass many types of plants; from aquatic (eg Water Hyacinth) to grasses (eg Pampas Grass), trees and shrubs (eg Privet or Lantana), herbs (not the ones you eat, but rather a herb is the name for any small shrub or plant that doesn’t have a woody stem, eg lawn weeds like Oxalis), and vines (eg Morning Glory). Basically, any ininvited or potentially dangerous plant that is in your garden without you having planted it or wanting it there, is a weed.

Asparagus fern. A particularly annoying garden weed!

Mint- can be an enthusiastic grower, but since I don't mind it growing here I don't consider it a weed.

The NSW Department of Primary Industries classes weeds in five categories, determined by seriousness of the weeds’ impact and the ecosystem/landscape they are of greatest risk to (the categories are Noxious weeds, Environmental weeds, Agricultural weeds, Weeds of National Significance, and National Environmental Alert List Weeds). The government created the Noxious Weeds Act 1993 to give guidelines and requirements for the management of weeds, as some plants can cause serious environmental and ecological damage if left uncontrolled.

Patterson's Curse - Echium plantagineum - toxic to livestock

If you have a think about where you have seen weeds, and what you think and feel when you see them, I wouldn’t be surprised if Bindii, Lantana, Thistle, Patterson’s Curse, Privet, Clover, Asparagus Fern, etc all come to mind. It would be unusual for somebody living in Australia not to have encountered or at least heard about these weeds at some point in their life.

Confusingly though, some native species can also be weeds- for example a West Australian wattle (Acacia saligna) is a problem species since being introduced to the eastern Australian coast. In my backyard I find ‘Bower of Beauty’ (I had to google the common name- I’ve only ever known it by its proper name Pandorea jasminoides) to be a weed because it grows uncontrolled and it keeps growing or sprouting new shoots as fast as I can cut it all back! It’s a beautiful plant when it’s in flower, but it has a tendency to grow over other plants and suffocate them. The dead and dying branches also stay trapped in the vine and create a huge mess of sticks and twigs. Great habitat for little birds, but it would be preferrable to me to give them lots of native trees to hide in instead (my little bottlebrush is growing, but it’s taking its time!!).

It can be a neverending battle to keep the weeds away from the garden, and whilst most people hate it and avoid it…in a strange way I find weeding to be very cathartic and relaxing. Relaxing only until you stand up, knees and back aching, and survey your work and realise you’ve just spent an hour weeding a patch that turned out to only be 2mx2m.

Petty Spurge - loves popping up all over the lawn and in my garden beds!

Petty Spurge - luckily it's easily ripped out.

So this is the time of year to be tackling the weeds, before they get too big and too out of control. With this warm weather it won’t take long for them to completely overrun your lawn or garden beds. I know in my garden, it seems like all I have to do is turn away for a minute and that’s enough time for them to multiply and take hold!

There are two, maybe three, weeds that are on my absolute KILL LIST. I’m not sure if everyone else has the same problems with them as I do, but I figure if I can eradicate them from my garden at least that will be one less patch of earth that they can take over and compete with natives or my ornamentals.

Number 1: GREEN CESTRUM

Cestrum parqui
This plant was introduced as a garden ornamental from South America, and for the life of me can’t figure out why anybody would want this invasive, disgusting-smelling, ugly looking plant in their yard!!!

Green Cestrum infestation

It is a woody plant with large bright green leaves that are borne mainly from the main stem/trunk. It has an invasive and long-lived root system that sends up shoot and suckers both close to and far away from the main plant. It has a characteristic stench, and bright yellow coloured roots.

Green Cestrum plant and shoots/suckers

It gets yellow flowers, which are slightly pretty, but these too stink during the day (although they apparently smell sweeter at night). It gets black berries which are eaten and dispersed by birds.

The fight with Cestrum in my garden is never ending, but I’ve added a new weapon to my arsenal and slowly but surely I am getting rid of it. The only way to truly get rid of it is to dig the roots out, which is hard and labour-intensive but well worth it because if you get almost all of the root out then you will probably not see the plant in that particular location again.

Green Cestrum shoots/suckers

My new weapon-

MATTOCK- I call it the 'weedinator'

Number 2: ASPARAGUS FERN

Asparagus sp. (most commonly Asparagus densiflorus, but there are over 100 species)

Asparagus fern comes from South Africa, and started as a garden ornamental plant because it has a fluffy octopus kind of look when it’s fully grown. But since I know what it is and what it does, when I look at it all I see is a big green spiny pile of PEST.

Asparagus fern - deceptively invasive and horrid.

The amount of sores I’ve gotten on my hands from embedded spikes, and the hours of sweating away in the garden removing it, makes me hate this plant with a passion. It has underground tubers that kind of look like tiny little pointy potatoes. These hold water and nutrients and mean that even if you pull out all the leaves/fronds/stems then it still has enough energy to grow more.
It gets a bright red berry which is eaten by birds and, you guessed it, spread by birds. It is a problem in bushland and home gardens because the tubers and roots form an impenetrable network which stops any other plant from being able to grow, and it can also impede water percolation into the ground.

I find the root mass is easier to remove with a weeding tool such as:

Which uses a levering method to pull the plant up by its roots. Particularly useful for flat weeds (dandelions, etc) and spiky things that you would rather not touch (thistle, etc).

Those are the two main weeds in my garden that I hate with a passion, but there are plenty more that deserve to be eradicated. Thistles, oxalis, petty spurge, carrot weed, bindii, etc etc. I don’t have the time to talk about them all though.

Carrot Weed

Clover is also a weed which invades lawns, but when you get clover in your lawn it tells you that your soil is nitrogen deficient. Clover is a special type of plant (legume family) that is able to grow in very poor soils, because it can draw from the atmospheric nitrogen in order to get the nourishment it needs but can’t get from the soil. It is common for farmers to plant a crop of nitrogen-fixing plants such as clover or peas, and then till them back into the soil to give it the nitrogen it needs in order to grow other crops. A permaculture spokesperson I was listening to once told us all of the dangers of the world ‘running out of nitrogen’. This is impossible, and all her little speech did was make her look like a fool. Whilst it is true that the main nitrogen ‘mines’ off on the Christmas Islands and the like, which are ancient piles of guano (bird poo) are being depleted, Nitrogen is an element and as such can’t be destroyed and will always be around. It’s like trying to say that the world will run out of carbon because all the forests are being chopped down and the fossil fuels mined. Nitrogen exists in the nitrogen cycle and we will never run out of it.

Clover invading the lawn

SO…
Now is the time to assess your garden and be brutal about getting rid of the weeds. What looks like a little innocuous plant now, could soon turn into a big nasty invasive weed! I don’t use chemicals unless absolutely necessary- I prefer to pull them out by hand for instant gratification and beautification of the lawn. After you’ve pulled out the weeds in the garden bed, a thick covering of mulch (such as pine chips) will help stop the weeds from growing through again.
Chemical-free is also safer for the animals that might frequent your garden and also safer for the ornamentals and natives you want to keep! Now really is the best time to get out in the garden as well, because it’s not hot enough to make it impractical and it’s before most of the weeds have set seed or come into flower. The trick with weed removal is to get the plants BEFORE they reproduce, otherwise it will be a pointless exercise. When you pull up your weeds or cut them right back to the ground, DON’T put the waste in your compost or in the normal bin, put them in a plastic bag and tie it up. Leave it outside for a week or so, to be sure the plants are completely dead (they can be tenacious little buggers) and then throw the bag into the bin. This will ensure that the weeds won’t live to see another day somewhere off down the track.

Now it’s time for me to get out and tackle the thistles…
Happy weeding

Links:
http://cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/Environment/PlantsAndAnimals/CurrentStatus/NoxiousWeeds.asp
Pictorial Guide to the weeds declared ‘noxious’ under the Noxious Weeds Act (1993).

http://www.sydneyweeds.org.au/docs/Sydney-Green-Cestrum-Plan-06-11.pdf
Comprehensive Report/Action Plan on the noxious weed ‘Green Cestrum’Cestrum parqui.

http://www.weeds.org.au/
Weeds Australia- by the Australian Weeds Committee (has a good Weed ID database).

http://www.thelawnguide.com.au/lawn-care/weeds-pests-diseases/27-pests-and-diseases/294-petty-spurge.html
A list of common lawn and garden weeds in Australia, and how to control them.

Seed saving!

The American project (http://www.seedsavers.org/) has been running since 1975.

Sick of buying expensive imported seeds? Want to do something good for your local environment (in a way) and become more self-sufficient? Do you want to join a network full of other like-minded gardeners? Do you have an annual plant that has done very well, and you’d like to have the same success next growing season?
Seed Savers is a worldwide grass-roots project where local gardeners and home horticulturalists let their favourite or most successful plants go to seed, and save these seeds to distribute to others. Doing so encourages local diversity and also encourages ‘heirloom’ plant diversity. It is also something very simple that home gardeners can do to decrease their reliance on commercial seed companies and gain more satisfaction from their gardening practices.

What is an heirloom plant?
Heirloom plants are plants that have been cultivated for many years (generally agreed as 50 years plus), most likely because they have desirable qualities such as pest-resistance or high yield or good quality yield and to help prolong rare or importance species.

A ’sciency’ aside…
Natural Selection?
A lot of you are probably wondering “Why worry about natural selection and heirlooms? I can buy all the seeds I want from the nursery!”.
There’s nothing wrong with buying from the nursery or from Bunnings, if you don’t mind where your seeds came from or if you want to experiment with different seeds, or if you don’t mind buying your seeds every year when your annual crops die off.
The beautiful thing about letting your plants go to seed, is that if you have a successful crop and want to be able to grow it again next year you can! This is technically called artificial selection but it is done in such a way that no genetic modifications or chemical agents are used to make the plants ‘better’ or to aid the survival of weaker plants.

Hypothetical scenario:
Say you sow 12 sunflower seeds…out of those 12 seeds only 10 germinate. Out of those 10; 6 are ‘normal’ height, 2 are shorter than normal and 2 are taller than normal. If you wanted to grow only tall sunflower plants, you could try your luck again with another dozen seeds the next year, or you could collect the seeds from the two tallest plants in the hope that their seeds will produce only/mostly tall sunflowers.
Congratulations- you’ve just acted as an agent of artificial selection!

Back to saving your seeds, and why you should do it.
When you buy seeds from the store, or even seedlings, it is more than likely the plants are hybrids that won’t produce viable seeds or will produce seeds that turn into plants that look and possibly taste nothing like the parent plant.

Will these seeds I took from store bought pumpkin and avocadoes grow into plants that will produce fruit that is just as big and tasty?

This is a deliberate move by seed companies and producers. With annual plants which need regrowing from seed each year (eg carrots, lettuce, celery, beetroot, etc), if home gardeners could harvest the seeds from their mature plants and save them for the year after to grow them again- how would the seed companies make any money? The same goes with the seeds of the fruit and vegetables you buy in the supermarket.
Being crafty with genetics and cross-pollinations means that hybrids can be made which won’t be viable to grow the next year. Or if they do grow, they will be weak (pest or disease prone) or produce fruit which in no way resembles the delicious crops you got off your original packet of seeds.
Not all food crop plants are bred to have useless mutant plant-growing seeds, but it’s very very common.

Will this Hass Avocado seed sprout into a nice fertile tree?

But that doesn’t mean we should not bother trying to collect and grow seeds from the plants, fruits, and vegetables we have already.

I have started to collect and grow any seeds I can get from my fruit and veges, and to let the plants I have grown from store-bought seeds ‘bolt’ (go to seed) and collect the results to plant again.
I’ve had mixed results, mostly with the seeds collected straight from store-bought produce not germinating. I have had some success with pumpkin seeds, however. Those little seeds are so determined and will grow anywhere!

Here is one that I pulled out of a tomato planter tub that I had put compost (from my pile) in:

It was obviously somewhere deep in the dirt, and has grown all the way up to get to the surface. Determined, isn’t it. Only the top green leaves were poking up above the soil level.

This pumpkin plant was grown from a seed I took from an ordinary old pumpkin I bought at Coles. Butternut, I think? I hope it’s butternut, at least- I love those things! Whether it will grow into a nice big plant that produces pumpkins that look and taste like the one I bought in the shop remains to be seen.

At the beginning of August

Here it is less than a month later!

Pumpkin on the left, basil on the right.

Another plant I’ve been growing, but from seeds bought at the shop, was Pak Choy. I love asian greens so thought it would be so convenient to grow my own.

Unwittingly, I put the whole packet of seeds in the planter box…so I ended up with a planter absolutely jam packed with pak choy. That’s not the way you should do it, because there it places a lot of stress on the plants through competition for water and nutrients and leaf area/available sunlight.

Anyway, this is the planter box in the beginning of June (sorry for the bad quality photo):

June 2nd

Give it a few weeks, and they had turned into very nice leafy plants. Then the ducks managed to get to them and almost demolished the lot of them. I did manage to save some though, and repot them into their own pots.

July 23rd

These are getting on a bit, and are at the point of ‘bolting’. The leaves are still tasty and not bitter so if we wanted we could have kept harvesting them. But these ones I specifically wanted to let go to seed so I could collect the seeds to plant again in spring.

I thought they would stay small, but I was very wrong!

August 14th

They’ve grown to 1m tall, or more, and I’ve since moved them to behind a mesh fence to help keep them upright in the wind.
The bees love the blossoms, and it’s very interesting watching the different stages of seed formation in the plant.

Here is what they look like now, after the petals have withered and dropped. The seeds form in an elongated inferior ovary so each petiole turns into/supports the seed pod.

September 3rd

Not long now before the seeds will be ready and I can replant them, and see how the second generation compare to the original plants.

I’ve also collected seeds from the sweet pea trellis and hope to get them back in the ground as soon as they’ve dried out enough.

Will update with more pics soon, as the chinese broccoli/beetroot/spinach have shot up and are so much bigger now, and I have lots of little tomato seedlings and new lettuce plants…not to mention to potatoes going crazy! It’s all going on here

Remember: taking away your dependance on big businesses for your gardening and food requirements is one step closer to a self-sustainable, and more ethical lifestyle.

Fat Betty the rabbit approves of self-sustainability!

Magnolia welcomes the season.

Magnolia grandiflora

It doesn’t look like more than a bunch of sticks from that picture, but this little Magnolia grandiflora (‘Little Gem’ dwarf form) is finally showing signs of life after what seemed an eternity.

I bought it in Spring 2007, and unfortunately wasn’t able to plant it in the ground until February this year. I’ve heard that Magnolias don’t take transplanting well, and this one was quite rootbound, so the odds were not on its side. It’s planted in a semi-sun area that gets morning and early afternoon sun (on our block it approximates to an easterly aspect) and the same horrible heavy clay soil. I prepared a hole for it with lime, and dug it to twice the width of the root ball. As it was rootbound I teased the roots apart a bit to try and encourage lateral growth.

Over the last month or so I’ve noticed buds forming and swelling all along the branches, and when every other magnolia around Sydney is in magnificent blossom at the moment the buds on this tree held a lot of promise.
All of a sudden, as if it knows what day of the season it is, the buds have all split and opened!

Leaves, not flowers!

They all contained leaves, and are almost all split and opened. I expect in the next few days the leaves will fully emerge and it will be able to start photosynthesising and making food for itself to grow over the warm seasons. Magnolias are notoriously slow growing, and since the ‘Little Gem’ dwarf form has been introduced to Australia from the United States not enough time has passed for people to see just how big they will grow! Regular M. grandiflora get to be up to 30m tall, but ‘Little Gem’ is said to grow between 4 and 8m tall. For my purposes, as an ornamental tree in a house-front garden, that’s perfect house-height. Ideally it will grow tall enough for the bottom-most branches to pass the top of the windows but not too tall as to not give the house any shade in Summer.

Magnolias are known for their massive creamy-white blooms, delicately perfumed, and their large dark green waxy leaves. The Magnolia is deciduous, so when it starts to get cold all the leaves will fall off.
The garden that I have planted it in has a variety of plants in it at the moment, and I am aiming to have a wide range of foliage and flower types in it to add interest. The dark shiny leaves will contrast against the silvery leaves of the lavender bush, and the bright green lobed leaves of the Seaside Daisy (Erigeron karvinskianus ) which you can see behind the Magnolia in the first picture up above. As the underside of the leaves is a contrasting colour to the top (in this case, silvery white, not the regular coppery-bronze of most Magnolias) which will add an extra element of colour to the garden.

I've 'mulched' around the bottom of the trunk with stones and pebbles, which have helped to keep moisture in and prevent the soil from washing away when I water it. It is planted on a slight slope which will help water drainage in the root zone. Magnolias are popular as container plants not just for their beauty and interest, but also because they are very low maintenance and it is more or less pest/disease free.

I look forward to watching the progress of the little Magnolia, and eagerly anticipate the arrival of flowers in Summer- although I'm not holding my breath for them!

*edit* I apologise for the sloppy HTML. Lesson learnt to check my work before I post!

Happy Spring!!

Of course on the day that I change the duck pond water and use it to water all the plants in the garden, it starts raining. We haven’t had rain in how long now? Oh well. The ducks are happy and the plants get a double dose today I suppose.

Over the last few weeks the garden has been slowly unfurling into flower and bud, and now it’s Spring it’s only going to get busier from here!

It’s only a short post today, because I have errands to run but I have a number of different posts in the works (including my potato explosion!) so keep tuned and enjoy the rain we’re getting today if you also happen to be in Sydney.

Carrots!

Thanks everyone for the views and for your comments There are plenty more posts to come, and as soon as I upload and organise all my photos I’ll be adding more.

Just a short one today, about my lovely little carrot seedlings!
I’ve never grown carrots before, and as an annual plant, it is much more economical (and rewarding, I think) to grow them from seed rather than from a punnet of ready established seedlings.
For the price of a punnet of maybe a dozen seedlings, you can buy a packet of a couple of hundred seeds. You also don’t have to worry so much about transplanting as you can sow directly where you want them to grow. I’ve bought a punnet of celery seedlings and the little plants were so intertwined with their roots and leaves that it was a real hassle to pry them apart- and once I did I had a terrible success rate. You’ll find that seeds grow rapidly so it only takes a few weeks extra for the seeds to catch up to the seedlings.

I planted the first row of carrot seeds (will update with the actual variety name tomorrow) a month or so, and planted another row about a fortnight after. Just so they aren’t all ready for harvesting at the same time and we have too many carrots at once.

This was taken in the last week of July, about a week or two after I sowed them:

And this is taken just this week- see how much bigger they have gotten.

When I planted them, I spaced them closer than it advises on the packet (they say something crazy like 10cm apart) but then thinned out the weakest ones along the way. I’ve probably thinned the first row from about 35 down to 20 or so, and the second row I will check on in the next day or so and make sure there aren’t any seedlings too close to each other. How close is too close? Carrots love space to grow, and if you plant them too close together they will feel crowded could grow into strange shapes. Another reason that carrots grow into weird shapes is because there are sticks or stones or obstructions in the ground which cause them to fork, etc. One thing that I am a little worried about is the depth of my container- I’ve chosen a variety that is either a dwarf or smaller-type variety so hopefully they won’t hit the bottom of the planter box and get stuck in the reservoir grate.

I’ve left about 15mm or so on the side of each seedling, so doing the math that means my container probably has more than 15 little seedlings in each row. You get the idea, anyway. When they get a bit bigger I will do another ‘cull’ so they have about 20mm on each side. I’ve read that by this stage the carrots should be at a nice ‘baby carrot’ stage and can be eaten!
Carrots don’t transplant too well, either, they tend to get bent and won’t grow straight. But they all taste the same!

I’ll keep updating as they get bigger and hopefully in another 2 months (carrots from seed usually take 3 to 4 months) I’ll have pictures of the tasty carrots we’ve dug up

Happy gardening!!

Goings on with styrofoam and hotboxes…

I’ll try to keep the words here more succinct, and the pictures more abundant…so bear with me here while I try and adjust

Last month or so, in our Bunnings spending spree, I was able to purchase a ‘hotbox’ or mini-greenhouse. The temps were cooler back then, and I really didn’t think little seedlings would survive outside with all the bird and bug activity that goes on.

So this is what we started with:

and:

It only took a few minutes to plant them out:

Notice that we’re using the same blue tub full of super potting mix mix (see previous entry for recipe)!

In that picture we’re planting tomato seeds. With the seeds we tried to plant them as close to the intructions on the packet as possible. However, when planting in seedling trays it is a better option to plant at least two seeds per ’segment’ to allow for a less than 100% germination rate. If both seeds in that hole sprout it’s a bonus, and you should ‘thin out’ and remove the weakest of the seedlings until there is just one per segment. Too much competition with not enough resources stifles growth and when you get 200-odd seeds per packet, you can afford to be choosy and only plant the best and strongest seedlings.

With the chinese broccoli and the spinach, we decided to make two or three separate seed-holes in the potting mix (per segment) and spread the seeds out that way, rather than making one hole and putting two or three seeds in there. It worked out well, and some were so healthy that we were able to pot-on both seedlings from some segments.

After we planted them, I wrote on the plastic with a permanent marker the type of seed that was in each row (to avoid confusion later). If you want to have a monoculture in your greenhouse box then it is sensible to stagger the sowing times by a week or two. If you do that, then instead of writing the seed type above the rows, you would write the date of sowing.

After a few weeks, we were pleasantly surprised with how the little sprouts were doing. So well, that I got excited and potted them on before I could get a picture of the almost fully sprouted tray!

You might be able to just make out my writing on the top of the tray with the seed names on them. The chinese broccoli was the first to sprout so I took them out and planted them in a recycled styrofoam box we got from the fruit market, along with some beetroot and spinach:

Aren’t they cute? It’s probably not visible in the picture, but I’ve also written on the box which row is which plant. It’s easy to tell the difference now, but I’m a stickler for being thorough about some things.

Here they are again in a different view, and you can see that they’ve grown! Especially the chinese broccoli.
Using old styrofoam boxes is a great way to recycle, but make sure you put drainage holes in the bottom!

I also planted some chinese broccoli in the lettuce planter box which was ruined by the birds:

I don’t have a picture just yet, but these are also doing very well. Most of them are poking their first set of true leaves over the wire now.

(This is just a diagram to show the difference between ’seed leaves’ or cotyledons, compared to the true leaves of a plant…it’s not actually my picture or my plant.)

The tomato seeds in the tray have now germinated, but I don’t have a picture of that yet. They are only a few mm tall (maybe 10 or 15mm) so I’ve cautiously potted-on the strongest and biggest of them and left the rest to get a big bigger before I try and move them incase they can’t handle the change.

So…in parting, some handy tips to remember:
-Don’t move seedlings from their hot-box until they are big enough to handle the change from their sheltered little world to the big bad outside world.
-Decide when you want your seeds to germinate and be ready, and work backwards from there to determine when you should plant them. If you plant the whole tray at once, you will get a glut of sprouts all at once! But if you stagger the sowing times, you can have a sustainable harvest for many weeks
-Don’t overwater the seedling tray. If you water them too much, then you risk ruining the lot but waterlogging and the formation of surface scum/slime on the wet soil surface. Too much humidity can cause damping-off, and root-rot as well.
-Start your hot-box/mini greenhouse while the weather is still on the cool side, so you can have seedlings ready to plant by the time it’s warm.
-When the weather gets warmer, keep your greenhouse/hotbox out of direct sunlight otherwise your fragile little sprouts will fry!

Planting tomatoes!

Long overdue (since we planted them several weeks ago now), here is the pictorial/tutorial of how we’ve planted our tub tomatoes. It’s not very complicated!
We’ve grown them in tubs because the soil here is very heavy and compacted. Heavy clay soils are very difficult to work with, and a lot of work is needed if you plan on planting things directly into it which are not suited to heavy and nutrient-rich soils like clay- which is also prone to waterlogging.
Being in tubs also helps with water-saving, as the pots you can get these days have special reservoirs in the bottom which collect excess water that the plant can access long after you last watered it. Of course there is an overflow so the plant is sitting in a pool of it’s own stagnant water!
The last benefit of using tubs (in our garden especially) is that you can move them about to find the best position for them, and move them to a sheltered position if it’s a particularly hot or windy day. The winds we have had this week have been very wild and gusty, and any of my poor little plants left out in it lost all turgitidy and dried out almost to the point of carking it.
One little Cineraria ‘Silver Dust’ was so dehydrated that it was flopping all over it’s pot. I thought it was gone for, but I fully submerged it in a bucket of water and sat it in a semi-shade position. The next day, the little Cineraria was looking back to full health!
Some of my little vege seedlings were not so lucky, and I took it as a lesson to not be lazy about mulching and to cover up any plants that can’t be moved when it is so dry and windy.

Anyhow, here is the tomato planters guide to….tomato planting!

Firstly:
Start with a nice big tub!

Coincidentally, the tub we chose was labelled as a ‘Tomato Tub’ but any big ol’ container will do. We liked this one because it has little feet and is a good size (and was a good price). At Bunnings, big planter tubs can cost anywhere from around $13 up to $60! Unless you want a pot that waters the plant itself and is super sturdy and nice looking (for example, to go on a patio or somewhere like that) I can’t see any reason to fork out $60 for a TUB. Even those big clear plastic storage tubs would do if you drilled some drainage holes in the botto, and you can get a 70L or so container for close to $20!

Our tub conveniently didn’t have the holes pre-drilled (who knows why…) but it did have ‘PUNCH HOLE HERE’ marks on it. So we did!

Don’t get me started on how important proper drainage for your pots is…and not just pots, any plant in general. I’ll always remember one of the scientists from CSIRO Griffith drumming into us that drainage is the number 1 most important thing that crops and plants need! Everyone knows plants need water, but I don’t think many people think about what happens to the water after they pour it over their plant. Most plants need a moist substrate to aid and assist gas exchange between the root surfaces and the micropores in the soil/potting mix/substrate. Roots also draw in water which contains nutrients, essential elements, dissolved minerals, etc and this water works its way up the xylem into the leaves, into the stomata, from there is is transpirated back out into the atmosphere as Oxygen. That’s a really really really simplified version of water uptake by plants.
Most of the water is stored in the soil, some is evaporated and some is taken up by the roots. If you water your plant enough, then some will run out the bottom (if you have holes in your pots). If you don’t have holes in the bottom of your pot then the water has nowhere to go. The water then sits in the soil and the only way it is removed from the pot is by root uptake or evaporation. Since this water is sitting there, getting evaporated, the remaining water gets more and more concentrated with mineral salts/nutrients/inorganic particles, etc. The plant is still trying to take in water, but all it is getting is a concentrated soup of the things it needs in small quantities…and as a result it is basically poisoned. If it somehow escaped poisoning, the waterlogged roots will basically suffocate and kill the plant anyway. Some plants are very good at living in waterlogged soils-and some plant require it to live! But for the sake of this article, tomato plants do not enjoy sitting in a pool of stagnant water so it’s important to punch holes in the bottom of your tomato tub.

(Potting) Mix It Up!

You can get some pretty good premium potting mixes these days, but I think if you really want to give your plants the best growing environment then adding some extra ingredients doesn’t hurt. So far, I’ve had good success with this combination and unless I have run out of one of the materials, I will always use this combo of ingredients.
So, the main material in the potting mix mix is POTTING MIX. That’s a no brainer, there. I don’t buy the most budget brand (because I find it very woody and inconsistent with particulate size) but I also don’t buy the most expensive one. For 30L of potting mix you can pay up to $12 or so, and I think that’s a bit steep (especially when I am going to beef it up myself anyway) so I try to get one for about $6 or so. Hortico makes a pretty good one for around that price, I’ve found. Potting mixes are generally made from pine chips, or wood chips, which have been heaped and left to compost themselves and decay over a period of time. Depending on the quality of mix, additives like slow-release fertilisers and wetting agents can be added too.
I think the amount I have in the blue tub is about half a bag? So about 10 or 15L worth.
On top of that I’ve added a small amount of Blood & Bone (with Potash), you can see it as the brownish powder at the bottom end of the tub. Blood & Bone usually takes a while to break down and become available to the plants as nutrient, so I add a little in there to give the plant a kick along once it has established it’s new roots and starts sending out new leaves and shoots. I wouldn’t say it’s a necessary step, and before I bought the Blood & Bone I was using a small amount of slow-release fertiliser granules. You can leave this out though, if you prefer, and instead feed your potted plants with liquid feed once a fortnight or so (during the growing time only!!). If I were potting in autumn, I probably wouldn’t add the fertiliser unless it was a plant that doesn’t enter dormancy in winter. Fertilising a dormant plant is like putting food in the cage of a hibernating animal- they aren’t in the mood for food and it will probably do more harm than good if you add too much nutrient to the soil.
The maroon-y coloured material in the top left of the tub is moist Coir. This stuff is awesome, it’s made from the shredded-up outsides of coconuts, and it comes in a little compressed brick and all you have to do is soak it in a bucket of water and it puffs up to about 3 or 4 times it size. I find it increases the water-holding capacity of the soil, and when you use it as a final ‘mulch’ layer on the surface of the pot it is effective in telling you when the plant is starting to dry out (http://www.brunnings.com.au/coir.html). It’s great for improving soil structure and it’s cheap, too. A brick will cost you about $2 (or less, depending on where you buy from) and it lasts for ages. I put two bricks in the blue tub and when I added the right amount of water, I had enough coir to fill the entire tub!

Lastly, I add some washed river sand into my potting mix. Not too much, because too much sand and I find my potting mix becomes ‘gluggy’ and has very poor porosity. When there is the right amount, the grains disperse throughout the mix and help improve drainage.
So I mix everything in well until it’s more or less a homogenous mixture, and then it’s pretty much ready to go!

Potting Up

So we’ve filled the tub almost to the top with the super potting mix mix, and to give it a bit of extra oomph we’re introduced some well-rotted compost into it (that’s where the straw is from). It turns out that the compost was inconsistently turned because whilst some parts were beautiful and dark full of organic goodness, a few weeks after planting we were noticing pumpkin shoots coming up in the tomato tubs! Little pumpkin seeds are tough buggers and were still viable long after they had been chucked in the compost. No bother though, I just dug them out and repotted them so hopefully we’ll have some nice pumpkin plants soon too!

Finally we get to put the little tomato plant in:

Repotting is a little different to replanting into the ground, in that the hole you make for the plant doesn’t necessarily need to be so much bigger than the original container. In a situation like this, where it is all new material going into the pot it is ok to make the hole the same size as the root ball of the plant. However, if you were planting into old soil or into the ground, it is important to make the hole twice the width of the root ball. The little roots need room to grow and extend into the surrounding soil, so making the hole bigger than the root ball gives them the opportunity to branch out into the softer soil that you have replaced back into the hole before hitting the harder and most likely more compacted soil of the surrounding ground. Replanting into the soil is a whole other topic that I won’t get into here, though!
You can see in the picture that we’re tying the plant to it’s stake. Tomatoes like to grow tall and with all that heavy fruit they bear, it’s crucial to stake them because they generally don’t have the strength to support their own weight by the time harvesting comes. It also protects them from winds, which has been particularly important here in Sydney lately. When tying, use something that won’t dig into the stem and will be easy to remove once the plant outgrows the old tie. Some people use old stockings, but I find these a bit too big and bulky for a tomato plant, and over time they perish and become a nuisance. We’re using plastic-coated metal wire, mostly because it was the only thing we had available, but also because you can control how tight you tie it and it is easily removable. I like to tie stakes to stem in a ‘figure 8′ because I find it holds better, and gives the plant more flexibility of movement than a conventional ‘o’ tie does. You are only tying loosely to support it from any extreme movement and to train it to grow upright. You’re not trying to restrict all sideways movement- remember, some movement is necessary (especially in bigger trees) because it help make the plant a bit stronger. If you have a plant or tree that has very firm ties, then it will be weak in the stem because it’s never needed to brace itself against even the most gentle breezes.
We’ve also included the label in the side of the pot, just because we have a few different tomato plants and it’s the easiest way to remember which is which.

Almost done!
I didn’t really get into the type of tomato we planted and how to select a good tomato plant, but it’s all down to personal preference and common sense. We chose a healthy looking Gross Lisse variety, as we already have grape tomato and Roma variety plants. When buying a tomato plant, or almost any plant for that matter, check that it is healthy and green. Yellowing leaves could mean nutrient deficiency, or a particular nutrient overabundance (eg phosphorus in native plants). Check for leaf turgidity (firmness) which indicates water stress. Check that it doesn’t look like it’s been an insects’ main course, or that it isn’t infested with any little critters. I don’t necessarily pick the biggest plant, but I pick the plant that looks the healthiest and looks like it has new growth ready to come on. Usually the biggest plants are the ones that have been sat there longest and are prone to be root-bound (not enough space for the roots to grow so they begin to circle the pot and this is a serious problem).

Here we are all done. We’ve added a layer (about 50mm) of sugarcane mulch, because this helps prevent evaporation and also helps keep the soil at a more consistent temperature (so no sharp rises or falls in soil temp over the course of the day, hopefully).
I companion planted a Marigold in with it, because Marigold roots are supposed to repel/kill certain types of nematode and eel-worms in the soil, but this isn’t necessary. A few prominent gardeners (Jackie French, for one) doesn’t believe in companion planting like this, so it’s not a 100% certainty that it works. Also, I don’t expect those kinds of nasties to be in my fresh potting mix, but if they are like curl grub larvae (which enter the soil through the beetles that lay eggs on the potting mix surface) you never know. At any rate I don’t think it hurts to have it in there.

The above pictures were taken a few weeks ago, now, and I can say that the little plant has been doing fantastic!

See how strong it’s going Also see another cheeky pumpkin sprout that isn’t quite big enough to transplant yet…I think it’s hidden in this picture though. In the background you can see how good the parsley I planted from seed a few weeks back is going. I didn’t think they would grow in that pot, but just dumped the remaining seeds I had in there. Turns out they are doing better in that pot than in the hanging basket I intended them to grow in.
I’ve dosed it with vegetable derris dust, because I’ve seen quite a few cabbage moths and the like flitting about lately, and some of my un-dusted seedlings have big chomp-marks in them. Tomatoes get affected by flies and aphids, I think, but this dust will protect against pretty much every pest.

Things aren’t always sunny in the garden.

It’s been a bit of a bad week/fortnight in the ol’ garden, unfortunately.
The weather has been glorious- with a nice day or so of rain to break up otherwise warm and sunny skies. It’s not the weather that’s the problem though!
I’ve collected some old styrofoam boxes and bought some new potting mix to fill them up with, but a lack of supplies is not the problem!

The problem is the bloody BIRDS that hang around the garden and destroy all my hard work.

These guys are pure evil wrapped in a cute feathery package.

Sure, they look cute. Don’t get me wrong- I love wildlife hanging around the garden and it makes my day to be able to sit outside and hear all the different types of birds singing. What I don’t appreciate, is when they destroy my plants and wreck all the hard work I’ve put in.

The speed that they can tear up a new planting is amazing. One day you can have a lovely planter box filled with seedlings and the next day it will be a big dirty mess! Today was the last straw, when the planter box I had 6 baby cos lettuce seedlings in was ruined. I salvaged 3 little seedlings but I really don’t think they will make it. You can tell when a seedling is no good anymore when the root below the soil-line is shriveled and withered when compared to the stem that pokes out above the soil and carries the cotyledons (seed leaves). A healthy seedling should have a gradual decrease in root thickness from the stem down to the tip of the root.

Yesterday I was watering the pots and noticed that my garlic pot was looking a bit strange. Instead of being covered with mulch and having 5 healthy looking garlic shoots emerging, it was devoid of mulch and had only 2 (now sickly-looking) shoots sticking up with a third shoot laying sideways half way out of the soil. It was obvious that birds had been in there scratching about and pulling up the mulch. I’ve noticed a few birds (mostly blackbirds and mynas) flying about in the trees with wads of nest material in their beaks. Cheeky buggers have been stealing my sugarcane straw mulch! I didn’t really think anything would touch the garlic but I guess I was wrong.

This little guy has the right idea! Plenty of palm tree fibre to go about, birdies.

Last week we went outside to find our little tomato shrub (about 15cm tall, only planted for a week) snapped off right near the base.
Before:

Now it just looks like a stump with the lowest little leaflet still hanging off it. The white stuff on the leaves in this photo is vegetable derris dust, to deter caterpillars from chowing down on the leaves. I might as well have let them eat it all now!
*edit* here is the poor little plant, post bird-snapping:

The area where the garlic pots and the tomato planter is behind a fence, so for once it can’t have been the ducks getting their sticky beaks into the pots (which they love to do). The lettuce planter was sitting up on a chair above their head height, too.

It has been a valuable lesson to COVER any small plants or burgeoning plantings you have, especially around this time of year where little birdies are getting ready to build nests and little feathered families!
I’ve since covered my seedling planters with metal mesh to prevent birdy beaks and claws in there.
Ironically, when I planted the potatoes (which I will go into in a future post) I wanted to make sure the ducks couldn’t get their beaks in rooting around the soil disturbing the potatoes so I covered it with mesh! The potatoes, of all things!!!

Let’s hope this coming week has more…fruitful…outcomes than the weeks past.
Happy gardening!

Edit: I think I have been a bit hasty in blaming the BulBuls, just the other day whilst sitting outside I watched a blackbird/starling make a beeline for my newly planted garden bed and stand there scratching the whole lot up and tearing it to bits. It was only sunflowers and corn, but it was still very annoying!!!