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Edible Garden Sustainability Workshop Melbourne

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Sustainable Living Festival Presentation Duncan Cocking

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leafrootfruit

🎃 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

🥶 I’m calling it…. This morning I observed

🥶 I’m calling it…. This morning I observed the first frost of 2024.

🔪 It was still a relatively mild frost, but it was enough to cause a bit of damage to this giant tromboncino. It’s a shame, because we were going to store it over winter. My son Angus had plans to enter it in the Kyneton show in the Biggest Vegetable category. But this frost damage means it won’t keep for long. It will need using quickly.

⏲ This frost is right on time. Previous dates for the first frost in our garden are:
22/4/20
17/4/21
5/5/22
29/4/23
And now 22/4/24

☂ Most of the summer vegetables are still unaffected thanks to the various microclimates that protect them.

❓Did you have a frost this morning?

📖 Read more about microclimates here:
➡ https://leafrootfruit.substack.com/p/site-analysis-microclimates-vegetable-garden

#jackfrost #Kyneton #macedonranges #frostdamage #tromboncino

🦔 Our resident echidna, Spike has been up to no

🦔 Our resident echidna, Spike has been up to no good.

⚠ A few years ago, I was warned by the neighbours that echidnas like to fossick in potting mix bags.

🙉 I didn’t listen.

👍 I highly recommend the potting mix Nature’s Soil. It’s incredible and provides consistently amazing results, time after time. The problem is, it’s only really available to commercial growers and can be difficult to track down in retail stores.
There’s a handful of online shops that sell it, but they are certainly profiteering from the potting mix trial that I ran years ago. The prices some online stores charge are incredible.

👨‍🏫 I stock it and make it available for purchase at my workshops and events just to help folks out who want to buy some. It also ensures that I have a stash available whenever I need it.

💰 It’s a four hour return trip to collect the potting mix (I normally plan it to coincide with a trip to Melbourne) but the effort involved in getting it makes this potting mix as precious as gold.

😡 And here’s my mate Spike trashing the stuff in an effort to find an easy meal. He must think the potting mix smells like the perfect place for ants to nest. Lucky for Spike, he’s rather cute and impossible for me to be cross with him for more than a moment.

➡️ Check out my potting mix trial on the LRF website.

❓ I reckon it might be time to run a new potting mix trial. What do you think, would you be interested in seeing the results?

#echidna #gardenpest #gardenvisitor #spike

🍊🍋 It’s almost citrus season! 🏆 The fi

🍊🍋 It’s almost citrus season!

🏆 The first citrus to ripen are usually the finger limes. My finger lime tree is over 10 years old. I nurtured it in a pot as a renter in Melbourne. Finger limes are extremely sensitive to the cold and my plant really shouldn’t be able to survive our cool-climate. So it stayed in the pot for the first few years in Kyneton.

🪴 Eventually, I became sick of dragging it in and out of the greenhouse every winter to protect it from the frosts.

🌳 I decided to plant it into the protected microclimate of the citrus grove. That was 18 months ago and the tree is still alive and thriving. It also has a decent crop of fruit on this autumn.

👁 The kids love finger limes and are watching this crop closely for the first ripe fruit to drop from the tree.

➡ Check out my citrus ripening charts and guide to growing citrus on the LRF webpage.

#fingerlime #bushfood #microclimate #Kyneton #citrusseason

🌱 Is your basil starting to become spotty?

📅 This is the sign that the days are numbered for your basil crop.

☀️ Basil is a warm season crop. The black spots are caused by a fungus that proliferates once the weather cools and the humidity of autumn increases. It will quickly overwhelm your basil plants leaving but a distant memory of a productive summer.

✂️ If you want to make the most of this summertime goodness then you’ll need to act fast. Harvest all that you can from the plants and turn it into pesto.

#basilpesto #blackspot #fungaldisease #gardenproblems #timetoact

What’s that stuff oozing out of my fruit tree tr

What’s that stuff oozing out of my fruit tree trunk?

Gummosis has been quite common this autumn. I'm being asked about it quite a lot and I have noticed it in some of my apricot trees as well.

Gummosis presents mainly in stone fruit trees. The characteristic symptom of gummosis is oozing sap (or gum). It is usually caused by a bacterial disease but can also be associated with physical damage to the tree. Accidental whipper snipping, snapped branches and borers can all damage the tree and lead to oozing sap.
Once a tree has gummosis caused by a bacterial infection there’s not much you can do about it. The tree may survive, but ultimately the infection will reduce the lifespan of the tree. Fungicides will have zero effect on this disease (because it is a bacterial disease) Prevention is better than cure.

Focus on good hygiene, and use methylated spirits diluted with water (30mL of water added to 70mL of metho) to sterilise your pruning tools. Prune susceptible trees only when conditions are optimal and at the right time of the year. Most importantly, plant the tree in a good spot in the first place, where it has great airflow and minimal chance of damage to the branches. Give your fruit trees room to grow, particularly susceptible ones such as apricots.

Find out more about how you can plant the right tree in the right spot at my upcoming backyard orchards workshop on June 15.

#backyardorchard #ooze #Gummosis #apricottree

The nets are off! Today the interns and I removed

The nets are off!

Today the interns and I removed the insect exclusion netting from our winter brassica crops.

The netting was installed on the day we sowed the seeds and was useful in preventing white cabbage butterfly from laying their eggs on the young seedlings.

White cabbage butterfly are extremely seasonal. They love mild, humid conditions. They thrive in January and February, but the numbers slowly dwindle with the cooling weather.

Here in Kyneton, the ambient temperatures are quickly dropping. So too are the white cabbage butterfly numbers. I haven’t spotted one in the garden for around a week. My brassica crops are booming and the first crop especially is pushing against the netting and needs more room. So it’s time to give them some room to grow.

Removing the netting allows the crops to be weeded more easily and I can monitor the developing florets. It will also increase the airflow around the plants which will help reduce all sorts of fungal diseases that can afflict brassicas.

If there are any stray white cabbage butterfly about and they lay their eggs then the plants are big enough to cope with a few holes in their leaves.

Folks in warmer climates can avoid the need to net their brassica crops by simply waiting for the WCB numbers to dwindle. But it becomes too cool, too quickly for us to wait here in Kyneton. The insect netting is essential to brassica success in cool climates like ours.

What about you, are you still observing white cabbage butterfly in your garden? Or have their numbers dropped in your area also?

#whitecabbagebutterfly #brassicas #winterveg #cropprotection

🍅 Problematic passata! ❓ Beth recently conta

🍅 Problematic passata!

❓ Beth recently contacted me asking what had gone wrong with her passata.

‼️ “This has never happened before. The lids were tight, so maybe the water was too hot?”

👍 Beth is spot on with her diagnosis. The water bath temperature was too high and it has caused a lot of the passata to be forced out of the bottle. Sometimes I get distracted when bottling fruit and have the same thing happen. When water bathing produce, the water needs to be at a very gentle simmer, not a rolling boil.

➡️ This week I’m trying something different. I’m sharing a few of the questions that I’ve recently been asked by my readers. You can read the post with my answers to those questions on my Substack page.

#passata #blowouts #toomuchpressure #gentlygently

You might think this is a fungus or other diseases

You might think this is a fungus or other diseases afflicting your apples, but it’s not.

Woolly aphid (Eriosoma lanigerum) is a sap sucking pest of apple trees. It has a fluffy white appearance and usually appears in autumn. Affected branches may show distorted growth the following year.

This major pest of apples will overwinter in the root system of the tree and increase in numbers over the summer and explode in growth in the humidity of autumn. The root ball may grow masses of galls as a protective response to the infestation.
Woolly aphid like humid conditions. Cramming lots of trees into a backyard orchard will reduce airflow and increase humidity. This is more likely to lead to an increase in the chance of woolly aphid infestation.

Netting your trees individually also reduces airflow and increases humidity.

Woolly aphid outbreaks were very common for me when I lived in Melbourne. Since I moved to Kyneton, I hadn’t seen any infestation in my trees until yesterday. I even brought about 40 apples trees here from Melbourne. These trees had shown severe symptoms in Melbourne, but have never shown signs since they were moved here. This is because our summers are hotter and drier. The reduced humidity prevents the aphid from thriving.

However, this year, the aphid has managed to establish on one lone tree of mine. It’s probably a combination of the rainfall in December and January and netting it. The infestation is only minor and I won’t do anything about it. I’ve nearly finished the harvest from the tree, so will soon be able to remove the netting and the “problem” should resolve itself. There’s even a few spotted amber ladybirds feasting on them.

Rootstock selection is the most critical aspect of preventing woolly aphid outbreaks. Some apple rootstocks confer resistance to the tree, so this pest is never an issue. Other rootstocks are highly susceptible.

Read more about which rootstocks to choose and which to avoid in my guide to rootstock selection ➡ Head to my Substack to read it.

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