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autumn planting guide

Published March 2, 2015 at dimensions 1024 × 252 in Autumn Planting Guide For Melbourne.

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🏇 Giddy up, tomorrow it’s the Melbourne Cup

🏇 Giddy up, tomorrow it’s the Melbourne Cup

🍅 There’s so much different advice about when is the best time to plant tomatoes. Some folks say AFL Grand Final weekend is a fantastic early start (the last weekend of September) and I agree that for Melbourne it’s an okay time to plant.

🌡 Others advocate for patience and waiting another month or so for the soil to warm up (my Fool’s Garden Experiment is a great example of why patience is a good strategy).

🏆 Regardless, in southern Australia, the first week of November is usually a good time to get planting. Coincidently, many of us Victorians have a public holiday on the first Tuesday in November for the running of the Melbourne Cup, or as I like to think of it, a day off work to do some gardening.

❄️ In my part of the world, the risk of a late frost is always lingering, but I can’t sit around waiting for the perfect conditions to arrive. My growing season is very short and it’s time to get cracking or I’ll miss the boat.

🌱 Tomorrow, I’ll be getting my salad tomatoes planted. I’ll be planting them deep, although I’m still not convinced that it make much of a difference. My tomato seedlings are looking lush and healthy, far better than last year’s plants at the same time. That’s because I’ve been paying closer attention to them this year and making sure that they were potted up in time. All the seedlings are flowering, and many have fruit set on them. I’m not sure that I’ll beat last year’s very early first tomato harvest (November 25) but I’m definitely on track to harvest a few Christmas tomatoes.

Are you planting your tomatoes tomorrow? Are they already in? Or will you wait a bit longer?

➡ Head to the Leaf, Root & Fruit website to read my guide to growing great tomatoes.

#melbournecup #tomatotime #springplanting #vegetablepatch

☁👀 It's shaping up to be another great day fo

☁👀 It's shaping up to be another great day for cloud watching today.

🍅 It's also going to be a cracking day for getting stuck into some gardening. I'll be clearing preparing some garden beds in anticipation of some Cup Day tomato and other summer vegetable planting such as zucchini and sweet corn. 🌽🌱

📋 For a full list of what you can plant now, how to go about it and what varieties to choose, see my Spring Planting Guide:
➡ https://www.leafrootfruit.com.au/spring-planting-guide-for-melbourne/

Peekaboo! This slithery friend was hiding in just

Peekaboo!

This slithery friend was hiding in just 10cm of grass. It was nearly impossible to spot until I almost stepped on it. I've seen heaps of snakes around the place this spring. Far more than usual at this time of the year. So I'm really watching where I step.

I’m focusing on whipper snipping any long grass and tidying up the place to reduce snake habitat around the house and the areas where the kids play the most. This all goes hand in hand with preparing the property for fire season.

The kids are well versed in sticking to paths, walking not running (although often need reminding) and watching where they walk. They're pretty good at spotting them and know what to do when they do. Stand still and then, when safe to do so, they carefully back away and find an adult.

The snake bite bandages are stashed in strategic locations.

Have you spotted any snakes yet this spring?

#snakes #kyneton #snakeseason #friendnotfoe

🍓 Look what I just found! There’s only a few

🍓 Look what I just found!

There’s only a few, but they indicate that a summer of berry abundance is not very far away.

Last year, I picked over 26 kg of strawberries. This was down slightly from the year previous (30 kg)

Some folks advocate for replacing their strawberry plants every second year. The assumption is that yields decline with time.

I’m not convinced.

Yes, the yield dropped last summer. But only slightly, and this could have been due to the wet summer that we had. All that rain made conditions perfect for slugs. Slug damaged fruit is launched straight over the fence where the chickens devour them. It isn’t weighed and doesn’t count towards my tally.

I’m really interested to see if this year, the downward trend continues, or if my 54 plants produce around 30kg again? Perhaps they’ll produce even more!

These plants were planted in spring 2021. Since then, they’ve been watered well, but that’s it. I haven’t fertilised them at all. I would, if I could, but my planting method doesn’t allow access to do this. They are thriving on water alone. What’s your take on growing strawberries? Do you replace the plants every few years? Or just let them do their thing?

❓ Now the burning question… do I tell the kids? Or just gobble these three strawbs without a word?

#homegrownstrawberries #berrytime #BeatTheBirds #gardeningwithchildren

Spike is up to no good again. I heard a commotion

Spike is up to no good again.

I heard a commotion in the chicken coop and went to investigate. Spike had found himself in the chicken run and decided that the nest box was the play to be. Biscuit and some of the other girls were not amused. Once Spike ventured out into the yard he created quite a bit of interest and the girls followed him everywhere he went.

Echidnas are monotremes, an ancient link in the evolution of mammals. Once widespread, there are now only two types of monotremes alive today, the platypus and echidnas. Monotremes are the only mammals that lay eggs. But this is getting a bit ridiculous

Spike, the girls are not happy, you’re holding up the queue for the nest box.

#kyneton #echidna #chickenantics #commotion

🥶We had a mild frost last this morning and I'm

🥶We had a mild frost last this morning and I'm kind of relieved about it.

I record a lot of data about my garden. Events such as:
🌸The dates that different plants start to flower
🫘 When I sow seeds
🐦 Behavioural patterns of birds and animals
⛈ Weather events such as the first and last frost.

✏ Recording the last frost event of the year is tricky. I don't know it is the last frost event until several weeks down the track. So around the start of October I usually start to record every time there is a frost. Then in late December I can look back at my gardening diary and find the last frost entry in my diary.

😟 I was getting worried because we haven't had a frost for weeks and I hadn't been recording frost dates in September. I was wondering if I'd missed my chance to record the last frost date for 2024. Would there be a hole in my data set? Most importantly, that hole could be a significant one if it is really early.

Alas, this morning presented me with a bitterer sweet mild frost. If it is the last one for the year, then I haven't missed it.

Given the long term forecast, I wouldn't be surprised if this is the last frost date for 2024 in my garden. But I'm also taking no chances, my tomatoes will stay in the greenhouse for another fortnight.

For those interested the last frost dates for previous years in my garden are as follows:
27 NOV 2019
19 OCT 2020
16 NOV 2021
16 NOV 2022
25 OCT 2023

📖 Want to know more about recording data in your garden? Part 10 of the Vegetable Patch from Scratch explains the how and why. There's also some great templates for paid subscribers to download and use to record their own garden data set.

➡head to my Substack to read it.

Did you have a frost this morning?

#kyneton #lastfrost #jackfrost #gardendiary #gardenjournal

🌽🏃‍♀️ The sweet corn is off and racing

🌽🏃‍♀️ The sweet corn is off and racing. I’m planting five successive crops of sweet corn to grow over the summer. This means that in late summer and autumn I can harvest sweet corn over a much longer period than if I just grew one crop.

🌡 Compared to say tomatoes, sweet corn is more tolerant of cool soil, but in the past I’ve had issues with trying to get the seed to germinate in my earliest crops. So this year, I germinated crop # 1 in HIKO cells in the greenhouse. The germination rate was fantastic (dodgy seed was the main problem last year) and the seedlings quickly emerged.

🌱 I’ve since transplanted these seedlings into the market garden beds and sown crop two directly into the soil. The soil has warmed up considerably in the last fortnight, so I expect the directly sown seed to germinate well here too. But after last year’s shemozzle, I’ve also sown some back up seeds in HIKOs and placed them in the greenhouse.

📖 Read more about growing sweet corn in my How to Grow Guide:
➡ head to my Substack to read it.

#summervegetables #homegrown #springplanting #sweetcorn

It’s baaaaack The dreaded garlic rust is back a

It’s baaaaack

The dreaded garlic rust is back again this year. I’m not overly concerned though. It was severe last year too, and I still managed a great harvest from the plants.
Garlic Rust is a fungal disease that shows as orange spots or blisters on the leaves. It’s exacerbated by too much humidity. Lots of folks advocate for removing affected foliage, avoiding planting in the same spot etc. But when I had an outbreak of rust in 2023 I didn’t heed that advice and my crop was fine, despite the rust. The bulbs were big and healthy. They stored well and I planted them again in 2024. There was no sign of a rust reemergence in the subsequent crop until now.

I’m sure it’s the weather conditions that help or hinder rust outbreaks and there’s not much we can do to control them. It’s been a strange spring. Rainfall has been below average and I’d say that would normally reduce the amount of fungal diseases. But I’m noticing fungus outbreaks everywhere, from curly leaf on peaches and nectarines, mildew on the peas and now rust on the garlic.

Are you seeing any rampant fungal outbreaks this spring?

#homegrowngarlic #gardenproblems #humidity #FungalDisease

🍀 It must be our lucky day. Today my son Angus

🍀 It must be our lucky day. Today my son Angus and I moved the chickens and their tractor to a new patch of ground. In the process we stumbled across this small patch of four-leaf clovers (some of them even had five and six leaves). They were all growing on the one clover plant and facing south.

Angus loved collecting the supposedly lucky charms and has now put them in a flower press. He plans to make some greeting cards with them and give them away to friends and family.

From my understanding, four leaf clovers tend to occur in soil that is high in copper. But our native soil tends to be copper deficient. I wonder if this indicates that there’s elevated copper levels in this part of the orchard, or if there is something else at play?

#fourleafclover #luckyday #gardeningwithkids #shamrock

I'm watching my strawberry plants closely. I norma

I'm watching my strawberry plants closely. I normally don’t harvest many strawberries until November, but last year we harvested a few handfuls in the last fortnight of October. I’m hoping for the same again this year, but I'll need to be quick to beat the kids to them. The strawberry monsters are hungry!

Head to the Leaf, Root & Fruit website to read my guide to growing strawberries.

#strawberrymonster #backyardorchard #homegrownberries #strawberrypatch

Long term followers will realise that I’m a big

Long term followers will realise that I’m a big fan of recording all sorts of data about my garden. Doing so enables me to consolidate my observations and adapt my gardening practices to be a more efficient and successful gardener in a changing climate.

One way that I record data is by taking photos. In the first week of every month, I set aside a couple of hours to wander across the entire six-acre property and take hundreds of digital images with my SLR camera. I then download these images into a folder on my computer. Doing so means that I have a visual diary of my property every month for the last five-plus years.

Sometimes the kids join me on these jaunts. Often, they mimic me with a toy camera (see last image for the “camera” that they usually use). This month, four-year-old Emily joined me for much of the tour. She wanted to take some photos as well, so rather than share the SLR, I lent her my phone. Our kids don’t get much screen time at all, but they do occasionally have to step up to take photos of me for the newsletter and other blogs (and do it surprisingly well with very little direction). So, they are both familiar with using the camera on my phone.

I was really interested to see what images Emily took on her journey around the property. It was an opportunity to see what our garden looks like from a child’s perspective.

Emily took hundreds of photos. Some were blurry or had fingers across part of the lens. But many were also great. Some of the subjects she choose were obvious (eg Spike the Echidna) but others were more surprising. She honed in on quite a few different flowers that I didn’t give a second thought. Alpine strawberries and cape weed to list two. Some of her images showed how much the views for little people are impinged by fences and other barriers. It was a great insight for me. Next month I’ll let 7yo Angus have a go and see what he comes up with.

Here’s a small selection of some of the photos that she took. A child’s “behind the scenes” tour of our property.

🍅 My tomato seedlings in the greenhouse are flo

🍅 My tomato seedlings in the greenhouse are flowering. This is a good sign that I’m on track to harvest some ripe fruit nice and early again this year. Now that they are flowering, these plants have been potted up and will be transplanted into the garden in early to mid-November.

🧪 At this stage, it’s only a few of the plants in my main crop of tomatoes that are flowering. The two plants in my experiment to grow a Christmas Tomato without a fancy greenhouse are still yet to bud up. Hopefully they do so soon.

📖 Read more about the Christmas Tomato experiment in my blog post. Head to the Leaf, Root & Fruit website to read it.

#gardenexperiment #christmastomato #kyneton #tomatotime

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