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Too much fruit on your trees at present and can’t handle it? The State Information
Shop at 77 Grenfell Street has a handy booklet for $2 on how to dry fruit at home. It
could save you heaps and deprive the rats of a feast. Worth a try eh?
Did you realise that when you use fresh lawn clippings to mulch your bedding plants they
frequently get colonised with a water repellent fungus so any water added is repelled and
your plants suffer. Use mulch by all means but scratch it around to diminish the fungal
effects.
You may even get the same water repelling take place on old organic mulch in the
vegetable garden and when you water it just runs off. Rather than dig the lot, spray a
wetting agent, sold as ‘Wettasoil®’ and the mulch immediately becomes an
organic sponge.
The recent hot weather has shed a lot of leaves from deciduous trees in the streets in
my area, especially the Plane Trees. These will not break down to compost in the fluffy
drifts they finish up in and should be raked up and added to your moist compost heap. Left
to lie they make great habitat for red-back spiders in my garden and probably yours too!
The hot weather really tests our plants doesn’t it? Best performers in my garden
have been young ‘African Queen’ Marigold seedlings (still the best Marigold
after 25 years of other try-hards), Vinca cultivars (more correctly known as Catharanthus
rosea cultivars), Passionfruit vines and all the Pandorea cultivars. These all love the
hot weather, but keep them moist, water at night no matter how sad they look by 4pm.
If you have a passion vine or are about to plant one, it’s that time of year to
bury the old liver under it. I’m going to plant one this week against a garage
that’s almost finished, but I suspect my Jack Russell will dig the liver up, so I
plan to wrap it in a chicken wire envelope and stake it in place! Yeh! I’ll keep you
posted.
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