Australian Bush Life

Small and withered zucchini that broke off the vine as was not filling out properly

Have you ever had zucchini’s or cucumber’s that don’t fill out properly? Are the zucchini’s or cucumber’s staying small, skinny, wrinkly, yellowish or they are simply skinny at one end and not filling out at the other?

This year we had this problem, particularly with our zucchini’s and found that some advice to add a dose of wood ash to the plant base and water it in really helped. Wood ash, particularly the ash from our home wood heater where we burn eucalyptus wood (or hard woods), is a good source of Potash and other beneficial nutrients such as phosphate to assist growing plants.

Potash is also known as K₂O or  Potassium Oxide and is often a product in many bought fertilisers. Potash is simply a medium, the ash itself, which contains potassium in a soluble form. Being soluble means that potassium can readily be taken up by plants particularly if it is dissolved in water near the roots of the plants.

Simply sprinkle a big handful (or two) of wood ash around the base of each plant. Sprinkle in a 30 cm diameter around the base but don’t sprinkle on the base of the plant. After this you can water in or simply apply before it is going to rain. Be mindful though that ash is very alkaline so best only applied to more mature plants whilst they are fruiting or otherwise could effect the roots of younger plants. The results for us were very fast with zucchini’s filling out within the week of application.

Potash from eucalypt wood ash

We collect the wood ash from our wood heater fire in a bucket so we can simply add these nutrients to growing plants as we require them. You can include any larger charcoal bits also, apparently charcoal and the potash itself can actually help water retention of soil as it acts like a bit of a sponge. The charcoal most definitely had no negative effects when we applied them to our zucchini’s this year.

Other types of organic fertlisers for growing vegetables…

Chilli plant in a greenhouse to avoid frost.

In southern Australia many areas receive frosts during our winter time which would often kill off many vegetable plants leaving us to think that they are annuals and need to be re-planted every year. But chilli plants (and capsicums too) survive quite well for a number of years (act as perennials) if they can avoid the frosty winter months.

We kept finding that by trying to grow our chilli plants each year they had such a long time required for them to set fruit that by the time the fruit was turning red the plant was dying as it was late into autumn and getting too cold. We then put our chilli plants into pots so that we could move them under the shelter of a porch over the winter and by avoiding frosts they managed to survive more than one year. In fact we have found that by keeping these plants alive over a number of years they grow much larger and produce a great deal more fruit as the years go by.

Woody stems of chilli plant after 1 years growth.

We have also placed a few plants in a neighbours greenhouse to avoid the winter frosts, well at least until we get a greenhouse of our own! After a year the plants stems become quite woody and they have a much greater capacity to set and hold a lot of fruit . Also the plants are able to grow much more fruit as they don’t have to grow from seed each year, hence having a huge head start each spring.

So if you love chilli’s like we do getting a couple of different varieties into a greenhouse or some pots that can be moved around to avoid frosts – will mean you can have an abundance of chilli’s on hand all year around. They also make great gifts as they are bright and colorful and can store well. Here are some ideas for preserving chilli’s for year around use – we even home made tabasco sauce with our chilli harvest this year.

Beetroot tied up with bright ties heavy with a bumper seed harvest.

We are really trying to collect as many of our own seeds as possible to close the food growing loop at our home. We try to collect seed from large/strong and healthy plants to ensure that we will have the best success in future growing of these food varieties using organic techniques. This all appears straight forward when the person collecting the seeds also always harvests the food as they can then avoid harvesting the certain parts of the plant to allow seeds to reach maturity.

But what happens when friends or family come and help with the harvest? Particularly unattended in your vegetable garden, those exact large parts of the plant being set aside for seed collection could easily be the most tempting looking pieces to be picked for immediate eating!

After have chosen specific plants which we hope to let go to seed we have come up with a few techniques/rules to avoid harvesting these individuals (or parts of them) prior to the seed reaching maturity such as:

• 

  Bean with bread tie to identify for seed harvest.

  Tie bright string around individual root vegetables as a reminder to avoid harvesting this plant. Tying low works well as usually this is where you would get down to harvest i.e. carrots, parsnip, beetroot, coriander, dill, onions etc.

• Tie bright bread ties around individual fruits, pods or branches as reminders to leave these ones on the plant. Tying at the location where you would cut the fruit or pod away from the plant works as a good reminder i.e. peas, beans, tomatoes, corn, cucumbers, zucchinis, radishes etc
• Tie individual plants to posts using brightly colored strings works particularly well for plants that become really large when you let them go through their entire maturing cycle as it also stops them falling over i.e. radish, beetroot, parsnip,
  carrot, onion etc

More information on how to store seeds once harvested…

Tomato climbing frame - vertical vegetables.

We have been working hard over the last few years trying to come up with simple ideas that can help us save space and make growing and harvesting food easier. This year we have tried making our tomatoes go vertical to save space as an out of control tomato plant, even though it can produce a lot of fruit, can also take up a lot of space. Although we have a good amount of vegetable garden it still minimises what else we can grow.

With our trial we had to purchase (unfortunately no one has thrown out on the hard waste) 2 of the longest metal stakes we could find at 2.4 metres. We simply strapped a long wooden stake vertically along the top – if we had found a longer one we could have hung it out longer at each end and planted more tomatoes either side of the metal stakes too.

Once the frame was in place we used vertical string ties which are anchored at the base with 2 x metal tent pegs at opposing 45 degree angles so that the strings are held in place firmly. The tomatoes were planted as close to the strings anchored int he ground as possible.

Vertical tomatoes hold growing tips with pegs. Cut out excessive side branching.

As the tomatoes grow we wind them up the strings while they are still young and fleixble. We sometimes use clothes pegs to hold the growing ends in place. We also cut off some of the side branches of the tomatoes to ensure that the plants grew upwards and didn’t get too many heavy limbs off to the sides. As the tomatoes start to ripen this year it is so much easier to harvest them. We particularly recommend this technique for growing cherry or other smaller tomato varieties as they are so much easier to find and harvest.

Links to more information on how to ripen tomatoes at the end of the season and harvest tomato vines to create more garden space for autumn vegetables. Ripen tomatoes on the window sill and ripen tomatoes on pulled out vines.

Compost Bay - making a new pile of soil. Back pile is soil at 4 weeks of age.

We have built a larger composting bay to manage all our green waste. It was really quick and easy and we used recycled corrugated iron and metal star pickets that we found on the hard waste.

We chose a flat area with a reasonable sized flat landing area in front of the bay to allow for manouvering wheelbarrows and also enough mowing space to finely chop our greens on location. We also chose an area where we can easily move the soil by wheelbarrow to all our different vegetable growing beds using a wheelbarrow. This was difficult for us a we are on a steep block, but we have managed to create ramps and avoid stairs as moving soil and soil making is heavy work!

All we did was build 3 walls to keep the compost in. We found that it was most important to get the length of the bay quite long, ours is about 3.5 metres long x 1 metre wide. This allowed us to have 3 different stages of composting piles on the go at once and we can easily shuffle piles along or mix them together if we need.

To make the soil we generally mix 3 different types of composting materials:

• Green waste; such as vegetable/garden scraps, green non-woody weeds or grass
• Manure; this is the nitrogen component for soil – we generally use horse, but sometimes chicken or cow
• Dry organic waste; this is the carbon component of soil – we generally use straw, dry leaves (not from our indigenous plants though, we usually use from Oak or Plane trees in local parks) or paper (newspaper or cardboard boxes – nothing with glossy print)

Finely chopped green waste using a lawn mower.

We mix these in at roughly the same ratios 1:1:1. Mixing them together well as this adds oxygen which is important and also water to ensure that it is all well moistened. We cover our pile with plastic to keep moist (and avoid getting too soggy if raining), and try to re-mix every week. Depending on the seasonal temperature and how warm the compost gets the breaking down and turing into soil can take about 4 – 8 weeks before it is ready to add back to our vegie gardens.

Making our own compost is great for conditioning soil. It adds life such as microbes (important bacteria and life we can’t see) as well as other invertebrates/insects like worms and composting bugs etc, which help structure the soil. Compost is also great for improving the ability of soil to hold water.

How to finely chop up and mange green waste…

We also compost our kitchen scraps in a worm farm…

Lawn mowing green waste to finely chop it.

We have a worm farm which composts all our kitchen scraps, but as we also grow a lot of our own food we have to manage much larger amounts of green material. Of course this green garden waste is actually a big resource when we we turn it into organic and nutrient rich soil, which we then return to our fruit & vegetable garden beds. By composting we manage all our green waste on site closing this recyling loop, this minimises transport costs (and fuel) and also avoids spreading weeds to another area to be managed.

The green material mostly includes all of our plant waste from vegetable growing, such as plants of corn, tomatoes, brassicas like cauliflower and broccoli etc after harvesting the food compontents. Green material also includes lots of grass both weedy and indigenous are fine and also any soft (non woody) weeds.

We don’t add any of our indigenous plants for composting, particularly woody parts as they are harder to break down into soil and also woody material can often deplete soil of nutrients – where we are wanting to create nutrient rich soils. All our garden waste from indigenous plants, such as lopped branches etc we return to the bush areas of our block as this provides great ground cover as a natural mulch and also great habitat for smaller wildlife particularly insects. It is most important to ensure that no seeds from non-indigenous plants get thrown out in the bush though – we are very strict about this to keep our bush habitat healthy.

Compost bins for green waste collection - plant pots.

We have found that the best way to manage all our green waste for processing into soil is to collect it in bins around our block. We found that large old plant pots are great as they have holes in the bottom and let out the rain and any juices from green material if it starts rotting etc. We have these bins near to every area where we grow fruit and vegetables, so that it is really easy and tidy mainting all our green garden waste. About once / month we round up all our greens and then chop them as finely as we can so that they can break down quickly in our composting bay.

We have seen many people use mulchers to help them chop up their green material, but we just use a neighbours lawn mower and mow over the top of the greens on a flat area. It all provides the same result of finely chopped greens ready for composting.

More information on how we compost in our compost bay…

Seaweed fertiliser - leaching in fresh water.

As we live in the mountains anytime we head off on a trip to the beach we ensure that we take along an empty bag or tarpaulin to take home a bit of seaweed to make liquid fertiliser at home.

As we are collecting something from nature we ensure that we do this sustainably as dried up seaweed on the beach is habitat too. We only take as much as we need and ensure that we take from areas where there is plenty therefore leaving plenty behind too. Of course we always check to see that we are not taking from areas where there might be shore or wading birds or other beach animals using these beach and seaweed areas for habitat to minimise disturbance for them too.

Seaweed fertiliser - draining for storage.

On our last visit we collected enough to fill 2 x 50L plastic water drums. The seaweed doesn’t have to be squashed in tight it is actually better a bit loose so that when you fill with water there is plenty of water contacting the seaweed to leach out the nutrients. We put a lid on the drums for about a  month or so until the water in the drum becomes tea colored.

We then strain out the seaweed from the nutrient filled water; which is now a great liquid fertiliser. We bottle up the liquid fertiliser for later use. This process generally produces about 6 months worth of liquid fertiliser, and we alternate the use of seaweed fertiliser with our worm wee liquid fertiliser that we drain from our composting worm farm. The use of the 2 types of liquid fertiliser provides a great range of nutrients to grow any kind of fruit, nut or vegetable.

Seaweed Mulch

Seaweed mulch.

We also put all the dried seaweed directly onto our vegetable beds as a mulch covering – this works particularly well in the summer reducing the rate of evaporation from the soil. We have also noticed that the seaweed is actually quite good for deterring slugs too – we tend to find slugs like to hide a lot more amongst areas where we have used pea straw mulch than areas where we have used seaweed mulch. There may be something in this, but more experimenting required!

Last winter we planted nut trees in our new ”Nut Grove”. We captured some of the moment using a GardenWatchCam which can be pre-set to take images and display them in a video format. Click here for a product overview on use and application of GardenWatchCam.

We dug 22 large holes (luckily we had use of a tractor) and filled them with all sorts of nutrients such as horse & pig poo, composted weeds, hay & pea straw, ash from our fire etc. These were all mixed in with the low quality soil from the hole and then left for about a month. This then allowed us time to research which nut trees were suitable and source where to buy them before planting.

We have currently decided on planting the following:

• 2 x chestnuts
• 4 x hazelnuts
• 2 x pecans
• 2 x pinenuts
• 3 x pistachios
• 2 x walnuts

We still have 7 holes to spare so will decide what to plant in them next winter as we are looking for some different, unique and interesting types of nuts too that aren’t always available from nurseries. We are luckily having some really great spring – summer rains and so far have not really had to use our new watering system that we laid to drip feed them yet.

More updates to come on any successes and failures with our nut trees. This was a big step for us as we haven’t had nut trees before. Hopefully we will still be blogging when we get our first nut harvest.

Click here to view a GardenWatchCam video file of our bush block and mudbrick home showing our indigenous vegetation after about 18 months of regeneration after the bushfire.

We have 2 ways of getting seed to grow and produce a beautiful vegetable with fruits you can eat.

1. Add the seed directly to the ground in our vegie patch.
2. Grow seeds in pots or trays and nurture before planting out seedlings into our vegie patch.

Seedling with protector from slugs, snails and slaters.

Using either technique we always have the issue with slugs, snails or slaters eating our young seedlings. Even a tiny nibble by one of these invertebrates can be fatal as they love to take a nip out of the stem completely cutting a seedling in half.

We have been really working hard trying to improve our rate of raising seedlings from seed with minimal effort and tackling slugs, snails or slaters particularly using natural (non-chemical) techniques has been a challenge.

For small seeds such as carrot, radish, parsnip, coriander, dill etc we tend to go with the tactic of just planting out heaps directly into the vegie patch. Using lots of seed with the hope that invertebrate pests won’t be able to eat every germinant or seedling. We have found that to do this in an efficient and cheap matter it is really worthwhile to harvest our own seed so that we have plenty to play with and can afford to loose some this way.

For larger seeds that we plant directly into the vegie patch such as peas, snowpeas, beans, beetroot we plant the seeds inside a seedling protector so that they get the chance to grow with reduced predation by slugs, snails or slaters. We also use a seedling protector if we plant out seedlings that we have grown and nutured in pots or trays before transplanting such as curcubits (pumpkins, cucumbers, zucchinis, squash), tomatoes, chillis, capsicums, eggplants, corn etc.

Seedling protectors on hand in the vegie patch.

We have made all our own seedling protectors using recycled materials. We started with good quality plastic yoghurt tubs but in the end found that PVC plumbers piping was probably best in terms of durability and lasting potential when out in the weather. We don’t buy the piping but have found it all through local hard waste collections. 90mm  diameter piping is the best but smaller and larger diameters can work too. We simply cut lengths about 150mm long.

The best tips we have found for making the seedling protectors most user friendly have been:

• Have plenty readily on hand so that you can grab one or many easily when and where you need them (we have about 50 scattered around our vegie patch).
• Ensure that the opening is wide so that the seedlings inside are easy to water, a small opening makes it difficult.
• Use the protectors to create micro-climates to nuture your seedlings, protect from sun etc
• Don’t put mulch up too close to the protector while the seedling is small as this provides hiding spots for slugs, snails or slaters. The protectors only reduce the chance of the seedling being found.
• Make sure that no slugs, snails or slaters are trapped inside the protector this will be fatal for the seedling.
• Use other manual techniques to reduce the overall number particuarly of slugs and snails.

The small amount of extra effort in using the protectors greatly improves our seedling success rate. We tend to only keep the protectors on until the seedlings have begun growing their secondary or adult leaves and look big and strong enough to tackle the invertebrate pests. Usually this is about 3 – 5 adult leaves present, not including the original 1-2 leaves that are produced immediately after germination. Keep the mulch away from the seedling stem a little longer also helps.

Soil sifter used to sow carrot seed. Month old carrot seedlings below.

To improve rates of germination when we plant seeds directly into the vegetable garden beds we ensure we prepare the site. Of course it is important to have nice healthy organic soil. We are constantly working on improving the organic content of our vegetable garden beds by regularly adding composted soil from our worm farm. But the small details right as you plant the seed can also really help.

But one of the best and easiest tips we have found to improve germination rates is to sow into nice loose and fluffy soil. This works especially well for smaller seeds such as carrots, parsnip, beetroots, coriander, dill etc. We have built our own soil sifter from recycled materials that we found on the hard waste. Each time before planting small seeds we loosen and sift the area where we are going to plant. It also works well to sift another fine layer over the seed once you have laid them.

Home made soil sifter.

Sifting also helps to remove any large objects in your soil such as rocks, twigs or leaves. Some of these items may be too heavy for seeds to push up through and reduce their chance of successful germination. Always water in with a fine spray of water to keep the soil loose until the seeds have germinated.

To build the sifter we simply cut piece of 200mm diameter PVC piping. Then we used a piece of mesh that had 10mm x 10mm grid – which was a common wire spacing. We actually wanted smaller holes than the mesh had so we overlapped 2 pieces of the mesh to create holes of approximately 5mm x 5mm. The mesh was then attached using a few hose clamps joined head to tail and tightened off.