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Home » Edible Gardening Blog for Melbourne Based Gardeners » 2015 » September » 24

Daily Archives: September 24, 2015

How to Grow Cucamelons in Melbourne, Mouse Melon, Mexican Sour Gherkin. — Cucamelons are becoming an increasingly popular edible plant in Melbourne. More and more people are asking me how to grow them, and from where to source the seed. Last summer, I grew cucamelons for the first time, they were amazing. Here’s our guide on how to grow them, it’s pretty […]

How to Grow Cucamelons in Melbourne

This entry was posted in How to Grow on September 24, 2015 by Leaf, Root & Fruit

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Bah... another lock down... After being postponed

Bah... another lock down... After being postponed twice, our cursed Introduction to Backyard Orchards Workshop has now been cancelled.

On the plus side, there's not much rain forecast for the next few days. So it's a great time to get out into the garden. We will be utilising our lock down to prepare soil and plant our bare rooted fruit trees. It has been too wet to prepare the soil lately but a few more days of fine weather should enable us to get them in the ground.

What gardening tasks will you be getting up to in the garden over the next week?

There's good news for those unsure of what you can be focusing on... our monthly planting guide and newsletter was sent out this morning (hint: it's time to plan and prepare for tomato season!). Link in Bio.

#lockdown #lockdowngardening #backyardorchard #gardenguide #monthlynewsletter #gardennewsletter #warmrhubarbs #rhubarb #barerooted #victoria #macedonranges #kyneton

We are harvesting plenty of carrots as last spring

We are harvesting plenty of carrots as last spring we massively over planted them as part of our root crop trials. The carrots were growing in what is now inside our new netted enclosure. In the next few weeks their position is destined to become our blueberry bed so they needed to come out. Another issue with established carrots crops at this time of the year is that they will soon begin to flower. When they do so, the roots become tough, fibrous and challenging to eat.

To free up the space and to try and prevent them from bolting, our interns have lifted all the carrots. We removed the foliage as they were picked and packed them horizontally in bins full of our very sandy soil. We ended up with 3 x 70 litre tubs of carrots.

This method is a traditional way of storing root vegetables. I’ve never had the pleasure of growing too many carrots before, so it’s the first time that I’ve tried it. Fingers crossed that it works!

What crops have you over planted in the past and ended up with a glut?

#carrot #abundance #veggiepatch #homegrown #glut #rootstorage #internship #permaculture #catchandstoreenergy #kyneton #errypatch #photoperiodism #foodscaping

Today our silver wattle trees (Acacia dealbata) st

Today our silver wattle trees (Acacia dealbata) started flowering. We have many of these trees on our property and the first one to flower has always been the same tree adjacent to our dam.

They are flowering 18 days later than last year. The flowering of the silver wattle is my cue from nature to start sowing tomato seeds. So accordingly, I have delayed planting my tomato seeds this year.

In Melbourne I would sow tomato seeds and place them straight into the greenhouse. But up here in Kyneton the nights are too cool and germination is delayed by weeks if I place the seeds in our greenhouse. Instead we bring the pots inside beside the fire to germinate. As soon as they've germinated we transfer the pots to the greenhouse.

What a great day it is for tomato seed planting. Here's to a productive summer of abundance!

#wattle #prespring #tomatotime #tomatoes #heirloomseed #kyenton #acacia #fireside #propagation #plantnursery

What a wet month July has been. We received 98 mm

What a wet month July has been. We received 98 mm of rain in July, with 20 days of greater than one millimeter of rainfall. The long-term average for Kyneton is 84.1 mm falling over 12.2 days. Long-time locals to the area are claiming that it is a return to normal winters of the past. Our soil is waterlogged, although seemingly not stagnant. Soil preparation and minor earthworks in our new netted enclosure have been delayed, as has the planting of our bare rooted fruit trees. Hopefully we will soon have a succession of fine, sunny days to help dry the soil out. Our sandy soil is very free draining, so it won’t take long for it to drain enough for us to get back into it. On the plus side, our tanks are all full!

Do you measure the rainfall and keep track of the seasonal variations? How has your winter rainfall compared to the long term average?

#rainfall #winter #kyneton #macedonranges #wetwetwet #earethworks #boggeddown #grantiticsand #raingauge #july

"POP" We have several beds of carrots happily si

"POP"

We have several beds of carrots happily sitting in the cool soil that we can harvest at will. These were sown last spring and have been keeping our household going with tasty carrots for months.

What are you harvesting from the garden at the moment?

#carrot #winterveggies #rootveggies #timeforsoup #backyardpatch #growyourown #organic #benefitsofsandysoil #kyneton #macedonranges

A bag of (bare-rooted) fruit (trees) There's so m

A bag of (bare-rooted) fruit (trees)

There's so much potential in this bag. The promise of boxes and boxes of fruit over the coming years.

For many years, I have collected bags and bags of bare rooted trees just like this, for our valued clients. Finally, it's time to collect a big bag of fruit trees for our own property! These bare-rooted fruit trees will soon be planted into our new netted enclosure space.

We can't wait to get them planted and thriving.

#barerooted #plantshopping #somuchpotential #dwarffruittrees #rootstocksareimportant #backyardorchard #ourturn #nettedenclosure #kyneton #macedonranges

Purple cauliflower perfection! What's did you get

Purple cauliflower perfection!

What's did you get up to in your veggie patch this weekend?

#sicilypurplecauliflower #veggiepatch #backyardgrower #kyneton #weekend #perfection #grewitmyself #biggerthanmyhead #purpleveggiesrule

Newsletter subscribers will be aware that we have

Newsletter subscribers will be aware that we have been working on an exciting project in our orchard. We recently installed a large, netted enclosure.

The space has been carefully designed with internal fencing to allow us to ingrate poultry in such a way that they focus attention on where we choose them to. The fully fox-proof, netted enclosure is divided into three sections.

One narrow bay will be designated as the default poultry run. Some trees will be planted in this space, but it will primarily be used for housing the chooks as a default when they are not required elsewhere. A larger area of the enclosure will be a berry patch which will host large plantings of blueberries, strawberries and raspberries. The chooks will rarely be allowed access to this space. This way we can utilise them to help prepare market garden beds for planting vegetables.

The majority of the enclosure will house our orchard with fruit trees espaliered around the walls and 16 free standing trees in the middle.

Poultry will occasionally be allowed into this section to forage and help to control pests such as codling moth, earwigs and slaters. However, we want to limit poultry access to this space as they can damage tree root systems and cause extensive damage if they are allowed to forage for prolonged periods.

The design also enables us to easily move chooks to forage in spaces external to the enclosure with a combination of permanent fencing and electric fence netting and a mobile chicken tractor.

Today we introduced the chickens into the main orchard space. They are now busy helping to prepare the site for the planting of our fruit trees. They will efficiently turn a lot of the ground over, remove a lot of pest insects, reduce the weeds and existing vegetation and add some fertilizer at the same time!

In a few weeks the inside of the enclosure will look completely different... stay tuned!

#beatthebirds #worksmarternotharder #backyardorchard #nettedenclosure #permaculture #chickentractor #poultry #foxproof #birdnetting #harvestprotection #permaculturedesign #soilprepping #barerooted

Our pea crops are growing well this year and we ar

Our pea crops are growing well this year and we are harvesting crops from the Blue Bantam, Sugar Snap shelling peas and the Melting Mammoth snow pea varieties. Not many of the pods have made it inside but at least the peas are keeping our children busy.

#peas #podding #peamonsters #veggiegarden #heirloomseed #gardeningwithkids #beanies #macedonranges #winter2021 #lockdowngardening #trowelsnotelevision

A frosty start to the day here in #Kyneton. #icy

A frosty start to the day here in #Kyneton.

#icy #chilly #frost #winteriscoming #macedonranges #veggiepatch #frozenrose #lastdayofautumn

Wednesdays are our internship day and today the te

Wednesdays are our internship day and today the team worked hard to assemble a huge hot compost.

We've harvested enough tomatoes, so all the saucing tomato vines were collected and added to the pile. We also fed spent sunflower and sweet corn stalks through the wood chipper which will help them to decompose much more quickly. Other items added to this compost pile included chook manure, cow manure, wood ash and plenty of straw.

In two weeks time we will begin work on an exciting new project... a large netted enclosure. Once today's pile has finished composting it will be used to prepare the soil for new fruit trees to be planted inside the netted enclosure.

#hotcompost #sohot #manure #internship #permacultureinternship #newproject #hardwork #sleepwelltonight #straw #autumncolour #kyneton

And the winner is.... with a very accurate guess o

And the winner is.... with a very accurate guess of 2400g, @kerryn.burgess ! The actual weight of the tuber was 2390g

Congratualtions Kerryn, you've won a ticket to our upcoming Science of Edible Gardening Workshop on "Reproductive Genetics: Seed Saving & Pollination".

Thanks to everyone on our social media platforms who had a guess in our sweet potato competition. (See previous post for more details)

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