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Christmas Tomatoes November 25 2023

Published July 23, 2024 at dimensions 675 × 540 in How to Grow a Christmas Tomato without a Greenhouse.

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Our family doesn’t eat much garlic, but I like t

Our family doesn’t eat much garlic, but I like to grow it so we have a bit on hand. I add cloves to some of my passata, and use it in my cucumber pickles. Plus, it is such an easy crop to grow.

I grow a hard neck garlic, but I have no idea what variety it is. It’s normally quite resilient, but the last two years it has suffered from rust. This is a fungal disease that is exacerbated by high humidity. The fungus hampers the growth of the plant, and it can reduce yields. Despite the rust outbreaks, I’ve still managed to harvest decent crops.

To manage this disease, folks will often advocate for sourcing new, disease-free cloves to plant, and avoid planting where affected crops have grown in the past. But I’m not convinced. So last year I planted garlic saved from the rust-affected plants. The rust returned, but I’m not sure if it was the high rainfall in spring that influenced this. Would planting disease-free cloves have resulted in the same outcome?

So this year I’m trying something else. My neighbour Bruce grows wonderful garlic crops just 200 metres from where mine have succumbed to rust. He’s kindly offered me some of his garlic to grow alongside mine. I’m intrigued to see what will happen:
• Will the rust spread from mine to his? That would tell me I’d need to avoid planting infected crops again and source disease-free garlic to plant in future years.
• Will the plants grown from my garlic succumb, but plants grown from his stay resistant? Genetics are the key to avoiding many diseases, and avoiding rust in garlic is possibly no different.
• Will the spring remain dry and both crops remain rust free? This would indicate that environmental conditions have the biggest impact.
• Isolated in his own garden, but growing in similar environmental conditions to my crops, will Bruce’s plants remain disease free?

The answer to these questions will help me to better understand and manage the rust fungus. I’ll report back to you next spring – stay tuned.

In the meantime, check out for my guide to planting garlic:
➡head to my Substack to read it

The second batch of pesto is in the freezer. Maki

The second batch of pesto is in the freezer.

Making pesto is so easy. This is my recipe:
https://www.leafrootfruit.com.au/duncans-basil-pesto-pasta/

The tomato season is slowly ending. I’ve picked

The tomato season is slowly ending. I’ve picked masses of tomatoes this year but the glut still hasn’t been enough to satisfy me. I love eating tomatoes.

One of my favourite ways to eat them is in a Caprese salad. There’s many different versions of a Caprese Salad and this is mine:
🍅 Sliced tomatoes
🌿 Freshly picked basil leaves
🧀 Baby bocconcini
🍾Drizzled with balsamic vinegar

Yum!

🏆My favourite tomatoes this year have been Wapsipinicon Peach, Black Cherry and Earl of Edgecombe.

❓What have been your standout tomato varieties this year and what’s your favourite way to eat them?

🧄My garlic crop has been planted! 🧑‍🌾

🧄My garlic crop has been planted!

🧑‍🌾 Growing garlic is super easy. Cultivate the soil well. They are light feeding plants (more on this in Part 19 of the Vegetable Patch from Scratch) so DON’T add any nitrogen rich fertilisers or compost. It will likely lead to all sorts of problems, such as witch's broom garlic.

💪 Always choose your biggest garlic bulbs for planting. Break them up into individual cloves and pick the biggest of these (smaller cloves are best used in cooking).

🔝Plant them pointy end up, a few centimetres deep into the soil. I planted mine in rows about 25 cm apart, with an inter row spacing of about 15cm. Other folks recommend tighter planting spacing. I don’t think it matters a great deal.

💦 Water them in, but after that, the winter rainfall should be adequate. Garlic is a low maintenance crop. The plants don’t need much care other than to keep the weeds at bay – they hate competition. Mulching with straw or something similar will help to keep the weeds suppressed.

📆It’s important to remember that garlic takes a long time to reach maturity. It is not harvested until well into summer. Avoid planting it in a space you’ve earmarked for planting out in spring, or you’ll find your patch ends up double booked.

👀 Read my guide to growing garlic on my Substack

Looking for something different to grow? Cucamleon

Looking for something different to grow? Cucamleons are great for engaging children in the garden. Some folks find the fruit a bit polarising. You either love them or hate them. I‘m indifferent, give me a Lebanese cucumber any day, but the kids love them.

Angus insists on growing them in his garden bed every year. They make a great snack, harvested right there in the garden. In this instance, a quick pit stop while riding his bike.

Cucmaleons are easy to grow. They’ll quickly ramble up a trellis. My biggest bug bear is that they take forever to start producing (usually late February is when I harvest the first fruit) and then dump an almighty glut on us for a few weeks before dying back.

Read more about growing cucamelons here: https://www.leafrootfruit.com.au/cucamelons-melbourne/

I love gardening for the stories that it shares. T

I love gardening for the stories that it shares. This peach has a great story of connection and growth. It’s our Angus peach.

Many years ago, my son Angus and I discovered a young peach seedling in one of our raised vegetable beds. It must have germinated from a seed lying dormant in the compost or worm farm.

Angus has always loved digging up and transplanting seedlings. They’re trended with much care and a fantastic dollop of watering in. But his enthusiasm for gardening is sometimes a bit too strong and this results in poor young self-sown calendula or dill seedings changing position in the garden every few weeks.

The Angus peach seedling was carefully dug up and planted in his ‘teepee garden’. I helped him with soil preparation and installed the drip irrigation. He did all the plant selection and planting on his own.

Fast forward a few years and Angus’s teepee garden is no longer. Most of the plants were annuals that died and the few perennials relocated as part of the major development that I did in that area in 2021. However, the peach tree remained. It was conveniently located in one of my future Edible Forest Garden beds so it could stay.

The tree is one of the most curly leaf susceptible peaches that I know of. But I wondered at the quality of the fruit (at this early stage we still weren’t sure if it was a peach or a nectarine). So I let it grow in the hope that Angus could one day taste one of his peaches. The tree is still there, but it keeps blocking the pathway, so it often receives a severe haircut. Its days are numbered.

However, I wanted to honour Angus’s efforts with the tree. So together we grafted a branch onto a fruit salad tree. That graft has taken well and the branch that has grown from it produced a small crop of peaches this year. Interestingly, the original tree is still yet to set a single fruit.

I’ve been watching these ripening peaches closely, mostly because I expect to see an outbreak of Queensland Fruit Fly in them. Last week the first ripe peach dropped from the tree. They are ready.

But the most interesting part of this story… That first ripe peach fell on Angus’s 8th birthday. We couldn’t believe it!

Don't you be teasing me now, BOM. #prayingforrain

Don't you be teasing me now, BOM.

#prayingforrain #prettyplease #wereallyneedthis

⌛Time is running out… ✂ To summer prune yo

⌛Time is running out…

✂ To summer prune your stone fruit trees.

🍂 Deciduous trees reverse their sap flow during autumn. They draw sap and nutrients from their leaves back down into the branches, trunk and roots of the plant. Pruning a tree when the sap flow is running towards the ground can “suck” pathogens such as bacteria and fungi into the tree’s vascular system. This is something you want to avoid because it increases the likelihood of disease.

🍁 As soon as you see colour change on tree leaves, you know that the reversal of sap flow has already begun. At this point it’s too late to prune. You are better waiting until the tree breaks dormancy in spring. That way, the wounds will quickly heal and your tree should remain healthy.

🍒 This advice is especially important for apricot and cherry trees. They’re very susceptible to diseases introduced via pruning cuts. Prune these trees only when they are actively growing. Avoid pruning apricots and cherries from the point of leaf colour change in autumn until bud burst in spring.

🏋‍♀Summer pruning of fruit trees promotes fruit production, whereas winter pruning promotes the growth of more foliage the following season and is more likely to introduce disease.

You can read more about pruning various fruit trees in my comprehensive guide.
➡https://www.leafrootfruit.com.au/guide-to-pruning-fruit-trees/

Warm temperate growers (including readers in Melbo

Warm temperate growers (including readers in Melbourne), it's time to get planting winter vegetables.

Cool temperate folks like me, your time is nearly up. Our growing season is much shorter here in central Victoria. The cold winters require brassica crops to be well established before the end of March. You might still be able to squeeze in a few last-minute crops of broccoli or cauliflower (just remember to protect them from Cabbage White Butterfly with netting), but if the cold sets in early they’ll struggle.

In my February garden update, I discussed my three successive crops of brassicas. Crop one is booming. I should see some broccoli heads beginning to develop any day now. Crop two suffered from some sporadic germination in the hot weather. But I have back-up seedlings growing in Hiko cells in the greenhouse to transplant into any gaps. I’ll be sowing brassica crop three later this week.

This broccoli plant, part of brassica crop one, is well established. It will explode in growth and develop a head during March.

After planting brassica crop three, I’ll focus on planting my broad beans and garlic and then relax knowing that the planting season is over for another year.

Check out my autumn planting guide for more information on growing winter vegetables.:
https://www.leafrootfruit.com.au/autumn-planting-guide-melbourne/

❓Other than watering, what else can be done to s

❓Other than watering, what else can be done to support my drought stressed plants?

Surviving drought stress is not just about keeping the water up to your plants. If water is scarce at your place, there are a few other tricks you can use to help nurse trees through these tough times:
• Mulching, mulching, mulching. Adding a thick layer of mulch can help to retain soil moisture. Of course, there’s no point adding it to already parched soil. Give the tree a good, deep drink first, and then add the mulch to help seal it in.
• The wind rather than the sun has the biggest impact on drying out soil moisture. Look for ways to set up windbreaks.
• A haircut is a great way to reduce the amount of foliage a plant has. Most of the plant’s water loss is via the leaves. Fewer leaves = less water loss. Pruning a tree is a (sometimes drastic) way to help support the tree through this tough time.

I’ve never watered these two lemon trees. They grow alongside the shed. Citrus need a lot of water to thrive, but these trees are usually fine without any watering help from me. They survive by thieving water from the raised beds in the nearby kitchen garden. Last week the two trees suddenly started dropping masses of lemons, many of which were soft and spongy. It indicated that the trees were drought stressed. So I quickly gave them a big drink of water (fresh, not bore). They were also due for a haircut, so I took to them with the hedge trimmer. This tough love should help them to cope until the rains return.

Wow – where did last week go? I’d love to say

Wow – where did last week go? I’d love to say I spent it reading books, but I didn’t even do that. It just vanished into a black hole of nothingness.

Oh wait, now I remember. Watering. I’ve been bloody watering all week, trying to keep my trees alive.

Last week, in one single session of power irrigation, I dumped approximately 20,000 litres of water onto the ground in less than three hours – that’s a lot of water! (For context, each of the black tanks in image two holds 33,000 L of water.)

But, I hear you ask, surely you have an irrigation system to take care of the watering? And you’d be right. I do have an irrigation system. It’s a fully automatic, wi-fi enabled, solenoid controlled drip system that can adjust the watering based on recent weather observations and the forecast. I couldn’t manage a garden of this scale without it.

Running in the background, my irrigation system has done a wonderful job of keeping my productive garden thriving. Most of the ornamental garden beds around the house are also protected from the dry by this system. Other than checking for leaks and monitoring tank levels, irrigation is largely a set and forget affair in my garden.

But last week I needed to turn my attention to the large established trees on the property. At that point, many of these trees had never received a single drop of water from me in our six years here. They’re resilient, they’re established and they get by on what falls from the sky alone. Having an irrigation system under these trees would be a waste of time and money. But last week, the ornamental pears started to change colour, their upper leaves wilting in the heat.

They are putting on their autumn show six weeks earlier than usual. This stage of the display is normally seen in mid-April, not at the end of February. It’s a sure sign that the trees aren’t coping with the drought stress.

We’re fortunate to have a reliable supply of water and I’m not afraid to use it. I flooded the ground under the trees with torrents of bore water. The trees perked up within 24 hours of the deluge and I’ll continue to monitor them closely.

How is your garden coping with the long and dry summer?

✅ My to-do list for March Until it rains, I’l

✅ My to-do list for March

Until it rains, I’ll continue to wrestle hoses. I’ll also be busy in early March planting broad beans and garlic crops. Here are a few of the other tasks I’ll be doing in March:

🍎 Picking boxes of apples, pears and nashi. I’ll dry some of the apples because the kids love them, but otherwise I’m not going to be doing much in the way of preserving this year – I still have plenty left in store from last year. Any excess fruit will be given away or composted. I’ll continue my summer pruning regime once each tree has been harvested.
🌿 I gave the basil a severe haircut in mid-February and turned it into pesto. The plants are now bouncing back with a second flush of growth that will be pesto bound in around a fortnight.
🪰 I’ll make daily patrols of the orchard to help control my Queensland Fruit Fly outbreak. I’m specifically looking for ripening fruit to pick before it falls to the ground. I’m also looking for tell-tale sting holes in fruit that indicate the presence of the maggots. Any infested fruit is frozen and then fed to the chickens.
🌽 As summer crops such as sweet corn finish, I’ll remove them and plant green manure crops in their place. This helps to improve the soil and support a healthy soil food web over the winter. I’ll be using a mix of lupins, broad beans, peas, mustard greens and any other spare seeds that I have lying around.
⛏ March is peak European wasp season. I’ve noticed a few wasps about already, and their numbers tend to explode in March. They hassle the beehives as the bees are preparing their stores for winter. The aggressive wasps can also affect native insect populations. When I locate a wasp nest, I don my bee suit, grab a shovel or mattock and make nocturnal assaults to destroy the colony.
🍅 Towards the end of the month, I’ll make my first batch of passata.

📖Check out my latest garden update to find out more about what's happening in my garden and what tasks you should be taking care of this month.

➡link in bio

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