Regardless of whether you’re planting only one or two trees or a backyard orchard with dozens, this post is a perfect checklist. Have a read before you race out and buy your trees.
How to Grow
2 I’m often mocked for my obsession with growing a Christmas tomato. But I’m not the only one who strives to achieve this gardening glory. Every spring, many hopeful gardeners plant precious tomato seedlings into the garden with the hope to develop and ripen a tasty tomato before Christmas. It is […]
How to Grow a Christmas Tomato without a Greenhouse
I love growing vegetables. I plant them, I tend them, I harvest them, I eat them, I sometimes even dream about them. Some might even say that I’m obsessed with growing vegetables. That obsession has helped me to learn quite a bit about growing food. You don’t have to be […]
How to Plan Your Vegetable Crops and Plant Them Out
2 I covered this topic briefly for my paid subscribers in part 29 of the Vegetable Patch from Scratch series. I want more gardeners to be aware of this issue so I’m writing about it in more detail and making this article free for everyone to read and share. Shivering citrus […]
The Danger of Adding Epsom Salts to the Garden
I remember vividly the open-for-inspection of the first house that my partner Caryn and I rented together. Caryn was hesitant – “The whole backyard is concreted; we can’t have a garden.” But I was excited by it. There were no trees or shrubs to contend with, just two half wine […]
How to Set Up a New Vegetable Patch
5 This cherry tree is on a full-sized rootstock. I’m using the Spanish bush method of pruning to keep it small and compact. I usually advocate for planting fruit trees on dwarfing rootstock (with the exception of citrus). Until recent years, there were no dwarfing rootstocks available for cherries. Most cherry […]
Spanish Bush Method of Pruning Cherry Trees
11 Many of you are familiar with my enthusiasm (some even mock it as an obsession) for cultivating and ripening a Christmas tomato. In Melbourne this is relatively easy, but I’ve also managed it in my first three years of growing food here in Kyneton. Part of my approach to growing […]
Is a Heat Mat the Best Way to Germinate Tomato ...
Recently I was chatting with a few friends at a Permies at the Pub meeting in Kyneton. We were discussing recording garden observations and my rather extreme approach to recording everything I see. The conversation went something like this: Kerryn: “Duncan, how do you find the time to record all […]
Five Habits of Good Gardeners
Strawberry plants are relatively small compared to other berries, but they certainly punch above their weight in terms of productivity. Strawberries generally have two main productivity patches. One in early summer and one in autumn. Essentially, they produce just before and just after the summer Blueberry glut. One strawberry plant […]
How to Grow Strawberries
6 Many gardeners see renting as a barrier to maximising productive gardening in their rental space. However, you can easily generate abundance of home-grown food in a rental property. I spent years hopping from one rental property to the next, prior to our move to our forever home in Kyneton. I […]
Edible Gardening for Renters
2 Fruit Tree Espaliers are living works of art. What is an Espalier? “Espalier” refers to special practices for training fruiting trees onto trellises. Espaliers save space and are beautiful works of art. There are many styles and designs of espalier that can be grown against a wall, a building or […]
How to Set-Up and Maintain Espaliers
10 What is Curly Leaf and what causes it? Leaf Curl in peaches and nectarines can look quite overwhelming, but the tree usually recovers well and produces an abundance of fruit. Leaf Curl (also known as Peach Leaf Curl) is a fungal disease caused by the pathogen Taphrina deformans. It affects […]
Curly Leaf in Peaches and Nectarines
10 Why do we Prune Fruit Trees? The reasons we often choose to prune fruit trees are: To keep the trees smaller to enable netting To keep the trees smaller to pick the fruit Because we think they need pruning to improve yield fruit (they don’t!) Because we are told that […]
Guide to Pruning Fruit Trees
10 The soil on my property on the outskirts of Kyneton is very sandy and is low in many nutrients required for optimal plant growth. In October 2019, I conducted a soil test in our orchard. The soil tests were taken at ten sites across the paddock, each one to a […]
The Impact Of Compost On Garden Soil: A Case Study
2 I get to visit a lot of gardens and am asked many questions about all things gardening. There are quite a few issues that I regularly see crop up. Here are my top ten mistakes that I regularly see Melbourne based gardeners make, and suggestions in avoiding making them yourself. […]
Top Ten Gardening Mistakes Made by Melbourne Based Gardeners
8 Households can produce large amounts of organic waste. Composting can be a great way to reduce your household contribution to landfill and create a useful product for your garden. The way to improve most soils, regardless of whether they are sandy, heavy clay or somewhere in between, is to add […]
What is the best compost method?
12 Growing your own food has many benefits. The food tastes better and is more nutrient dense. Growing food connects you to nature and is very rewarding. Gardening has physical and mental health benefits. Recent Coronavirus (Covid-19) panic buying and empty supermarket shelves have now given us another reason to grow […]
The Leaf, Root & Fruit guide to Covid-19 Panic Induced ...
4 This is part three in my three-part series on creating a resilient garden ecosystem. In this blog post I discuss some design techniques to help your garden landscape become a low maintenance resilient foodscape! Avoid large patches of monocultures and rows in the garden If you plant a long row […]
Garden Ecosystems Part Three: How to Turn your Garden into ...
28 Spring is the busiest time of the year for working in the garden: The days are increasing in length Daytime temperatures are increasing The soil is starting to warm up Melbourne’s rainfall is typically plentiful All of this means that plants (including weeds) will thrive and […]
Spring Planting Guide for Melbourne
There are tomato varieties of many different shapes, sizes and colours avaiable to the home gardener in Melbourne To me, nothing says Melbourne summer like the smell of tomato plants as you brush past them in the garden. The smell of tomato leaves (and basil) as I water the garden […]
How to Grow Great Tomatoes in Melbourne
18 Raspberries are a great addition to any edible garden. They are easy to grow and can be highly productive. Raspberries are best trained up a trellis so they can make great use of vertical spaces. For those of you worried about prickles… you can even get thorn-less varieties! Best of […]
How to Grow Raspberries
56 Sweet potatoes are a subtropical crop that grows very well in Melbourne. I’ve grown them for years now and have had some fantastic results. I’ve even grown sweet potatoes in Kyneton which has a cool-temperate climate and a much shorter growing season. Here’s what I’ve learnt about growing sweet potatoes. […]
How to Grow Sweet Potatoes in Melbourne
56 Cucamelons lare great in salads or picked straight from the vine and eaten. 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, […]
How to Grow Cucamelons in Melbourne
30 New Guinea Beans (Lagenaria siceraria), are an ironic vegetable. They’re not from New Guinea but actually from Africa – and, they’re not even a bean! They are actually a climbing edible gourd or squash – a member of the cucurbit family. Its common name comes from a taste similar to […]
How to Grow New Guinea Beans in Melbourne
34 Winter in Melbourne is the time to attend to your fruit trees. It is important to invest time and effort into fruit trees during winter, to ensure that you have successful fruit crops in summer. Some fruit tree related tasks that are traditionally completed in winter are: Winter pruning of […]
Fruit Trees in Winter in Melbourne: Pruning, Planting and Care.
13 It is important that you select fruit trees grafted onto the correct rootstock for your situation Most fruit trees available for purchase in nurseries, large hardware chains and online stores are grafted. This means that the desired tree has been added onto a rootstock, that can alter the growth habits […]
Buying Fruit Trees: The Importance of Choosing the Right Rootstock
It’s been 28 weeks since we built the Giant Edible Trellis and this week we harvested the last of the produce. We harvested two large potimarron pumpkins, a few more zucchini tromboncino and the massive new guinea bean, from the trellis. There was a small moon and stars watermelon fruit, […]
Giant Edible Trellis Week 28: The Final Harvest
22 This was my fourth year of growing watermelons in Melbourne. Surprisingly, watermelons are very easy to grow in our Melbourne climate. You use similar methods to those methods used in growing pumpkins, but they take far less space than your average pumpkin vine. If you can spare a few square […]
How to Grow Watermelons in Melbourne
8 During 2012, my partner Caryn and I spent a gap year in South America. During our trip we developed a keen appreciation of the agricultural practices of the local inhabitants. One of the ancient planting techniques still used there today is the ‘Three Sisters’, a fantastic companion planting technique. According […]
Three Sisters Gardening, an ancient form of Companion Planting
14 Last summer we tried growing a small, experimental crop of peanuts, in a planter box. The trial was successful with quite a decent crop. This year we’ll be planting out a much bigger crop. Peanuts are easy to grow and great fun for the kids to grow. Here’s the Leaf, […]
How to Grow Peanuts in Melbourne
42 Zucchini Tromboncino is a heirloom vegetable common throughout Italy. Valued for its abundant, tasty harvests. It was developed in Liguria, in northern Italy. The fruit has a very pale green skin and can have varied faint white stripes like some zucchini varieties as well. The really nice thing about this […]
How to Grow Zucchini Tromboncino
4 The answer was that they represent some of the different methods that gardeners use to decide when to plant out their tomato seedlings into the garden. Some Gardeners consider it a great achievement if you can harvest a ripe tomato before Christmas. Many of you have your own traditions when […]
What do these 4 images have in common?
4 Originally designed for use in Ethiopia, wicking beds aim to increase food production, while using approximately 50% less water. Think of them as a giant self-watering plant pot. Water is drawn up into the soil via capillary action from a reservoir in the bottom of the wicking bed. Crates, tanks, […]
Make Your Own Self-Watering Wicking Bed
16 The biggest pumpkins come from the variety called ‘ATLANTIC GIANT’. The current world record for an Atlantic Giant pumpkin is held by Beni Meier from Switzerland, with a 2,323 pound Pumpkin, which is a whopping 1054 kg! The current Australian Record is held by Dale Oliver, with an impressive 743kg […]
Growing Giant Pumpkins in Melbourne
47 Fruit trees don’t need to be pruned to produce fruit. However, if they do need pruning, then selecting an optimal time will ensure the tree remains healthy, productive and resilient. Neglecting to prune your fruit trees won’t stop production of fruit. However, it can help to establish a strong framework […]
When to Prune Fruit Trees
4 Next time that you are cooking with eggs, don’t throw the eggshells away. Did you know that eggshells are a great gardening resource? Let the eggshells dry out for a day and then you can crush them up and sprinkle them as a barrier around seedlings. Slugs and snails hate […]
Using Eggshells in the Garden
8 This blog post is specifically about planting strawberry runners. Why not check out our guide on How to Grow Strawberries as well? Strawberries can “reproduce” either through seeds or from runners. Strawberry runners are horizontal stems that run above the ground and produce new “baby” clone plants at the end […]