Tag Archives: Don Burke

Mushrooms

Have you ever thought about growing mushrooms at home? Well it’s very easy and lots of fun for both adults and children.

With all of the toadstools and wild mushrooms around at the moment, it’s pretty obvious that now is a good time to grow your own.

Home mushroom kits are available at most nurseries and hardware stores. You can get ordinary mushrooms to grow or you can get various varieties such as shitake, oyster and Swiss Brown.

Excellent instructions come with the kits too. You can grow mushrooms in a garage, under the house or anywhere when the temperatures are fairly constant. Small metal sheds may get too hot or cold for mushrooms.

By the way, mushrooms don’t necessarily need a dark place to grow in.

After setting up the kit, expect to start harvesting in around 3-5 weeks. You can harvest young mushrooms as button mushrooms, or wait ‘til they are bigger to eat them.

Mushrooms really are a lot of fun.

Hooroo, Don

Vertical Gardens

Vertical gardens are all the rage at the moment.  These are basically pots or long troughs that hang against walls to make a green wall.

You can grow vegies or herbs in your vertical garden or you can just green a wall with ferns, philodendrons and grasses.

Vertical gardens usually come in kits and you are best advised to ask your local nursery people to show you how they work.  Setting them up requires some understanding of the whole process.

Both nurseries and hardware stores stock vertical gardens and some of them have built in watering systems to make them very successful.

So now, a wasted wall space can become a productive part of your garden, and a very pretty part at that.

Hooroo, Don

Heritage Seeds

Remember the old days when tomatoes tasted like tomatoes?  When grandpa grew superb tasting beans and chillies.

Well, you can grow many of these superbly-flavoured vegies at home. The home varieties fruit over a longer period too, which is ideal for home use. That is, just enough fruit each day or two.

There are companies that specialize in these heritage or rare seed varieties:

Seedsavers

Green Harvest

Royston Petrie Seeds

Diggers Seeds

Yates

& Eden seeds

To get their contact details go to the Burke’s Backyard website: burkesbackyard.com.au & search for the words seed companies.

You’ll be glad you did!

Hooroo, Don

Blue Flowering Plants

Nothing looks better than blue flowering plants and to quote Oscar Wilde: “nothing succeeds like excess”.

So why not consider a blue selection for your garden – or better still, an entirely blue-flowering garden!

Right now the King of blue flowers, Plumbago ‘Royal Cape’ is looking awesome.  The flowers are an electric-blue colour.  You can also get the blue butterfly bush (Clerodendrum ugandense), blue hydrangeas, blue flowering ginger, blue tropical water lilies, blue irises, blue campanulas, native blue bell creepers (billardiera), blue hyacinths aNd blue granny’s bonnets.

There are lots of blue flowering plants and you can select one or two blue flowering plants for almost every month of the year.

Talk to your local nursery people and get the BLUES!

– the good Blues

Hooroo, Don

Tree Preservation

I am a deadset tree lover and I adore the Aussie bushland.  I am also a qualified tree surgeon and arborist.

However, some trees should be chopped down.  The tree that fell on and killed little Bridget Wright and injured several others at Pitt Town public school is a case in point.

Native gum trees, like any other living thing, have a lifespan after which they die.  Gum trees also suffer very badly when houses or schools are build nearby.  Soil compaction and soil level changes plus changes in drainage patterns can kill trees.

The tree preservation ordinances around Australia often made it near impossible to remove dangerous or badly placed trees.  These tree preservation ordinances need to be abolished.  The sentiment behind them is a good one, but the laws themselves merely make people hate trees.  Since these silly laws were introduced the planting of trees in suburban areas has massively declined.  The NSW Nursery Industry Association estimates that the sales of trees from nurseries have shrunken by 95% in the last 10-15 years.

Tree preservation ordinances lead to less trees in cities: people won’t plant them because they can’t remove or prune them later on.  We need better laws to prevent more tragic deaths like Bridget’s.  Let’s hope that her passing leads to better laws and systems affecting trees.

Hooroo, Don

Coriander

One of the best of all herbs is coriander, yet it is often a disaster for many gardeners to grow.  Why?

Well during the warm months it bolts to flower and seed and then dies.  Since we mostly eat the leaves, this is a disaster.  So what do you do?

Well, during autumn, winter and early spring, it doesn’t bolt to seed so you get heaps of leaves to eat.  So plant it now!

But when it does go to seed, it produces the seed capsules that many Asian people prefer to the leaves.  So, buy a mortar and pestle.  Then you can grind up the capsules to make a superb coriander spice for fish, crustaceans and chicken dishes.

This is called a win-win situation, that is, you eat BOTH the leaves and later the seeds.

Don’t forget the mortar and pestle!

Hooroo, Don

Bulbs

You can’t beat the stunning displays that daffodils, jonquils, hyacinths, tulips etc. make in spring gardens.

Bulbs make the end of winter a magic time as spring arrives.

And bulbs are dead easy to grow.  You’ll find them at nurseries and hardware stores now and most are planted straight away.  Then you forget about them ‘til they surprise you in late winter/early spring.

Tulips are best put in the crisper part of your refrigerator for about 6 weeks prior to planting. This helps tulips get the number of cold days they need to flower well.  Other bulbs don’t need to spend time in the fridge though.

Why not grow your own bulbs for cut flowers in spring.  Kids love growing cut flowers like daffodils and jonquils.

…and jonquils are perfumed too  as are hyacinths and friesias.

Hooroo, Don

Processionary Caterpillars

At this time of the year, you often see congo-lines of processionary caterpillars moving across lawns, up trees and fences and in paddocks.  They are following each other as they look for a safe spot to pupate into moths.

These caterpillars are usually covered in stinging spines which can cause pain and skin rashes in humans.

These caterpillars can also be accidentally eaten by horses and goats and the end result can be aborted foals and kids.  It’s thought that the spines may carry a bacterial disease which causes abortions.

So, it’s a good idea to get rid of the caterpillars when you see them.  Sometimes the caterpillars will hide under a hessian sack tied around a tree, after which they can be put in

a plastic bag and disposed of.

You can spray the caterpillars with Dipel or Success, both of which are safe around stock.

Keep an eye out for processionary caterpillars.

Hooroo, Don

Autumn Is For Planting

This is a wonderful Autumn for planting.  This is THE time to plant most trees, shrubs & flowers.

In the rest of the world, Spring is the planting time since it is a gentle period followed by an equally gentle Summer.

In Australia, however, the Spring periods can be brief and the Summers savage.  So Autumn is our best time to plant.  Our Autumns & Winters are fairly gentle and allow the plants to settle in and produce many roots prior to the stressful Summer ahead.

So, look at your garden.  What needs fixing?  If yours is a new house, put in your major plantings of hedges, trees and flowers now.

Plant up pot plants now too.  This will guarantee a much more successful year in your garden if you do.  The weather now is also much cooler and better for heavy working in the garden.

Autumn is the best time to plant.

Hooroo, Don

Fertilising

It’s autumn, but we still have time left for some growth in most plants.

A light fertilising NOW will help roses, citrus and lawns a lot.  It will strengthen them up for the winter and spring ahead.

Use liquid feeds such as Seasol Powerfeed now since liquid fertilisers act very quickly.  This is ideal for all pot plants, seedlings, orchids and ferns.

Since the rains came rather late in most areas of Australia, many plants are putting on a major growth spurt at the moment.

…This is very unusual, so this rather late liquid fertilising really makes sense this year.

The weather was very strange this past 9 months, so you need to be flexible in the way you look after your plants.

Fertilise lightly now.

Hooroo, Don

Autumn

Well, it’s well and truly Autumn; the leaves are falling and accumulating.  This is pure gold for your garden!

Why not pop out and buy a compost bin or two for your garden.  Rake up all of the leaves and put them into the bins with the lawn clippings and kitchen scraps.

Really keen gardeners (like me) will go out in the streets with a broom, fork and barrow to collect the leaves in the gutters.  These are the leaves that leaf-blower people blow out there to clog the road drains and pollute the local rivers.

So you will be helping your local environment if you collect street leaves and your garden will benefit enormously.

Remember also that a few handfuls of garden soil on each layer in the compost heap will help the process enormously.

Collect leaves!

Hooroo, Don

Flowers for Picking

Does your garden have flowers for picking? All great gardens do!

Roses, lavender, gardenias, daphne & osmanthus all are great flowers for picking for perfume. Hydrangeas are great for style. Poppies, daisies and the very trendy gerberas always give a cheerful & happy look to your home.

There is nothing better than strolling through your garden, just before guests arrive, to collect some beautiful flowers to place around the house. It makes everything more welcoming.

With some perfumed plants such as lavenders and roses you can cheat by getting essential oil from the health food store and spraying it around to accent the perfumes. The combined perfume of the flowers & essential oils beat room fresheners with manufactured perfumes hands down!

Little kids absolutely delight in picking flowers to give to their mum. Flowers picked from your garden are also wonderful to take as a gift when visiting friends. You’ll definitely become one of their Favourite guests.

Perhaps a special “picking garden” is a good idea for your place.

Hooroo!! Don.