I've been watching the A-Z of Gardening on YouTube. It's interesting because they just focus on one letter at a time, but take what are I think are excerpts from numerous UK gardening shows and put them all together. I always hope to see some things under different letters, some have great information and then some like "F" gave me "fences" as one of the topics. Not the most exciting topic for this plant enthusiast. Following that they spent some time on Fushias, beautiful, but again I'm not really ready for these pretty plants. My focus, if you're new to my garden, is all about things you can eat. Now I'm not saying that I won't stray off into fencing (we've just put up a new side fence, so I may just share that on some quiet gardening day), but primarily I want to share my love for growing food.
While my mind was busy spinning thoughts of which 'letter' will really deliver, the post delivered me something to get my heart pounding, the new Green Harvest newsletter and catalogue. (If you're not local to South East Queensland Australia, do yourself the most delicious gardening favour and have a look at their website greenharvest.com.au. and be amazed by the variety of plants and their great information, by the way, this isn't an advert of any kind, and I don't get anything for promoting them, I just buy goodies from them, and consult their website for advice and inspiration, and really enjoy doing so). Anyway getting back on track, I was reading through their spring planting flyer and discovered I already have most of what they were suggesting growing here in my own backyard, or alternatively I've already tried it, and killed it (not all things work first go...). I had forgotten just how many plants I have accumulated and learnt about since starting to garden 8 years ago.
So I thought, why not do my own A-Z list, at first I was thinking to myself, "Gosh I don't have anything before C", but then I sat down and looked out the window.
So enough about how I got here and why, lets get started, drum roll please.....
"A" is for:
Acerola Cherry
Now me growing these was a stroke of good luck because I bought them when I was still very new to gardening, and thought I was buying your stock standard type cherry. It's just as well, because in our subtropical climate on the coast, we'd never have any cherries produced as we don't get anywhere near the chill hours required. These are a great option for a warmer climate, easy to grow (our lives out the front where we rarely bother to water, rarely mulch, and only ever remember to fertilise once in a blue moon),and taste good too. Our neighbours have a brazilian cherry, another type of tropical cherry type option, but the fruit on it are so bitter compared to these. Ours didn't fruit for almost 5 years, but I have seen them fruiting on fairly young trees at the nursery.
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| Pink flowers are a sign of coming fruit, |
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| Green Berries follow on from the flowers fairly quickly. |
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| Cherries are ready to pick when they have turned red and darkened a little. |
Apples
We have two subtropical apple trees that are about 5 years old. One is a Golden Dorsett, the other is now a mystery as I've lost the tag, and can't remember what it is. It is however not the same variety as that is one of the suggestions with Apples, you get better pollination and therefore crops supposedly by planting not only a second tree, but a tree of a different variety. These were bought as grafted trees that were about a year old. Up until last season ours had only produced very small, about small apricot sized fruit and very few of them. This last lot however, we made sure the trees had regular feeding and were kept well mulched. We also ensured we bagged the fruit from the time they were really small to make sure we avoided damage by fruit fly or any other pests and we had good results. With Queensland fruit fly a major problem the previous season, I'd been trying out different options on all my fruit to see what worked best. The mesh bag was ok, but because it is softer, with rain or wind it can get very close to the fruit, enabling the fruit to be stung through the mesh, although in fairness we only lost one, and it was a fairly full bag as you can see below, so for value we would do these again. We also tried pest guard bags from Green Harvest as these had been really helpful with the nectarines and peaches, but I find it frustrating not being able to see the fruit and they seemed to take longer to ripen. The best results came from the fly screen mesh bags and sleeves, these were easy to get on, held their shape well, but are the most expensive option. All these came from Green Harvests website, where I bought a kit with various options in it to try them all out. It also came with some exclusion netting and seemed a good value option (
http://greenharvest.com.au/Other/Specials.html )
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| Apples on the unidentified tree, bagged to protect from fruit fly and other pests |
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Apples on the Golden Dorsett, this bag was the easiest to use, made from what looks like fly screen wire, available from Green Harvest. |
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| One of the apples minus it's covering bag while being checked. |
You can grow apples from seed, fairly easily but they say that you may not get a fruit anything like the apple you took it from. Whether this is because of the pollinator or because of genetic throw backs, I'm not sure, but it hasn't stopped me from giving it a go. I've got four plants grown from a supermarket apple seeds. One of my homestay students kindly sprouted the seeds in wet tissue as her grandmother in Russia had taught her and I then carefully planted them out and have been repotting as they grow since. They are now about 2 years old, only small, smaller than our grafted trees were when we bought them but growing well and due for another repot.
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| The apples grown from seed as seedlings |
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| One of the seedlings on the potting bench 6 months on. |
Arrowroot
see "Q" for Queensland Arrowroot and "I" for Indian Arrowroot (sorry, you will have to be patient, I have to hold some of the good stuff back for the hard letters, goodness only knows what I'll be able to come up with for X & Z, time for that later though)
Artichoke
See "J" for Jerusalem Artichoke and "C" for Chinese Artichoke
Still to come ... more "A" for Asparagus
What "A's" are you growing in your garden?
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