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- The snails and slugs are particularly rampant at present and spend their
days lurking in dense undergrowth in the garden, quite often your
neighbour’s garden, moving up to 10 metres a night to graze. So if you
bait, cover the possibility of them entering from next door. If you take
to picking them up by hand, make sure not to kill any brown Leopard slugs,
as they don’t eat your plants, but actually eat snails and other
creatures.
- Time to feed the Staghorn ferns, with an old banana skin. They resent
most liquid fertilizers and yet still need nutrient, albeit rather
slowly and a rotting banana skin provides just enough, nitrogen,
potassium and the ethylene released, acts as tonic too.
- The yellow and white flowering iris in flower all over this area at
present are Spuria Iris and they were very popular in the 1920’s and
30’s since they thrived on Adelaide’s austere summer water
restrictions, because they need a summer dry spell to flower well in
late spring. The new colour ranges available these days, warrants a lot
more interest too.
- I hear all sorts of complaints from folk trying to grow container
plants, but still getting the yellow leaves of lime-induced-chlorosis.
This is caused by watering with Adelaide water, which over a period of
time will turn even an acidic soil mixture to a slightly alkaline media.
The remedy is to spray the foliage with iron chelates, since as a foliar
spray the essential iron will be absorbed, without being locked up by
the alkaline potting mix. Of course mulching with cow manure will also
be effective in maintaining an acidic media, but add iron chelates as
well to hasten the return to healthy green foliage.
I often mention using yellow sticky traps in my garden for controlling
infestations of aphids and a codling moth trap that relies on pheromones to
attract the female codling moth to a sticky end, only to get inundated by
gardeners wanting to know where they can get these traps. Admittedly there
are not many outlets and the few I know of insist on a 100% mark-up at
retail, so I have taken to supplying them myself by mail order with a far
more modest mark-up, details at my website
www.greenfingers.com.au
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