Problem Solving articles – here I answer questions and help provide solutions for common garden problems.

Design Tips for a Productive Kitchen Garden

Do you ever feel frustrated when pest insects damage your plants? Wish your kitchen garden was more productive? You’re not alone! Even the healthiest gardens struggle with a few ‘unwelcome visitors’ at times.

Design Tips for a Productive Kitchen Garden

 

If you have limited space for your food garden, then losing precious crops, can be even more disheartening.

The good news is there are design strategies you can use to:

  1. Maximise your space;
  2. Minimise pest insects;
  3. Enhance the beauty; and
  4. Even improve some of your harvests.

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20 Reasons Why You Should Mulch Your Garden

Are you sick of weeding or watering your garden all the time? Losing plants to hot summers and freezing winters? There may be a simple solution to minimize the impact of these challenges – Mulch!

 

20 Reasons why you should mulch your garden

20 Reasons Why You Should Mulch Your Garden

What is Mulch?

Mulch is a material that is spread around a plant or over the soil surface as a protective layer. If you think of soil as a ‘cake,’ the mulch is simply the ‘icing’ or ‘topping’. It provides a huge range of benefits for you and your garden. Mulch comes from a wide variety of organic or inorganic materials. Mulch ranges in cost from free to expensive.

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15 Benefits of a Herb Spiral in Your Garden

Herb Spiral Design

Do you have limited sun, space or time to garden? Want a highly productive, energy efficient way to grow food?  Then consider a herb spiral design in your garden. Creating a Herb Spiral close to your kitchen might be your perfect solution.

 The Herb Spiral design is easily accessible from all sides: to plant, water, fertilise and harvest. This large long herb spiral has a dry microclimate at the top and a moist zone at the bottom. | The Micro Gardener

The Herb Spiral design is easily accessible from all sides: to plant, water, fertilise and harvest. This large long herb spiral has a dry microclimate at the top and a moist zone at the bottom.

What is a Herb Spiral?

The Herb Spiral is a highly productive and energy efficient, vertical garden design. You can stack plants horizontally AND vertically to maximise space. It’s a practical and attractive solution for urban gardeners. A herb spiral design is typically 1.5 – 2m (5 – 6.5ft) wide in diameter at the base and rises to 1.0 – 1.3m (3.2 – 4.2ft). The centre of the spiral is at the highest point. The spiral ramp provides a planting area large enough to fit in all your common culinary herbs.
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Imitate Nature for Higher Yields & Less Pests

Get Hundreds of Free Workers AND an Abundant Harvest!

Want less pests in your garden? To help achieve a balance between pests and predators, I’ve found that imitating natural ecosystems can be a useful pest management strategy to use.

 

Imitate Nature for Higher Yields and Less Pests

Facilitating natural predator-pest relationships in your garden is a way to harness hundreds of free workers to help manage insect imbalances. An example is the ‘aphid banquet’ on the menu for this ladybird’s lunch!

How to Work with and Imitate Nature

Whilst ‘having a relationship’ with birds, lizards, frogs and insects may not be on your To Do List, seeking a ‘win-win’ outcome by working with these creatures in your garden can help you:

  1. Achieve a higher crop yield (by encouraging more Pollinators); and
  2. Minimise insect damage to your edibles (by creating an unwritten ‘Workplace Agreement’ of sorts with Pest Predators – one that offers the kind of job perks that are an incentive for them to get to work in your garden)!

I’ve learned the benefits of ’employing’ hundreds of workers in my garden. Even though I don’t know them all by name, they still turn up regularly for work, never ask for a raise, are reliable in undertaking their jobs and save me hours of hard labour. In this article, I’ll share with you what my end of the agreement entails and how you can negotiate a similar arrangement at your place.

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Coping with Caterpillars – Part 2

Are caterpillars damaging your plants? If you’re having a tug-of-war with caterpillars over who gets a fair share of food from your edible crops, you’ll know how frustrating it can be to come off second best! As mentioned in Coping with Caterpillars – Part 1, the first step is observation and diagnosis to ‘know thy enemy’.

Use a magnifying glass to get up close and personal to see what's happening in your patch.

The next step is what intervention you choose to use to manage the situation.

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Coping with Caterpillars – Part 1

Most of the time, my garden’s thriving but sometimes the weather tips things out of balance in favour of less welcome garden guests! In our hot, humid and wet subtropical climate, this can happen more frequently than I’d like. No matter where you live, creepy caterpillars are sure to visit sometime during the year. If they start to chomp on your crops, you’ll need some strategies up your sleeve!

Coping with Caterpillars Part 1 - How to Manage Pest Problems in your Garden

Extended periods of heavy rain can play havoc, creating the environment for pest populations to arrive en masse and thrive. It’s hard to inspect your garden with days of teeming rain. So by the time the sun shines again, there’s sometimes a pest problem to deal with.

Do you really have a pest problem?

I have a few Integrated Pest Management (IPM) strategies I use to minimise insect invasions and maintain balance, so I thought I’d share how I deal with one of the most common critters – caterpillars.

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Garden Design Ideas for Small Spaces

Good design is essential for small space gardens. If you have limited room to grow as many of us do in urban areas, maximising the area you can garden in and wise plant selection are top priorities. These space saving solutions may be just what you need.

 

It's important to use good design principles to make the most of small garden spaces. | The Micro Gardener

Sometimes it just takes a little inspiration to make some simple but creative changes to your space.

 

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Top Tips for Wet Weather Gardening

Don’t you love it when it rains?

… and hate it when it rains TOO MUCH!

Top Tips for Wet Weather Gardening

All gardens need adequate moisture but periods of heavy rainfall, storms and runoff can bring you a truckload of challenges. These include:

  • waterlogged plants;
  • leaching of soil nutrients;
  • erosion; and
  • pest and disease problems.

11 Wet Weather Gardening Tips

Want to minimise these common issues? Dig into these wet weather gardening tips to learn how.

I’m into ‘designing out’ problems whenever I can – both in my own garden and for my clients.

Good observation, a bit of thought and planning can help reduce the impact of water-based problems.  These are some of the strategies I use to help avoid these issues. (more…)

Appreciating Your Garden’s Assets

I come inside after a hot morning’s work in the garden … I’ve been adding bags of manure, organic fertiliser, lucerne, sugarcane mulch, seaweed and compost tea to our main shade tree by our house to try to save it.  I hope it’s not too late …

It’s not happy since we trimmed some of its surface roots which were ‘inconveniently located’ where our new paving needs to be. In protest, it started to drop its leaves … not many at first so we didn’t take much notice.

It’s not happy since we trimmed some of its surface roots which were ‘inconveniently located’ where our new paving needs to be. In protest, it started to drop its leaves … not many at first so we didn’t take much notice.

 

Then a few more fell and as its solar panels became few and far between … we suddenly realised our plans for an outdoor room may have compromised the shade and beauty that we wanted to sit under. We didn’t realise our actions could cause the tree so much stress.  Maybe we should have kept the patchy lawn instead of pavers.  Hindsight is a humbling teacher!

Highly motivated to delay any sudden death, I started telling the tree I’d nurture it back to health and make up for cutting its root off!  It didn’t seem at all convinced … more leaves and skinny branches dropped on the lawn.  I felt guilty and sad. Perhaps similar to not valuing your health until you get sick?

It’s still not looking good. The tree needs a tonic (so do I!) so I deliver more seaweed and hose in the manure tea. I set up a soaker hose as it’s been hot and dry lately which hasn’t helped. It needs a lot of love.

It’s still not looking good. The tree needs a tonic (so do I!) so I deliver more seaweed and hose in the manure tea. I set up a soaker hose as it’s been hot and dry lately which hasn’t helped. It needs a lot of love.

 

When I finish foliar spraying the kelp on the remaining leaves, I smell like some foul thing that’s been lying on the beach after too many days in the sun. I hope it’s worth it!

That’s when a visitor pops by … I walk out onto the verandah in the hope that the fresh air will disguise the odour.  I move a little hoping he’s standing downwind of me.  He’s either too polite to comment or ‘smell’ is not one of his stronger senses!  Either way, I’m grateful.  After his sudden departure, I stand back and look at the tree again near our entrance … and realise now how much I value it. (more…)

The Benefits of Moon Gardening

I’d like to share a secret I use in my garden to get great results. Strong, healthy happy plants. This ‘secret weapon’ saves me a LOT of time and money.  It’s moon gardening or planting by the moon!

OK, ‘moon gardening’ may sound a little strange if you’ve never heard of it before! Stay with me and I’ll reveal the secret in more detail and how YOU can use this to your advantage.

Learn the Benefits of Moon Gardening and how to work with nature's moon cycles to boost your success

Learn the Benefits of Moon Gardening and how to work with nature’s moon cycles to boost your success

You are probably already familiar with your climate zone and are planting in the right season for your location. One easy way for you to maximise your gardening success is by working with nature’s lunar cycles. By that, I don’t mean getting outdoors with a shovel in the middle of the night! Moon planting has been practiced by farmers and gardeners who were in tune with nature’s patterns. In our busy modern world, many gardeners have lost sight of this age old science-based technique.

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