The dastardly tale of Sheep Sorrel (Acetosella vulgaris)

I have a love hate relationship with sheep poo. Not sure what experiences others have had but I find it a fantastic manure for adding texture to poor soils, however I have also noticed the introduction of said sheep sorrel. Sheep Sorrel is a rather insignificant looking weed that the chooks and pigs love (however I would not feed too much of it to them!!). It it is very hard to remove due to the long underground rhizomes and has made my life difficult this season when trying to grow onions from seed as the sheep sorrel keep taking over the bed.

I am now considering reducing the use of sheep poo until I can get some control of this weed. I am hoping a winter of tic beans over the infested beds will help prevent germination during winter.  Sheep sorrel likes acidic soil so liming beds is recommended. I did this in the onion bed and did not seem to control the weed a great deal. Tho my soils are naturally acidic (hence great berry growing area) so i may have had to add much more lime?

Sheep sorrel with a long rhizome. (They get longer than this!!)

Sheep Sorrel close up

Last growing season I was given some chicory seed. I planted them direct and raised two plants. We added some of the leaves to salad during winter to add some flavour, but I left them to continue growing in their corner and have been impressed by the attractive 1.5m and higher flowering stalks, which seem to be covered in bees. I would highly recommend adding to your patch purely for the flowers.

chicory in flower

I thought I would take a few pictures of some vegetables and their varieties for what is currently growing in my patch. Photos follow:

Climbing Beans have started to take off.

I had some patchy germination with the beans this year. Did not find any culprit in action but I suspect birds early on as some corn went missing also. Beans all seem to be taking of now.

flowering "Merida" Carrot - retained to collect seed of the strongest growers last winter

Kohl Rabi

Kohl Rabi is one of me preferred vegetables. It surprises me it is not more commonly eaten.

Green  salad bowl Lettuce

I always seem to grow too much lettuce for eating. I feed some to the pigs and chickens and sell some at the Cygnet market or to people we know.

Royal Oak Lettuce

Happy New Year to all. I look forward to blogging my experiences in 2013. Would love to hear other peoples tips and tricks also.

Dave

What plant is that?

It seems many blogs start off with a spiel about the writer. I attempted to skip this in my first two blogs but thought I better follow the line of past blogs.

We have 4 children (3 boys and 1 girl) and so far have done quite well living off what we grow. I first started some vegetable growing in pots when living in Brisbane over a decade ago. I then stumbled upon Pete Cundalls "Patch from Scratch" DVD. This got me interested and when we moved to Toowoomba, I got the rotary hoe and followed exactly what he did in the movie. So I have been learning natural gardening for about a decade now. But there seems to always be a mountain to learn. Every month there is a new experience or challenge. Things we tend to buy vegetable wise are onions, capsicums and lemons. Providing year round supply of some items is a difficult task, and one to be discussed in a future post. Last season I grew 110 kg of potatoes and this was not enough for the family. They lasted till September so I am aiming for 150 kg this year.

My day job is based in Hobart where I work as an Ecologist. What this actually entails is botany and animal ecology. Often I can be seen trailing behind the family on a walk while looking for plants I may not know or threatened flora species or that piece of poo that is evidence of Tassie Devil or Quoll having been past.

Yesterday we went over to Coningham to do the Coningham beach to cliff top walk. The kids often complain before hand but once they do the walk they enjoy it, especially when the walk includes a secluded beach with fantastic views.

Legacy Beach with Mt Wellington in the background

The spring flowers so dominant during tassie springs have all finished now with the papery seed of a number of local daisies the only evidence of what was once the colour of the bush. There were still some heathy species in flower such as Leucopogon ericoides  as well as Wahlenbergia, Dianella revoluta   and the weedy Centaurium erythraea .  There were a number of native grasses to be seen which is not uncommon at this time of year. The wallaby grass (Austrodanthonia sp) and spear grasses (Austrostipa sp) were flowering with fresh seed making life easier to identify (However my tip sheet for id is at work and I am still coming to grips with these grasses. The wallaby grass being a very tricky genus to key to species level sometimes).

In Tasmania it is not uncommon to come across some spectacular views. Being a mountainous State, this lends itself to many views of water and mountains. But what did I do in the veggie patch today?

Nothing bar watering. the corn is growing well now and their water requirements are increasing. I am about to pick some Kohl Rabi and the spinach has been fantastic. I have grown two varieties this year. English winter giant and Tyee. Tyee has been a little better and slower to bolt in my observations, however both have nice tasty large leaves.

Till next time
Dave

View over to Tinderbox

This area is also known to have a colony of the endangered forty spotted pardalote bird. I did not hear or see one on this walk. Click the link to read more about this interesting bird.

One of the wallaby grasses - can you see it in the centre? they do not come up well on the camera.

Allocasuarina verticillata (Weeping She Oak)

Pumpkins are not squash

Pumpkins grew very easily in Qld. Our preferred variety was Jap pumpkin. One vine seemed to grow no less than 12 pumpkins around the 4 to 5 kg mark. The only thing to watch was the soil moisture during the hot days. Sometimes the humidity/overhead watering caused either downy or powdery mildew, which I often used to try to prevent with a 10% milk 90% water spray.

Life has not been as easy since moving to Tassie. In the 2010/11 summer,  I planted one waltham butternut and one sugar pie. I got 3 fairly bland tasting butternuts and the sugar pies seemed to struggle to mature before the April frosts arrived. This 2010/11 summer did feel like a cool one however the location they were planted did not take full advantage of the available sunlight (I had little choice at the place we were renting), plus a mountain nearby reduced the evening sunlight by another couple of hours.

During the 2011/12 summer I did not place a great deal of time into pumpkins. I had not yet extended the size of the veg patch (at that time about 12m by 15m) and decided to not bother to save space for the year. I did plant two red kurri plants, one which the soil was not ideal and the other was better but i did not allow it ample room. However I did get some red kurri pumpkins which we thought were much better tasting this time round, especially in a risotto. I also planted a jap pumpkin to see what happened. As I suspected, it grew very large but only started showing female flowers late march which was too late to mature the large pumpkins before cool nights and frosts returned. With better planning I will try the jap again int he future maybe with some black plastic on the soil to get the soil warmth up to speed up the growing season.

After extending the size of the veg patch to keep out rabbits and wallabies (i did have to fine tune it a bit), I decided to put more effort into the pumpkins for the 2012/13 summer season. This season I germinated three seeds in each punnet in the hothouse. I reduced these to two of the stronger growers. I read Steve Solomons advice on direct seeding pumpkin, however the effort into chitting the seed, watching for rain and planting in a dry spell (does this happen in October in Tas??) and replanting each week if they don't germinate (pumpkin seeds have soil temp requirements and tas spring can be quite volatile) put me off his advice and I decided to stick to what I had done before and raise in hot house before transplanting. Maybe I should have taken his advice, but time will tell.

This year I have planted 9 pumpkins of the following varieties:

• Red kurri
• Golden Nugget
• Butternut early (sourced from Inspirations Seeds)
• Buttercup

The bed I prepped during winter by mowing the grass low, laying down sheep poo, then newspaper, covering with hay/barleystraw/lucerne and more poo. Some of the barley straw blew off with some big winds we got so i may stick to the cheaper hay in future (tho more grass seeds germinate). I use this method now rather than kill my back with digging. Our soils are clodden together when waterlogged in winter so I find this method slower, but better for grass removal, soil improvement and helps to raise the height of the bed. When planting the pumpkin, I dumped a wheelbarrow load of soil for each pumpkin which had poo and mushroom compost mixed into it. Each pumpkin was planted into this soil.  I planted one out Oct 28 to see if it would take that early. It did well and I planted the rest out Nov 4th. We did have some warm weather around this time. Had we experienced a cold front I would have waited.

6 pumpkins early Dec 2012

6 pumpkins by Dec 28th. There has been vigorous growth during December.

 I have been impressed by the growth rate of the golden nugget. These are supposed to mature early and it looks like they will. Some tell me they are not the best tasting, but I like to try things myself as our taste buds are all different. The buttercup and butternut early have made real progress over the past 10 days, with one trailing arm now 2m long on a buttercup (would be longer had I not pinched the end off), with female flowers wide open and bees galore.

The golden nugget are forming.

So far this season looks like we will harvest an ample number of pumpkins. How they taste will be determined. I have been determined to keep the soil moist and mulched further mid Dec once the soil was warm to keep moisture in. I will report back at the end of season with the final harvest and weights and yields etc.

Happy pumpkining (no their not squash)

Dave Sayers

What is this blog stuff

After reading other blogs for years it occurred to me today that. why not do my own. If not for others, then to refer back to my own posts in the future. These blogs will be predominately about vegetable gardening in Southern Tasmania. We reside on the edge of Cygnet and Cradoc with views of Franklin over the Huon River to the North West. Our soils are made up of Permian mudstone, which in winter is often water logged and in summer dry to a concrete like top. The high clay content of the soil also made vegetable growing a challenge to begin with, however these soils, once the organic content is raised, are quite fertile and holds water well.

We have been living at this location for about 18 months and so far I have set up the veg patch, two chook runs and a pig pen. Over the next few months I hope to post many thoughts on things I have done whether chook, vegetable/fruit or pig related or anything else actually. I enjoy reading other peoples blogs and believe the more of us that put experiences down the more we can learn from each other.

Tomato. 

Since moving from Toowoomba, Qld, I too have caught this strange Tomato growing addiction. Tasmania is not too bad for growing Tomatoes considering the cooler average Summer temps it receives. It is probably this marginal climate for Tomato that creates the addiction. Who will have the first ripened Tomato? will the summer be a cool cloudy wet one?, what varieties have you planted? There are many variables to consider when setting up each seasons Tomato crop. Once thing I have really learned since moving here is to give some thought to the variety you plant. When we first moved here we had no summer (2010/11summer). Many days did not get much over 20 it seemed and I heard many say their tomatoes have not ripened still in March. This was at a time I was experiencing some good harvests. It was by coincidence not skill that I had a good harvest. Through a lady I was working with at the time I bought the variety "kotlas" and "taxi" Tomato and these did very well at the place we were renting near Huonville.

When we bought our place, it was May 2011. There was minimal infrastructure, no fencing, no vegetable patch, nothing. There was an area that must have once grown a few things judging by the spuds coming up along with the infestation of hemlock (Conium maculatum). This area was not far from the house and on the slope so i figured i would pick this area, fence it off amateur style,  stick up a floppy top to stop the possums and get a rotary hoe to turn over the grass and soil. Initially I dug over a few patches by hand to get the garlic and potato onions in but the higher clay content made me get the rotary hoe in quick smart. However all this gave me time to consider my Tomato plantings.

At the time of writing it is Dec 28 2012. The varieties of Tomato I am trying this year are as follows. Most are germinated from seed during August:

1. Kotlas
2. Riesenstraube
3. Gold Nugget
4. Legend
5. Hill Billy (sourced from the Garden Pantry - Kate)
6. Mortgage Lifter
7. Mamma Mia (sourced from Mitre 10 as seedlings)
8. Rouge de Marmande
9. Break O'Day  
10. Roma

I had germinated some Siletz and Oregon Springs also which proved successful the previous year, however I had not put a hothouse up yet until late September and left the young seedlings in the hot sun and they were no more.

Kotlas fruit

At the moment the race seems to be between Kotlas (photo above) and Legend for the first ripe tomato, however my money is on kotlas as they are smaller. Steve Solomon sings the praise of Legend, which I must admit were very tasty but not as early (first picked march 3rd last summer) as I had expected. However this may be due to some issues in raising from seed that year.  The Riesenstraube have grown furiously and look like they will produce a bumper crop of cherry tomato. I normally grow tommy toe but opted to try Riesenstraube this year.

Legend fruiting

Last year we grew 4 plants of Gold Nugget which produced a huge quantity of yellow cherry toms, however we did not really enjoy the flavour all that much so I opted for just the 1 this year for pizza. I also started off with Money Maker seedlings however learnt another lesson in hardening off.

Late October 2012 I planted out the Tomato seedlings with stakes and tree protection cover to give warmth from coolish nights and the possible late frost. Instead we had a really hot day while I was at work and it seems the money maker did not survive this sudden heat. That is what I put it down to anyway. The others survived ok.

The current growing season seems to be going nicely. We had a warmer November 2012 than the previous year which seems to have got things growing nicely. The wireless weather station I have showed the following:
                                                         Avg  Nov 2012
                                          Min                 7.7  Celsius
                                          Max               22.2 Celsius
                                          Rain               44.5mm

The determinate tomato (bush type)

  

This photo shows 4 capsicum (Antohi) - bottom 4, 2 chili (early jalapeno) and 2 watermelon (top)

Being the first post there feels like there is so much to write down. Next post I might look at the pumpkins i am growing this year plus a few others.

Dave

The indeterminate tomatoes (large vines) - I train 4 to 6 main stems up the stakes and pinch off laterals to focus energy into the fruit for ripening.