Pests and Diseases

Posted on April 4, 2011 by Liz

I have to say that I do struggle to not get hugely frustrated when problems stand in the way of me and perfect produce.   For instance I started the year with 156 tamarillos on the tree, and I love tamarillos, so this was a cause for great celebration, however during a 10 day holiday all but 7 of them were removed from the tree.  About 30 were lying on the ground but the rest had simply vanished.   What eats that many unripe tamarillos? – my bet is on flying foxes (fruit bats) but it may well be something else.  Usually though I am more aware of what exactly it is that I am dealing with.  My most recent frustrations, aside from damage caused by an unruly 17 month old boy, have been: cabbage white butterflies, birds, powdery mildew, and mice and rats.  All is not lost though, I have come up with some solutions.

Birds – Last year we had blackbirds nesting in our Bougainvillea and the baby birds decided the best way to test their digging skills was on fresh patches of earth – usually where I had just sown seed of some kind.  Scarecrows failed, my 4 year running at them yelling RAH!!!! worked well for brief periods but she soon tired of the game so we built cages to place over seeds.  These worked!   The cages are simply chicken wire attached to some fairly flimsy wood.

The birds have now gone but the cages are equally effective against bum shuffling toddlers for whom a raised bed is basically a very dirty and very big sand pit.  Below are some newly planted leek seedlings happily not being squashed by the aforementioned toddler or indeed dug up by baby blackbirds.

Mice & Rats

Arrrgh… I’m fairly sure we have both mice and rats which is really annoying.  I thought I glimpsed a rat running up the fence under the passionfruit and next door also says she saw one run up her fence and into our shed.  The other thing that makes me think we have them is the damage they do.  Last year pretty much all my broccoli was eaten as soon as it formed heads.  This year there have been tell tale nibble marks on pumpkins and whole baby pumpkins have simply disappeared.  Unfortunately I don’t have any workable solutions….as yet……  We have set rat traps but have never caught any, despite trying over periods of months.  We can’t leave poison because of the kids and so I am currently at a bit of a loss to know what to do.  My current tactic is to ignore them and hope they go away – which did work with this pumpkin which has grown to a good size despite the odd nibble mark.

Powdery Mildew

 

Because our garden is relatively warm and sheltered I have to say I think I will always be battling against powdery mildew.  The peas got it, the pumpkins have it and now the cucumber’s caught it.  With the peas I tried to camomile tea and noticed no difference what so ever.  With the pumpkins I tried milk solutions and while this worked better than the tea did for the peas it could really only be described as lessening the symptoms slightly and delaying the spread a little.  I do think the milk treatment could work if applied regularly from or before the onset of mildew developing and I will try weekly applications from day one on next year’s crops.  The milk application that seemed to work best for me was:

  1. First thing in the morning (so the plants get a chance to dry off after the treatment) hose off as much of the mildew as possible.
  2. Mix a batch of 60/40 water and full cream milk.
  3. Apply to the both sides of the leaves with a watering can.
  4. Cross fingers and hope it works.

With the cucumbers I have simply taken off the worst affected leaves and left the plant to try and deal with the mildew itself.  The plant looks pretty tatty but it is still producing cucumbers so I am happy with that solution in this case.

Cabbage White Butterflies

Aren’t they annoying.  I found this one on the nasturtiums this morning.

The best solution I have found for getting rid of cabbage white butterflies is also the most labour intensive.  Simply run your fingers under the leaves every day (or every other day) to dislodge as many of the eggs as possible.  Inspect the leaves for baby caterpillars and remove any you find.  They seem to like to lie along the vein of the leaf best, especially when very young.

The other thing I have noticed with cabbage whites is that plants which are planted later in the season suffer from significantly less attach as the butterflies seem to prefer the warmer weather.

Finally I always give my broccoli a quick soak in salty water before cooking as this generally causes any remaining caterpillars to fall off before its cooked.

Aphids

To get rid of aphids simply blast them off with the hose.  This works well in pretty much all cases I have found, except really bad infestations in broccoli heads.  Ants farm aphids on our tamarillo tree and quick blast of the hose dislodges them quickly and easily.  They do return but usually not that quickly and in reduced numbers.

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In Search of the perfect Green Bean

Posted on April 2, 2011 by Liz

The plant:

I enjoy eating beans, I eat them in a variety of dishes; stir fry’s, curries, soups as well as as a side vegetable.  They have also been pretty trouble free to grow in our temperate climate – ie the pests leave them alone (with the occasional exception of birds digging up the seeds), they crop reliably and the plants look good in the garden.

How I grow them:

This year I grew both a bush and a climbing variety of bean and both are still producing beans. I sowed seeds directly into prepared soil.  For the climbing beans I used 3 tall stakes tied together at the top to form a tepee, and planted 2-3 seeds at the base of each stake.  I am happy to let my Bush beans sprawl so I didn’t give them any form of support.  The climbers were sown in October and the bush beans in October, November and December.  Due to germination issues with the bush beans I had only one plant from my October sowing , however I sowed more seed in November and December and finished up with a total of 6 plants of varying sizes.   Interestingly the most productive plant was the plant that was sown in October.   Taking all the plants into account I have had beans pretty much constantly from December onwards in varying quantites.

I grew my beans in my main raised bed, with climbers occupying one square metre and bush beans occupying another square metre but split into two areas.  This part of the bed gets sun for about 6 hours per day.  This is the first year of using the raised bed and the veggie mix from our local sand and soil place is still pretty good.  I added a bit of Dynamic Lifter and sowed the climbers in a square in which I previously grown spinach.  The bush beans followed Coriander and Broccoli in one area and Cauliflower and Beetroot in another area.   I applied both liquid fertiliser monthly with a watering can.  Both were mulched with pea straw.

The Varieties:

This year I grew two types of beans in Melbourne and my father, who also grows beans, grew five varieties.   He gardens outside of Melbourne, in full sun but in a slightly colder climate.  For some veggies this seems to make a big difference in both flavour and productivity of the plant but for beans I have not noticed much difference.   In both locations the beans were productive and we had no real problems with the plants themselves.  I grew Jade; a French style bush bean, and Purple King; an attrative climber producing purple podded beans.  They were grown from directly sown seed, got over 6 hours direct sun per day and were well watered.  My father grew; Jade, Blue Lake; a climber producing green beans, a climbing butter bean, Brown Beauty; a French style bush bean, and Romano; an Italian long flat podded bean.  All his beans with the exception of the butter bean (which he bought as seedlings at a market) were sown directly where they were to grow.

The only noteworthy  problem we had with any of the beans  was the germination rates of the Jade beans.  We both experienced poor germination rates (about 1 in 3), despite sowing from different packets and within the sow by date.  Both packets were from the same seed company though.

In terms of volume of beans per plant Blue Lake was probably the most prolific, followed by Purple King with the Butter Bean being the least prolific.

The taste test was conducted by French cutting all the beans into uniform size pieces and boiling them until cooked.  Different beans took differing amounts of time to cook with the Butter Bean being especially quick.

The taste test results:

Blue Lake: – Traditional French bean shape.  Generally a very nice bean.  However one of the beans in the test was extremely stringy – not just in the normal way but the whole pod was inedible.  (Since our test I have experienced this with a couple of other individual beans.  Perhaps once the beans get slightly older they get extremely stringy, or it may be that all these beans came from the same individual plant).

Brown Beauty: – Traditional French bean shape.  Slightly stringy – this was noted both during the preparation of the beans and on tasting.  Very mild flavour.  Not the best one we tried.

Butter Bean: – Flattish longish pod. Again very mild with a light beany flavour, would suit kids.  They do vary significantly in shape from bean to bean making preparation of the beans difficult.

Jade: – Traditional French bean shape.  Firm, a thicker pod that the others with less seed.  Excellent flavour and the best texture of all the beans tested.

Romano: – Flatter bean.  Very uniform in size and shape.  Good flavour, good texture and very easy to cut.

Purple King: – Slightly flattish bean, purple coloured but turns green when cooked.  Prettiest plant.  A bit insipid, slightly course in texture.  The weakest in flavour terms.

Based on our taste test I plan to try growing Blue Lake and either Jade again or Romano.  If space allows I may also grow a Butter Bean.

Post Script: – since writing this the quality of the beans produced by the climbing beans has declined significantly.  This has not been the case with either Jade or Romano.  If you are looking for beans of a good quality over an extended period then the bush beans varieties we tried seem preferable over the climbing types.  For freezing or preserving the prolific nature of the climbing beans would be of benefit and the plants could then be removed after the first few weeks of cropping.

From a space perspective the climbers are fabulous, lots of beans in a relatively small area but you do need to be quite careful where you grow them as they will shade anything growing behind them.   In previous years I have successfully grown bush beans in large (40cm)  pots.   Space require to feed our family for the summer ?  1 – 2 square metres.

Next Time: –

In order to ensure a continuous supply for my family of 2 adults and 2 young children, I think I will need to plant 4 bush beans plants each month from September to December and if I have room I will plant Climbers in October.   (It would be interesting to experiment with planting the climbers over an extended period, perhaps one side of the tepee each month for 3 months and see how this affected the productivity of the beans).  This should hopefully mean I have beans continuously from December til May.

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Welcome to Suburban Tomato

Posted on April 1, 2011 by Liz

Welcome to my blog.  The idea behind this blog is simple: to provide a record of the joys and pitfalls of kitchen gardening in suburbia.  More specifically it is about trying to identify the best types of vegetable and herb to grow to ensure I can both feed the family from the garden (as much as possible) and enjoy what I am producing.

The rewards of growing my own veggies so far has been great; my kids understand where what they eat comes from, the produce is fresh, cheap and chemical free and I enjoy the time I spend in the garden.  There are frustrations though, from seeds that don’t germinate and shade from next doors trees, to mice, rats, flying foxes, cabbage white butterflies and powdery mildew.  The things that don’t work can be disheartening and frustrating.  I do believe that most (and hopefully all) of these problems can be overcome and that a lot of the challenge in gardening is looking for different solutions to counteract everything from space limitations to predators and disease.

This blog aims to address the problems thrown up by kitchen gardening in a suburban backyard by finding the best ways of growing the nicest tasting varieties of everything we like to eat.  This will cover both vegetables and herbs as well as any fruits that my space allows.  I am interested in both the quality and quantity of the vegetables (and herbs) that I am able to produce, as well as the ease with which they grown.

To give you a bit of background: I live in a northern suburb of Melbourne, Australia.  The climate is ‘temperate’, in theory at least, and frost free (or it has been during the 4 years I have lived here).   I have a 12 square metres set aside for growing veggies plus space for pots.  In this blog I will document how I use this space: what I grow, when, and how and then record the outcome; what grew, what didn’t, and most importantly how the end product tasted.

Finally, why the name?  Tomatoes are pretty much my favourite food and were the initial motivation behind establishing a kitchen garden.  I simply wanted to grow great tasting tomatoes to cook and eat.  Things mushroomed from there to incorporate other vegetables and herbs but I am still looking for that perfect tomato.  It needs to be one that: grows well in partial shade, resists disease, the birds don’t eat, doesn’t fruit all in one go, fruits no matter how hot or cold the summer is and most of all tastes delicious.  In short; the perfect tomato for my part of suburbia.  Impossible?  The thing I love about gardening is that each year brings a new chance to find out.

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