FGG Newsletter April 2022

 🌽 Food Garden Group newsletter - April 2022  🌽

 We like to grow what we eat 

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In this April 2022 newsletter you will find links to two virtual visits to members' food gardens that took place during March. You will see what was added and changed in the Food Garden Group blog in March, and be made aware of other food garden info that will be handy to have in April, plus other interesting food garden info.

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In My Garden .......

Every month two Food Garden Group members show us around their food garden by taking ten or so photos and telling us some things about each photo. 

In March we were shown these two gardens:

1. Frank and Laura's garden at Otago Bay
2. and Lian's garden at Lauderdale

Thank you, Lian, Frank and Laura for sharing your food garden experiences with us!

There are more In My Gardens in the pipeline for coming months. 
Thank you, Pauline and Laura, for taking part in the coordination of this series.

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What FGG activities will there be in coming months?

With an increased number of COVID cases expected in coming weeks and months the plan is to continue the monthly newsletter and the In My Garden series in May, June, July and August, and then, to resume genuine food garden visits in September, when hopefully there is much less COVID around!

Would you be happy to do an In My Garden in June, July and August?

It will be great to extend the series over the winter period because it will show how food gardens can be productive over the winter season.

If you would be happy to show us your food garden in ten or so photos in June, July or August, please email foodgardengroup@gmail.com. All you need to do is provide the photos and texts and Laura, Pauline or I will put them on the FGG Extra blog.

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New or updated on the Food Garden Group blog

My focus on the Food Garden Group blog for the next few months will be pest control.

Once upon a time pest control meant spraying with poisonous pesticides. These days most of us don't want to use poisons in our food garden if we can help it. Spraying a pesticide is therefore something we only do if other pest management steps failed or don't apply. These steps are:

1. Make your food garden as healthy as possible 
2. Don’t please your pests 
3. Keep them out 
4. Catch and remove 
5. Is further action needed? 
6. Use a low-impact pesticide

Each of these steps is discussed in the Safe Pest Control series our Food Garden Group blog. It starts with Safe Pest Control - Step 1 and 2 here.

In her inspiring book Beyond Organics writer Helen Cushing talked about an aphid infestation in an apricot tree:

With lots of sweet young growth, the aphids arrived to sip on the gently flowing sap, and the new growth started to deform. However, I did not interfere, though I could have gone in with pyrethrum or simply with a jet of water from the hose to remove the aphids. I knew from experience that both these measures bring only temporary respite and must be repeated again and again. I decided to wait and observe nature taking its course.  

Soon, there were a couple of ladybirds. Next time I checked, I counted eight ladybirds just on one small twig.  

Now, both aphids and ladybirds have gone. All I have done is watch and admire and learn. That is low-maintenance, ecological gardening. It requires and understanding and a patience that leads to minimum intervention, rather than a reactive approach.

In March the following changes were made on the Food Garden Group blog:

A new blog post Homemade Pest Control Sprays discusses how to make simple food-garden pest control sprays at home, so you avoid the nasty chemicals that are present in many commercial products. These 'old as the road' recipes cost very little and have been effectively used by generations of food gardeners, without putting anything that is too poisonous to humans on your produce or in your soil.

FGG blog post Preventing and Overcoming Mildew was rewritten and made more to the point.

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About Facebook and the Group Expert badge

Facebook is often the subject of criticism these days, and a lot of the time for good reasons. Many people have forgotten that Facebook is still as relevant today as it was when it was started in 2004. Facebook brings like-minded people together online and it creates truly worldwide communities.

Because I am the Food Gardeners Tasmania Facebook page Administrator I regularly receive info from Facebook about new initiatives. I have also taken part in online events for Administrators that aimed to help Admins to make the most of their Facebook page. I have met online an amazing variety of great people who started a Facebook page to publicise their issue, find like-minded people, and bring about change. In good hands, Facebook is a powerful tool for creating community and changing our society.

Facebook now offers Administrators the option to make a member a group expert, in recognition for contributions to the page. Facebook's definition of group expert is:

These knowledgeable members often join conversations to answer questions, provide insights, and offer support. We have heard from Admins how important these members are---their contributions to groups help strengthen trust among the community.  Group experts receive a badge, making it easier for others to spot informative or insightful posts and comments they make.

When in 2011 I advertised that I would like to start a group by and for food gardeners Marg Murray was one of just five people who put their hand up. She became one of the founding members of our group.  It was also Marg Murray who suggested a few years later that it might be great to start a Facebook page for the group. When I started the Food Gardeners Tasmania page in August 2013 Marg became one of the early people to join. Since then she has been forever commenting, helping people, and making sure that no one's post remained unanswered.

I asked Marg and, although she does not see herself as an expert, she is happy to have the Group Expert badge attached to her name on the page, in recognition of her dedication to the page.

Congratulations Marg, and thank you on behalf of all the members of our Food Gardeners Tasmania Facebook page, for all your contributions to the page!

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An important book and a great read!

I just finished reading English Pastoral by James Rebanks, and would like to tell you about it!

The title of the book meant nothing to me when I started reading, but after a few hours I began to realise that this Christmas present was something special.

In English Pastoral lifelong farmer and very talented writer James Rebanks relates, in at times Creatures Great and Small type story-telling, the trials and tribulations of three generations of his family on a mixed farm in the Lake District in Great Britain, a farm that his family has farmed for 600 years.

But then he very successfully combines that with a compelling explanation of why farming practices of the 1970s in Great Britain (and in most other places around the world) had to change, and how they changed, and why that change went completely wrong, for farmers, for the land, and for consumers.  

He then adds to that a vision of how modern agriculture can be changed to arrive at a form of farming that feeds people, while creating a balance between farmed land and the natural world.

This very good read was written by a farmer for farmers.

This book is also for anyone who owns land because it makes us see that every parcel of land is part of a greater landscape.

This is also a book for anyone who buys food, so we know why we need to support local farmers.

This is a book that makes you look with new eyes at what a farm is, and can be.

FGG blog post English Pastoral - An Inheritance will tell you more about the book and the writer, and YouTube videos and interviews with James Rebanks.

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Vegie Patch Basics

April 2020 (now two years ago) was the time of the first COVID lockdown in Tasmania. Food gardening suddenly became incredibly popular, and over the following months hundreds of novice food gardeners joined the Food Garden Group (thank you Laura for helping me cope with that at the time).

To help people make a successful start with their food garden I began to write Veggie Patch Basics, a series of blog posts that discusses what you could do in your food garden in every two-month period of the first year of growing food to make it a success right from the word 'go'.

The series starts with the April-May period, so if you want to start a new food garden, or if you want to make a new start and make your food garden more successful, you could do no better than reading blog post Veggie Patch Basics, followed by Veggie Patch Basics-2 that covers what to do in the April - May period of the season.

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Delicious recipes on FGG Extra

Did you know that our group's second blog ( FGG Extra ) not only contains every monthly newsletter, and every In My Garden blog post, and dozens of posts about gardens our group visited over the years, but that it also contains the recipes of many delicious contributions people brought to morning teas at food garden visits?

These are recipes people were eager to hear more about after tasting them at our food garden visits.

Some people even came to these visits purely for the morning teas! I know this because they told me!

To find all the recipes on the FGG Extra blog:

1. Go to the FGG Extra blog at http://fggextra.blogspot.com 
2. If you are on mobile switch to View web version (button at bottom of page)
3. In the righthand column find the section Covered on FGG Extra 
4. Look under Recipe

Find out how to make lemon curd (😛🍰), and limoncello (🤪🍷), egg and sausage parcels (🫔🫔), how to preserve olives (🫒🫒), make corn fritters (🌽🌽), and strawberry and rhubarb jam (🍯🍯).

There is too much to name it all: 35 recipes in total; all goodies that earned their place on the FGG Extra blog by being so delicious!

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What you can do in your food garden in April ....

• Water regularly to make sure your soils don’t dry out
• Make sure beds are well mulched to conserve water
• Keep weeds at bay and don't allow them to go to seed
• Sow green manures where your soil needs to become more open and friable

Vegetables

• Sow in pots spring and salad onions

• Sow in your garden winter varieties of spinach (try sowing one row every fortnight),  broad beans and peas (from late April if you don’t get heavy frosts in winter), 

• Sow in your hothouse herbs like coriander and dill for use this winter and spring

• Plant leek, garlic, spring onions and salad onions (after adding some lime to the soil), Chinese cabbage, Asian greens

• Foliar-feed crops once a month with seaweed extract to maximise growth before it slows down
• Collect seeds from heirloom varieties of crops that you would like to grow again next season
• Put something under pumpkins that rest on the ground so that they don’t rot
• Take pumpkins inside when the weather turns cold and damp
• Bring all unripe tomatoes inside for further ripening if the weather turns cold
• Remove flower-heads on rhubarb so plants focus on forming leaves
• Remove beans and other summer crops when the weather turns cold
• Take beds to their next stage in your crop rotation plan
• Control slugs and snails after rain if the weather is still warm
• Dig up potatoes and hill the ones that you are leaving for later
• Sow green manures where your soil needs to become more open and friable

Fruit trees and berries                (* = don't repeat if already done recently)

• Plant new blueberry bushes
• Feed all blueberry bushes a generous amount of blood & bone and mulch them
• Prune apple, pear, quince, cherry and stone fruit trees once their foliage stops growing
• Remove and destroy coddling moth infested fruit on apple, pear and quince trees
• Trap and kill coddling moths on late apple, pear and quince trees
• Check existing coddling moth traps and replace and refresh where needed
• After harvest, feed peach and nectarine trees blood & bone or mature poultry manure (*)
• Consider adding new fruit trees and berries to your garden and order them from nurseries

For a complete 12-month calendar see Food Garden Calendar on the Food Garden Group blog.

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Happy food gardening,

Max Bee