Bug city

A few months ago I decided to plant some flowers throughout my food garden for a few reasons. Firstly, because they're pretty and I can cut them and bring them inside. Second, because I was frustrated at the nematodes and thought if I can't grow vegetables, what can I grow? And most importantly because they attract insects into the garden. Bees for pollination and everyone should be doing all they can to keep bee populations healthy while insecticide sprays on crops are wiping them out and they are vitally important to food production. (rant over) Also all the other bugs we have keep a neat ecosystem going so that no one type of bug will take over and destroy crops.

Here's some of the bugs visiting my garden over the past week;

I have a couple of spiders that I like to leave in the garden. I threw a slater into his web. The spider didn't seem too interested in it, sadly.

And this mantis was about 5cm long and was trying to hitch a ride around on my arm the other day. I haven't seen one of these so big since I was a kid. I hope he eats slaters.

Beans!

 

My first broad beans of the season:

 

They're a little bit late. I know this because my neighbour has picked, podded, frozen and dug the remains of hers back into her soil already and planted out tomatoes on top of where they were. I only have a small patch, mainly because I don't like broad beans all that much. Until now. My experience of broad beans in the past has been giant beans with the outside a kind of grey colour and boiled to a soggy mass. I have decided that if you pick the beans really young, they are sweet and delicious!

 

For dinner the other night we has this delicious broad bean bruschetta, an adaptation of a Donna Hay recipe. We brushed slices of sour dough with olive oil, grilled them, then rubbed them with a clove of raw garlic, like you would for bruschetta. Then spread on some soft fetta, topped it with beans quickly blanched in boiling, salted water and then sprinkle dover some gremolata (finely chopped parsley with lemon zest). It was really tasty and the beans were delicious;

Even Mustard thought it looked pretty good and insisted on watching us eat every single bite with a mournful expression on his face!

 

I'm now watching closely for the next lot of beans to grow to the right size for picking!

It's cactus!

Gardening isn't for everyone. And when all else fails you can try this:

                                      

I picked up this fantastic knitted cactus at a craft fair in Perth recently. I know it's not a real indoor plant, but at least I can't kill it! The beagles probably could if they got their teeth into it, though!

Magnificent magnolia

How amazing is this magnolia? It belongs to a neighbour of mine and it's so beautiful I had to take a photo of it a couple of weeks ago.

I didn't even know I could grow this sort of magnolia in my area of Perth. I wonder if the gardener has created the perfect microclimate on the other side of the ivy-covered fence for it? I'd love to explore the rest of his garden!

It's this time of year I promise myself that I will plant my leisure garden (the backyard, as opposed to the food garden in the front yard) with flowering deciduous trees.

From our backyard we have a view of a row of ornamental plum trees and a flowering pear planted in our neighbour's yard. Up the street is an almond tree that spreads drifts of petals up and down our street like confetti.

And of course, down the laneway is the beautiful magnolia tree. Here's a photo I took more recently of the same tree:

All these trees are losing their flowers and the greenest of green shoots are appearing everywhere, a sure sign spring is here. Now I have my heart set on planting some of these trees in my yard so that every day while I eat my breakfast I can watch their bare branches burst into bloom, watch the petals littler the ground and then watch as spring turns them green again..

Back to my roots

Growing up on the farm I spent many childhood days picking mallee roots. We'd head to a paddock that was going to be cropped and hurl the dry, gnarly roots into small piles. Then Mum or Dad, or later my siblings or I would drive the 'ute', a thundering F100, around the paddock. We kids would be standing on the sideboards or sitting on the tailgate as we made our way from pile to pile. When we got to each pile, we'd all jump off and throw those mallee roots onto the back of the ute before jumping back on the running boards and heading to the next pile.

The mallee roots of course would be unloaded into our wood pile and used through winter to light the fires to keep us warm, light the kitchen stove and heat our water.

I don't have a big open wood fire in the city, and I certainly don't have a wood stove or water heater, but I still have a use for those mallee roots.

My wonderful Mum and Dad were coming up from the farm last week, so I asked if they would mind bringing me a couple of old, weathered mallee roots for my native verge garden. See how good they look:

 

 

 

They already look right at home among the kangaroo paws! The good thing about using the rocks and roots in this garden is that it gives it some structure, so even when it's not all flowering, it looks like a vaguely naturalised scrub.

 

 

 

 

It also gives the little lizards somewhere to play and hide. I look forward to watching all my tiny plants grow up amongst them.

A bucket of slaters

I've been having trouble growing anything from seed. As soon as my pea shoots clear the soil, they're chomped off. Same with the radishes, leafy greens, beans etc. They only thing that isn't being routinely eaten is my coriander. It turns out over winter I created the perfect breeding ground for slaters. I always thought they were quite harmless little critters, but in large quantities they are weapons of mass garden destruction! I have set out to eradicate them. Unfortunately, it's not easy. Again, it's one of those things that can be controlled with noxious chemicals that you wouldn't want anywhere near your food crop. I recently heard you can create a barrier with lime and sawdust mixed together to protect certain plants. But I have chosen an old remedy. Oranges!

 

 

 

 

I am drinking a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice every day and forcing my husband to do the same. The leftover half oranges go into the garden, skin side up. This orange I put out in the garden about an hour ago, you can see the slaters starting to gather around it already:

 

 

 

 

Each day I look inside the orange halves and hundreds of slaters have gathered underneath them.

 

 

 

Then I tip them out into a bucket:

 

After a week of this, there must be thousands of slaters in my bucket. I heard an experienced horticulturist once say he doesn't think worm farms are very good, so he built a slater farm to help compost his scraps. Wish I could give him my bucket of the little destroyers. You could feed them to your chooks, they'd love them... or a neighbours' chooks! I have no idea how long I am going to have to keep squeezing oranges for, but I think the population is starting to reduce! And my vitamin C levels are great!

Garlic maths

At the end of March I planted some garlic. 'Some' turned out to be about 150 cloves of garlic. So now I have about 150 strapping garlic plants that are just months away from harvest:

It's looking really good. Some of course are bigger than others and seeing as I bought bulbs from two different people and then received a bowl of homemade-grown garlic from my Italian neighbour, I have no idea which is which. I might just have to wait and see and then save the biggest to replant next year. I will take my harvest queue from my neighbour, who told me when to plant. her garlic looks amazing, the plants are the size of leeks! But I'm happy with the way mine are going compared to last years sad lot that were planted too late into sand and only grew one small clove each!

I now need to calculate how many I need to keep for a year of garlic in the kitchen and how many to save to replant!

Meanwhile, on the verge...

You may remember that less than a year ago, we transformed the half dead and compacted patch of grass on our verge into this:

 

Then we added some pine bark and planted out some low-growing Australian native plant tube stock (scaveola, conostylis, grevillea, kangaroo paws) and it looked like this:

 

 

Well, nine months later the plants have grown, we lost a few and along the way we've planted some more here and there (knobby club rush, cushion bush, pimlea, banksia) and now it looks like this: 

 

I'm ready to add some more bird-attracting plants while we're getting good rains to help them settle in before summer. (banksia blechnifolia, eremophila Amber Carpet and decipiens, eutaxia obovata or bacon and egg plant, grevillea gingin gem and kangaroo paws Mangles and Pink Beauty) I expect that in another 12 to 18 months our verge will be a carpet of flowering native plants. Here's my tube stock:

Not only are the plants beautiful, they will provide a much-needed food source for native birds and bees in the metropolitan area. On top of that, I will hand water them through their first couple of summers and after that, they should be able to survive on rainfall alone. The tube stock, although small, does grow quickly and tends to settle in better than more established plants.

 

It's really important to provide food and habitat for our native animals and insects in the city. Imagine if every 10th house on our streets replaced their patchy, unmowed, ugly, water and fertiliser-guzzling lawn with a native verge garden. It would be like having thousands of acres of bush reserves in our cities. That could only be a good thing for our environment right?

 

Now, if I've inspired you to plant out your own native verge, even if it's just a couple of ground-covering grevilleas and a few kangaroo paws, stay tuned for my next post on how best to plant your tube stock!

In the lime light

About two years ago I planted one of the CSIRO's Australian Red Centre Lime trees in a half wine barrel. I thought I was getting an Australian Finger Lime, the ones where the centre of the fruit comes out like caviar. I thought that would be marvellous with fresh oysters, sprinkled on mini lemon tarts or in cocktails. Well, it turns out my lime, and the one I thought I was planting, are completely different plants! Oops.

This year the Red Centre lime had a bumper crop as you can see below:

The fruit is tangy and tasty, but it would take a lot of work and a very small juicer to squeeze enough for an evening of margaritas! I am keen to try some of the fruit thinly sliced and placed on top of white fish fillets, then baked in the oven. But for now, I had a small bucket of fruit to use.

What to do with them? Well, an idea came to me at the weekend, while we were sausage-making with our Italian neighbours and shared an amazing lunch of home-grown and home-made delicacies and heard stories of life in Italy and what it was like coming to Australia on the boat. The conversation turned to grappa and what it was good for. My husband suggested the only thing it was good for was cleaning drains. But our hosts said they pickled kumquats in grappa and sugar. The Red Centre lime is about the same size as a kumquat and it got me thinking. What about lime-infused tequila, or vodka? (...or grappa for those who are brave enough)

So I put my rain jacket on this morning and while the beagles snuffled for dog biscuits I'd scattered over the paving, I picked the limes. After washing and slicing them open, I put them in boiled jars, topped some up with tequila, some with vodka and one lucky one with grappa and sugar. The I added these super-cute 'jar bonnets' that my friend gave me and there you go, pickled limes, ready to taste in 6 weeks:

I'm not sure what I'm most excited about... a glass of the lime-tequila on ice, or trying a lime-vodka martini? Of course, the limes won't be wasted... I think I'll still use them on fish or maybe in a dessert. I'll let you know how it works out. Maybe I will still find room to plant an Australian finger lime to add to my lime tree collection?

Holiday gardens!

While I have no idea how my own garden is going back home, I've found plenty of time on my holiday to enjoy some other gardens!

Here in London, our special friend Greg organised to take me to the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew.  We have been there before of course, but he thought I would like to see their latest exhibition - Incr-Edibles! They had some fabulous displays like this garden below fashioned just for the exhibition:

They also had a garden party set up, with all the herbs growing in the bowls and pots:

We walked for about an hour to see an exhibition titled 'Bouncy Carrot Patch' which sounded like fun. We were disappointed when we finally found it - a patch of mulch cordoned off with some construction webbing with an apology stapled to it!

The gardens are spectacular. They are trying to get people not just interested in growing vegetables for themselves, but educating them about where vegetables come from. I heard more than one adult asking what some of the plants were. Plants they should have been able to recognise from the food they put on their tables! I was surprised.

I have some more photos to post soon... Not just a crack plant, a crack TREE! 

Time to rest!

Remember my nematode problem? I can't forget it! I've been trying to 'cure' my vege bed of root knot nematodes. I planted a mass of mustard seed and let it grow for a few months, until it was just starting to flower. The other day I slashed it down. Here is my progress slashing photo:

 

After I slashed it, I dug it into the soil which I will keep it moist while it breaks down. As the mustard decomposes, it releases a gas the nematodes don't like. The slashing and digging was hard work, I'm not going to lie. I also sowed some more mustard seeds, so they can grow over the next month and I will slash and bury them as well. I spread some sheep manure and Piggypost before I covered it all up with lupin mulch.

Today I tried another remedy. Apparently the nematodes don't like molasses. So I mixed up molasses and water in a watering can and poured it over the garden bed:

 

 

 

 

I've read that the sugar can kill worms and good critters in the soils as well. To remedy that, I have some Troforte ready to spread in a few weeks to encourage the good guys back to the soil and the compost in my two compost tumblers will be ready by then as well, so that will help:

 

 

                                               

Anyway, while my garden bed and my compost have a rest, so will I! I'm off on a holidays for a few weeks so my next blog will be from the road... maybe a bit of foreign garden inspiration!

The Beagles are also exhausted from all the gardening and are looking forward to their holiday:

 

 

 



Living on the edge

I’m convinced that growing in my front garden brings a sense of community to my neighbourhood.  The mornings I’m out in the garden I hear a cheery “Good morning neighbour!”  from across the short expanse of road. “Lovely day for gardening!”

My husband has a theory that the introduction of water restrictions has caused a decline in neighbourliness. He thinks back to when he was younger and people used to stand around on their front verge, with a tinny or a glass of West Coast Cooler in one hand and the hose in the other while they watered their verge lawns. It would be a good time to catch up with the bloke over the fence and you’d know if something wasn’t right with your elderly neighbour across the road if they weren’t to be seen watering their verge for a couple of days, so you’d go and check in on them.

When I’m in my food garden or on the verge planting natives, drivers slow down and wave as they pass. In the past week I’ve met two neighbours who drove up their laneways, then came back on foot to introduce themselves and have a chat about things.

Yesterday, while waiting for her husband to drop something off, a woman got out of her parked car and wandered right into my garden and started chatting. She was most impressed with my herb patch and told me all about the exotic fruit trees and vegetables growing in her backyard not far from here that she inherited from a previous owner. She spotted my Thai basil and gave me some tips on how to use it. She was cooking bolognese for her two boys that night, so I sent her home with a bunch of sage, basil and thyme and she was delighted. How often can you make a stranger happy by something so simple? She told me she’d pop back and drop off some sugar cane for me to plant.

And you know what? She did! The next evening, she ran down my driveway with a bag of sugarcane. She also brought some seeds from a fruit in her back yard that she said was delicious, but she didn't know what it was called. She said if I had any success with the seeds, she'd love me to drop one of her plants back to her!

Crack Plant

Crack plants amuse me.

 

I have vincas in my garden that get watered over summer and get some manure and slow release fertiliser. They don't look half as happy as this crack plant growing by my front door:

 

    

 

This plant gets swept over, the dogs walk over it and catch their leads around it. The neighbours son pulled all the flowers off it for fun once. It certainly doesn't get watered and yet, all summer it has thrived in a crack. Maybe I should pay less attention to my plants in the garden.

A pocket full of seeds

Some of my herbs are just going to seed now, and I’ve come up with a very cute idea!

I bought these seed pockets, made up a quick label on the computer and now I have sweet little gift envelopes to fill with seeds for my friends.

My basil, Thai basil and garlic chives are going to seed now. I like to let them flower to attract the bees and then I will collect the seeds and make up some more of these Garden Beagle envelopes!

Mycophobia?! I can't believe it has a name...

I have a fear of fungus. There, I've said it. As a gardener a fear of fungus is fraught with issues.

I can't say exactly where my fear came from. One incident I remember all too clearly from my childhood is that back on the farm each year around this time, my aunts, uncles, cousins and my Nan and Pop would come over and we'd pack some food for a barbecue and all head out to Stone Henge. That was the name of a particularly rocky paddock, one that was so covered in rocks and boulders it never got cropped. The upshot to this is that mushrooms were free to grow. So we'd take buckets and small knives and set off in different directions picking mushrooms. It was always a wonderfully fun day... I liked to stay within sight of my Nan and then just bend down and pretend I was picking loads of mushrooms. She was oddly competitive. And didn't like the idea of someone picking more 'shrooms than her. She was much the same about fishing, but that's another story! At lunchtime, an old plough disk on a circle of rocks became our barbecue and we lit a fire and cooked up a storm.

Anyway, one year I happened across a mound of mushrooms, ran over and went to pick them, but as I turned them over, it was a pile of toadstools, white underneath instead of mushroom pink. Worse than that, they were crawling with maggots. And I had just touched them. I have goosebumps all over me just typing this, I'm not joking.

Needless to say I never ate any of the mushrooms we picked. Nan got all of those, so I don't know why she was so worried that I'd pick more than her!

My fungus experiences weren't just limited to the annual mushroom harvest. Each year when Dad was out ploughing the paddocks, he'd come home with some mushroom specimens... enough to make the hair stand on the back of your neck. They were HUGE. The size of a large dinner plate (there, I've got goosebumps again). Mum would put them aside for us to look at when we got home from school. Sometimes we'd put them on a dinner plate and take them to school for show and tell. Mum would get out a big sheet of clean, white paper and we'd rest the giant mushroom on it overnight, then by the morning, it would leave its imprint on the paper. Gross. Spores.

My husband and friends once forced me to go to a whole fungus exhibition while travelling in Bormio. I wasn't very thrilled. They seemed to think my goosebumps were as fun to look at as the fungus itself.

Anyway, now as a gardener I'm convinced fungus is haunting me. I have discovered fungi so diverse and creepy and fascinating it astounds me... and gives me the heebie jeebies. Just this week I discovered these two horrendous outbreaks:

 

The one on the left looks like dog vomit. It may actually be dog vomit fungus. Yes, that is a real thing. One day it just appears like a froth. Then I made the mistake of watering it. As the outside crust disintegrated and the water hit the inside, it exploded into a dust cloud of black spores. That is the stuff of nightmares.

The one on the right are the field mushrooms of my youth. Here they have entirely lifted up a layer of mulch like some beast bursting out of the ground. Tell me that's not creepy!

Once, I even emailled an expert at the Department of Agriculture about various fungi in my garden. I didn't know whether to pull them out, whether they are good for the soil or harmful to me, especially when one started climbing my spinach plants. That's the one below top left:

 

 

The one on the bottom left looked like an egg... before it exploded into the monstrosities on the right. The expert said not to worry about any of them, just don't eat it. Even he didn't know what the one was that climbed my plant, though.

Down at our dog park, there are giant "fairy rings" of mushrooms and the lawn is always greener, more healthy and faster growing in those rings, so it must be good for the soil. As the fungus mycelium grows in the soil, it must make the nutients more easily available to plant roots.

I once read that the biggest living organism on our planet was a mycelium, the white hair-like roots of a fungus that grow underground, it covers an entire forest floor in Canada. I can tell you I won't be travelling there any time soon!

Garden Week inspiration

Perth's Garden Week is in its 42nd year and runs for another few days. Organisers say the event fell away for a while and there wasn't much interest, but in the past three years they've had more and more exhibitors and now the crowds are coming back.

 

 Here's a peek of what's there:

 

 

 

Don't forget you can sign up to follow this blog, by entering your email address in the field on the right. You'll get an email notification whenever a new post is published!

 

 

 

 

 

At the opening, the mayor of the Town of Cambridge, Simon Withers, spoke about how town planning is responsible, in part, for the amount of green space in the city. He said decreasing block sizes and councils that allow people to build massive houses on them, leaving no space for a lawn or a tree or two have created a 'heat island' in the city.

 

His council has banned synthetic lawn on verges and even stipulates what percentage of the space out the front of a house must be vegetated. He believes residents and councils must demand more green space and gardens in the planning process.

 

Mr Withers seemed very passionate about planting more street trees to create an air conditioning effect in the suburbs. After his talk we had a great conversation about town planning. We discussed the merits of not having walls at the front of your house, so it allows you to interact with your neighbours and bring the community feel back to your neighbourhood. I feel that by having my food garden out the front with no walls, it has allowed me to meet and strike up friendships with all my neighbours. That's something to think about for anyone planning or designing their front gardens. Maybe walling yourself away isn't the best idea. Oh, and go and plant a tree!

My garden is on the telly!

The episode went to air this weekend, I was very nervous about seeing it! I was happy to see my wonderful neighbour made the final cut, as well as Chilli and Mustard, the beagles.

 

I've had some requests from readers who want to follow The Garden Beagle... so I figured out how to add the follow function. Just enter your email address in the "FOLLOW BY EMAIL" on the right of your screen.

 

And if you missed the show, watch it here:

I met an inspiring woman... and you can too!

Yesterday, Garden Week opened in Perth. I got to meet a wonderful Australian - Stephanie Alexander:

Stephanie (I like to think we're on a first name basis now) is a keen kitchen gardener herself as well as being the author of a lot of cookbooks. But what I find most inspiring is her not-for-profit organisation that is teaching children the value of growing your own food and how to eat it. The Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Project was launched in 2004 and now involves 296 primary schools across Australia. In Western Australia 24 schools have joined the program and Stephanie said about 70 more in have put their hand up to take part.

 

Stephanie said her favourite place to be was in the garden. She had a bit of a poke about the Garden Week displays in between her engagements and she said what had caught her eye was the CSIRO limes. She was going to try to track some down in her home state of Victoria. I felt pretty chuffed that I have one of those limes. It is covered with fruit this year and I'm pretty excited to experiment with it in the kitchen when they ripen!

At Garden Week, the organisers set up this beautiful vege patch for Stephanie to use (below) and she'll be holding workshops with kids today.

Apart from my photo of Stephanie, I also took home some more native plants for my verge from the Carnaby's cockatoo display. I'm going to add couple of prostrate banksias, pimlea and more grevillia to the verge this afternoon.

I'll be back later with some more photos from garden week!



Did the camera man make my garden look good...?

As someone who works in television, I'm used to cameras. And I'm very good at interviews. The problem is I'm used to being the one who asks the questions. So when the Garden Gurus came around to interview me about my garden, I was not prepared for how strange it would be answering questions!

 

The Gurus have filmed my meagre kitchen garden. I can confidently say I've never spent so much time in the garden trying not to get dirty or let my makeup sweat off.

 

No sooner was I telling the lovely presenter Susannah Wilson about what a beautiful neighbourhood we live in, the neighbourhood turned out to see what all the fuss was about. I guess not every one has a whole film crew in the front yard every day.

 

I'm hoping my wonderful Italian neighbour makes the final cut, I mentioned what a wonderful guide she'd been to me in the garden and then she turned up, so they roped her in to being filmed.

 

Here are Susannah and I hard at work, discussing gardening:

 

The poor garden was so bare, despite my best efforts to cheat and I swear that in the days since the segment was filmed, my garden actually decided to grow. It now looks quite abundant, the tomatoes are tall, and covered in flowers, we're eating the salad greens that just look like weeds in the picture above!

 

Like I said, it was very strange being the interviewee, so I expect I will look very, very uncomfortable when the show airs... but you can judge for yourself! Wherever you are in Australia, tune in to the Garden Gurus THIS weekend! And for those readers living overseas, don't feel left out, you can go online and watch the show.

I feel a little bit out of my league after seeing the Guru's latest show, where Susannah interviewed a couple living in a beautiful multi-million dollar house with a garden that would have cost just as much. How can I follow that sort of luxury in my little vege patch?! ...but that couple did say "The gardeners say they really love working in our garden."

At least I do my own gardening!

In the meantime...

While I'm waiting around urging my vegetables to grow to be ready for the television show, I started another project in the garden. About a month ago, my wonderful and knowledgeable colleague Jenny invited me around for lunch so she would give me some cuttings of her frangipani trees. She had read about my frangipani envy and has several frangipanis worth envying in her backyard! Here's me with one of my cuttings:

I let the cuttings dry out for a month, leant up against a fence in the shade, while we prepared a new garden bed for them. In the front yard we had a mass of aloes... which prickled the back of your head when you were sitting around the outdoor table and appeared to be the perfect breeding spot for red-backed spiders. And snails. My husband hates them. So he took his chainsaw to them, cut them down and ripped them out. Here's my action man:

It wasn't until the aloes were gone, did we realise just how big that garden bed was. We planted the frangipani cuttings in the bed and are now hoping for the best. Again, I'm trying to cheat a bit, by getting a big cutting, I can have a small tree already and don't have to wait for it to grow. The flamingo looks happy beneath the tree and adds a festive air to the place:

Of course, I planted the whole bed out with mustard seed as well, just in case that darned root knot nematode has made a home in this soil as well. You can't be too careful!

Cheating

I'm still frantically trying to make my garden look productive after my nightmare. I'm getting serious about my cheating as the Garden Guru filming day gets closer. Not only have I resorted to buying punnets of vegetables, instead of growing them by seed, now I've taken it a step further. If I can't have plants in my garden, I will have structures! Here's my bamboo bean tee pee:

Who cares if there isn't any actual beans growing over it yet... you can imagine they're JUST ABOUT to grow all over it. Will I trick the viewers? I don't know. I did plant some runner bean seeds under it. A few have come up, but slaters ate the tops off. That means there could be another trip to the nursery to buy cheat runner beans!