We’re at the point in spring where some plants can start to flag. You’ll notice it most in the vegie patch, where things planted back in late winter will have put on a big spurt of growth, but are now starting to look a bit tired as temperatures warm and winds increase. To revive sagging fortunes in the vegie patch and beyond, it can be a great idea to splash around a watering can or two of liquid fertiliser.

Gardeners seem to forget that plants take up nutrients in liquid form. In other words, when you apply a solid fertiliser such as pelletised chook manure, nutrients don’t get absorbed through plant roots until the pellets start to dissolve in the presence of moisture. By contrast, liquid fertilisers provide a quick response. The nutrients are taken up almost immediately through a plant’s foliage and root system. This enables the savvy gardener to correct any deficiencies relatively quickly, in addition to providing a rapid boost to plant growth.

To give you an example of this fast-acting process, I used liquid fertiliser extensively during last summer’s wet weather. Heavy rainfall leaches nutrients from the soil, and as a consequence, some plants may show obvious signs of being “hungry”. Citrus trees, being gross feeders, were particularly vulnerable to nutrient deficiencies last summer, so once the soil had dried out a bit, I applied a solid fertiliser around the root zone of my trees to provide a slow release of nutrients. But that’s not all. I did so in tandem with fortnightly applications of liquid fertiliser. Until the solid fertiliser started to break down, the liquid fertiliser provided a rapid boost. The result was that the plants remained green and healthy all summer long.

Two other situations where liquid fertilisers really come into their own is with container plants, and leafy green vegetables. Plants such as lettuce, rocket, bok choy, and silverbeet will produce lots of tender leaves in response to regular applications of liquid feed, while container plants benefit greatly from monthly doses of liquid fertiliser as a supplement to slow release products. Indoor plants in particular are prime candidates for regular liquid feeding during the warmer months of the year.

At this point, some of you might be wondering what I even mean by the term “liquid fertiliser”. So let’s define it. A liquid fertiliser is any liquid containing nutrients essential for healthy plant growth, including nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium. Liquid fertilisers shouldn’t be confused with liquid plant tonics. These products are often based on seaweed extract, and generally contain trace elements and other helpful micro-nutrients, but very little nitrogen. Rather than promote foliage growth, tonics enhance soil life, encourage healthy root formation and provide other benefits such as making plants more resistant to frost and drought.

Liquid fertilisers, on the other hand, come in a wide array of different configurations based on the ingredients used in their manufacture. The most basic are very low-tech and can be entirely home made. Human urine (don’t cringe) has been used as a fertiliser for thousands of years, and there’s still merit in having the gentlemen of the house say good night to the lemon tree. At home you can also make liquid fertiliser from the worm juice that accumulates in the lower chamber of your worm farm, or from comfrey or soft weed leaves steeped in a bucket of water for couple of weeks.

Some organic gardeners make a compost tea by placing about one litre of compost in a shadecloth “teabag”, putting the bag in a 10 litre bucket, and letting the liquid brew for a week before use. With any of the above fertilisers it’s important to dilute to about one part concentrate to 10 parts water.

When it comes to commercial products, nurseries and hardware stores carry dozens of different liquid fertiliser brands. Being an organic gardener I choose products that are made from previously living ingredients, rather than synthetic chemicals. My favourite liquid fertilisers are based on fish emulsion, and in my view the best of the lot is Charlie Carp. I generally avoid endorsing a product specifically, and never accept payment or kickbacks for such recommendations, but I love the fact that Charlie Carp takes a problem – feral fish infesting our waterways – and turns it into a fertiliser for plants. Brilliant. There are lots of others available as well, but it would pay to look for those that are Certified Organic.

The only other caveats I have with liquid fertilisers is to always dilute them according manufacturer directions, to avoid burning sensitive plant roots, and to not ignore the long term process of building healthy, fertile soil via the continual addition of decomposed organic matter. Liquid fertiliser can be helpful, but soil building is still the main game.

First published in the Toowoomba Chronicle 22nd October 2011. Photo by Justin Russell, orange blossom.

Check out our new site The Radish, edible gardening from roots to fruits.

Our lilac is flowering! This is cause for celebration in any spring, but it’s extra special this year because the plant was given to us by a friend over at Ravensbourne (thanks Kym). Her garden is warmer than ours, so the lilacs she had planted never bloomed very well. Rather than coddle them along she dug the mature shrubs out of the ground and gave them away. I love this aspect of gardening culture – the swapping of plants and hard won wisdom, so I was really keen to see the plant thrive.

For a year it piddled along and did next to nothing other than blow over in a storm. I re-staked it, mulched, gave it plenty of seaweed extract and a dressing of wood ash in the hope that it would get a liking for our conditions and send out lots of beautiful new roots. For months during summer and autumn our lilac looked horrible. It was alive, but had failed to leaf out and was a bunch of bare sticks in an otherwise lush garden. Now, after a cold winter, the lilac looks beautiful. It’s covered with big panicles of grape coloured flowers and the fragrance…wow. What a knockout.

I should have had more faith that the plant would do well. For those who aren’t aware, the lilac genus, Syringa, is most closely related to privet and that’s a plant in more than enough abundance around our parts. We have a large windbreak of the non-weedy small leaved variety on the western side of our house. It was planted thirty years ago by the property’s original owners and went absolutely ballistic during last summer’s big wet. Down at the creek, the large leafed privet is a serious weed. What’s more, lilacs are generally grafted onto a privet rootstock. Should I be surprised that our plant is thriving? Probably not.

When push comes to shove, lilacs are a tough and adaptable plant. Their ideal conditions are a slightly alkaline, relatively impoverished soil, plenty of sun in summer, and a cold winter to produce the best flower displays. I’m not sure if they’re growing lilacs down at Stanthorpe, but their conditions should be ideal. In the blacksoil parts of the Downs, it would pay to improve drainage with some gypsum and compost, while on the red soil plateaus an annual dressing of lime (or wood ash) each autumn.

Lilacs are best purchased bare-rooted in winter and for best results, a special technique should be used when planting. You see, lilacs are difficult plants to strike from cuttings. But they are easy to graft, so propagators put the named lilac variety onto either a seedling lilac or a privet rootstock. However, privet grafts usually fail in five to ten years and lilac seedlings tend to have inferior flowers. Both these problems can be overcome by planting your lilac extra deep, making sure the graft union is buried about 20cm below soil level. In time the named lilac will grow its own roots above the graft, and any suckers coming from below ground can simply be cut out. Note that this is the opposite of what you should do for most grafted trees, which need to be planted with the graft union above soil level.

As for pruning lilacs, there’s two golden rules: first, avoid pruning if you don’t need to; and second, if you must prune, do it just after the plant his finished flowering. Lilacs flower on wood formed the previous summer and autumn, so if you prune in April or July, you’ll be cutting off all the flower buds. Who wants a lilac that never flowers? Not me. Flowers are the lilac’s raison d’etre.

There are more than 2,000 named lilac cultivars, but the most commonly available in Australia are either hybrids or cultivated forms of Syringa vulgaris, the common lilac native to the Balkan Peninsula. The vulgaris types tend to have more fragrant flowers, so I’d be inclined to keep an eye out for ‘Belle de Nancy’ (compact, mauve flowers), ‘Congo’ (dark purple flowers), ‘Madame Lemoine’ (pure white, double flowers) and ‘Sensation’ (purple flowers with a white border). Specialist growers are also likely to have a range of species available, including Syringa afghanica, which has pastel blue flowers and lacy foliage.

I have absolutely no idea what variety the lilac in my garden is. And you know what? I don’t really care. I’m just happy that the plant survived the wettest summer in 40 years, and that it’s flowering. You’ll excuse me then, if I finish up for another week and race outside to take a whiff of that heady fragrance.

First published in the Toowoomba Chronicle 15th October 2011. Photo by Justin Russell

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One of the best plant combinations I’ve ever seen was in the garden at Vineyard Cottages in Ballandean. On a central arbour marking the axis of two intersecting paths is a yellow banskia rose, and a purple Chinese wisteria. The two were in flower when I visited a number of years ago, and the image will be forever burnt in my memory. The purple and yellow flowers set against the hazy blue backdrop of Sundown National Park was simply stunning!

Is it any wonder? Everything about the combination is spot on. Yellow and purple complement each other on the colour wheel, which means that in theory, the combination should work nicely. But as any half knowledgeable artist will tell you, mixing colours also has a lot to do with combining the right shades of a certain colour. In the case of banksia rose, the yellow is a soft lemon shade, which means it teams perfectly with the wisteria’s dusky lavender.

But there’s more to a good plant combination than colour alone. The other reason banksia rose and wisteria work so well together is that they both like very similar growing conditions. Because they hail from the botanical hotspot of southern China, which has a climate ranging from alpine to subtropical, the two plants thrive right across the Darling Downs. Cold winters aren’t a problem, nor is drought, heat, or heavy black soil.

The only major difference between the two plants is the way in which they are pruned. Banksia roses are a cinch. Unlike most modern shrub roses that flower on the current season’s growth, banksia roses flower on wood that grew last summer, and the plants only flower once in spring. So if you’re going to prune you should do so just after the plant has finished flowering. This will give the new wood a chance to form before the plant goes dormant in winter. Don’t prune in winter like you would other roses. If you do, you’ll cut off all the flowering wood for the following spring.

Wisterias are a bit harder to prune, but they’re not as difficult as many gardeners imagine. Unlike banksia roses, wisteria flowers on short, finger-like spurs that form along lateral branches growing from the main trunk. With this in mind, wisterias are pruned for two reasons: to keep the plant relatively compact, and to encourage the formation of these flower spurs.

Ideally, wisterias are pruned twice a year. After the plant has finished flowering in spring it will start to send out lots of whippy shoots. In summer, these “side shoots” can be pruned back to about 30cm from where they originate on the lateral branch, leaving about four to six leaves on the shoot. If you want to extend the plant, leave some of these side shoots in place to grow on. Then in late winter, shorten the side shoots you pruned in summer even further. Take them back to about two or three buds. This will encourage the side shoots to become flowering spurs, and all being well, you’ll get to enjoy a magnificent display of flowers in September.

Besides staying on top of summer and winter pruning, the other way you can encourage wisteria to flower is by growing them in quite lean soil. Avoid applying lots of high nitrogen fertiliser. All this will do is tell the plant to send out new growth and you’ll end up with a triffid-like monster that never flowers but does a great job of crushing your back fence with it’s weight. Fertilise your banksia rose after pruning to encourage new flowering wood, by all means. But with your wisteria you should either avoid fertilising altogether, or at most, apply some “flower and fruit” fertiliser that’s low in nitrogen but high in potassium and phosphorous.

Finally, if you’re going to grow a banksia rose/wisteria combination, it pays to give a bit of thought to what you’re going to use to support the plants. Strength is a primary consideration, as a mature wisteria is heavy, and a mature banskia rose only slightly less so. In the garden down at Ballandean the plants were trained on an arbour made from solid hardwood, but they also had a wisteria growing on a solid post-and-rail boundary fence. If you’re handy with a welder, or know someone who is, steel can be a more reliable choice.

Combining plants for best effect is an art form, just like any other. Good combinations are hard to achieve, so if you’re after a showstopper for your garden, take my advice – banksia rose and wisteria are a match made in horticultural heaven.

First puublished in the Toowoomba Chronicle 1st October 2011. Photo by Justin Russell, wisteria and banksia rose, Vineyard Cottages, Ballandean.

There comes a point in spring where I’m absolutely itching to sink my teeth into the first properly ripe strawberry of the season. I don’t buy strawberries from the shops. I grew up eating plump, deliciously sweet berries grown on my Pa’s market garden in Brisbane, so to my palate, the commercial strawberries sold in plastic punnets are a serious disappointment. As far as I’m concerned, real berries come from the garden (or a really good local farmer), and they’re as far removed from the bland, mushy, transported-halfway-across-the-state excuses for fruit that promise so much but deliver so little.

I get the impression that some people consider my attitude elitist. Someone once suggested that not everyone’s lucky enough to have a large garden like me. Others have claimed that they too could grow their own strawberries of only they’d achieved my level of gardening skill! Such defeatism! I try to explain to the naysayers that they’d probably change their tune if they saw just how laid back my strawberry growing efforts actually are.

Besides preparing the soil properly before planting, mulching the plants until they naturally cover the ground, and putting out some eco-friendly snail bait during wet weather, I do nothing to my strawberries other than pick, and enjoy, them. I don’t spray, fertilise, or water. My plants don’t have viruses, but they do get the occasional bit of grey mould during wet summers. I don’t worry about it. And I’m not a commercial grower, so I ignore the traditional advice that strawberry plants should be completely replaced every three years to prevent disease taking hold. In spite of my laissez faire approach we get bumper crops of berries every spring, summer and autumn that more than justify the minuscule amount of time I put into the the plants.

So what’s your excuse? I don’t mean to be rude, it’s just that if you’re keen to grow strawberries but haven’t yet had a go, I’m wondering what’s holding you back? If space is limited try growing strawbs in pots or hanging baskets. If your soil is black clay try raised beds. If you’re worried you don’t have the requisite skills, take comfort in the fact that you only need the bare basics.

There’s a common misconception about strawberries that they are delicate, and therefore, difficult to grow. While it’s true that the berries themselves aren’t very robust, the plants are actually quite resilient. The ideal growing conditions are a free draining, slightly acidic soil that’s full of organic matter, a position in sun or dappled shade, and some supplemental irrigation during really hot, dry periods. These needs reflect the plant’s origins in the woodlands of Europe where wild strawberries grow naturally in the humus-rich, semi-shaded soils of the forest floor. Replicate these conditions at home as best you can, and you’ll be on a winner.

Unfortunately, it’s a bit trickier to pick a winner among the few strawberry varieties offered for sale in the nurseries. Truth be told, many are superseded commercial varieties that were bred for qualities such as transportability, extended harvest and disease resistance. Like most commercial fruit, flavour isn’t top priority. For home growers, the situation is reversed. My primary consideration is flavour, so I try to choose fruit and vegies that are, more than anything else, absolutely delicious to eat. Usually this means looking to specialist nurseries for the right plants.

With this in mind I’ve just planted out a new patch of strawbs. The variety is ‘Hokawase’, an old Japanese selection that is blessed with one of the most incredible flavours on the face of the planet. Hokawase is so good you’re unlikely to ever find your local supermarket. The berries don’t transport well (strike one), they go soft in the punnet (strike two) and only bear in spring and early summer (strike three, and they’re out!). But for me, Hokawase is precisely the kind of strawberry I want to grow.

‘Red Gauntlet’, my other main variety, is incredibly productive but lacks the flavour of the best strawberries. I’ve also got an unknown variety that nearly rivals Hokawase, but the next best is the much overlooked alpine strawberry or fraises des bois – the wild strawberry of the wood. This plant runs like crazy, which makes it a good groundcover, and it produces little fingernail sized morsels that burst in your mouth like sherbet. Still, they’ve got nothing on a just picked Hokawase.

The gates of berry heaven are wide open and all gardeners with an ounce of enthusiasm for growing their own fruit are welcome to enter.

First published in the Toowoomba Chronicle 24th September 2011. Photo by Justin Russell, Red Gauntelt strawberries and calendula in the vegie patch.

September is the most irresistible month of the year. For gardeners living in a four season climate, the few short weeks of transition from winter to spring are so full of promise that it’s difficult not to get carried away.

For the wise heads out there, heed this word of caution. Be patient. Try and curb your enthusiasm just a wee bit. I know it’s hard. The sun’s out, the weather feels warm, the soil’s moist after the recent rains and all the nurseries are selling your favourite summer vegie seedlings. It seems like the perfect growing weather. This is certainly true for some plants, but for true warm season vegies, we’re not quite there yet. The air temperature is warm enough but the soil is still cold. If you doubt me, try the bare bottom test used by medieval peasants. Drop your daks, place your bare bum on the soil surface and test the temperature. I’ll bet it feels darn cold.

The problem with cold soil is that some seeds – corn, beans, pumpkin and tomato for instance – need a soil temperature above 15 Celsius to germinate. Capsicum, eggplant and melons need even warmer soil – 18C or more. Try sowing these seeds early in September and you are likely to be disappointed with the results. Plus, there’s still a chance of late frost and a single decent freeze may wipe out all of your warm season crops and you’ll have to start over. Old timers have learnt to take it slow and steady in September. They know that time lost at the start of spring will be well and truly gained by the end.

Inevitably, some of you will completely ignore this advice and rush headlong into the season without caring a fig what the weather may or may not do. Who am I to judge. Excitement gets the better of us all and I too have been guilty of starting plants too early in spring. If I’m to be really honest, I think I might have lost a few plants on a frosty night or two last October.

So if you simply can’t resist the urge to get some summer plants in the ground, you might want to try planting seedlings. You can purchase these if you like, but you’ll get better value for money, not to mention better plants, if you raise the seedlings yourself from seed. Start the seeds indoors. Light isn’t essential for germination, but warmth is, so look for balmy places like the top of the fridge or a bench top near the oven in the kitchen.

Once the seeds have germinated, which might take anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks, it’s vital that they go outside into a well lit position. Don’t fall for the mistake of placing them on a sunny windowsill. The tiny seedlings will become weak and leggy as they crane toward the light. Put them out into bright shade or morning sun, and avoid covering the seedlings with those clear plastic mini greenhouses. If the seedlings blow about a bit in the breeze and are in bright light they will develop stout, strong stems that eventually support healthy plants. Also, don’t saturate the soil either before or after germination. Water daily, by all means, but allow the soil to dry out a little between times.

What should you sow the seeds in? I like to use a custom seed raising mix and biodegradable pots. I make the former from fairly sandy commercial seed raising mix (Debco is my favourite brand, if you are wondering) and perlite combined at a ratio of two thirds to one third. It doesn’t really matter what brand or mix you use as long as it is sterile, to avoid problems such as damping off, and reasonably loose. I don’t add any fertiliser to the mix. Instead, I start feeding the little seedlings with a weak fish emulsion fertiliser once they are up and growing.

Biodegradable pots can be made from toilet rolls, egg cartons, or rolled up newspaper. I’ve got a big carton of coir punnets sitting in my propagating area so I use those, but the principle with all the various materials is the same. When it comes time to plant the seedling in the soil, put it in pot and all. The pot will decompose, and the seedling will suffer very little transplant shock. Wouldn’t you be happier if you weren’t squeezed and cajoled and shaken from your bed in the morning? One of the hallmarks of master gardeners is that they have learnt to think like a plant.

All the best for spring everyone. As American farmer Joel Salatin might say, may your earthworms dance with celebration and your carrots grow long and straight.

First puublished in the Toowoomba Chronicle 3rd September 2011. Photo by Justin Russell, pansies.

The sap is rising. New growth is suddenly bursting out everywhere in my garden, and the first blossoms have made an appearance. Almonds are invariably head of the queue, but they’re closely followed by an apple called Anna, a low chill variety that flowers very early compared to many of it’s compatriots. A couple of Japanese plums have also burst, and the scene is starting to take on a distinct springtime exuberance.

One of the jobs I look forward to most in late August is grafting. I propagate most of my own apples and pears for my little fruit tree nursery, and it’s a process that I find quite meditative. There must be something about grafting that appeals to my sensibilities. I usually emerge from a session feeling quite happy with the world, probably because the process is all about hope. There’s a miraculous quality in the uniting of a scion with a rootstock that I never tire of.

It can be tempting to think that grafting is a skill beyond the reach of the average home gardener. It isn’t. Anyone with the right gear, a willingness to practice and enough strength in the hands to cut fruitwood can have a go at grafting. Before long you’ll be able to perform all kinds of wonderful horticultural tricks and solve some otherwise insurmountable problems. Like changing from one plant variety to another.

Let’s imagine you planted a Red Delicious apple (my least favourite variety), but have come to your senses and decided that you’d rather grow something truly delicious – a Cox’s Orange Pippin or a Lord Lambourne for example. Assuming the apple tree is healthy, there’s absolutely no need to pull it out and start again. You can simply cut the existing tree back, then “top work” it by grafting branches over to the desired variety.

Or, you might choose to graft the tree over to a number of varieties. Pollination can be an issue with some fruit varieties, and in small gardens, finding space for more than one plant may be impossible. Don’t fret. If you’ve learnt how to graft, you can easily grow two or three varieties on a single tree, solving your pollination problem without the need to find room for extra plants. For collectors of rare plants, grafting will enable you to put dozens, even hundreds, of individual varieties on a single tree.

The process is actually very low-tech, but you will need to follow a few simple guidelines to avoid butchering your trees. The first is that grafting requires a good quality knife, preferably a proper grafting knife, that’s been honed to a very sharp edge. It seems counter-intuitive, but the sharper your knife, the less likely you’ll be to take off a thumb. To provide support and prevent drying out before the graft “takes”, you’ll need to seal the join up with grafting tape – it’s available at most hardware stores and nurseries.

Secondly, timing is of the essence. The best time to graft is in late winter or early spring, when the rootstock is “on the move” but the scionwood is still dormant. I harvest my scions in early winter, then store them in a plastic bag in the fridge until required. When harvesting wood, aim for branches of pencil thickness and cut them into pieces containing three or four buds. Of course you’ll need a rootstock to graft the scion on to. This is likely to be an existing tree in your garden, but for enthusiasts, you can propagate rootstocks from seed or cuttings, or alternatively, buy a tree, cut off the top, and graft onto it.

Third, practice. The three most useful grafts for beginners are the whip, the whip and tongue, and the cleft (or wedge) graft. It’s beyond the scope of this article to describe them in detail, so I’d recommend you consult a decent book or have a look on YouTube for some video demonstrations. I got lots of excellent tips from a series of grafting videos made by an English apple grower named Stephen Hayes (his username is stephenhayesuk). Once you’re familiar with the techniques, make cut after cut on some scrap wood until you feel confident enough to have a go at a proper graft.

Then do just that – give it a go. Apples and pears are the easiest trees to work with, and they take readily. As long as you graft at the right time and ensure the cambium layer (green layer of growth cells just below the bark) of the scion matches that of the rootstock, you’ll get more successful grafts than failures. Other fruit and ornamental varieties can be a bit trickier, but they too, are worth a shot. Grafting is a skill worth learning.

First published in the Toowoomba Chronicle 20th August 2011. Photo by Kylie Russell, Justin grafting a pear tree.

What a run of magnificent winter weather we’ve just experienced. Frosty dawns and sunny afternoons are tonic for the soul as far as I’m concerned, and it seems the various fruit trees in my garden appreciate the weather just as much as I do. There are signs that my fruit trees are waking from their winter rest. Most notable are the buds. On some trees they are small and slender. On others, the pears and apples in particular, the buds grow fatter and more expectant by the day.

But hard won experience has taught me not to get fooled. It is, after all, barely the start of August. Officially, winter still has a month to run, and in some parts of the Downs, including my little cold pocket on the western fall of the Great Dividing Range, frost can settle on the ground well into October. My enthusiasm for the garden is swelling just as quickly as the buds on my trees, but I’m not quite ready to throw open the windows and embrace the wonders of spring.

Besides, there’s still a mountain of jobs to do in anticipation for the season to come. August is probably the busiest time of the year for food-centric gardeners like me, for the simple reason that if the preparation work isn’t done in earnest now, there will be slim pickings in the vegie garden until the summer crops get started in November. And if I can help it, I prefer to grow my own, rather than depend on the seasonless conveniences offered by the supermarkets.

Traditionally, the period from late winter to early summer was the leanest time of the year in cold climate gardens. People called it the “hungry gap”. It was a time when the stored surplus of autumn began to dwindle but the weather hadn’t thawed sufficiently for fresh produce to be ready to eat. Hunger, even starvation, was a very real possibility. This is why lent is celebrated during the northern hemisphere spring – the religious symbolism of fasting and suffering coincides with the reality of rarely filled bellies.

Thankfully, the situation isn’t quite as dire as it once was. Yes, I loathe the supermarkets, that much is obvious. And I’m very dubious about the perceived security of the modern food system. But compared to the average medieval peasant, or the modern day Somalian for that matter, we’ve got it very easy. The grocery shops offer a safety net that would be inconceivable to many, and our climate is, for the time being at least, conducive to growing a broad range of nutritious vegetables every month of the year.

So for me, it’s head down bum up for the next month, not so much in an effort to avoid the hungry gap, but to build a level of security and sheer deliciousness into my family life that no supermarket can ever begin to match. My Woolies…my big toe! I’ll tell you where my real loyalties lie, and that’s with my garden.

Top of my notepad titled “Jobs for August” is spuds. Some people ask me why I bother growing something so cheap and readily available in the shops. My answer, beside what I just wrote above, is that you must never have tasted a freshly dug spud. Tender, new potatoes bandicooted from the soil before the main crop is ready, are exceptionally flavoursome. I’ll always find some room for them in the garden. At the moment though, my seed potatoes are sitting on the kitchen bench waiting patiently for me to get them into the ground. They’ll go into well drained soil into which I’ve incorporated some compost and a generous scattering of pelletised poultry fertiliser.

Besides potatoes, my next priority is roots. Especially carrots. They are a nightly staple in our household, and the last of our autumn sowing was pulled from the ground this week. This time around I’m trying out an heirloom variety called ‘Danvers’ as well as my old favourite ‘Purple Dragon’, and unlike spuds, both will be sown into well dug soil that has no added compost or fertiliser. Carrots and parsnips prefer lean ground.

Finally, I’m going to sow a “catch crop” of leafy greens. Because greens are so fast growing they can be planted to catch the small window of opportunity that exists between late winter and the first plantings of summer ripening tomatoes, corn and beans in September and October. Rocket, mizuna, kale, Asian cabbage, and lettuce are all easy to start from either seed or seedlings and give quick results when speed is warranted.

There’s plenty to be done. And to be honest, after writing this week’s column I’m almost so keen to get into my vegie patch I could burst quicker than a plum blossom in September. It’s an exciting time of the year.

First published in The Toowoomba Chronicle 30th July 2011. Photo by Justin Russell, unfurling buds on an ornamental peach.

St Patrick’s Day has come and gone for another year and a question beckons: did you get your sweet peas in? March 17 is the traditional date to sow Lathyrus odoratus seed on the Darling Downs, but in truth, sweet pea seed can be sown anytime in early to mid autumn, and if you miss the boat this season, you even get a second chance by sowing in early spring.

Nonetheless, St Pat’s Day is as good a reminder as any, so last Thursday afternoon you would have found my wife Kylie, brilliant woman that she is, racing against dusk to get her seeds in the ground. She’s hoping for a display the equal of what we had last November, but I fear that it ain’t gonna happen. The unusually wet spring of 2010 contributed to the lushest growth I’ve ever seen on sweet peas, to the point that our four metre long row of plants grew so tall that they almost doubled their six foot trellis. Flowers appeared in genuine profusion, and the resulting scent was mind-bendingly intoxicating.

Our garden is a joint passion, and therefore, a joint effort, yet Kylie doesn’t often get recognised for the many hours of work she puts in alongside me. So it was nice to hear visitors complimenting her on the sweet peas, and even asking for some tips on how to grow them.

Kylie starts, as all clever gardeners should, with the soil. What you’re aiming for with sweet peas (and edible peas for that matter) is a well worked soil that’s full of organic matter but not overly rich in nitrogen. Too fertile, and you’ll get lots of lush foliage growth at the expense of flowers. The solution is compost. A month or so prior to sowing Kylie adds a decent barrow load of home made compost to the sweet pea bed, as well as generous handful of lime per square metre to balance out any acidity. Some blood and bone will help provide slow release nutrients without making the soil too fertile.

Her next tip is to use saved seed. As the sweet pea season comes to a close each year we leave some pea pods on the vines to dry out. These are harvested and stored in a cool, dry place until autumn, before being soaked in a bowl of water the night before St Patrick’s Day. Nothing special is added to the water. The soaking alone helps the seeds absorb moisture, and by the following day, they’ve swelled up and are ready to go in the ground.

I should note that to save your own seed, you’ll need to grow an open pollinated, heirloom variety of sweet pea. If you try to save seed from a hybrid, the offspring won’t grow true to type, which simply means that you’ll get a bunch of seedlings that revert to either of the original hybrid’s parent varieties. Kylie mostly grows ‘Matucana’, an old variety from the 1920’s that bears bicoloured violet and maroon flowers with a knockout scent. The Diggers Club is a good source of heirloom sweet pea seed.

Beware the modern sweet peas. These are often sold in punnets at garden centres, and while they produce showy flowers, many are completely devoid of scent. It seems completely stark raving bonkers to me, that plant breeders would deliberately breed scent out of a plant bearing the species name “odoratus” but that’s plant breeders for you. As English garden writer Monty Don says, a sweet pea with no smell is like food without flavour.

Once you’ve got the seeds in the ground, be it on March 17 or whenever, it’s important not to overwater. If the seeds were soaked and the soil watered upon sowing, there is plenty of moisture for germination to occur, so hold off with the water until the seedlings appear in about seven days. As your seedlings grow, it will probably be necessary to tie them loosely to the trellis to get them heading in the right direction until the tendrils get a grip. Keep them powering along with regular moisture and a monthly application of liquid fish emulsion.

If you planted in autumn, you’ll be enjoying flowers by late spring or early summer. Don’t waste such special blooms by leaving them all on the plant – Kylie harvests the flowers regularly for use inside the house. She gives lots away to friends. The key is to just keep picking, because the more you pick, the longer the plants will flower. Eventually though, flowering will cease. This is your cue to let the pods dry out, in preparation for another magnificent display of colour and scent next year.

First published in the Toowoomba Chronicle 26th March 2010. Photo by Justin Russell, Matucana sweet peas, Thistlebrook, October 2010.

Every season has its stand out plants, those that prefer the conditions more than the others, and perform to their peak potential. When it’s dry in my garden, things like apricots and mulberries come to the fore. This spring, it’s my climbing roses of all things, particularly “Pierre de Ronsard’ and its cousin ‘Red Pierre’.

Both plants are looking absolutely magnificent, and they haven’t even burst into flower yet. The glossy new foliage is tinted maroon and fat round buds are forming all the way along arched canes, and in a week or two, the plants will be smothered with what I consider to be some of the most stunning flowers in the whole plant kingdom.

Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585) was a French poet who served in the court of Charles IX of France and for three years in the court of James V of Scotland. Pierre was known both as the “Prince of Poets” and as a very keen gardener. To honour the 400^th anniversary of his death in 1985, the Paris city council suggested that famous rose company Meilland might name a rose after de Ronsard.

The company agreed, and chose a climbing rose from the nursery’s trial beds as the plant to bear the Pierre de Ronsard name. At the time, old rose varieties were out of fashion, but Pierre’s romantic, cupped blooms were deemed so different to anything else on the market that the company were desperate to commercialise the variety. The rest, as they say, is history. Pierre de Ronsard was an instant hit with gardeners. In 2006 the World Federation of Rose Societies voted Pierre de Ronsard the “World’s Favourite Rose”, and the variety remains an international best seller.

Women tend to really like it, and while I tend to go for “manlier” colours like blood red, I can definitely appreciate the romantic image Pierre de Ronsard coveys. The flower colour is like strawberries and cream, off white petals blushed with carmine-pink at the tips. This unique colour, combined with the voluptuous bloom shape, conjures up scenes of medieval maidens picking olives on hot Tuscan hillsides.

Then, in 2006, Meilland released ‘Red Pierre de Ronsard’. Bred as a companion for Pierre, Red Pierre has similar cupped blooms, but in a raspberry red colour that is less romance and more flamenco fire. I’ve got mine growing on an old shed, and I absolutely love the contrast of sumptuous flowers with rusty iron and weathered timber. The delicious light tea scent is almost an afterthought.

Both Pierre and Red Pierre are genuine, strong growing climbing roses. This means that they have a natural tendency to produce long, stiff canes, often heading straight up toward the sky. However the more upright they grow, the greater the flow of sap through the canes and the less inclined they are to produce flowering buds.

The foliage on both roses is attractive, but the main reason I grow them is for their flowers, so it’s important to train the plants appropriately. In the first couple of years after planting minimal pruning should be done, other than to tidy up any wayward growth. Once some decent canes have developed, they should be trained as close to horizontal as possible to slow down the flow of sap and promote flowers along the stem. In winter, about a third of the oldest canes can be pruned back to the base of the plant to encourage new canes to form, and the lateral branches growing from the remaining canes can be shortened to just a few buds or about 15 centimetres. Next summer the shortened branches will be covered with flowers.

I’ve found both Pierre and Red Pierre to be extremely healthy roses. I’m not a particularly fastidious sprayer of roses at the best of times, and prefer to choose disease resistant varieties that will look good despite my lack of attention.

To date, I haven’t sprayed my Pierre’s with anything. Pierre is growing adjacent to the fertile ground of the chook run, so it gets no attention beyond pruning, and Red Pierre on the old shed simply gets some organic fertiliser in spring and summer. Any outbreaks of black spot have been very minor, and so far the roses have been free of powdery mildew.  Perhaps the only issue I’ve encountered is that the flowers don’t last very long in damp weather before turning to mush.

Our resident possums are another story. They have a fondness for eating roses that is almost on par with their fondness for rhubarb leaves. Who could blame them? If there’s a more beautiful pair of climbing roses than Pierre and Red Pierre, I’m yet to find them.

First published in the Toowoomba Chronicle 16th October 2010. Photo by Justin Russell – Red Pierre.

As I write this week’s Secret Garden, yet another stormy burst of rain is passing overhead and adding some more welcome moisture to the soil. What a month it’s been. Thanks to a La Nina event we’ve now recorded more than 170mm for September here at Thistlebrook. I’ve never seen the garden look so lush.

There’s something really special about the combination of fresh spring growth and consistent rainfall that we’re treated to very infrequently on the Downs. Early perennials are flowering beautifully, roses are producing a huge number of fat buds, and our fruit trees look set for a magnificent crop. Nothing beats regular rain. It’s fair to say that I’m absolutely revelling in the conditions.

This doesn’t mean I’ve been lulled into a false sense of security. Our weather seems to be getting more and more fickle, and last year’s dust storms bounce around in my head like a half remembered nightmare. Who knows what summer will bring. As for next spring – it might turn out worse than 2009. The point is that we can only roughly predict what the weather is going to be like in a month or two. Next spring is more of a punt than a prediction.

One of the things my Mum and Dad taught me was to be prudent, to try and exercise sound judgement in practical affairs. It’s an old fashioned word, prudence, but the virtue is as important as ever, and I think it applies perfectly to the situation we’re in at the moment with the weather.

Here’s how things stand from my point of view. We’ve had outstanding spring rainfall in most parts of the Downs, but does that mean the drought has broken? I’m not so sure. Toowoomba’s dams are currently only 20 percent full even with the Wivenhoe pipeline going full tilt and good rain in the catchments. I live opposite the headwaters of Merrit’s Creek, which flows into Cooby Creek, then into Lake Cooby, and I can assure you that despite 170mm and a wet soil profile, the creek is hardly running a banker. More like a trickle. The other telling point is in the four years we’ve been here, we’re still yet to break our average rainfall total for the year.

I’m optimistic that this will be the year, and my approach is a one of a glass half full, rather than half empty. But if we’re to be really prudent, we need to realise that we’re facing a future of extreme booms and busts. At the moment we’re in a boom. But you can guarantee that around the corner, whether it’s next month, next year or in ten years time, there’s going to be a bust.

This means it’s time to make hay while the sun shines, or in our case as gardeners, to get planting while the soil’s moist and the tanks are full. Normally, I shun spring as my main planting time but this year, I say go for it. Get them in the ground now and hold off on any supplemental watering until regular rainfall ceases. As a rough guide, an inch per week (approximately 25mm) is plenty to get plants well established. If it’s falling from the sky, be prudent, and save the rainwater for a dry spell.

When you’re planting container grown plants, don’t forget to add lots of organic matter to the soil as far ahead of time as possible. Homemade compost is ideal. Well rotted manure is excellent. Bagged compost from the nursery will do the job in a pinch. Whatever is available, get it in there and you’ll find that the soil soaks moisture up like a sponge and gradually releases it to developing roots as plants get established.

If you are wondering what to plant, two things that immediately spring to mind are shade trees, to help beat the heat when it’s hot and dry, and windbreaks. One of the major inhibitors to strong plant growth is wind. After last year’s string of north westerlies that blew directly from the desert for weeks on end, and carried some of the desert with them, it should have finally dawned on us all that the more we can create a sheltered microclimate, the better our plants will grow and the nicer the garden will be.

Finally a pat on the back – Downs gardeners have done really well with conserving water over the last few years. We’ve changed many outdated practices for good, and even now that restrictions have eased somewhat, we’re still only using around 120 litres per person per day. This is a great achievement. But let’s not rest on our laurels. Conditions can change quickly, and the time to plan for the bust is now, during a boom. It’s the only prudent thing to do.

First published in the Toowoomba Chronicle 2nd October 2010. Photo by Justin Russell – Thistlebrook in spring.