The chance of morning frost

In the last week we have had our first glimpses of the arrival of winter with a number of mornings nudging 1 degree, extensive frosts around the corner in Nicholls Rivulet, and heavy snow above 800m asl. The fireplace has also kicked into gear for the first time since last October. The forecast for tomorrow is possibly light morning frost and I think I have gambled with the pumpkin long enough.

Today I will be picking all left over pumpkins and tomatos, no matter how underdone some are. With pumpkins I will leave as much vine on the pumpkin as possible and bring undercover on the deck. I will leave them there for 3 weeks to catch the arvo sun and hopefully sweeten up just a little more.

All ripe or having turned colour Tomato will go into the kitchen, the balance will be picked and stored in a box to ripen slowly or left on the plant and hung under a tree. Each week I will go through the boxes of green tomato and take to the kitchen the ones turning colour. I trialled picking a few earlier in the season when they were very green. About 75% of them ripened in the kitchen before some of the green ones on the plant. This shows that temperature is a key factor in the ripening of Tomato and a higher average temp in the kitchen must be the reason.

I will also pick all capsicum and watermelon.

Tomorrow I will plant garlic where some of the tomato are growing. I planted garlic in early May two years ago and they grew just as well as the garlic i planted late March last year, so I have delayed planting this year to allow more beds to open up.

And with the onset of the risk of frost heralds the Oca harvest. Oca or New Zealand Yam tastes a bit like sweet potato but even better in my books. And frosts are the time to harvest when the tops are burnt down. If you have never tasted Oca I highly recommend it.

Happy gardening.

While most tomatoes still seem to be doing well, it is there time to come out with the risk of frost

Pumpkins and the summer crop clean up begins

Last weekend I pulled the corn. I am currently processing all this by cutting up and adding to a compost heap which will be finished when i remove the tomato and pumpkin and take the mulch from this and add to the compost. The corn provided a reasonable harvest of cobs which have all been eaten, however I will be switching to a different variety next year as the corns lacked some sweetness we are used to from our crops when we lived in Qld. I have heard the open pollinated ones may be sweeter but need to be eaten on picking as they lose their sweetness quicker than the hybrids.

We have picked 10 kgs of pumpkins which are now in storage after having sat outside in the sun for 3 weeks. Today I picked another load of gold nuggets and buttercups. The butternuts are being left on the vines till the very last minute as they need all the time to sweeten their flavours in our shorter summers of Tasmania.

The warmer march and early April has extended the Tomato harvest which large quantities still being picked. While we had one morning this week get down to 2 degrees celsius, the majority of days are still warm enough to continue the ripening of fruits. In the next 2 weeks tho I will harvest the last lot of tomato for indoor ripening.

All of these summer crops have been and will be replaced with a green manure of tic bean which is perfect for my soils which are higher in clay and create a lovely loamy clay when dug in early spring.

The next couple of weeks I have to catch up which a number of clean up jobs as the start of the soccer season and being away for work has seen me not do a great deal in te veg patch apart from harvesting. However on my work travels we stumbled upon a wombat who seemed to be interested in our presence and wondered at a distance smelly our presence often. It is easy to forget how large wombats are and they truly look like little Australian Bears.

Pumkpin update

So what is happening with the pumpkins. We are starting to get to the business end of the growing season now. This time of the year is when we ideally want to ensure fertilisation of those female flowers to allow enough time for the last lot of pumpkins to mature and sweeten before the cold weather returns (especially the potential April frost).

Here is how mine are tracking. How are yours going? If you live south of Hobart, I would love to hear what varieties you have success with and how they usually taste.

Gold Nugget - About 6 to 8 pumpkins per plant of varying age - some ready to be picked in the next couple of week.

Gold Nugget

Buttercup - Each plants has 3 forming pumpkins with another couple at early stages. Hope these young 2 or 3 mature nicely by mid April

Butternut- I am happy to see the 2 butternuts both with at least 1 well sized pumpkin. There are another 3 to 4 young ones so should see them ready before the cold weather arrives which is a good result for butternut down this way.

I also have a Red Kurri which has 2 large pumpkins, but would like to see more pumpkins forming.

The worm farm has two pumpkins that have popped up from past compost. I let these go as well as a tomato to see how they went. I have no idea what the pumpkin is, but they are forming pumpkins so will be interesting to see how they taste.

The bush and climbing beans are flowering now, with some climbing beans having grown faster than others. It has been hard to keep the water up to the beans, and this has been evident the last few days with some bush beans curling (a typical sign of lack of water). Below I took a picture of the climbing bean (Purple King) as they are pretty.

Climbing Bean - Purple King

<a href="http://www.hypersmash.com">www.hypersmash.com</a>

Powdery Mildew

With this warmish and dry weather we are having at the moment, is anyone noticing some powdery mildew on any of their plants?? Here is an interesting snippet I found on facebook (austraflora page).

Powdery mildew is one of the most widespread and easily recognised plant diseases. Powdery mildews are most severe when the weather is warm and dry, and they affect virtually all kinds of plants. Powdery mildews are characterized by spots or patches of white to grayish, talcum powder-like growth.

Here is a useful treatment you can make yourself:
Mix together 1 tablespoon of baking soda with 3.5L of room temp water, along with 1-2 drops of liquid soap (this adheres the solution to the plant). Add a teaspoon of vegetable oil, then shake well to create an emulsion that will help contain the spores (and limit re-infection). Spray in the evening when it's cool, and repeat as necessary.

Why does this work? The solution changes the pH balance of the surface of the plant, making it an unsuitable environment for powdery mildew to proliferate.

Powdery mildew on pumpkin leaves

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