| This is ‘be kind to your street tree
week’ and you are expected to water your fledgling street tree if you have one. Soil
moisture stress is at its highest this week, so even a few litres would be most welcome. It’s also a good time to remove those lower dead branches that
develop in summer on large trees, since with a few good gully breezes they will finish up
on your roof, in your gutters or worse still on you as you innocently water your garden
one night.
Trees only develop a trunk, because they shed their lower
branches as they grow. Only the tip of a tree elongates, as well as its girth, so paint a
mark on a seedling at 30cm from the ground and in your old age, it will still be 30cm from
the ground, if it survives.
The Adelaide Botanic Gardens has the most stunning display
of the enormous pink-flowering "Sacred Lotus" in one of its very murky ponds at
present. The sustained hot weather this year has seen them put on one of their best ever
displays. They don’t set viable seed in Adelaide though, because the vital
‘Lotus Beetle’ pollinator is not present, so don’t bother trying to pinch a
seed head.
It’s a good time to plant your late tomatoes, like
‘Burnley Bounty’, still one of our best and for climbers ‘Sweet Bite’
and ‘Cherry Cocktail’. Keep the Thistles under control though, because this is
the season when the little sap-sucking ‘Thrips’ spread viruses to your tomatoes
and the "Common Milk Thistle" is the benign host.
There’s a lot of ‘Verticillium’ and
‘Fusarium Wilt’ around this year, caused by over watering and high humidity.
Both are fungal diseases that by the time the symptom shows it’s too late to do much.
Leave your tomatoes until they actually weep from lack of water then flood irrigate.
Resist the temptation to add a little water every day. |
