🍅Food Garden Group newsletter - January 2024🍅
We like to grow what we eat
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Happy new year from Gaye and Max!
What will 2024 bring? Once again we are so lucky to live in Tasmania when there is so much bad stuff happening in the rest of the world.
It's the start of 2024 and that means the start of the 2024 Golden Tomato Award challenge!
In previous years the award was given to the FGG member who produced the first ripe tomato of the season. Blog post Early Tomatoes will tell you who the winners were and how they did it. We learnt a lot from that once-a-year contest, but it is now time for a different tomato challenge - who will grow the heaviest tomato this season?
Food Garden Group member Shanon G. started the ball rolling (👍) on 12 December when he sent me a photo of a KY1 tomato grown in his hothouse that weighs 101 grams. |
| Shannon Greer with his greenhouse grown KY1 |
So here is your challenge for January: produce a tomato that is heavier than Shanon's KY1, which, as the photo proves, weighed in at (for this early in the season an impressive) 101 grams!
The February, March and April newsletters will report on the progress with this challenge. Everyone will be allowed to forward as many photos as they like, as long as the weight of the tomato in the photo exceeds the tomato that was shown in the last newsletter.
The winner of the 2024 Golden Tomato Award will be announced at the end of the season.
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This month's food garden visit
About their garden Troy wrote:
I moved to Old Beach in May 2008 and around the existing house there was very little in the way of garden infrastructure except pine bark a large amount of prickly Grevillia and gravel with no food plants in the garden. The almost frost-free sunny microclimate and deep sandy loam soil were a good base to start gardening, although the sandy soil, that could be easily dug down to one metre, was quite hydrophobic and needed lots of compost and manure to enrich it.
Until four years ago when I met Jing, I focussed on growing exotic palms (over 40 species), tree ferns and cycads, including edible Monstera deliciosa fruit which can be eaten when the green scales start to fall off and tastes like sweet pineapple flavour. I also grew a palm tree from the Andes call Parajubaea cocoides that produces seed that tastes just like coconut and a Myer Lemon tree that is very prolific.We now have 20 plus different fruits, including five citrus, and kiwi fruit that is cropping for the first time this year, Loquat, Chilean guava and Tamarillo. We organised nine raised beds for vegetables, adding lots of manures and compost to grow organically. We also converted a shade house into a greenhouse for an early start on cucumbers, tomatoes and yams.
A highlight of my gardening was a visit from Gardening Australia back in 2017 that was focused on palms (one day of filming for 5 minutes of screen time). Unfortunately back then there was little in the way of edible crops except for citrus.
We have been lucky that we don't have wildlife eat anything and only bird and white moth protection is necessary.
The entire garden is irrigated automatically by a commercial grade Hunter irrigation system using valves which makes life easy as some years we get less than 400mm of rainfall at Old beach.
The best thing of the edible garden journey is the satisfaction of walking out the door and picking something to make dinner with and the home grown taste that is way better than supermarket produce.
The vegetable garden is still a learning curve and we look forward to any advice during the garden visit.
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Last month's food garden visit number 100
I would like to thank all the hosts who made it possible to have 100 food garden visits! And a big thank you also to Gaye, Laura, Pauline, Mandy and Elizabeth who help make our group a success! Thank you Mandy, for writing up food garden visit 100!
Click here for the run down on the garden party of the year.
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Sunday 10 March: Liz Hanson's garden at Lower Snug
Sunday 7 April: Vivien and Mark's garden at Bellerive
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Processing and preserving
How to deal with aphids
The number one pest management strategy in organic growing is to optimise growing conditions for plants so they deter pests by themselves without any need for pesticides.
If a pest affects a plant, a good response is to ask what makes this plant susceptible to this pest?, rather than just killing the pest. And, leading on from there, how can I improve conditions, so the plant becomes strong and can combat the pest itself.
Soil health, nutrients, water, wind, ventilation, sun and temperature are all factors that can make a plant healthy or unhealthy.
Aphids come in many guises. They may be green, red or black. Some are covered in a woolly white substance and don't even look like aphids. The presence of aphids is often a very good indicator that something is wrong.
If you decide that the aphids should go, you could consider a hands-off wait-and-see approach that may be quite successful in getting rid of them!
In her inspiring book Beyond Organics Helen Cushing mentions an aphid infestation in an apricot tree:
For more info about aphids see Pest Control Quick Guide on the Food Garden Group blog.
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We have a 'self-serve membership'
- Subscribe yourself to our monthly newsletter by going to https://fggtas.wordpress.com and clicking on To subscribe click here.
- Explore the Food Garden Group blog at https://foodgardengroup.blogspot.com/ any time you want to learn more about food gardening.
- Apply for membership of our Facebook page by searching for Food Gardeners Tasmania on Facebook and joining the page. It is a great way to meet other Tasmanian food gardeners online, share your food gardening experiences, and ask anything you would like to know.
- RSVP for a food garden visit advertised in the FGG newsletter, so you can see a food garden up close and personal , learn on the spot, and get inspired!
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Food garden activities suggested for January
- Water regularly to make sure your soils don’t dry out
- Make sure your food garden is well mulched to conserve water
- Keep weeds at bay and don't allow them to go to seed
Vegetables
- Sow in pots iceberg-type lettuce, loose-leaf lettuce, brassicas, leek, parsley, spring onions, salad onions, celery, Chinese cabbage and Asian greens
- Sow in your garden beans, spinach, chard, silverbeet, radish, carrot, parsnip, turnip, swede, beetroot
- Plant loose-leaf and iceberg-type lettuce, chard, spinach, silver beet, celery, parsley, late potatoes, ocas, leeks and onions (after adding some lime to the soil), brassicas (provide protection against caterpillars), tomatoes, capsicums, Brussels sprouts
- Minimise caterpillar damage to brassicas by manual removal, netting or spraying
- Put shade cloth over newly-planted seedlings to protect them from hot sun
- Put something under pumpkins that rest on the ground so they don’t rot
- Dig up potatoes and hill the ones that you are leaving for later
- Dig up all remaining garlic, allow to dry and store in cool, well ventilated spot
- Foliar-feed crops once a month with seaweed extract to maximise their health and growth
- Hand pollinate pumpkins, cucumbers and other cucurbits early in the morning
- Cut off tips of cucurbit vines that have two fruits so the fruits become larger
- Tie up or provide support for climbing crops such as beans and tomatoes
- Remove laterals on tomatoes and limit plants to 3 or 4 branches
- Remove flower-heads on rhubarb, so plants focus on forming leaves
- Sprinkle sulphate of potash once a month around vegetables that form fruits
- Control slugs and snails especially around beans
- Foliar-feed crops once a month with seaweed extract to maximise their health and growth
- Remove runners on strawberries if you think you won't need young plants next season
- Thin fruit on all fruit trees, so fruits become larger and branches don't break (*)
- Cover fruit trees with netting to avoid fruit-damage by birds
- Remove and destroy coddling moth infested fruit on apple, pear and quince trees
- Trap and kill coddling moths on apple, pear and quince trees
- Check existing coddling moth traps and replace and refresh where needed
- Apply bud grafts to all types of fruit trees in the second half of this month
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Happy food gardening,
Max Bee
FGG coordinator
To subscribe to this newsletter go to https://fggtas.wordpress.com and follow the prompts
Lots of food gardening info can be found at https://foodgardengroup.blogspot.com/
For past food garden visits, recipes and past newsletters see https://fggextra.blogspot.com/
To join our Facebook page search for Food Gardeners Tasmania and apply for membership
The Food Garden Group is affiliated with Sustainable Living Tasmania
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