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The northern Adelaide plains area grows some of the best Sweet Peas in Australia, so
don’t miss out and order yours soon. It’s not time to be planting them just yet
that can wait until March or April, but get your seed while you still have the pick of the
best cultivars.
Most famous are the Gawler Sweet Peas, bred by Barry McDougall and son Bradley. Their
Sweet Peas flower four to a spike all at once, rather than as most other commercial
varieties, successively up the stem. Their 2000 mail order catalogue is out now and a SSAE
to 18 Second Street Gawler 5118 will see it in the mail in a flash. Named varieties are
only $1.00 a packet of 14 seeds, while a mixed pack of 50 is $2.00.
If you only have room for growing them in containers I’d recommend the new BPA 2000
flower of the year ‘Your Highness’ as seedlings or the Erica Vale packet seed
‘Cupid’. Yates seed have a container variety called ‘Bijou’ that
flowered from October to December for me last year. In containers you can sow later
(May-June) due to the warmer temperature of the potting media.
Keen organic gardeners who grow tomatoes may notice that there’s a large brown
rotten patch at the base of each fruit. Called "blossom end rot" it is caused by
a lack of calcium and can affect tomatoes, capsicum and eggplants but we don’t give
them milk!
The remedy is to dust garden lime around your tomato plants. We don’t use much
garden lime in SA, because our soils are usually so alkaline anyhow, but when you grow
your vegies organically, the humic acid leaches from the mulch to create a more acidic
soil, that is not usually a problem, except on tomatoes and their kind.
Australia Day is always a great day to think about your lawn. Feeding it and replacing
the blades on your mower. I’ve hardly ever seen a mower that couldn’t have done
with a new set of blades. Why Australia Day? Well why not what other day of the year do
you walk onto your lawn and say, ‘yeh it does need a feed today’.
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