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Duncan Cocking Permaculture Educator Kyneton Melbourne

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Duncan Cocking Site Consult Garden Advice Melbourne Victoria

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💪 They’re still going! 🥶 Despite the odds

💪 They’re still going!

🥶 Despite the odds, my zucchini plants are still producing several zucchini a week. There’s even been a few frosts in our garden, but the plants must be protected enough to not be affected.

👌 The zucchini productivity in my patch this summer was as close to perfect as it comes. Normally I have a one zucchini plant rule in our household. This helps to prevent a massive glut. However, this year I planted a second, as part of the Fool’s Garden experiment. Then I was worried that come late January we were going to drown in zucchini.

🐞 However, all that rainfall created ideal conditions for powdery mildew and the zucchini were quickly covered in the stuff. The yellow ladybirds moved in for a feast.
I thought the plants were done for before the glut had even kicked in. But then February was very dry. The incessant wind helped provide good airflow. The plants were hampered by the fungal disease, but each plant still managed to produce a single zucchini a week.

⚖️ In our family two zucchini a week is perfect. So thanks to the over-planting of the Fool’s Garden and the interplay of the powdery mildew, we achieved the holy grail of vegetable gardening: zucchini equilibrium.

➡ I recently shared my reflections on the hits and misses in my vegetable garden this summer. Head to my Substack to read it,

#zucchini #vegetablegardener #stillgoingstrong #holygrail

🍃🥕🍅 May is the last chance for warm-tempe

🍃🥕🍅 May is the last chance for warm-temperate gardeners (such as Melbourne) to plant their winter crops. Get planting now if you want to enjoy an abundance of broccoli and cauliflower in spring.

🪱 As you remove your summer crops consider planting green manure crops instead of leaving fallow, bare soil. Your soil microbes will thank you.

🍂 Autumn leaves and grass clippings are an ideal carbon nitrogen ratio for adding to the compost.

🌼 Don’t forget to plant some flowers to encourage beneficial insects and pollinators into the garden. Poppies and sweet peas are a great choice for planting right now.

🧡 It’s my favourite time of the year in my garden – mostly because I can afford to take the time to stop and enjoy it. It’s my downtime. I’ll reflect on the season just gone and plan the next summer crops. The weather is cooling rapidly and the leaves are changing colour. Make sure stop for a moment and enjoy the spectacle of autumn.

📖 Read more about what to do in the garden this May in my FREE monthly planting guide and garden update ➡️ Link in bio.

#whattoplant #gardenguide #melbournegardens #melbourneveggiegardens

🥦 While the summer crops are coming to a scream

🥦 While the summer crops are coming to a screaming halt, the winter crops are just ramping up. The first harvest of broccoli is not very far away.

💪 Look at the size of this monster that is developing. Despite its size, it’s still not quite ready for harvesting.

⚖ Harvesting brassicas is a bit of a balancing act. The longer you leave the broccoli or cauliflower head, the bigger it becomes, but only to a point. Once the florets begin to separate and open, then time for picking is running out.

📏 Don’t let the overall size of the head be your guide for picking brassicas. It’s the individual florets you want to pay attention to. Stressed seedlings often result in small flower heads. Planting stressed brassica seedlings is number 6 in my list of top ten gardening mistakes.

➡️ Paid subscribers can read part 31 of the Vegetable Patch from Scratch to learn more about harvesting brassicas and all sorts of other vegetables. Head to my Substack to read it.

#winterharvest #broccoli #homegrownbroccoli #frommygarden

📖 Every year in April, as the frosts put an end

📖 Every year in April, as the frosts put an end to my summer crops, I reflect on the season just gone. The growing season is fresh in my mind so it is the perfect time to record in my gardening diary all sorts of ideas.

⬆️ What should I grow more of next year? And less of?
🏆 What crops did well and what performed poorly?
📉 What did I grow too much of?
📈 What crops do I need to increase in size to meet demand?
🤔 What should I do differently?

I also do a quick stocktake of my seed collection and put together a shopping list for next planting season, which begins in just a few short months.

See today’s blog post for the big hits and misses from my patch this summer ➡️
Head to my Substack page to read it.

❓ What were the big successes in your patch this year? What were the learning opportunities and how will you do things differently next summer?

#gardenplanning #gardenreflections #hitsandmisses #nextyeargoals

🍋 Following on from my recent update on the fin

🍋 Following on from my recent update on the finger lime, my other established citrus trees are covered in ripening fruit. The lemon trees are even blossoming.

🌏 Citrus trees are originally from warmer climates in Asia. They have different annual growth patterns in different parts of Australia. Here in Victoria, they normally flower in late autumn or early winter. These flowers take around twelve months to develop into mature fruit and ripen. It’s therefore challenging to find the correct time to prune them.

🌸 The exception to this is lemon trees, which often flower and set fruit several times per year. As you can see from these images, my trees are covered in fruit at many different stages of development.

✂ Pruning lemon trees is more possible at any time of the year, because lemon trees can carry multiple crops at any given time. Any pruning session will likely result in a flush of new growth and flowers. This will lead to another crop of fruit. So your lemon harvest won’t be interrupted for long after a prune.

➡ Read more about pruning citrus trees in Part 4 of my Citrus Growing Guide. Head to the Leaf, Root & Fruit website to read it.

#lemontree #citrusseason #howtogrow #victoria

📖 A new chapter begins…. ✂ Earlier this we

📖 A new chapter begins….

✂ Earlier this week, the interns and I removed the spent summer vegetable plants from one of my large “market garden” beds.

🌽 🌻 The sweetcorn and sunflowers were cut off at the base and fed through the chipper before rotary hoeing the lot back into the soil. This organic matter will slowly decompose, release the nutrients back to the soil microbes, which will in turn support the growth of the next crop.

🫘 After preparing the soil, we sowed a green manure crop. Bare soil is terrible for soil biology and the soil food web. Many of the microorganisms that make up soil will be killed if the soil dries out and is exposed to UV light. Winter rainfall will quickly leach many nutrients from the soil.

🌱 Growing a green manure crop in otherwise fallow beds is a great way to support soil biology and health and reduce nutrient leach. It can also help with the long-term aim of increasing the organic matter in your soil. A green manure crop can help to support a healthy and diverse garden ecosystem. It can even be productive!

👩‍🌾In this instance we planted broad beans and lupins as the main crop. We also broadcast coriander, and a few packets of peas, broccoli and cabbage seed. These last three had all expired or had poor germination rates. They were just bonus plants to increase the diversity of the crop.

➡️ Paid subscribers can read more about green manure crops in Part 39 of the Vegetable Patch from Scratch series.

⁉️ Do you have fallow beds in need of some love? Have a go at planting some green manure crops to help support your garden ecosystem.

#greenmanure #soilfoodweb #soilmicrobes #organicgardener

🍅 On Anzac day, the whole family pitched in to

🍅 On Anzac day, the whole family pitched in to help turn some excess tomatoes into tomato sauce – not passata, but the type you put on your pies. (What Americans might call ketchup.)

👨‍🍳 I haven’t done this for years. It’s been so long that I have misplaced my tried and tested recipe.

📖 The new recipe that I decided on (but adapted anyway) worked pretty well and tastes great. I used some homemade apple scrap vinegar, so the sauce is even more homemade than usual However, despite boiling it down for hours, it’s still much runnier than I remember making past batches of sauce. Perhaps it had too much vinegar in it?

❓ Do you have any tips or famous family recipes you can share with me for next time?

#tomatosaucerecipe #preserving #recipesplease #cookingwithkids

The heaviest frost of the season yet. Even the bir

The heaviest frost of the season yet. Even the bird bath has frozen over. That'll be most of the summer vegetables finished.

Did you wake up to a frost in your garden this morning?

#frostymorning #birdbath #icedover #summerisdone

🎃 The pumpkins are finally done. I harvested ma

🎃 The pumpkins are finally done. I harvested many in early April, just before we had that huge dump of rain. At the time, a few plants were still going strong and the fruit wasn’t fully mature. So I allowed those plants to keep growing.

🌳 Now the vines have finally died back and I’ve picked the last pumpkins. I grow most of my pumpkins as a living ground cover in the orchard. The pumpkins ramble under the fruit trees to shade the soil and retain moisture.

🥕 I also have plenty of other plants growing under my fruit trees. Most of them are self-sown annuals, such as silverbeet, carrot, parsnip, parsley, lettuce, calendula, nasturtium, broad beans, sunflowers, barley and chamomile. Others are perennials such as yarrow, scarlet runner bean, daffodils and lucerne. There’s also less desirable plants such as sheep sorrel, plantain, bent grass and milk thistles.

🐔 At this time of the year, the space can become a bit of a jungle. To tame the jungle I have rotated one of our chicken flocks into the space.

🚜This flock of chickens are housed in a mobile chicken tractor. Combined with a portable electric fence unit, I can move them from garden bed to garden bed where they can conduct their pest control and fertilising services. As a bonus they lay plenty of eggs.

❗️Chickens and fruit trees don’t mix for extended periods of time. The chickens are likely to forage in the soil around the root systems and heavily damage them. There was quite a bit of thought went into setting up my netted enclosure to allow me to integrate the chickens. Features such as these make it possible:
🤺 Internal fencing to regulate chickens movement
⛩ Extra wide gates to accommodate the relocation of the chicken tractor
👗 Special mesh skirts of the fruit trees to reduce damage
🌱 Planting specific plants for the chickens to forage on

🦊 Our netted enclosures are fully fox proof to keep your chickens safe. They also prevent attacks on your fruit from possum, parrot, deer, wallaby, kangaroo, wombat, rabbit and hares.

➡️You can read more about our netted enclosures and see pricing on the LRF Website

🥒 Are these the last cucumbers of the season?

🥒 Are these the last cucumbers of the season?

🥶 It’s highly probable. There’s a few tiny fruit developing on some of my plants, but I suspect the frost will get them before they amount to anything.

📊I grew three succession crops of cucumbers this summer. Crop one and two produced well. However, crop one suffered an early demise thanks to the powdery mildew. My third crop never really hit its straps as the cool weather of summer kicked in just before the plants hit their prime.

🧺Succession planting allows you to spread your harvest over a longer period of time. It also ensures that any seasonal variation can be overcome. For example, if I relied on one single crop of cucumbers alone, we would have hardly harvested a single fruit after late January. My extra crops allowed me to continue harvesting until this late in the season.

🌽🥦I also use succession planting for sweetcorn, brassicas, leafy greens, beetroot, peas and snow peas.

➡️ Read more about succession planting in Part 13 of the Vegetable Patch from Scratch. Head to my Substack page to read it.

#successionplanting #lebanesecucumber #autumnharvest #lastharvest

🥶 The weather is cooling and that’s great new

🥶 The weather is cooling and that’s great news for my efforts to curb the Queensland Fruit Fly outbreak in my orchard. Being from a more sub-tropical climate they hate the cold weather and it hampers their proliferation.

🪱 However, I’m still finding plenty of larvae in my fruit. Last week, I even discovered them for the first time in my apples. Until then, I’d only found them in the Beurre Hardy pear and plenty of different nashi varieties. They definitely love nashi pears.

😢 For me, one of my darkest Queensland Fruit Fly moments was the day that I realised that I’ll never again be able to bite into a juicy piece of home-grown fruit. Instead, everything needs to be cut into pieces to inspected for the dreaded maggots that are turning the fruit to mush.

🤮 You see, to the untrained eye, it can be difficult to spot fruit that has been infested with QFF. From the outside the fruit looks relatively fine. But inside the fruit is a nightmare waiting to happen. One unsuspecting bite later and you’ve got a mouth full of disgusting grainy, mush. Yuk!

🔎 However, I’m getting better at spotting infested fruit. Keen eyes can usually see the sting hole that the female has made with her ovipositor to lay eggs, under the skin of the fruit. After a few days, the maggot has carved its way through the fruit, wreaking destruction along the way.

⬅️ These series of images show the same nashi pear. I've marked the sting hole on this piece of fruit with a blue arrow. You can see that once the fruit is cut open that the sting hole is just the tip of the iceberg. The maggot has migrated right across to the other side of the fruit, where most of the damage has occurred. The whole piece of fruit is now damaged.

🧞‍♂️A few days ago, this sting hole was next to impossible to spot, but it’s been sitting on the bench and the maggot has grown in size.

🤜🤛 By working together we can limit that extent of the infestations we endure each summer and autumn. Please share this post to raise awareness of Queensland Fruit Fly and the havoc that it can wreak in or gardens.

#queenslandfruitfly #qff #backyardorchard #gardenpest

❓ “How can you make a large fruit tree small a

❓ “How can you make a large fruit tree small again? I can’t net my tree, it’s too hard to pick the fruit. I prune it every year but it still grows too big”

🔥 This is one of the hottest topics that I get asked about all the time. It dominates question time at every single one of my fruit tree pruning workshops.

🍐 Nothing gets a point across like a productive pear tree and there’s no finer example of one than my Beurre Bosc pear. It’s on a vigorous rootstock, and at around 10 years of age it should be around four or five times the size it is.

🤫 The secret to keeping it small lies in how it’s being treated.

My Beurre Bosc pear tree is neglected:
💩 It hasn’t been fertilised and grows in poor soil
💧 It is hardly ever watered (I haven’t watered it for two years now)
✂ It receives only an occasional light prune.

⚖️ This year, I picked 91kg of fruit from the tree.

💪 Ninety-one kilograms of fruit and other than netting it I did NOTHING!

📖 Check out today’s Substack post for more ways you can tame your rampant fruit tree monsters. ➡

#fruittreepruning #gardensecret #beurrebosc #heritagefruit

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