Monthly Natter November

As I Write this I look back over the past couple of weeks and wonder where they have gone, in fact the same can be said of the whole year! So many jobs to do and so little time. The biggest time killer this month has been the excessive heat, earlier in the month when I was supposed to plant out most of my summer fruiting veg , I had other things on and so leaving it a week or two late has put me in the middle of all this terrible weather. I have now taken to getting up very early and doing my garden chores, and putting up shade cloth/hessian covers to protect fragile new plants. Luckily I have had a few volunteer seedlings that have happily popped up in the front garden and will supply me with the early tomatoes.


I had to resort to buying some zucchini plants, Bunnings have a brand called the naked farmer, http://www.nakedfarmer.com.au/ they are NASAA Certified organic products, and I figure best to have some rather than none at all. They look quite healthy and are in packs of 6 for around $6.00. With Everything in and fingers crossed this year will hopefully be a more fruitful one.


While at CERES I picked up a couple of tomato varieties as well. These are grown from Eden seed stocks so will be open pollinated, and I'll be able to save their seeds.

Our Next Meeting will be held first Sunday in December along with Violet Town, 1:30 we will try and car pool so please let me know if you're coming along. BYO plate of goodies to share. Please have a think about what you would like to do next year and if you want to host a meeting or have some willing workers over to do a working bee please let me know .

I'll leave you with a little bit of Jackie French's wisdom From Jackie (October 2009

Spring -" Let some vegetables go to seed and let them flower and go to seed around your garden. This is perhaps the most important spring advice there is: flowering vegetables are one of the best ways to attract pest-eating predators. Most adult predators eat nectar from flowers; only their offspring are carnivorous. Happily, most prefer the nectar from the plants their offspring like to forage as pests: your vegies....Now that we can get golf ball tomatoes and pineapples any time of the year, a lot of the old spring foods have been forgotten. Most people won’t eat or harvest anything they don’t recognise from the supermarket – and most of us now prefer much blander foods. Bitter food was presumed to be a spring tonic in both European and Asian folklore.Many traditional ‘hungry gap’ foods are all good, if now unconventional. Try them before you reject them. If you baulk at eating prickly pear fruit, mistletoe jam or carrot tops, remember that it’s better than an elderly, well-travelled tomato, that wasn’t much good in the first place" http://www.jackiefrench.com/index.html

Carley