Supporting you to grow food

In Our Garden

thermal image of the garden is useful microclimate Kyneton — The sustainability house kit supplied by Goldfields Libraries is full of useful equipment and information. My local library in conjunction with the Macedon Ranges Sustainability Group offers for loan sustainable house kits to help improve the energy efficiency of your house. There are some exciting pieces of equipment in the […]

Using thermal imaging to analyse the garden

This entry was posted in Experiments In Our Garden on August 1, 2023 by Leaf, Root & Fruit

Photoperiodism bolting plants Melbourne — Around late October and early November, we start getting a lot of inquiries related to coriander, silverbeet and parsley. Usually the inquiry is from a puzzled gardener who has been growing great plants all winter, but suddenly everything has bolted (flowered), and is about to set seed. The process of […]

Day Length and Plants (Photoperiodism)

This entry was posted in In Our Garden on July 30, 2018 by Leaf, Root & Fruit

We live in a rented house in Hawthorn East. It has a reasonable sized yard, but I don’t like to waste precious growing space on vining plants such as pumpkins and watermelons. I usually grow these sorts of things on the family farm. However, we have a single car garage […]

Growing Watermelons on the Shed Roof

This entry was posted in In Our Garden on January 4, 2015 by Leaf, Root & Fruit

Good bugs and bad bugs in the garden — Recently, I wrote a blog post on the large number of whitefly currently plaguing gardens across Melbourne. While their numbers are still quite high, I’ve noticed a huge increase in predatory insects over the last fortnight. We’ve had plenty of ladybugs, spiders, praying mantis, hover flies and lacewings in our […]

Whitefly Predators

This entry was posted in In Our Garden on December 15, 2014 by Leaf, Root & Fruit

Bee hovering over a pink poppy — My mother still lives on the family farm at Mickleham. She’s has an extensive and productive veggie patch in the backyard. It’s also the location of our giant edible trellis project. Back in autumn, mum came across some “out of date” packets of flower seeds she had stashed away. The […]

Attracting pollinators into the garden with poppies and other companion ...

This entry was posted in In Our Garden on November 9, 2014 by Leaf, Root & Fruit

Yesterday was a fantastic, sunny day. It was a great day for a caterpillar search and destroy mission in the garden. We’ve had real problems with caterpillars in our garden in the last year or so. They love to munch through beetroot, potatoes, rocket and many of the other leafy […]

Caterpillars: Search and Destroy

This entry was posted in In Our Garden on September 30, 2014 by Leaf, Root & Fruit

Our lemon tree is bursting into bloom with the warmer weather I’ve got a lemon tree growing in a large pot at the back doorstep. It’s just bursting in to bloom at the moment. Unfortunately it is also starting to get a bit of scale appearing on the undersides of […]

Controlling Scale on Citrus Trees

This entry was posted in In Our Garden on September 27, 2014 by Leaf, Root & Fruit

We had a family dinner at Mum’s last week. Before dinner I popped out to inspect the veggie patch and couldn’t believe the size of the broccoli. I wanted to take a photo to share on our social media pages, but I needed something to give perspective. So, we got […]

Aussie the Broccoli Bandit

This entry was posted in In Our Garden on September 15, 2014 by Leaf, Root & Fruit

Aphids hate the cold. At the moment, with the unusually warm weather they are thriving in protected micro-climates in gardens all over Melbourne. Today, when I was out pottering in the garden, I noticed that all of my parsley and coriander plants were covered in aphids. The plants have been […]

Attack of the Aphids!

This entry was posted in In Our Garden on June 13, 2014 by Leaf, Root & Fruit

It’s Peanut Sunday here at LRF Head Quarters in Hawthorn East! Earlier in the year we planted out an experimental crop of peanuts and today we harvested them. As you can see, our crop was a huge success. It was so exciting to uproot the withering plants and finding masses […]

Peanut Sunday

This entry was posted in In Our Garden on May 25, 2014 by Leaf, Root & Fruit

Autumn planting guide onion — Our garlic is leaping up out of the ground at the moment and it’s not too late to get yours in. As long as you’ve got a sunny spot for it, growing garlic is very easy. It loves moist (but not waterlogged), friable soil with plenty of organic matter and […]

Garlic

This entry was posted in In Our Garden on May 19, 2014 by Leaf, Root & Fruit