Extending the life of your basil

In my last garden, I found that my basil grew fairly quickly, flowered and then became quite bitter. The plants generally still grew and stayed healthy, but obviously the point of having a basil plant is to use in your kitchen and meals and not just take up room in your garden....well that's my reason for having it.

At our new place I have planted about five basil plants thinking this would give me enough leaves across the five little plants to make pesto and then as they grow up and become bitter I won't mind because I would have had enough leaves over all of these plants to make several batches of pesto. And then I would just replace them over time with new plants.

But I have found a sneaky trick that seems to have elongated my crop! The trick you ask...  Well, it is really quite simple! All I do is remove the flower heads every time I notice these on the plants. I just pick these flower heads off and amazingly this seems to have allowed my basil plants to continue to grow, without turning really bitter and allowing them to continue to look amazing.

Wow, so simple and now I have much more basil than I ever need in the kitchen.  I can also let some of them go to flower and seed, which allows new crops for another year and brings in pollinating insects that are needed more broadly in the garden. 

See if this works just as well for you.





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Garden activities for this afternoon

With all the rain that we have received over the last few weeks, you really have to grab any time you can in the garden. This afternoon was one such break in the weather and I jumped to it!

Watered the worms, as the little brown ants are back and after heading to a Worm Farming seminar the other weekend, I have learnt they are attracted to your farm if it is a little dry. So, to the tap I headed and poured about 3 litres of water through the system. Let's hope that makes a difference.

Another task was to reduce the fruit on the lemon tree. This task for me has been delayed since I learnt that this was something that I needed to do.  The reason for my delay is that I am a bit of a skeptic when it comes to my gardening capabilities and I am forever thinking that more is better because at least it is growing right! Wrong! Thinning fruit on your lemon tree will help the development of the fruit. Also thinning seedlings of some vegetables means that you will get a more productive and appropriately sized reward at the end of the growing season. But I do find it difficult to take this advice.

So, as I said I got to the lemon tree and its fruit reducing task this afternoon. What made me tackle this task, was not the learned gardener advice about this matter, but the fact that I noted some sooty leaves on the tree and thought it best that I remove these "diseased" leaves completely. Once into this task and examining my lemons on the tree I noted those lemons that were touching another lemon where attracting scale insects at the connection point. So, this rapidly bought me to removing the less promising fruit from each of these situations. My tree looks a little less burdened by its fruit load, but hopefully at least I won't lose all my fruit to some disease or insect! Now that would be a trauma! Especially since I want to make my first home made lemon cordial from all the fruit on the tree.

After the initial gardening episode this afternoon, dinner needed to be prepared. Sweet potato was on the menu for dinner tonight and due to my lack of sweet potato using recipes of late, the one that I cooked tonight had started to sprout little roots. Rather than putting these sections of the sweet potato straight into the compost bin or worm farm I thought it might be worth trying to grow these. So, a later afternoon activity saw me burying these sections with their roots attached into a recently cleared out garden bed with a bit of my home-produced worm castings. Let's see how they goes. If they do take, it will be a good crop to loosen the soil and de-compact the bed for future crops. 

Hope you've found some time amongst all this rain to get out into your garden.....maybe just pulling those weeds.


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What beetle is that?

If you have started coming across the odd beetle round the house and you're wondering what it might be, the ABC has produced a small online beetle guide, which I thought was useful and provided a little bit more information than just the name and photo. The beetle guide can be viewed at: http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2003/12/04/2045274.htm.

I have seen one rhinoceros beetle at our place and unfortunately very few Christmas beetles this year, maybe not wet enough yet.

Happy Bug Watching! Pin It

Things in the garden

I came across this "bug" when we first moved into our new home. I had no idea what it was, but it was quite large, approximately 3-4cms in length and distinctively white and furry with an orange "body".

A fabulous website for identification of creepy crawlers in south-east Queensland, is the Brisbane Insects website. From this website I managed to identify my critter as a Large Mealybug and likely to be a lady (due to her size and lack of wings). It also describes them as sap suckers, similar to aphids.

Fascinating! Next time you're in the garden see what insects you have in your garden and maybe you can identify some of them and what role they play. Pin It