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South Australia - October 2001 |
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Select
the date from the list shown below for this months tip |
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1st Oct.
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In the past week I’ve been in Sydney and Hobart
and they don’t get much more rainfall than we do in Adelaide, but the big
difference is that our evaporation rate is three times our rainfall, where as
theirs are both about 1:1.
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8th Oct.
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This is Weedbuster Week, a time to reflect on
containment of plants that could well become local weeds unless pruned or
disposed of responsibly. I see lots of the ‘Three cornered Garlic’ in
gardens at present and few folk growing it realize how invasive it is and
what a threat to our remnant vegetation, not to mention how it out competes
most of our garden plants for space too.
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15th
Oct.
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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.
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22nd
Oct.
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Black spot on your tomatoes already? Well one
easy way to control it is to stop watering your tomatoes at night, which
leaves drops of cold water on their foliage all night, that makes it easy
for the black spot fungal disease to spread. Best water tomatoes and
capsicum in the morning then the water on their leaves quickly evaporates as
the sun rises.
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29th
Oct.
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The heavy clay alkaline soils of this area
frequently cause lime-induced-chlorosis or a yellowing of the leaves that
curiously leaves the veins green on many of our acid-loving plants, which is
a cause for constant treatment with iron chelates (pronounced keelates).
That is unless you mulch regularly with old organic material and even then
may need to periodically apply iron chelates.
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