October 2021 Kitchen Garden Guide

 I have spent hours weeding today and other days recently too. All this rain means I have also spent some frustrating days inside, watching the weeds grow! However, weeds can be your friend too, in several ways. Looking at a graph of this year’s September temperatures is enough to make me seasick! Don’t be fooled by any of the weather, there are nearly always beautiful warm, summery days, driving rain and snow and lots of wind, all the way up to Christmas!!

What to do about weeds

1.   If it is a whole bed that you want to clear, don’t bother pulling the weeds up, just chop them down with a sharp spade then cover with wet cardboard or newspaper and top with wet mulch. Soil life much prefers dampness so don’t use dry material when you want microbial activity, which is what will break down the weeds under the newspaper and mulch.

2.   Any weeds, including onion grass, weeds carrying seeds, couch/twitch – pack densely into a bin. Fill with water. You can also hang a kg or so of old manure in it in a hessian bag and add some wood ash and comfrey leaves if you want to. Cover well. Wait 2 weeks or so. Scoop a litre into a watering can, fill up with water and use as a light liquid feed.

3.   If there are no seeds or runners, feed weeds to your worms, your chooks or lay them on your paths. Even if your chooks don’t eat them, they will scratch them up, turn them over, poo on them and turn them into compost for you. Worm juice is simply made by watering the worm farm, collecting the liquid, diluting it to a very weak tea look and watering the foliage and soil of your plants. One of my worm juice making devices is a terracotta water filter from the tip shop. It lives in my little greenhouse. The worms are fed in the top section, with weeds and trimmings from the hothouse. I water it from time to time and this collects in the bottom. I use the tap to drain some into a small watering can, dilute it, then water my seedlings in the hot house. No fuss. No carrying of heavy buckets. The job takes 2 minutes. A big, worm-farm bath is outside for bigger jobs as are several worm towers. More about worms next time.

4.   In future, let your vegetables go to seed. Then some of your weeds will be vegetables that you didn’t even have to sow! Good seeds for that are lettuce, parsnips, chicory, frilly mustard, miners lettuce, corn mache, parsley, endive.

Creating a garden that provides you with seasonal food, all year round, with (eventually) very little work, is like growing a family where you spend a lot of time tending and nurturing and feeding for a couple of years then the jobs change to encouraging and managing and letting things go a little bit wild. Eventually, if all goes according to plan, you have created a beautiful base for life to grow on its own. By then you will have learnt a lot too, allowing the next child / patch of earth to evolve more easily. My motto is: start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.

Codling moth

The larvae that turn into the codling moths that lay eggs in our apples overwinter amongst the bark of your trees and the debris near the base of the trunk. Chooks are the best line of defence as they eat them for you before the larvae even get to adulthood. If possible, give your chooks free reign of your fruit trees or design your chook yard to include access to your fruit trees. My chooks even like to hop up onto the low branches of various of my fruit trees in winter, when there aren’t any leaves.

Now is the time to set codling moth traps for apples, pears and nashis to catch the adult moths before they lay eggs in your fruit. You can buy sticky, pheromone traps that lure the males in, then they get stuck to the sides and can’t escape. The girls get to remain free but unfertilised so do not produce fertile eggs (like chooks without a rooster).

My mother had a different way which almost totally removed codling moths from her garden in a few years. She lured the males with port. She hung one or 2 empty tins (tinned tomatoes, for example) in each apple and pear tree, by drilling holes and threading string through the tins so they could be hooked over branches that she could reach. Into each tin went a good dash of port and the same amount of water. Codling moth males (and many human males!) love port and died every night in those tins. After a few days she would sieve or scoop out the moths, top up the port and re-set the tins into the trees. There are usually 2 hatchings of codling moth eggs, one in mid spring and another in late spring or early summer, so the clever little things can get to the early and late flowering trees! So, don’t give up too early and the moths are not fussy, so get the cheapest port you can find!

Local Events

Cygnet Seed Library – at Oura Oura House, Cygnet: fortnightly, Sunday afternoon pack n chat sessions and monthly gardening workshops. See our website and facebook page for dates, details and fact sheets.

Cygnet Spring Garden Market – at The Cannery, 12 – 4pm Sat. Nov. 13^th: All things gardening! Stalls, 30 minute presentations, food, coffee, open bar and live music. See our facebook page and local flyers for details.

Sow in October
For transplanting later, especially in frost prone areas Any vegetable that fruits or has edible seeds: (Tomatoes – a bit late), zucchinis, corn, melons, pumpkins, cucumbers, capsicums, eggplants   In fact sow almost anything you have seeds of including flowers and herbs galore.	Outside: Leaves, legumes and roots Lettuce and other salad greens, beetroot, parsnips, carrots, peas, radish, celery, summer spinach and brassicas….. and of course lots of herbs; all of them.   Tip: If you have grass problems in your beds, sow everything in trays.