Ingenious plants: onion weed

While we were giving the garden a spring clean-up and planting seedlings over the weekend, I also dug out a huge couple of handfuls of onion weed (Nothoscordum borbonicum).

What an ingenious plant it is too! It ensures its survival by growing smaller bulbs, or bulbils, off the main bulb, which, when disturbed, break away to take up a new, vigorous life of their own, multiplying your onion weed problem in no time!

Lyn Bagnall writes about onion weed on her Aussie Organic Growing blog (she also has a book available on organic gardening) and has some ways to rid your garden of onion weed. Lyn says:

To get rid of onion weed, you have to prevent the bulbs storing food for growth. Onion weed can also produce seed. Cutting off the foliage at ground level will prevent the plants making carbohydrates in their leaves, and also prevent seed forming.

In an unused garden area, you can do this by slashing, or mowing, the foliage to ground level, then covering the area with black plastic for several months. Anchor the edges of the plastic with planks, bricks or whatever you have to prevent it blowing away.

You might prefer to use mulch instead of plastic, esepcially if you are growing other plants and vegies nearby. Check the comments out on her post - some other ideas there too, like eating it! I'm not sure about that one, but you never know. :o)

Onion weed by margoc

In our raised garden beds, I use a small fork to loosen the soil and pull out the main plant very carefully, to minimise the lose of the bulbils - then I fish out as many of the small bulbs as I can see, though this is by no means foolproof. In larger, more sparse areas a spade would be better to catch as much soil around the bulb as you can, minimising disturbance. Some of the bulbs are really quite deep, often a spade head deep or more! And, as many forums and gardener comments say, even pulling out the green shoots helps, as it'll stop the bulb receiving sunlight (photosynthesis) and nutrients.
It looks like many gardeners face onion weed, as this amateur gardener shows!

All we can do is keep digging...!

Happy gardening!

Spring plantings and seedlings

We had a very productive day in the garden today - the first in a little while in fact. Firstly, Alfie and I went to the gardening shop to pick up some seedlings, particularly capsicum and basil, the purple kind too. We found some nice looking yellow button squash too while we were there. After our last zucchini effort though, I'm a little sceptical about squash, but willing to give them another go.

Capsicum and purple basil seedlings.

Also got some aged manure and sugar cane mulch and dosed the garden up, including the lovely looking tomatoes that came up from the compost - I just love these sort of visitors :o)

The lemon and lime also got a dose, plus the olive trees, papaya and guava. The lime and lemon got a good prune too - both have a number of flowers as well, so here's hoping for some fruit this year - although may still be a bit young, but we will see.

Simon also made a narrow bed on the outside of our boundary (to the vacant lot behind us) and transplanted some tomatoes and put in some of the purple basil seedlings as companions. He also popped a couple of the yellow button squash in the middle just to see how they go.

Boundary garden bed with tomatoes, basil and yellow button squash.

Now all we need is to monitor for bugs and nasties, and, more importantly, water regularly!

Happy gardening!

Autumn goodness continues

We've had close to 60mm of rain over the weekend which makes it a perfect time to plant and sow in the garden!

We picked up two olive trees at the local garden shop: a kalamata and a manzanillo.



Kalamata


Manzanillo

We had two half wine barrels from a friend down south which are a perfect size for these.

Alfie and I also planted out our Desirée potatoes on the weekend, plus some mixed lettuce and rocket.



Simon and Clancy planted some purple garlic on ANZAC day which sprung up only about 5 days later with the rain and the relative warmth!


Water (via rain) is an amazing elixir. You can just see how alive everything becomes after a decent rain! It's renewing and rejuvenating :-)

The birds obviously love it too - the Willy Wagtails are such great gardeners too!



What a special time in the year! Happy gardening!

Kids in the garden

Alfie will be one next month - who knows where the time has gone! As he engages more, especially outdoors, I'm reminded of when Clancy was a toddler and how we spent lots of time out in the garden when we lived in Canberra.

Now Alfie can spread his wings (or should that be green thumbs?) in the garden! How do you best engage the highly physical toddler without unleashing total garden destruction? My answer is pots.




And a big sister helps too! Alfie follows Clancy everywhere and no doubt is learning heaps from observing her and then copying where he can! He was stoked to "help" sow some peas in these colourful pots. If he decides they need not be in pots anymore, well, at least he hasn't destroyed the bigger garden beds! :-)

I've also noticed that Clancy can now focus on the whole process of choosing and filling pots, choosing seeds, sowing, watering - the lot, when she only need deal with one or two pots. This detailed experience combined with the bigger picture experience of exploring the garden in its entirety (we often walk a circuit in the morning to check everything out) is a good overall development process I reckon.

Little jobs, exploring and discovering, pretend plantings (planting cut flowers for example) all help to develop Clancy and no doubt Alfie into engaged and confident gardeners!

And if course it's simply gotta be good fun... Happy gardening!

Working with seeds

I mentioned in our last post that we hadn't yet seen the carrots pop up, but they have since then! Don't you just love their delicate fine leaves?




Will be keeping these moist so they get the best start possible and we also sowed another couple of rows in one of our large planters. That should keep us in carrots for a while. :-)

As for our Okra seeds, we have yet to see these emerge from the soil! Have been reading what others have experienced with Okra and apart from keeping the soil moist and the environment warm I can't see what else could hinder them. So, we will wait a tad longer - they can take up to 3-4 weeks to germinate so they still have 1-2 weeks to surprise us!




Oh, the suspense! Happy gardening :-).

Gardening companions

Clancy decided our garden needed a scarecrow. And he couldn't be happy, he had to be an angry scarecrow to scare the birds away!



The weather has been warm enough to give our seeds a cracking start too. The beetroots are already surfacing, as are the peas and beans planted at the same time. Its been barely a week!

Haven't seen the carrots yet. I have a feeling the seed was old. Will give them a week's grace.

Enjoying Autumn, happy gardening!

It's Autumn, what shall we plant?

Clancy and I are looking at the Gardening Australia Vegie Guide to see what we can plant in our garden beds, now the Summer seems to be over.

We found this article by Millie Ross which shows how to plant out a bean chubby house! Clancy thought that would be very cool :o). As our grapevine is beginning to lose its leaves, it would be good to plant beans at the end of the raised bed that is next to the vine so we can string the beans across to it to provide a tent-like cover for Clancy (and Alfie) to play under. Worth experimenting anyway.

Other things Clancy would like in the garden include beetroot, potatoes (we haven't planted them in our Perth garden yet, only back in Canberra, Clancy says), sweet potatoes and of course some purple, yellow and orange flowers!

Happy gardening!