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leafrootfruit

My finger lime tree keeps dropping masses of ripe

My finger lime tree keeps dropping masses of ripe “dog poo”. The tree shouldn’t survive here in Kyneton, but it stubbornly flips the bird to all naysayers.

This tree is thriving in my citrus grove microclimate. To me, finger limes are a condiment, something to be added to fancy drinks. They’d also be great in a summer salad – if only they ripened in summer. The kids love snacking on them. They snap them in half, and squeeze the vesicles out like toothpaste, straight into their mouth. They’ve affectionately named the tree “The Dog Poo Tree”, and I guess the fallen fruit do resemble turds on the footpath.

Read more about the challenges of growing citrus in a cool-temperate climate here. There’s plenty of advice that’s also applicable to warmer climates, such as Melbourne’s.
➡ https://leafrootfruit.substack.com/p/growing-citrus-in-a-cool-temperate-climate

The mild autumn has enabled my tomato plants to co

The mild autumn has enabled my tomato plants to continue ripening fruit. That’s right, I’m still picking tomatoes. In Kyneton. At the start of June. Sure, they’re not the tastiest of fruit, but given how bland many of my tomatoes were back in February, for this time of the year, they’re not that bad. We had one heavy frost on 19 April, but since then there has been only the odd mild frost. The insect netting I use to protect the fruit from birds and Queensland fruit fly does a remarkable job of creating a warm microclimate to extend the season. And the tomato plants grow on.

➡ https://leafrootfruit.substack.com/p/how-to-grow-tomatoes

I was still wearing shorts last week. By this time

I was still wearing shorts last week. By this time of year, they should be well and truly stashed at the back of the wardrobe for winter. In this part of the world, June is typically miserable: it’s grey and dreary and the temperature rarely nudges past 10 degrees. Day after day of June weather can feel like an eternity in Kyneton. No local ever looks forward to June, but this June is forecast to be warmer and drier than usual.

In 19 days, on 21 June at 6.24 pm Australian Eastern Standard Time, the South Pole will be tilted as far away from the sun as it can get.

This is the turning point, the winter solstice. In three weeks, a return to lengthening days will create all sorts of positivity. You will just need to know where to look for the signs of spring.

Spring bulbs will bloom. The chickens will return to laying. Some birds, such as the white-browed scrub wren, will begin nesting.

The winter solstice marks the start of a new gardening year. Yes, there’s still plenty of cold weather to come. But it’s nearly time to think about sowing tomato seeds to germinate in front of the fire, preparing soil for spring planting and dragging the shorts back out of the back of the wardrobe.

After the rubbish that this summer dished up to the vegetable patch, I can’t wait to crack open a new gardening diary and get planting.

Read the rest of my FREE monthly planting guide and garden update here:
➡https://leafrootfruit.substack.com/p/june-2026-planting-guide-garden-update

Now that we're into winter, your planting options

Now that we're into winter, your planting options are slim. For readers in warm temperate climates, like Melbourne’s, there's still time to get some late broad beans or maybe some broccoli (particularly sprouting varieties) planted. Leafy greens such as spinach, silverbeet, kale and lettuce will also grow well over winter. Here's my guide to some of the things you could consider planting this month in a warm temperate climate like Melbourne’s.

My planting guide generally refers to vegetables planted in the garden (as opposed to a greenhouse). This planting may consist of seeds directly sown (my usual and preferred method) or plants transplanted as seedlings.

My Vegetable Patch from Scratch series is popular with novice and seasoned gardeners alike. It covers everything you might want to know about growing vegetables. It could save you a bit of time and frustration by steering you away from preventable crop failures.

https://leafrootfruit.substack.com/p/site-analysis-where-to-put-the-vegetable-patch

🎉Hooray for more workshops! Announcing some new

🎉Hooray for more workshops!

Announcing some new workshops for the second half of 2026

Early bookings guarantee you a spot and help me to plan more workshops. To sweeten the deal, until 7 June 2026 you can get early bird pricing on all newly listed workshops.

✂ Fruit Tree Pruning: Gain the confidence to tackle those fruit trees.
Friday 24 July
➡ https://site.corsizio.com/event/6a1638f7ab66dc30049c2ad8

🍎Espalier: Create your own garden masterpiece.
Friday 7 August
➡ https://site.corsizio.com/event/6a163403ab66dc30049b0fe5

🌿Controlling Weeds Naturally: Spend less time weeding and more time enjoying your garden.
Friday 4 September
➡ https://site.corsizio.com/event/6a1644f6ab66dc30049dd747

My gardening workshops are unlike anything else offered in Melbourne or Central Victoria. Designed to give you the knowledge, skills and confidence to manage your garden independently, they’re grounded in local conditions and scientific evidence.

See all my upcoming events here:
➡ https://www.leafrootfruit.com.au/upcoming-workshops/

It’s been just over three years since I first disc

It’s been just over three years since I first discovered Queensland fruit fly in my orchard. I’ve been through a huge spectrum of emotions in my journey to understand and deal with this pest. From depression to optimism, from frustration to empowerment, I’ve felt it all. I’ve also researched. A lot. But research can take you only so far and I’m keenly observing my orchard from year to year, recording data and trying to connect the dots.

I set up my five male-biased traps in December 2025 and placed them in locations spread across the property.

And I waited

And I checked. And I waited. And I checked. Every week I checked.

And I didn’t observe any Queensland fruit fly. Not a single fly. I didn’t see any maggots in my fruit. No sting holes. In 2026, I saw no evidence of Queensland fruit fly anywhere in my garden.

It was a delight. A relief. A joy. So much fruit-fly-free fruit. I felt confident to once again share my bounty with friends and family. I gave away bags, boxes and crates of fruit. Hundreds of kilos of fruit.

For Victorians, there is still much to be understood about this novel pest. You can read my take on the Queensland fruit fly season in 2026 and what I learnt here:
https://leafrootfruit.substack.com/p/queensland-fruit-fly-2026-update-central-victoria

What about you? Was your fruit infested with Queensland fruit fly?

🌞 Summer sensations saved in a seed! This month I

🌞 Summer sensations saved in a seed!

This month I’ve been busy saving seed from some of my summer crops. It feels like every surface is adorned with boxes of mature produce or drying seed heads awaiting processing. Old pillowcases of lettuce seed heads, chicken pellet bags of mustard greens and kale heads, jars of fermenting tomato seeds and a tray of papayadew seeds spread out to dry. Two giant zucchini from my very productive “Black Jack” and crates of tough old landrace cucumbers await seed harvesting.

Some vegetables are more suited to seed saving than others. Many of the cucurbits are not likely to come out true to type, but I’m saving them anyway. They’re part of my journey into the unknown – surprise gardening!

Read more about seed saving in these Vegetable Patch from Scratch articles:

Seed saving: what varieties to save seeds from
➡https://leafrootfruit.substack.com/p/seed-saving-what-varieties-to-save

How to save seeds for planting next year
➡https://leafrootfruit.substack.com/p/how-to-save-heirloom-seeds-for-planting

How to test the germination rate of your saved seeds and store them
➡https://leafrootfruit.substack.com/p/saving-seed-storage-germination-rate

Planting some fruit trees this winter? There are

Planting some fruit trees this winter?

There are still spaces available for my upcoming backyard orchards workshop on Saturday 20 June in Kyneton. Come along and learn more about designing, planning and maintaining your backyard orchard. During the workshop I’ll conduct a tour of my orchard and highlight what’s worked well, and what I’d do differently next time.

➡ https://site.corsizio.com/event/692796a5e5df27d0b0422474

🍊 Citrus season full steam ahead 🚂 Lemon trees ty

🍊 Citrus season full steam ahead 🚂

Lemon trees typically ripen some fruit all year round because they flower and produce multiple crops throughout the year. But oranges, limes and mandarins have a specific season. In Melbourne, May is the start of citrus season. Provided you kept the water up to your trees this summer, you can expect an abundance of ripening fruit over the next three months. You should also expect to see plenty of blossom forming. It takes around 12 months for this blossom to develop into fruit.

I’m observing different annual growth patterns of citrus here in Kyneton. My orange and mandarin trees tend to ripen months later than they would if they were growing in Melbourne. My lemon tree produces all year round and the Tahitian lime has a huge crop every year from around June until November. I’m in for a solid harvest of oranges and mandarins this year, but I’ll need to wait a bit longer than Melbourne based growers to enjoy them.

It’s interesting that even though the ripening time of oranges in Kyneton is very different from the time in Melbourne, my finger limes continue to ripen at the same time as they did in the city. Read more about the challenges of growing citrus in a cool temperate climate like mine here.
➡ https://leafrootfruit.substack.com/p/growing-citrus-in-a-cool-temperate-climate

I also have a five-part guide to growing citrus that covers everything from typical ripening times to planting and pruning citrus trees. Read part one here.
➡ https://www.leafrootfruit.com.au/citrus-varieties-melbourne/

I stopped checking the weather forecast for days.

I stopped checking the weather forecast for days. That’s unheard-of. But for a while there, every day of the seven-day forecast seemed exactly the same. The last 10 days of April were stunners – warm, calm and rain-free. Hardly a breath of wind. Perfect picnic weather. Perfect for mosaic burning. Perfect for pottering in the garden. Perfect for sitting in the afternoon sun and reading. All that perfection was thanks to a blocking high sitting stubbornly over the Tasman Sea. The high-pressure system acts like a shield, fending off oncoming weather systems and pushing them south of us. In Victoria, these weather systems most commonly occur in autumn and lead to long periods of stable weather.

Earlier in April, during the school holidays, my family and I travelled west to Broome. April is Marrul, or dragonfly season, in Broome. It’s a transition period from the wet season of summer to the winter dry. During this transition period, the weather is hot, and the humidity almost unbearable. Despite the oppressive, sticky heat, our Top End break was fantastic. We soaked up the pearling history of Broome, walked in the footprints of dinosaurs, watched the monster tides come and go, came face to face with huge prehistoric-looking crocs, and swam until the kids’ fingers turned wrinkly. But on our return to the east, after all that humidity, I truly appreciated the relaxed and mild vibes of late April in Kyneton.

The leaves on the claret ash and pin oak trees are fully into autumn mode. The former are now settling a carpet of leaves on the gravel, temporarily hiding the weeds and providing a sense of organised calm. The ornamental pears have recently begun their visual outburst. At the end of the day, as the sun drops, golden hour turns my garden into a wonderland of rich colour. I love this time of the year.

Read the rest of my FREE garden update here:
https://leafrootfruit.substack.com/p/may-2026-planting-guide-garden-update

Thanks to the run of warm weather at the end of Ap

Thanks to the run of warm weather at the end of April, the cabbage white butterflies are still flitting about in large numbers. I’ve kept my brassica crops covered with insect netting to stop the butterflies from landing and laying eggs on them.

The broccoli is going gangbusters and we’re enjoying plenty in our dinners. Earlier in April, masses of cabbage aphids (Brevicoryne brassicae) infested all of the brassicas. They made themselves at home on the backs of the leaves and up inside the broccoli heads. But the silver lining of the heavy frost was that it entirely wiped out the aphids.

Rodent numbers remain high, and I’m expecting to wander out to the patch one morning and find that they’ve suddenly destroyed plenty of broccoli heads. This has happened in the previous two autumns. As the summer vegetable harvest ends, the rodents who have bred up in a time of abundance go looking for alternative food sources. Apparently, broccoli is the next best thing to sweet corn.

For folks in warmer climates, like Melbourne’s, there’s still time to plant a late crop of broccoli and cauliflower. The cabbage whites should dwindle over the next week or so and the seedlings should be able to establish with few caterpillars munching on them.

How to Grow Broccoli
➡ https://leafrootfruit.substack.com/p/how-to-grow-broccoli

How to Grow Cauliflower
➡ https://leafrootfruit.substack.com/p/how-to-grow-cauliflowers

Bookending a very short story... There are lots o

Bookending a very short story...

There are lots of ways to measure a summer (apparently observing only one swallow isn’t one of them). In this part of the world, summer officially starts on the first of December and ends on the last day of February. In most other countries, it’s the solstices and equinoxes that determine the start and the end of the seasons. Many Indigenous folks around the world use phenology. But if we consider visits from Jack Frost the bookends of the growing season, then this summer growing season has been a short one indeed.

This summer’s frost-free period was 24 days shorter than last summer’s. That’s over three weeks less growing time. Three weeks fewer tomatoes. But on the flip side, three weeks less of a zucchini glut. Each summer is different. This time last year we were still waiting for rain. It was incredibly dry, and despite the lack of frost, the garden struggled anyway.

It is the first time I’ve calculated and reviewed the length of the growing season in this format. I now understand why our first summer in 2019–20, after moving up from Melbourne, seemed like such a big slap in the face. Kyneton summers are brutally short compared to what I was used to. And my first summer in Kyneton was the shortest I’ve experienced. At the end of that growing season I realised that I needed to re-learn gardening all over again. If we had moved here a year or two later, the change in climate might not have seemed so extreme. That final frost on 27 November 2019 was a big kick in the bum but a helpful learning curve. My tomato seedlings weren’t killed by the frost (they were protected with insect netting) but it sure set them back.

A short, sharp growing season for my first in summer really calibrated my expectations. Now with seven growing seasons under my belt, I know what to expect, but also to be prepared for anything. Outliers can happen any time.

What will next summer bring? I can’t wait to find out.

Read the rest of my FREE garden update here: https://leafrootfruit.substack.com/p/may-2026-planting-guide-garden-update

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