The Desert Echo

PRE-SPRING FRUITS – DAMPENING-OFF & PROPAGATION

October 14, 2012 2 Comments

Cold, wet and sickly – that’s no way to start life. Neither is wrenching for the light, dizzy with bleach fumes, roots clawing through lifeless soil.

Close up of a chamomile plant leaves and flowers

When you don’t believe in nuking soil to remove the bad bacteria and fungi or bleaching the hell out of your pots, you have to accept that whilst protecting the good guys in your soil you are also keeping the baddies. (I’ll be honest my decision is based as much around my own laziness as it is about the delicate ecosytems involves, really who can be bothered baking soil for an hour?!)

In the damp coolness of Pre-Spring you might despair as seeds fail to germinate, seedlings wither with yellowing leaves or worse a healthy green seedling suddenly rots at the base and topples over.

But it’s not your fault, it’s Dampening-Off! Wicked fungi that thrive in these conditions and rot your seeds and seedlings, before they have a chance. The solution is not sterilising with chemicals or blasting with heat (sterile and seeds just don’t make sense) The solution is as easy as making Chamomile Tea!

Watering your seed trays with diluted chamomile tea which has steeped overnight and again when the seedlings emerge can stop dampening off. It has natural anti-fungal properties and more importantly whilst it does not destroy all the fungi in the soil, it contains magnesium which not only aids germination by breaking down the natural enzyme inhibitors surrounding the seed, but also is integral to photosynthesis producing more resilient plants that are more resistant to disease.

Fresh leaves are meant to be better than flowers as they have more magnesium, so whilst tea bags will probably work if you can get a hold of a plant that would be best.

Chamomile tea brew in glass bottle

Chamomile tea brew sitting ourside in sun

Chamomile tea brew sitting in window sill

Sowing seeds for tomato experiment in plastic bottle greenhouse/pot

Tomato Experiment

As well as testing out my Plastic Juice Bottle Greenhouses my Tomato experiment is meant as a step-by-step way to test when to sow and plant out tomatoes in your local area for optimum results.

I want to test to see if tomatoes sown later really catch up to those planted later, and if adding beneficial bacteria to the soil really works!

I chose not to use cherry tomatoes in the experiment because really that would be too easy.

What: Tomato Periforme Abruzzo
Why: Good slicing or cooking tomato
Where: Heirloom seeds from Diggers Club, to be planted for The Tomato Experiment
When: Packet expires DEC 2012 so planted 4 seeds in each pot
How: Plastic Juice Bottle Greenhouses, placed in polystyrene boxes on north facing verandah

Sowing capsicum mini sweet and eggplant listada di gandia seeds in punnets

Sprawing solanaceae seed punnets with chamomile tea to prevent dampening-off, plastic bag covers tray to act as greenhouse

What: Eggplant Listada Di Gandia
Why: Early maturing extending the fruiting season. Small, delicious with pretty striped fruit
Where: Heirloom seeds from Diggers Club, to be planted in my Crop Rotation Plot
When: Packet expires OCT 2013
How: 6 seeds in a punnet sitting in a metal roasting tray with a plastic bag over the top to act as a greenhouse

What: Capsicum Mini Sweet Mix
Why: Had far more success with the mini varieties than their larger cousins. Produced through Winter!
Where: Heirloom seeds from Diggers Club, to be planted in my Crop Rotation Plot
When: Packet expires MAR 2014
How: 6 seeds in a punnet sitting in a metal roasting tray with a plastic bag over the top to act as a greenhouse

What: Chilli Joes Long Cayenne
Why: Packet expired, no luck in past, just threw them all in to see if they would germinate.
Where: Heirloom seeds from Diggers Club, to be planted in my Crop Rotation Plot
When: Packet expires OCT 2011
How: Seeds in a punnet sitting in a metal roasting tray with a plastic bag over the top to act as a greenhous

What: Tomato Purple Russian
Why: Early fruiting variety.
Where: Saved from the garden last year, between two paper serviettes, to be planted in my Crop Rotation Plot
When: Saved MAR 2012 from tomatoes sown last year from Diggers Club
How: Tray on north facing window sill with wet newspaper underneath to prevent drying out. Interesting to see how compares to tomatoes grown in juice bottle greenhouses.

For more information on dampening-off and natural remedies please check out Easy Organic Gardening by Lyn Bagnall it’s amazing!

Travel

A CAMPSITE BY A LAKE

October 9, 2012 No Comments

Walking around the lake, driftwood and leafless shrubs

Stones around Lake St Clair, rounded by the swirling waters

Clouds of fog reflected in Lake St Clair, Tasmania

Dylan looking for fish and platypus in Lake St Clair

Banksia seed cone, Lake St Clair, Tasmania

Sweet little Paddymelon near the Lake St Clair campground

Strange fungus, lichen, growing on tree trunks

Dylan fishing in the river, Lake St Clair

Dylan under the bridge over the river at Lake St Clair, Tasmania

Deciduous beech tree by the river, the only deciduous Australian tree

Edible Pink Mountain Berries are bush tucker in Tasmania

We’re back from a beautiful spring holiday in Tasmania and there is so much to tell you, I’m quite overwhelmed by how many posts I have planned and how many photos I have to wade through! I have so much to tell you!

We worked to a deadline, and then in a flurry of papers bid a cheery sayonara to our colleagues and took off to meet the Spirit of Tasmania. As we hummed and whirred across the Strait the nautical novelty began wore off and we bundled ourselves upstairs with the ghosts. We just had to escape the layer of modern tackiness of poker machines and overpriced, greasy food. The way up to the top deck is hidden away and only a dozen people out of hundreds found their way up there. The little empty stage and wooden benches were from another era, the flickering soundless TVs adding to the forsaken feel.

The water raged against the ship, cold, dark and scary until morning.

The sun rose behind grey skies and we drove and drove, away from the city, past farms and tree stumps, to a wild and windswept campsite by Lake St Clair, walking distance from a not so wild cultural centre with all the amenities one could wish. Darling Paddymelons were our neighbours, so fat and furry, and cute cute cute. A baby quoll ran across our path by torch light as the fire in the hut crackled. Tomorrow would be an epic bush walk…

Garden

COMPANION PLANTING – CALENDULA & MARIGOLD

September 15, 2012 7 Comments

Orange Calendula Flowers

Yellow marigold flower growing in painted tin can

The very hungry caterpillar does his grocery shopping by scent and silhouette. The European vegetable patch, everything in neat little rows, is his ultimate convenience store. The snail can just slime along that generous aisle between vegetables and mow down each snow pea it comes to. One, two, three!

Let’s not make it too easy for them shall we?

You need to fill those gaps with companion planting! We want to propagate veggies not pests! There is no room for bare earth in my tomato bed this year!

Let’s begin by sowing seeds of Calendula and Marigold.

The Desert Echo's Tomato Companion Planting Chart with sowing times

To crawl amongst these flowers is, for a bug, like the overwhelming stench of a department store perfume floor, that sweet essence of tomato leaf gets lost amongst the confusing odours and they flee, overwhelmed.

French marigolds in particular are known to deter the nematode, those transparent, millimetre long worms that carelessly multiply in your soil spreading bacteria and viruses, leaving behind them a trail of disfigured and useless tomato roots.

The repellent effect of the substances exuded from their roots is meant to last several years after the plant has been long dead.

Whiteflies tend to plague tomato plants, quivering merrily under each leaf in shimmering clouds. Tiny sucker mouths by the thousand cause young growth to deform and wilt and fruits to become disfigured. Happily marigolds deter these nasties, whilst Calendula gallantly act as a decoy crop attracting them away from the precious tomatoes.

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Garden

THE TOMATO EXPERIMENT – HOW TO MAKE A PLASTIC BOTTLE GREENHOUSE

September 12, 2012 4 Comments

It begins…

with your overflowing recycling bin and a sigh of shame that you are not doing enough to be sustainable. But be warned what begins as a wholesome notion to re-use can quickly escalate and before you know it you’re that crazy lady

looking at the neighbours’ bins with a twitching desire to rummage through them for treasures.
It’s best to dial it back a notch at this point and stick to finding alternate job descriptions for your own rubbish, we can’t all be Tiffany Sedaris.

And besides when you have five housemates you have plenty of material to keep you busy.
The youngest drinks at least one 3L plastic bottle of orange juice a week, two if there are no bottles of coke in the fridge, that’s over 52 binned a year!

They might be recycled into the latest in green bag technology or a jazzy promotional hat, but I’m sure that comes at a huge energy cost. It seemed like a waste, so I started thinking about what else I could do with them…

Autumn came and it brought with it a slimy army of snowpea killers! I sliced the bottom off the juice bottle and dug it into the soil to became an impenetrable snail guard. The peas climbed upwards and their salvation became their prison as they clawed at the closed bottle lid. I set them free with a twist and the snails savaged them with a crunch.
I retaliated, slicing the top off the bottle as well and added another, then another bottle, stacking them to form a tower, the peas grew tall and strong and when they were released the snails turned up their nose at the strong tough stems and didn’t think to crawl upwards to the tender shoots.
The weather cooled and the bottles doubled as greenhouse to encourage young lettuces to be sweet while their unbottled neighbours grew world weary and bitter.
And now we come to the current day, the weather has mellowed and soon I will need to start planting my tomato seeds and I thought…

tomatoes despise being transplanted almost as much as they hate the cold, dry soil and wet feet!

Coupled with a general lazy attitude toward fiddly potting on, the bottle greenhouse was born!

Now we finally come to my experiment (Don’t you hate it when people take ages to get to the point? Ha!).

The “pot”

is a bottle with the top and bottom removed and is filled 3/4 with potting soil, then a piece of damp newspaper and 1/4 of seed raising mix. After this has settles the seeds are planted in the top in the more friable, low nutrient soil, when the roots are large enough to break through the thin paper they get a boost from the more nutrient rich potting soil.

A half bottle cut length wise is

the water “tray”

at the base. The “pot” is placed in the “tray” before it is filled which prevents the soil from falling out. Then from the top the soil is well watered until the water pools in the tray. While the seed settles the soil moisture levels will stabilise so it is neither too dry or too wet, if it is hot additional water may have to be added to the tray before planting. When the seeds go in the top should be gently misted and the tray filled with water.

The seeds won’t be washed away by overenthusiastic water spray and the water in the tray will slowly wick up through the soil to the developing seedling’s roots as it needs it.
Even it hotter weather the tray doesn’t have to be filled everyday so you are free to leave your nursery for a long weekend beach break without coming home to crispy reminders of what could have been. It will also encourage deep roots, which are preperable as shallow roots are more likely to dry out when planted in the garden.

A bottomless bottle acts as

the “greenhouse”

in cooler weather it keeps heat in and as it warms up it prevents too much moisture loss. Ventilation is important as the soil can get mouldy so the top can be left off. If pests are a problem the lid can be left on and small ventilation holes pierced around the bottle neck, too small for a slug.
When it comes time to transplant the “pot” can be gently buried, the roots undisturbed grow out the bottom into the soil with no transplant shock. The tomato experiment? More about that soon…

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