Green tree frog in my frog friendly garden

During the last lot of rain I heard the calls of three different stripey marsh frogs around my garden!I also heard the deep calls of a green tree frog!

This is so exciting because it has been a few years since I heard our native frogs in my garden. Unfortunately the frogs had been driven out when cane toads overtook my garden. Cane toads out-compete our native frogs for food and they will even eat the frogs.

So why is it important to have a frog-friendly garden?

Frogs tell us so much about our environment. If you have frogs in your garden it means that the area is low in toxic chemicals.

Frogs absorb pesticides, herbicides and other chemicals through their skin and these chemicals kill them! So you won’t see or hear frogs if you or your neighbours use chemicals. This includes all manner of weed killers based on glyphosate, as well as lawn weed and feed products.

How to create a frog-friendly garden?

Pot of water chestnuts where the sedge frogs love to hide

Frog-friendly gardens are easy to create! The first step (and for some people the hardest) is to stop using nasty chemicals!

Then you need to create the perfect environment for the frogs. You can do this by adding a natural water pond or water feature. I use lots of pots for my frog ponds. You can fill them with plants such as water lilies, lotus, water irises and even edible plants such as water celery, watercress and water chestnuts.

Frogs also need places to hide from predators and to keep cool, so it’s important to leave plenty of mulch and leaf litter around. They also need some rocks or logs to sit on and sun themselves. My frogs love using garden statues that I’ve placed in the garden.

Next you need to eliminate cane toads.

These are an introduced pest that will out-compete your native frogs for food. They have even been known to eat native frogs!

Cane toads can be eliminated manually by collecting the frogs and placing them in the fridge until they go to sleep. You then move them into the freezer and from there out into the garbage on garbage night.

I use biodynamic peppers to control cane toads (Magical Biodynamics) . The peppers work on making my garden inhospitable to cane toads so they go elsewhere. This allows space for the frogs to move back in.

Create the perfect environment and the frogs will come! And you will have the joy of knowing that your garden is safe for frogs to live in. And that means that it’s safe for you and your family!

Your Edible Garden Guru

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Blueberry Hill?

I am thinking of renaming my place Blueberry Hill after the number of blueberry bushes that I now have producing fruit! The only problem being that I am at the bottom of the hill, not up the top?

How it started?

It all started with one little blueberry bush that I found on the ‘take me home and love me’ tray at the Big Green Shed! The poor thing was soo close to dead! It didn’t even have a label and was reduced to $1.00. This bush has become so productive that I wrote a separate blog about it. As a result I was given another 2 blueberry bushes that people had not been able to get to produce fruit. Since then, these blueberries have flowered and produced a couple of great crops of blueberries!

Since then I have found more blueberry plants on the ‘take me home and love me’ tray at the Big Green shed. Of course I just can’t resist these temptations?

Grow and thrive

As they grow and thrive in part shade at my place, they have become a great filler plant. I have them in pots as well as in the ground. They are great for under larger fruit trees and deciduous flowering trees.

I cannot believe how different the fruit taste straight from the bush! They are sooo sweet. Absolutely none of the tartness or blandness you can get from store bought blueberries. And the size! They can be double the size of the store bought fruit!

And what’s even better is that they are good for your health, with research showing that the anthocyanins that cause the bright blue colour are helpful in combating several human diseases and may even prevent some cancers!

So, why not grow some yourself?

Happy gardening from your edible garden guru ?

The post Are Blueberry’s Easy to Grow? appeared first on Delectable Garden.

This week I have been asked if I could talk a bit about composting on my BayFM radio program.

We have mentioned compost a few times. However, it seems its one of those things that people are a bit hesitant about.

I can understand this as it took me a while to really get into composting. Once you get started, and see the benefits, you will wonder why it took you soo long to discover this magic!

Composting in action

Why should I compost?

One of the first questions I get asked is “why should I compost”?

And there are soo many reasons!! Getting free soil. Improving the biology of your soil. Growing fantastic veggies without additional fertiliser! And helping to reduce carbon emissions and lower your impact on the environment.

So let’s look at these in a little more detail.

When you first start gardening, it’s hard to imagine all your garden pruning’s and grass clippings could actually be of benefit to your garden.

They just look like waste right? But put that waste in the right environment and it can quickly change into what gardeners refer to as “black gold”!

That’s because worms and microbes break down this waste material. They return it to the vitamins and minerals that it started out as.

So you get the carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, magnesium and all those other minerals in a form that can be easily absorbed by your plants!

And this is why you can grow fabulous, healthy veggies using just compost as the fertiliser.

Believe it or not, what you buy as potting mix or compost from your local nursery or big green shed is just fancy (or not so fancy!) compost, with a high price tag!

Reducing carbon emissions

So, how can it reduce your carbon emissions?

By stopping all the green waste and kitchen scraps from going to landfill! This is the most important reason to compost in my opinion!

It’s estimated that between 30-50 percent of the contents of our rubbish bins is organic matter that can be repurposed as compost.

A lot of people don’t realise that when organic matter goes into normal rubbish bins it gets buried along with all the plastics, tissues and other rubbish.

And when it hits landfill it doesn’t have the air and microbes to help it break down naturally.

Instead it breaks down very slowly! And, along the way, it releases methane and other gases associated with climate change.

It has been measured that a normal lettuce when broken down in this manner can take 20 years to decompose.

In a compost bin it takes around 3 months and releases little to no methane gas. This goes for any organic matter.

I think some people get confused about the difference between green waste bins and normal waste bins because they think they all go to the same place i.e. the tip right.

However, when they get to the tip they get treated differently. The contents of the green waste goes off to be composted while the contents of the red bins gets buried.

How do you start composting?

It’s pretty easy, but there are a few simple rules.

Before we start, there are two main types of composting: Hot composting and cold composting.

With hot composting you build a compost heap all at once and leave it to brew. Cold composting you add to the compost heap slowly.

As hot composting takes up quite a lot more space, I am going to focus on cold composting. That’s what most people in the Redlands will be doing.

Composting involves pretty basic chemistry. The kind of stuff you learnt in primary school!

Basically you have some organic material that is rich in carbon, and some that is rich in nitrogen.

Your carbon materials are often called brown material. This includes things like paper, cardboard, branches and twigs, straw and sawdust and dried autumn leaves.

Your nitrogen rich materials (often called green material) are your grass clippings, green leaves and kitchen scraps.

Manures like chook poo and horse poo are also included in the nitrogen pile, even though they are brown in colour, as they are very nutrient dense.

To compost successfully you need a good mix of carbon and nitrogen materials.

You don’t want to aim for a 50:50 mix because the nitrogen materials are a lot more nutrient rich than the carbon materials. A ratio of around 30:70 or 20:80 is a good mix to aim for.

So where are you going to put all this material?

Ideally your compost bin should be located in part shade. You can compost in the sun, but you’ll need to ensure you keep the moisture up to your compost heap.

I recommend you buy or make a compost bin. There are all sorts of commercially available bins including tumbler bins and beehive bins made out of plastic.

Or, even better if you have the space, build compost bays out of recycled timber. You need at least two bays so that one can be brewing while you are building the other compost pile.

You can also create a compost heap using chicken wire or similar to contain the heap.

Of course you could just dig a hole in the ground and bury your waste. However, this can take longer to break down and may attract rodents like rats and mice if you bury food scraps.

I know some people who have a compost bin in each veggie patch. This way they don’t have to move their pruning, or the finished compost far!

What’s the process for composting?

Once you have located your compost bin it really is just a matter of starting to put your kitchen scraps, grass clippings, leaves etc in the bin.

I recommend that you have the bin on the ground. The worms and bacteria from the soil will travel up and start the composting process. It really is that simple.

If you want, you can buy some composting worms. This will help speed up the process.

Every time you add a layer of green material, especially kitchen scraps then you need to cover it with a layer of brown material like cardboard, paper, straw etc. Otherwise it can attract flies and rodents or start to smell.

A good compost heap honestly should not smell. If it smells then something is going wrong.

You need to keep your compost heap moist. You need to give it a sprinkling of water every couple of days.

If your compost gets too dry it will stop working! And the leaves and scraps just won’t break down.

I recommend you get a compost aerator from the big green shed or nursery. This is like a giant corkscrew or bottle opener. It really helps introduce air into your compost heap and speed up the process.

Follow these steps and in about 4 months your compost should be ready to spread on your garden!

This compost will add lots of nutrients to your plants. It will also add all those beneficial microbes into your soil. And the more beneficial bacteria in your soil, the bigger, stronger and healthier your veggies will be.

Is there anything that you can’t add to your compost?

There are a few things you shouldn’t add to your compost heap.

This includes any meat or fish products, dairy or cheese. The average home compost system can’t cope with these products and they will start to smell off!! Also, they can attract vermin like rats and mice or even snakes.

Another thing that you shouldn’t put in your compost heap is any plants or cuttings that are diseased or infested with pests.

This is because an average compost heap doesn’t generate enough heat to kill these diseases. So you will just be spreading them to other, non-diseased areas of your garden.

Also if you have sprayed your grass with weed killers then you can’t add this to your compost heap. The same goes for any pesticides. These don’t break down and will kill all your worms and microbes.

You also can’t compost bio-plastics. Even though a lot of take-away containers, including coffee cups, say they are compostable. Your average home compost heap won’t break them down. They actually need a special system to compost them.

And hopefully it goes without saying but normal plastics, glass and big planks of wood also won’t break down.

Most people wouldn’t normally add these to the compost bin, but I did find a kitchen bowl and a fork in one of my compost bins when I emptied it! Obviously, they had fallen in when I was emptying kitchen scraps and I hadn’t noticed!

Also, you shouldn’t add any dog poo or cat poo! This is because these animals primarily eat a meat diet. So you might be introducing pathogens into your garden.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t compost pet poo! You just need a separate system. I use a worm tube.

This brings me to other ways of dealing with kitchen scraps, if you don’t have enough space to have a compost bin.

What if I don’t have any garden? Can I still compost?

If you don’t have any garden space, because you live in a unit or townhouse, then try a kitchen top composting bin. All you need is a bucket with a lid, food waste and Bokashi composting mix.

You add your scraps to the bin and at the end of each day you cover it with the composting mix. This is rich in all the microorganisms that break down the food waste.

The compost made in these bins is very rich so it can’t be added directly to your potted plants. You will need to find someone who has a garden where the composted material can be buried.

I have a few people who gift me their compost! They don’t have space for it themselves, but have been encouraged to start composting after listening to me!

If you have a little more space, another option is to invest in a worm farm. This is a container system where you use compost worms to break down your food scraps.

They produce a worm tea that you can dilute and use on all your potted plants. Eventually this will also fill up, so you will need to get rid of the compost. However, it will take a fair bit longer than the bokashi bin.

Hopefully this will encourage you to try composting, if you aren’t doing it already.

And a final WHY?

You hear in the news about the need for carbon sequestering to remove carbon from the atmosphere. By composting you are doing your own little bit of carbon sequestering!

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Ladybeetle lays eggs in your garden

So what do I mean by Good Bugs?

Good bugs are those insects that prey upon bad bugs in your garden. Bad bugs include caterpillars, scale, aphids and mealybugs.

There are plenty of beneficial bugs including lady beetles, lacewings and praying mantis. These good bugs also include the larvae of insects such as cryptolaemus, which is the larvae of ladybeetles.

Encouraging the Good Guys

When you encourage good bugs into your garden, your veggies grow bigger and better, and suffer fewer pest attacks. And you won’t need to use any pesticides to get rid of the bad pests!

In fact, you will have to stop using pesticides before these good guys will visit your veggie patch!

This is because pesticides kill the good guys just as quickly as they kill the bad guys!

My favourite Good guy is the larvae of Lady Beetles, also known as cryptolaemus or the Mealy Bug Killer! And they deserve this title as they eat dozens of mealybug each day!

I once watched a mealybug killer clean up an infestation of mealybug on my lime tree. I had a pretty bad infestation at the start, and by day 3 there were only a few shell corpses.

The Mealybug killer works by disguising itself to look just like its prey. In fact, the only way you can tell them apart, the mealybug killer moves on its own. This is an important distinction, as the mealybug itself has no legs and requires ants to move it around. Mealybugs live on your fruit trees and in your veggie garden!

So, if you see a mealybug that is walking, it really is a good guy – the mealybug killer!

Mealybug killer

You can purchase these good guys online, from places like Bugs for Bugs. However, I find it just as easy to encourage the good guys into your garden. You can do this by providing food for the good guys with plenty of flowers and nectar.

Providing a pesticide-free garden

You also need to provide a pesticide-free garden. When I talk about not using pesticides, this includes those pesticides that are sold as “natural” and “harmless” such as Pyrethrum.

These pesticides are considered “natural” as they have their genesis in nature. The chemicals in these pesticides have been extracted or copied from plants. However, they are made into a concentrate that is hundreds of times more poisonous than that found in plants!

And these pesticides kill all bugs, both the good guys and the bad guys. So instead of spraying your veggies with pesticides why not give nature a chance to use its own predators to kill the bad bugs in your garden?

When you do this you will notice that you have many more insects in your garden, but many of these will be good bugs.

So why not take a walk around your garden and look at all the abundant insect life? Many of these insects are helping you in your gardening endeavours https://www.thedelectablegarden.com.au/good-bugs/. They do this by pollinating your plants, but also by eating other bugs!

Until next time

Your Edible Garden Guru

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Many single use plastics come into our homes in disguise!

Did you know that chip packets, lolly packets and even food sachets are actually made of plastic?

In fact, single use plastic is used all across the food industry to get food products to us as cheaply as possible. And part of the reason is that plastic weighs very little!!

Previously we used glass and paper but they added weight and bulk. Then they discovered plastic!

And now the plastic doesn’t even look like what we think plastic should look like. The chip packets look like aluminium foil. But they are plastic!

Recycling??

And, YES, all these single use plastics are easily recycled!!

All you need to do is rinse them out (so they don’t smell out the collection centre) and drop them into the Redcycle bins at Coles when you are next shopping! The recycled plastic is makes new shopping bags, plastic bottles, even the foam matting used in childrens play areas.

What to Do?

I know you don’t need any more jobs to do! But this one is really easy, I promise you!

All I do is keep a soft plastics recycle bag near the front door, and drop in any single use plastics that come into my home. This includes the plastic bags used for the Blood and Bone and potting mix that I use in the garden!

When the bag is full, I take it to Coles when I’m next going shopping. Redcycle do the rest!

And NO, I didn’t eat the chips and lollies from the photo! I picked these bags up when walking my dogs this morning (hence this post)!

Sadly, we are responsible for the Whiskers sachets. Even though it’s cat food, my dogs love it for breakfast! However, I feel a lot better now that I know that I can rinse and recycle the satchets instead of them going to landfill where they can sit for 1,000 years before breaking down!

So, while we are trying to cut down on the single use plastics, why not make sure that you recycle those plastics that do come in with your shopping?

Let me know what other items you recycle through the Redcycle bins? I am sure there are plenty of other plastics that we just don’t think to recycle

And, as a bonus, you can reduce the amount of rubbish in your council bins!

Here’s to living more sustainably

Your Edible Garden Guru

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Living a Low Plastic Life

If living without plastic was easy, we’d all be doing it! 

Most of us are aware at a rational level that plastic has significant negative impacts on the environment. But plastic is so widespread in our lives today it seems impossible to imagine life without it!

And that is one of the reasons that deter people from trying to living without plastic.

So, in the spirit of Plastic Free July, I thought I would start with some of the reasons you might have heard, or given yourself, for not trying to reduce our plastic consumption.

Reason #1
Plastics are everywhere and, while I see that there is a problem, nothing I do will make any impact.

Sadly, this is the most common comment that has been made to me since I first started talking about trying to reduce my plastic consumption! But we can make a difference! It was consumer demand that led to the banning of single-use plastic carrybags in supermarkets! And it was consumer demand that led to the re-introduction of 10 cent recycling for plastic bottles and glass bottles in most Australian States and Territories, despite very heavy lobbying by companies such as Coca Cola for over a decade.

Reason#2
Not all plastics are bad.

This is true. Without plastic we would not have motor cars, lots of household appliances, clothes and shoes and many of the newer medical breakthroughs. Not all plastic is bad. It’s just the single-use plastic, like the plastic bags we use to separate our veggies when we take them from the supermarket to our homes. I mean do we really think the bananas, already perfectly wrapped by nature, need another bag just to be transported home to the fruitbowl?

Reason#3
I’m not ready to go cold-turkey and stop using plastic.

While a few people do manage to go cold turkey and eliminate plastic from their lives, its not always easy or practical to do this. It’s great if you think you can achieve this, but to me it seems a little bit like diving headfirst into all those new years resolutions. You start with a bang, but don’t manage to keep it going past the 3rd of January! It’s better to start slowly, try taking you own reusable bags to the supermarket when doing your shopping, or refusing single-use plastic bags for some or all of your fruit and vegetables. Every little bit helps ?

Reason#4
You are not going to throw out all your current house-hold plastic. It would be costly, time consuming and inconvenient to find replacements.

The thing is, you don’t have to throw out all your plastic bottles and containers. You just need to make sure that you don’t buy any new stuff ? In fact if the plastic currently in your home is useful, and serving a purpose, then it is far better staying in your home and being used, than it is clogging up landfill.

Reason#5
I’m already doing everything possible to minimise my use of plastics.

This was my personal favourite and the reason I was most aligned with! I thought that because I didn’t drink take-out coffee, I take my own cloth bags to the supermarket, recycle all my soft plastic in bins at the supermarket etc that I was doing okay with plastic free living. Then I looked around my home. What about the shampoo bottles, all those tubes of makeup and moisturisers, the toilet paper wrappings and so on! And this didn’t go near the fridge and the pantry, with all the butter, milk bottles, sauces etc ?? And even outside, what about those seedling punnets from the Big Green Shed!

Reason#6
Alternatives cost a lot more and are less convenient.

I’m sure that there is some truth to this. However, people survived before plastic came along and, while there will be some inconvenience, I’m looking forward to finding solutions and alternatives for plastic free living and sharing these with you.

Reason#7
I forget/forgot my recycle bags when I went shopping, therefore I have failed, so there is really no point in trying again.

Going plastic-free is like any new practice that we try and take on. We are not going to get it right first time, every time. However, like that diet you adopt to try to lose weight or like trying to give up alcohol, there will be lapses and mistakes. It is important not to give up at the first hurdle but to keep on trying!

Reason#8
But I put everything in my recycle bin!!

Another reason that I was partially aligned to! Recycling still means that a lot of the plastic will end up in landfill or in the ocean ?? Less than one-third of plastic in Australia actually gets recycled!! Recycling really should be seen as a last resort, not the start of the journey!

Let me know which reason you have for not living without single use plastics, or if you have another reason that I haven’t thought of for not trying to reduce your plastic use.

I hope you will join me in signing up to Plastic Free July. For further information visit www.plasticfreejuly.org

Here’s to living more sustainably

Your Edible Garden Guru

The post If living without plastic was easy, we’d all do it! appeared first on Delectable Garden.

And one of the major reasons is the awful, tragic effect that plastic pollution is having on animals, especially in our oceans ?

However, I am not going to use any of those heart-wrenching photos of animals killed by plastic rings or plastic bags in their gut!

Not because I don’t believe that it is happening! But because those photos and that information make me feel sooo sick in the gut, sad and powerless. So it almost seems easier to give up, than to try and make any difference! ? After all, I’m only one person right?

I was also horrified to read that plastic rubbish was recently found at the bottom of the Mariana trench. ? That is nearly 11,000 metres below sea level. That is about 3,000 metres deeper than Mt Everest, if you inverted Mt Everest!

And I know that plastic pollution is found at the top of Mt Everest!

But you need to be in a submarine to visit Mariana trench! And the number of people who have achieved this (unlike Everest) are in single digits!

Another reason my Plastic free living journey was when I read that scientists have found shreds of micro-plastic in our poop. Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t like to think that I am eating and digesting enough plastics that it is coming out the other end! ?

Another thing that horrified me was the change, or should I say lack of change, that happened when single use plastic bags were banned in Queensland. ? It seems to me that this was just an excuse for the supermarkets to charge for the single use bags and put their logos on them! This just replaced the previously freely supplied ubiquitous grey or white plastic bags.

And the final reason was when I realised that every piece of plastic that has ever been made is still with us on our beautiful planet Earth! ?

I think I knew that subliminally, but I had never really thought it through.

Plastic doesn’t degrade! If it was made, then it is still made.

It’s in our landfill, in our oceans, in our back yards and in our homes! And at the rate we are producing and using plastic, soon there won’t be enough land for us to fill with plastic waste! ?

Anyway, these are some of my reasons. I’m sure if I thought about it I could come up with a lot more. However, my aim is not to preach at people but to give you some ideas and suggestions about how we can all make a difference, one piece of plastic at a time!

I hope you will join me and the millions of others signed up to Plastic Free July. For further information visit www.plasticfreejuly.org.

Here’s to living more sustainably.

Your Edible Gardening Guru.

The post Plastic Free Living: My Journey appeared first on Delectable Garden.