Natural Gardening
Comfrey is a forgotten hero of the gardening world. It has a higher fertilizer analysis than most animal manures and compost. It has a tap root that goes metres into the earth and drags up minerals. I grow it at the edge of my bed as it is very good at suppressing weed and as a barrier to couch grass.
No rash or itching from comfrey on me
Most articles I have read state that it causes rashes and itching if it contacts bare flesh. I must be immune as it doesn’t worry me at all. Either that or most articles are copied by people who have never touched comfrey or had the personal experience of growing it.
The easiest way I have found to use comfrey is to shove it into a 200 litre barrel three quarters filled with water and let it sit for a few weeks with an occassional stir. A piece of electrical conduit makes a perfect stirring rod. I pulled up the wheelbarrow load and shoved it into the drum with no covering on my hands or arms. The comfrey grows quickly in the hot and wet summer here and the drum gets a wheelbarrow load every month to six weeks.
After letting the comfrey break down in the barrel for some time, you have to get it out. I purchased a jiggle siphon from Supercheap for $11. It was too short so I got a 13mm dripper irrigation barb joiner and added a bit of old hose.
This made the hose long enough so that when the water level dropped, I could lower it further into the barrel and stop it from getting blocked by all the comfrey still breaking down in the barrel.
Comfrey is bullet proof and easy to grow and all you need to do is to dig it up or cut it in half with a spade. Leave half where it is and transplant the other half. It is like sweet potato, once you have it, you have it for life as it is practically impossible to kill.
Siphoning Comfrey Tea
I have comfrey growing in a number of locations. Where it is irrigated it grows all year round. In the dry season (winter in Brisbane) the comfrey disappears where it is not irrigated. As soon as the rain starts, it magically appears again.
Uncategorized
Yes, I know nearly everyone calls them egg plants. But have a think about it for a minute. I am talking about the fruit that is on the plant. So what would that be? Egg plant fruit? Hence, I call them egg fruit. Have a look at this Lebanese egg plant. Hasn’t it got some fruit on it. I planted it four months ago and have already picked twenty fruit. This is the second flush.
As always when you grow vegetables without using chemicals to suppress the insects it takes a while to work out what grows well in your area and how much insect damage is too much. In the picture to the left you just might see the little diabolical that is causing the holes in the leaves. Look for a grasshopper. He’s sitting on the leaf to the right of the cluster of egg fruit. And while this grasshopper, along with all of his mates is having a bean feast on the egg plant, in turn he is becoming food for a couple of different birds.
Organic Gardens encourage birds and predatory insects
I am pleasantly surprised to have a magpie patrolling the garden and rounding up grasshoppers. What surprised me more was the mynah bird that also targets them.
The idea of organic gardening is to create an environment where the plants can grow without the need of chemicals. When it comes to pests, you want to encourage the predators like lady birds, hover flies and lacewings. Letting plants go to seed will encourage them to visit and stay. Notice the two ladybirds in the top right corner of the picture above.
The last time I grew egg plant, I had the best plants you had ever seen, but very few egg fruit. I had 200 plants and I sent about 4 x 10kg boxes to market. This time I reckon I will pick that much off this one plant.
I didn’t think it would grow this well so didn’t bother tying it up or staking it. The weight of the fruit is pulling the branches to the ground. I can only attribute this to the amount of organic matter in my garden beds and the cracker dust I add also the rock dust. It has been quite hot, which helps with egg plants and we have had regular rain. I have a dripper system as well.
Needless to say I am pleased with this. All I have to do now is find the perfect recipe.
Alternative Thinking, Experiments
Castoffs Make an Instant Trellis
I have been thinking about how to build a trellis for the climbing plants I want to grow. Plants like cucumber, climbing beans, some Asian climbing plants and maybe some gourds.
I needed a fairly strong trellis and was thinking that a sheet of concrete reinforcing wire might just do the trick. They are about 6 x 3 metres with 20 x 20 cm squares.
Well, low and behold the concretors doing the driveway on the new house two doors up left some reo and steel in the block next door that is for sale. They didn’t return to get it and the owner had to organise its removal. So I grabbed a sheet before the steel merchant took it.
All the original blocks around me are the quintessential Australian quarter acre blocks or just over 1000 sqm. As they get subdivided and new houses built, the new owners usually put in a new fence. The old fences
have water pipe as their top rail and I have managed to collect a few lengths.The next task was to use the water pipe as uprights. I purchased a star picket driver from The Shade Centre for around $40 and using a step ladder was able to get high enough to drive the three lengths of water pipe around 1.5 mtrs into the ground.
Using gal tie wire I wired the reo to the water pipe uprights and voila, instant trellis. I know the reo will get quite rusty over time, but it will last a few years, and in that time I will figure out the best location for the future trellis.
I have been collecting cardboard for quite a while and used it to cover all the grass below the trellis and covered the cardboard with about 30cm of compost.
The final touch was installing the dripper line. Now all I need to do is plant.
Natural Gardening
Gardening is a learning curve and the best way to get better at it is to keep doing it and try and keep some records so you can look back and see what works at what time of year. You will get failures along the way, but they are one step in finding out what grows well in your area, what insects cause the most damage and experiments in trying to overcome them.
Aphids
These little suckers (in the literal sense of the word) are up there with cane toads and white cabbage butterfly as a pest that causes me to think of genocide. When you see your hard work devastated by a pest, you start to understand why the majority of farmers and gardeners turn to chemicals to rid them of the problem.
In the picture above you can see all the aphids on the Wombok growing in the wicking bed. I have sprayed them with a mixtrure of dishwashing liquid and grapeseed oil. Many sites recommend a horticultural oil, which is quite expensive. I have found that olive oil, canola oil or any cooking oil that is in the cupboard seems to do ok.
Horticultural Oil is a petroleum derivative. That’s why it is more expensive. Though with the price of oil below $50 a barrel, maybe it will become less expensive. But somehow, eating produce that has been sprayed with petroleum oil doesn’t really appeal to me.
Aphid Infestation Crop Loss
While spraying, I figured I was wasteing my time and the infestation was that bad that the only cure was to remove the infested plants. I ended up keeping two Wombok that weren’t as badly affected to see if the spraying worked. The rest went to the compost heap.
Not all Doom and Gloom
As you can see there are still plenty of vegetables left. It would appear that aphids are sweettooths, and don’t find the produce that is more on the bitter side palatable. The spinach, endive and minutina weren’t touched. Some would say that the aphids have good taste, as I would have said when I was a kid. But as it happens my taste has changed over the years and I am pleased to find non aphid infested produce.
I can also verify that aphids don’t infest broad beans. Another vegetable that wasn’t on my favourite list as a child.
Another vegetable we use in soups and sometimes a stir fry is Garland Chrysanthemum. It is used a lot in Taiwan and I bought the seeds at an Asian grocer in Sunnybank. They are easy to grow and the aphids leave them alone.
The lady of the house likes these so much they have all been picked.
Gardening is not always beer and skittles. But whenever you get a problem, you have a chance to use your problem solving abilities.
I have re-learned that I am not ruthless enough in the garden. Whenever I plant seeds, I find it very difficult to thin them out. I am often transplanting them or letting them all grow. This was the case with the Womboks, cabbages and cauliflowers in the wicking bed. Having them too close together has meant that the aphids have found it easy to move from one plant to the other and it is difficult to inspect the plants.
The bright side is, with the Womboks gone, there is now more room for some more of the Garland Chrysanthemum. They will be planted with good separation and culled if too close together.
Natural Gardening
I planted some Black Russian Tomatoes in the wicking bed and showed how to tie them up and prune them. These are some very strong tomato vines.
This vine has one set of roots and two laterals that I have tied with string to the overhead wire. As the vine grows, I wind it around the string and prune any more laterals that grow.
This is the other tomato in the wicking bed. The photo doesn’t show it well but the stem on these tomatoes are about 25mm (1″) thick. They are like a tree. Tomatoes have formed on the lower trusses and laterals are trying to grow on the ends of the trusses. They are vigorous vines.
I overplanted the wicking bed a little, but everything seems to be growing gangbusters. It is good to see a brassica without caterpillar damage from the white cabbage moths. I am overblessed with them in this location.
In between the tomato and the cabbage are French beans. I planted six in the wicking bed and more outside. Although some are getting smothered by the cabbages, I was able to pick 1/2 a kilo from them today. They are producing beans better in this location than out in the garden.
