Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue #11.5 - 2020 i Good Organic Gardening

“In summer, the song sings itself,” wrote the poet William Carlos Williams. Lately, though, it seems the melody has taken some unpredictable turns as our summers swing from one extreme to another: too dry, too wet, too hot … too bad. Bushfires one minute, floods the next. We prepared this issue during a glorious spring of bright sunshine and gentle rain. The long-awaited return of La Niña after eight harsh years brings the breaking of the drought and the promise of a temperate season — but, really, who knows where the song will go next? Your summer garden won’t prepare itself. To that end, our permaculture expert Angelo Eliades explains how to build some resilience into your garden to help it handle climate extremes — not just summer heatwaves but…

Panama berry sounds a bit too good to be true. It’s a fast-growing tropical shade tree with a slightly weeping habit. It produces white flowers with prominent yellow stamens, followed by sweet, tasty red fruit. Even more, it flowers and fruits for most of the year and lives up to its promises. The fruits are small — about the size of a small cherry — with a red skin and a pulpy light-brown flesh with masses of tiny seeds. They are sweet and can be eaten fresh or made into jams or pies. Organic grower and contributor to this magazine, Linda Brennan of Ecobotanica (ecobotanica.com.au), is a big fan of the tree and its fruit and has grown it in her own garden and also recommended it for other gardens,…

EVERYBODY AT THE COMMUNITY GARDEN HAS THEIR OWN METHOD OF GARDENING, THOUGH, OF COURSE, SPRAYS ARE NOT PERMITTED AND EVERYTHING HAS TO BE ORGANIC. When you think about wartime victory gardens and European allotment farming, there’s nothing new about community gardens — but they’re almost certainly the wave of the future, bringing urban neighbourhoods together with the added promise of food security. One such initiative is Warrnambool Community Garden (WCG), established in the southwest Victorian coastal city in 2006. Rented on a long-term lease from Warrnambool Council, the 2.5ha site comprises 52 plots worked by a current membership of 90. The WCG’s values are inclusiveness, ecological, social and economic sustainability, reducing, reusing, recycling, restoring, replenishing and empowerment. It acknowledges the land’s original custodians, the Gunditjmara people, and community elders visit…

Cauliflower has recently morphed from a white vegetable to one with Technicolor aspirations thanks to the arrival of green, purple and orange varieties. Whether white or coloured, the head of the cauliflower is a flower referred to as the “curd”. It is made up of a mass of tiny, immature buds much like broccoli. The flower head forms best when temperatures are cool, which is why cauliflower is most successfully grown as a winter or early-spring crop sown in late summer or early autumn. VARIETIES There are many varieties of white cauliflower for home gardens but the pick of the crop are mini cauliflower varieties such as ‘Snowball’. Harvest the entire 15cm head for a meal. Mini cauliflowers are quicker to grow than large-headed varieties, which means they are also…

Summer is the season when nature’s energies reach their peak. As the days get longer and the nights warm up, plants respond with prolific growth and amazing displays of flowers and fruit. However, these ideal conditions can sometimes take a turn for the worse, as warmer weather can also bring unpredictable temperature extremes, relentless hot winds and persistent drought. To cope with such adversity, plants have evolved various survival strategies over the last 460 million years that enable them to become more adaptable and resilient. But in order to survive unforgiving hot weather, they have to make some major sacrifices. PLANTS AND STRESS When plants encounter stressful environmental conditions, such as water shortages, their roots release the plant hormone abscisic acid (ABA), which stops general growth to conserve resources so…

IN SEASON JANUARY FRUITS Apricot, avocado, banana, berries, carambola (starfruit), cherry (Morello sour), currants (red currant, black currant), grapes, lemon, limes, lychee, mango, melons, nectarine, passionfruit, peach, pear (Paradise, Williams), pineapple, plum, prickly pear, rambutan, tamarillo VEGIES Asparagus, beans (butter, flat, green, snake), capsicum, celery, choko, cucumber, eggplant, lettuce, mushrooms, okra, onions (salad, spring), peas (green, snow, sugar snap), potato, radish, spinach, squash, sweet corn, tomato, zucchini IN SEASON FEBRUARY FRUITS Avocado, banana, berries, custard apple, fig, grapes (Cardinal, Muscat, Sultana, Waltham Cross), guava, kiwifruit, lemon, lime, lychee, mangosteen, melons, nectarine, orange (Valencia), passionfruit, peach, pears (Howell, Red Sensation, Williams), pineapple, plum, prickly pear, rambutan, rhubarb, starfruit, tamarillo VEGIES Beans (borlotti, butter, flat, green, snake), capsicum, celery, chilli, choko, cucumber, daikon, eggplant, leek, lettuce, okra, onions (brown, salad, spring), peas…

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I first encountered okra as the allimportant green in gumbo, that piquant stew that symbolises the multicultural mix of New Orleans but is served all over the American South. The ingredients vary but usually include a base of filé, a Choctaw Indian invention made from ground sassafras; Spanish chorizo or French sausage; shrimp and other shellfish from the Gulf; and okra from who knows where, though the word itself is probably of Nigerian origin and was first recorded in Virginia in 1679. Controversy rages among food historians as to whether okra travelled north then east from Ethiopia or west from India, but it was well known in the Middle East and around the Mediterranean some 800 years ago (its generic name Abelmoschus is a Latin translation of an Arabic phrase…

In South America there’s a drink that has the same sort of standing that coffee has in other countries: yerba mate. As with tea and herbal tisanes, it’s made by steeping dried leaves of a plant, in this case Ilex paraguariensis, an evergreen tree that thrives in the subtropical rainforest regions of South America. Like coffee and tea, mate is a popular morning drink due to its caffeine content. Consumed by the indigenous Guarani people for centuries, yerba mate is now the national drink of Argentina and popular in Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil as well as, of course, among the Latin-American diaspora. The word yerba in Spanish simply means herb while mate (pronounced “matay”) can refer to the drink or the drinking vessel. Together, they can mean the drink or…

A landscaper and garden designer by trade, Tohm Hajncl — along with his partner Danielle and children Max and Charlotte — can often be found in the garden in the subtropical Sunshine Coast hinterland. Around three acres of their 10-acre property are under cultivation, including a 120m2 vegie patch, but Tohm admits that when he has excess herb or vegetable seedlings, he scatters them through the garden so it ends like a trail of little edible surprises. Similarly, fruiting trees and plants are dotted all over the property. Tohm’s father was definitely his main gardening influence. “He always had something going on in the productive garden,” Tohm says — including chickens, which he in turn has kept for the past 20-odd years. Gardening didn’t start in earnest until he was…

Gooseberry is a cool-climate berry that may leave many people underwhelmed as the fruit is small, tart and found on prickly stems. But if you grew up with a gooseberry patch, they are sure to be a sentimental favourite. Gooseberries are not easy to find in the fruit shop so to get a gooseberry fix it’s necessary to grow a bush or two. Although many Australians won’t have tasted a gooseberry, most of us have heard of this strange little fruit. It crops up in well-worn sayings such as playing (or feeling like) a gooseberry — a chaperone or unwanted third person. Babies that weren’t found in a cabbage patch or brought by the stork were apparently found under a gooseberry bush, once a slang term for pubic hair. Then…

In the heat of the summer garden, when your spinach leaves become bitter and the plants wilt in the hot sun, then it’s time to consider a heat-loving alternative — one undeterred by the extreme summer conditions. A heat-tolerant climbing vine from the tropics of Asia and Africa, Malabar spinach — also known as Ceylon spinach, climbing spinach and vine spinach — is actually not a true spinach. It belongs to the Basellaceae family but its leaves taste like spinach and can be enjoyed raw or cooked. There are two main species — Basella rubra, with an attractive dark-red stem, and B. alba with a green stem — but both have the same heart-shaped dark-green edible leaves. In warmer, frost-free climates it can be grown year round but in cooler…

A raised bed is any elevated gardening platform designed to improve drainage while retaining moisture, holding nutrients and often providing an ergonomic advantage — and that means no bending. Have you ever installed raised beds and found they don’t perform as expected? Perhaps they dry out too easily or become boggy when watered. Maybe your plant leaves have turned yellow and the only plant flourishing is the uninvited onion weed. Here is some advice on how to avoid such outcomes. TO ACHIEVE GOOD DRAINAGE, THE GROWING MEDIA SHOULD CONTAIN APPROXIMATELY 30 PER CENT COARSE RIVER SAND. THE IDEAL VEGIE SOIL A lack of structured soil and nutritional balance results in boggy or dry soils and nutritional deficiencies in plants. Soil for vegies should have good structure, with material like coarse…

COOL & TEMPERATE VEGIES • Fruit fly are more active as crops ripen. Use organic baits and traps or cover individual fruit with exclusion bags. Clean up fallen fruit. As fruit fly is spreading to fruit-fly-free areas, watch for signs of attack. Use fruit-fly traps to monitor for their presence. • Set up systems to manage heat stress so plants can grow for longer and remain healthy. A temporary shade screen prevents sun damage and reduces the effects of hot, dry winds. On heatwave days, move potted plants into a shaded spot, check vertical and hanging gardens and cover nearby hard surfaces to stop reflected heat damage. • If some crops are failing to form fruit — particularly cucurbits — try hand pollination (transferring pollen from male flowers to female…

Comfrey has fallen in and out of favour. Once commonly used as a herbal remedy, its internal medicinal use was banned when it was shown to cause liver toxicity and the plant has since been listed as a poison. In ancient times, it was considered so helpful in the repair of fractures it was widely known by the name knitbone. Even its genus name Symphytum refers to the growing together of bones, as does “comfrey” itself (from Latin conferva, or “knitting together”). First in China and later in Europe, the leaves were used as a poultice around the damaged area. Given time and immobility, bones will knit together, but perhaps comfrey assisted. It was also said to help heal lacerations, which earned it another common name, woundheal. Comfrey leaves are…

JANUARY 2021 Mid-summer is a time of high productivity but the heat can be very harsh. Protect your plants with some shade and keep the watering consistent if the weather is dry. FEBRUARY 2021 This month you can start to focus on sowing some cooler-season crops, but you may need to keep them under cover until it’s time to plant them out in the garden. When the moon is waxing from new moon to full moon, it is increasing light and drawing sap flow upwards. During the waning from full moon back to new moon, light decreases and sap is drawn downwards. This movement of sap flow has an influence on how well new plants will grow. There are four phases, each lasting seven to eight days. Sowing, planting and…

As we head into the heat of summer, most gardeners’ thoughts are on how best to drought- and heat-proof their gardens and protect their plants. In this article we look at various ways to achieve this using a combination of methods. We know water is one of the most valuable resources on our planet, but how do we make the most of it when we irrigate and when it does arrive in the form of rainfall? And how do we make it stretch as far as possible in the garden or farm? STORING WATER IN THE SOIL With the use of swales and organic matter, you can slow water runoff and store it within your soil instead of letting it run away. • The key to good water-holding capacity in…

COOL & TEMPERATE VEGIES • Reduce mozzie numbers by regularly emptying water in containers and saucers under potted plants, which removes their breeding grounds. Even pet water should be replenished daily to avoid it being used by mosquitoes to breed in. • Stay on top of pests, diseases and weeds by inspecting plants daily and taking action on problems. In particular, search for 28-spotted ladybirds and pumpkin beetles. These pests skeletonise leaves on pumpkins, zucchini and their relatives. Squash adults, larvae and eggs. • Edible plants need daily watering while it’s hot, dry or windy. Leafy crops may bolt (begin to flower and seed) if they dry out. Tomatoes may develop blossom end rot (a nutrient deficiency). • Liquid feed summer’s strong growth of leafy vegies every 7–10 days with…

Documentary KISS THE GROUND Directed by Rebecca Tickell & Josh Tickell, streaming on Netflix Do we really need more bad news about the climate crisis? Well, even though it begins with narrator Woody Harrelson glumly contemplating the planet’s dicey future, Kiss the Ground is anything but bad news. Instead, it’s an inspiring documentary that explores soil regeneration and the reversal of desertification as a way to mitigate climate change and maybe even get our species off the endangered list. Directed by Australian-born filmmaker Josh Tickell and his wife, activist and co-director Rebecca Tickell, the movie uses state-of-theart graphics to present the latest in scientific research while some big names get their hands dirty (Harrelson is joined by fellow actors Amy Smart, Patricia Arquette and David Arquette, supermodel Gisele Bündchen and…