FGG Newsletter April 2024

  🍏Food Garden Group newsletter - April 2024 🍏

 We like to grow what we eat 

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In this April 2024 Food Garden Group newsletter: info about the food garden visit planned for April, last month's visit in words and pictures, food garden visits will commence in Northern Tasmania in the new season, the 2024 Golden Tomato Award, and more.

Welcome to the last FGG newsletter of the season! 

This newsletter is the last one for the 2023-2024 season. After three La Nina seasons with too little sun and warmth this season has been a good one, with plenty of rain early on followed by many warm sunny days. I hope that this helped making your 23-24 food gardening season a success for you.

April marks the end of another FGG season. There will be no FGG newsletter in May, June and July. If all goes to plan the first newsletter of the new season will be out on 1 August.

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This month's food garden visit

On Sunday 7 April at 10.30am you will be welcome in Vivien and Mark's garden at Bellerive.

About their garden Vivien wrote:

Our small garden is on a little peninsula that projects out into the Derwent River. It is on a sunny corner of land that slopes down towards the river at the bottom of the street. The block is exposed to the prevailing winds and sea breezes and its soil consists of a few centimetres of topsoil covering a sticky, greasy grey clay on top of dense, almost impenetrable, sandstone. 

When we bought the property 12 years ago there was some grass (mostly twitch) covering the ground and some scattered trees and shrubs around the fence line and the house. Nothing now looks like it was 12 years ago. We have contoured and terraced the land, built up the soil, used fences and pergolas to protect the house and garden from the wind and planted to provide shade in summer and allow sun in winter.

At the start of the covid -19 pandemic 4 years ago we bought a 3m strip of an adjacent carpark along our northeastern boundary. Developing this area was our pandemic project and it has become our “official” food garden. Here in a protected warm microclimate, we grow vegetables and berries and the more cold sensitive citrus trees, as well as passionfruit, a choko, cherry guava, a babako, ginger and turmeric. In addition, we have erected multiple climbing frames so that we can grow vegetables vertically. An attempt to grow a Haas avocado ended badly.

The rest of the garden looks like an ornamental garden however the planting is of a mixture of ornamental and food plants planted in close proximity. We are growing a small orchard in the flower beds. Here we grow 40 dwarf fruit trees which include oranges, lime, mandarin, apples, pears, figs, plums, apricots, peaches and nectarines, an almond, 2 pomegranates and 5 grapevines. Mixed in amongst the flowers and shrubs are herbs and a tree chili and currently the flower garden's late summer/autumn vegetables are brassicas, spring onions, celery, silver beet, tomatoes, climbing beans, and a climbing zucchini (tromboncino). The ornamentals camouflage the shape and the smell of the vegetables from potential predators and the flowers attract pollinators.

Our garden gives us an enormous amount of pleasure and a fair amount of exercise.

Contributions for morning tea and the produce table will be much appreciated! 

Please RSVP to foodgardengroup@gmail.com if you would like to attend. When you RSVP please clearly state who you are RSVPing for and provide names if you want to bring others, so we can have a name sticker ready for every person on arrival. 

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Last month's food garden visit

The group visited Liz and Mark's permaculture food garden at Lower Snug on a warm late summer's day. Despite months and months of extremely dry conditions in southern Tasmania there was still a lot to see and discuss.  The produce table was beckoning as was the morning tea! And what a great spot to enjoy a cuppa with friends and other like-minded gardeners. 

Thank you to all who contributed and a big thanks to Liz and Mark for sharing their story and garden with us.

For a virtual tour around this garden including great photos click here. Thank you, Pauline, for writing the blog post about this garden!

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Golden Tomato Award 2024

The winner of the Golden Tomato Award 2024 is .... Roslyn M. of Lymington. On 1 March Roslyn shared with us a picture on Facebook of an incredible Rebel Starfighter Prime tomato weighing 1205 grams. Congratulations Roslyn! 

Here is a picture of the winning tomato:

Rebel Starfighter Prime sounds a bit science fiction, but it is the official name of the tomato variety. Not only are its fruits very big, but they also have a rich flavour, which puts paid to the myth that large tomatoes don't have a lot of taste.

Here is the complete list of all tomatoes that were put forward for this year's award:

Thanks to everyone who took part! It has been so nice seeing everyone sharing their tomato pictures on the Facebook page.  

In coming months I will add details of the Rebel Starfighter Prime, Mortgage Lifter and Brandywine varieties to the Large Tomatoes on Show article on our Food Garden Group blog. This will help people choose in coming years what large tomato varieties to grow and where to get the seeds.

The Golden Tomato Award 2024 competition is closed now.

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Monthly food garden visits coming to the North of the state!

Planning is currently underway for food garden visits to commence in the north of the state at the start of next season. 

For far too long these visits have been exclusive to the south, but next season keen food gardeners in and around Launceston will be able to visit local food gardens, learn from each other and share experiences, produce and seeds, just like Southern members. 

At this stage, the first garden visit will be in September, with details to be included in the FGG September newsletter that will be out on 1 September. If you are interested in coming to Northern food garden visits or are happy to host a Northern food garden visit, please feel free to contact Denby at fggnorthtas@gmail.com.

Thank you Denby for volunteering to organise this new garden visit group.  We wish you, and your helpers, all the best!

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If you have never been to an FGG food garden visit ....

If you RSVP soon after the FGG newsletter comes out, your chances to make it onto the RSVP-list are high, irrespective of whether you attend these visits regularly or not. We love to meet new people, and you will be very welcome.

Our visits are about seeing food gardens and meeting other food gardeners. Everyone arrives at the same time just before or at the start time. If you have any surplus food-plant seedlings, seeds or produce, please bring them. They all go on the produce table, where people give and take without money changing hands. 

After seeing the garden and lots of spontaneous discussions we share morning tea. It would be great if you brought something for morning tea, but this too is optional. 

You may go home with new food-plants and ideas for your garden and interesting produce. It’s all about sharing, learning from each other, and community.

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Food garden activities suggested for 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

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