An Open Day is a great way to get feedback from gardeners on what you’re growing and how you’re doing.
Category Archives: Fungi
In Production Today
Warm, humid, sunny conditions have allowed most crops to grow well.
In Production Today
In Brisbane, winter crops have finished flowering. Their seed is ripe and ready for harvest.
In Production Today: September 2012
Spring is warm and dry, so the diversity of temperate crops in this 300 sq metre garden has dropped to 156.
Book Review: Australia’s Poisonous Plants by Dr Ross McKenzie
If you put raw silverbeet in your salad, or casually add nitrogen to your vegetables, this book is a must read. If it doesn’t save your life, it will certainly improve it.
In Flower Today
Brisbane‘s subtropical winter comes to a happy, floriferous end in mid-August. Today there’s around a hundred different plants flowering, two weeks before Australia’s official first day of spring.
In Production Today – June 2012
There’s just 112 different types of edible available right now, less than in late winter, since many crops sown are still juvenile.
Winter in Brisbane is perfect for mushroom growing on the cheap. In cool conditions, mushroom fly (Lycoriella sp.) ceases egg laying, so its maggots don’t riddle mushrooms with holes.
Botanical Stamps
A selection collected by my parents, grandfather and me.
One way for a child to learn about plants and places…and a bit of botanical latin too.
There’s just one from my grandfather’s collection: Cattleya skinneri, an orchid. Stamps of his era hadn’t tapped into the profitable collectors’ market. There are more from my father’s collection which he started in 1931. These two collections span the peak and close of the colonial era, useful for understanding politics and nationalism. There are also some beautiful first day issues sent to me by my mother, something that she has done all my life.
Vomit – It Lives!
My garden has a new visitor, but is it an animal, a plant or a fungus?
This winter I mulched my garden with pine bark and sheltered my vegetable beds with bales of sugarcane. They’ve started to decay, the weather is warming up and dewfall is increasing, and these visitors keep popping up. All over the place.
