AN ABUNDANCE OF TOMATOES

Although I grow organic tomatoes in my garden they are mostly for salad use. I find that the cherry tomatoes have less insect problems than the commercial varieties. My garden at Das Helwig Haus B&B on the Granite Belt of southern Queensland is surrounded by commercial fruit orchards and vegetable farms. The down side of this is that all the insect pests manage to find breeding spots every year, hence the need for farmers to use insecticides and those pests are happy to move on to my unprotected crops. The plus side is that the farmers will kindly give me their excess produce.

Cherry tomatoes and hot red chilies.

Last year I was allowed to pick tomatoes from fields that had been abandoned. It is commercial practice to only pick tomatoes while they are green. When the price drops, or the farmer thinks the plants are past their prime, the crop will be abandoned as uneconomical. When time permits the farmer will clear his land for a different crop in his rotation plan. Thus, each year I witness the waste of many vegetables as they rot in the field.

Sun ripened Roma tomatoes

The good thing is that as the crop was still green when the farmer abandoned it, these tomatoes had several weeks to ripen naturally in the sun, free of insecticides. . Read the rest of this entry »

FOR CARMEN

Carmen was one of three Italian girls who came to WWOOF for me in August. Recently she wrote to ask:

Kookaburra by David Osburg.

AN ABUNDANCE OF ZUCCHINIS 1

Every year when I was a child my father cleared a piece of scrub land on our farm at the foot of the Bunya Mountains and burnt off the felled scrub, before planting pumpkins, watermelons and other vegetables in the ashes. Years later he asked me if I knew why these crops flourished? By then I had become the gardening guru in the family. Dad said, that if he merely added ash to a vegetable garden he couldn’t get the same healthy result. I explained that not only was he using fertile soil for the first time, but the heat of the fire had killed all the nasty pathogens in the soil which might have inhibited the growth of his vegetables. This is a method of growing vegetable gardens in tropical countries like Papua New Guinea.

When I was a child we never ate baby vegetables like button squash and zucchini. The Acorn Squash and Marrow, as we called zucchini, were rather despised and tasteless vegetables, best hollowed out and stuffed with a savoury meat mixture. It was only after Eberhard and I moved to live on the Granite Belt of southern Queensland in 1992 that I came to have an appreciation of Mediterranean vegetables like zucchini, eggplant and capsicums. The Granite Belt has a cool mountain climate and many of the farmers here are descendants of earlier Italian immigrants. Each year this district supplies a huge volume of vegetables and fruit to the Brisbane and Sydney markets.

Disaster struck the Granite Belt community on Christmas Day with a huge hail storm that destroyed or damaged many of the vegetable crops as the farmers were about to commence the seasonal picking.

Hail storm over the Granite Belt on Christmas Day 2008

The farmers had two choices. They could slash their damaged plants to the ground, plough the soil and replant, or they could pay workers to strip from the plants and throw away all the damaged vegetables, in the expectation that the bushes and vines would recover and begin bearing produce again. Read the rest of this entry »

A GREEN DROUGHT

The Severn River which forms one boundary of our farm flows south-west to join the largest river system in Australia, known as the Murray-Darling Rivers system. Like the Mississippi River in the USA it drains inland waters south to the sea. Early Australian explorers thought there must be an inland sea in the middle of Australia, as all the rivers they discovered on the far side of the Great Dividing Range drained westward. By following these rivers they found that they later joined with the Darling River to flow south and into the sea in what became the State of South Australia. Thus water from southern Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria flows south over several months before reaching its destination in South Australia. It is a slow flowing river and subject to periods of drought when it becomes nothing more than a series of water holes. A hundred years ago paddle steamers worked the river, carrying out wool bales and other produce from the interior. During times of drought they remained stranded waiting for “The river to come down.” During the past decade drought has once more dried this mighty river to a series of water holes.

Here on the Granite Belt at the northern end of this river system, we rely on summer storms to start the water flowing. Most years we get sufficient rain to bring our river down in a flood and on average, once in a decade we will get a mighty flood as happened in January 2008.

Flooded Severn River January 2008

Since this January flood we have received little rainfall and experienced a dry winter.  During these spring months, storms have only brought small falls. This has created a green drought. The countryside appears green, but there is little grass growth. The abundance of water in our frontage to the Severn River has provided me with the ability to irrigate my garden and Remembrance Field of Flanders poppies during this drought. Read the rest of this entry »

WE ENTER THE HERB GARDEN

“Why do you call this your herb garden?

I am always asked this question as we walk down the slope between borders of marigolds and camomile daisies. It is true that this lower terrace at the rear of the house has never been designed as a formal potager. The style of such a traditional garden is usually symmetrical and surrounded by neatly trimmed box hedges. They often contain a fountain, bird bath or sundial in the centre.

The reason that this area at the rear of Das Helwig Haus B&B became our herb garden is its proximity to our kitchen. Rather than keeping a bunch of herbs in a glass on my kitchen table, I prefer to go into the garden to gather fresh sprigs as needed.

Garden path between marigolds and camomile.

I grow the German camomile (matricaria recutita) as an annual plant like the marigolds as it self-seeds and germinates thickly each year in August. The flowers are plucked when fully open, dried and stored. Later they can be steeped in hot water to provide a soothing bed-time tea to encourage a restful sleep.

We pass beside the feijoa trees under which I have planted seed of jam melons as they will need space to run out their vines.  Borage always self-seeds in this area too. It was the ancient Romans who first floated borage flowers in cups of wine. I pick a few dainty blue flowers and hand them to my garden visitors, remarking that I freeze the flowers in ice blocks to later float in a jug of water. The leaves of this herb are cucumber flavoured.

Read the rest of this entry »

WE WALK AMONGST VEGETABLES

When pegging out our house extension in 1993 for the guest wing of Das Helwig Haus B&B, Eberhard realised that the northern veranda would abut against the rockery garden. As the house was positioned on a slope falling away to the south, the ground for the extension would have to be excavated to the sixty-centimetre depth demanded by the Stanthorpe Council. A bulldozer was hired to clear the site and push rocks and subsoil to form a hill on the south-western side of this site. The weather was hot and the pile of decomposed granite, which forms the whitish subsoil of the Granite Belt, produced a barren moonscape. The glare reflected off this site and into the kitchen and living room was horrific.

“As soon as we can, I must plant a fast growing leafy tree against the back veranda to shade our kitchen,” I said.

“Make it a deciduous tree,” Eberhard advised. “Once the new wing goes in it’ll block the sunlight from the north. During winter months we’ll need light!”

Sweet-corn beside the persimmon tree December 2004.

Now the gooseberry bushes, quince, persimmon and fig trees are well established and by December are lush with green foliage.”

This area where I’m leading our garden visitors is the service area for our home. A huge concrete rainwater tank was constructed on site and a hole was blasted out of the rocky ground beside it to admit the bio-cycle tank, which handles all the gray water from our guest accommodation before it is recycled on to shrubs.

Frank Musumeci brought his bobcat to build rock retaining walls and level off the pile of subsoil to create a broad terrace. I watched mesmerised as he wheeled the machine to and fro, selecting large rocks from within the earth and delicately dropping them into place, forming a semi-circle of boulders.  Finally, he leveled off the fill to form a platform. Later we spread topsoil over this area, which is the sunny high ground carrying the currant and gooseberry bushes, the asparagus and rhubarb. Read the rest of this entry »