Visit David and Helen 9Dec18

On Sunday 9 December 2018 the Food Garden Group visited David and Helen's property at Acton.

David and Helen have lived here for a long time, and they have developed their property into a great garden with ornamentals, two large fruit-tree cages, a hot house, vegetable areas and chooks.  It is the result of a lot of work, care, and clever solutions, over many years.

In the photo above David and Helen welcomed us and talked about the successes and challenges they had had with their property.  Acton is a very dry area with mud-stone clay, they get strong winds, and then, there is the wildlife.  In spite of these challenges, what we saw on the day was a great garden with many successful crops. 

Everyone was very impressed with David and Helen's vigorously-healthy strongly-growing tomato bushes: two heirloom varieties named Debarao (a 'better than Roma'-type) and Red Russian.  David explained that they have very strong winds at times, and these bushes would be blown away if they were not protected with strong shade cloth.  It gets very warm inside the enclosure, but the shade-cloth helps to keep the temperature down. With everything carefully mulched within the enclosure, the soil does not dry out, and the bushes are very happy.

Also in their front yard, completely unprotected, and clearly not held back by winds or anything, was a vigorous stand of berries.  This looked like a blackberry with elongated fruit.  After some discussion, the general agreement was that this was a Silvanberry.  I looked it up and the Silvanberry is described as 'a complex hybrid between Marion berry and Boysenberry'.  David commented that the local wildlife does not seem to be interested in its fruits.  Very worthwhile growing, as long as you make sure it does not escape.

 

Above are the two cages that protect fruit trees and vegetable areas.  Their raised vegetable beds, contained within one of the cages, contain imported soil, as earlier level garden beds with the heavy soil had proven to be a struggle.

Many of the fruits looked very healthy and promising, especially the cherries (see photo below).  David and Helen put grease on the trunks of trees (the dark area in the second photo) to prevent the various pests from climbing up the trees, and this is working well.

David and Helen's lemon trees looked very happy. The lemons on the tree in the photo below were quite large, thick skinned, rough surfaced, and the branches do have thorns.  This lemon tree was thought to be a Lisbon.

The photo below shows David and Helen's hothouse, with tomatoes on the left, and cucumbers on the right.  When they go away, the blue tubs are filled with water, so the soil in the taller black pots does not dry out.  Windows at the far end of the hothouse can be opened, so the prevailing wind can blow right through to cool things down in summer.  Shade cloth is used to make sure it does not get too hot inside in summer.  This hothouse is further discussed in this Food Garden Group blog post: https://foodgardengroup.blogspot.com/2018/02/sharing-our-hothouse-skills-no2.html

David showed us his 'hand held refractometer', also called 'Brix meter' (see photo below), and discussed its use.  Brix meters are widely used, for instance by wine makers and honey processors, to measure sugar content of juice-solutions.  They can also be used to measure the quality of fruit and vegetables. Fruit and vegetable quality correlates to the amount of dissolved solids in plant sap and hence the amount of nutrition likely to be present.

In 2014 Letetia Ware presented the 2014 Food Garden Group winter workshop, and she mentioned Brix meters.  It was good to hear about them again.  David told us that, with his meter, he found that the quality of supermarket-bought out-of-season fruit and vegetables was quite low compared to the same in-season and grown-locally.

This was a very informative food garden visit to a very productive and attractive garden.

It is clear that David and Helen are very motivated, and have quite a passion for their garden.  Many thanks to both of you for sharing it with us.

Many thanks too, to everyone who came, your contributions to produce table and morning tea, and for making this food garden visit such a success!