South Australia - 13th January 2003

One reason there is so little in gardening books about bracket fungus is that there are probably well over 100 species, in three plant families and while most are quite benign and do not affect their tree host, a few are aggressively parasitic, but thankfully those mostly colonise dead or dying plants. Dean admits to having used Bordeaux mix without success, which is a copper compound. I contacted a few orchardists and they leave lichen and bracket fungi infestations alone. One thing for sure is that walnut trees have quite thin bark and cutting them off is very likely to lead to damage and dieback. My considered opinion … do nothing.

Deborah at Panorama has leaf curl caterpillars that have gone ballistic on her roses. These are generally small smooth green caterpillars and because of their leaf curling habit they escape the usually contact insecticides you might have in your arsenal, like Carbaryl, but use a systemic insecticide such as Confidor or Rogor and they will disappear as soon as the graze on the next leaf. According to the manufacturer of Rogor it lasts 3-4 weeks but do not use on Apricots, early peaches, loquats, figs, Meyer lemons, Seville oranges, guava or chrysanthemums or leaves flowers and fruit are likely to scorch.

Another query from Panorama about beating a chestnut tree to encourage a better set of nuts. This is a practice that originates from the Balkans and various Mediterranean communities where they crop poor barren soils. The practice is that olives, almonds and chestnuts are beaten down with long bamboo poles to harvest the produce and in doing so the tree is lightly beaten and in doing so the bark is mildly damaged releasing hormones that signal “all is not well”. The response is that the plant flowers more next spring and so a larger crop set is possible.

A similar response is used on stone fruits, figs and loquats to break the alternative fruiting cycle that some of these have, by applying a wire tourniquet. The wire is tightened around one limb (never the whole tree) until it bruises the bark, then instantly removed. This releases the hormones in the same way as beating an olive.

Stan at Elizabeth South SA) has had spectacular results from planting a liver under his Passion Vine, as directed in this column, but now wants to know if he can terminate the long canes, since he has all the fruit he can handle and wants to see it mature. Certainly Stan, prune it as hard as you dare, while it’s in a state of growth, but never in winter!

Every year there’s a new pest on my tomatoes. This year it’s slugs and bud worms. Yes slugs are really active at present and they stay that way all summer when you water at night! I’m baiting in a staked PVC pipe, so the dog doesn’t go down too, but the budworms are a worry.

Tomato budworms get into the small fruits through a tiny hole that their moth mothers lay and then they grow at the same rate as your tomatoes until they are 3cm fat pink bugs too large to get out. The remedy is to dust with tomato dusts as they are growing, but yours truly thought he had all the bugs under control this year! I use yellow sticky traps for the white fly and garlic spray for the soft-bodied sapsuckers, but caterpillars and their moth mothers laugh at that stuff.

I’m back to dusting the ‘Mighty Reds’, but of course this crop is all infected, so I picked it this morning and disposed of it, but the good news is they will set more pretty quickly and go on cropping until April-May, without getting wilts of any sort and they are one of the tastiest disease resistant tomatoes I know of. Nothing resists caterpillars though.