Gardening Australia episode 12 2020: Jerry Coleby-Williams shares tips for growing unfamiliar plants, Costa Georgiadis visits a tulip-lovers garden, Tino Carnevale learns how to easily preserve vegetables and Sophie Thomson manages fire-affected fruit trees.
Gardening Australia has always provided practical, trustworthy and credible gardening advice to inspire and entertain. Inspiring, entertaining and full of practical advice, join Costa Georgiadis and the team as they unearth gardening ideas, meet avid gardeners and look at some of the most inspiring gardens from across the country.
Gardening Australia episode 12 2020
One in a Million
Josh goes behind the scenes at Perth’s Kings Park to discover how their plant breeding program is developing new and exciting cultivars of garden favourites.
Josh Byrne visited Perth’s Kings Park, an internationally renowned and awarded botanic garden. WA is home to a staggering array of native plant species and is one of the world’s global biodiversity hotspots. Visitors flock to Kings Park to take in the stunning floral displays, as some of WA’s best natives burst into colour and put on a show. But many of our favourite natives aren’t wild species, they’re instead “cultivars” bred by carefully crossing selected varieties and species.
The breeding program at Kings Park has been going for over 30 years, producing hybrid native plants, and then selecting for desired traits like flower colour, leaf size and vigour. It takes many thousands of plants to find one genuine the garden hit, and they have produced a few!
FAQs – Falling lemons | Autumn colour | Harvesting Jerusalem artichokes
Gardening Australia presenters answer commonly asked gardening questions.
Medlars
Tino explains why you may have never heard of medlar fruit.
Tino is a fan of the medlar, Mespilus germanica, a fruit tree which has fallen out of favour in home gardens. It was popular in medieval gardens and also features in many literary works. A handsome deciduous tree, they grow easily in a wide range of climates and produce a delicious fruit however, unlike their relatives’ apples and pears, the fruit must be ripe almost to a point of rot before they are edible – a process is known as ‘bletting’.
Pretty as a Picture
Millie revisits a stunning ‘garden for all seasons’ in Central Victoria and catches up with friend (and super-gardener) Simon Rickard.
Fire-Affected Fruit Trees
Sophie visits an orchardist in the Adelaide Hills to learn how to manage fire-affected trees and vines. Recovery of fruit trees and grapevines after fire. Mark Joyce is an orchardist whose decidious fruit trees were damaged in the devastating 2019/20 summer bushfires and Darren Golding is a vigneron whose grapevines also sustained damage.
Fruit trees and grape vines can be saved depending on the level of damage. Those damaged by radiant heat are more likely to recover than those burnt thoroughly in high intensity fires.
Fermentation Station
Tino learns how to make easy and delicious ferments at home from late summer harvests and left-overs!
Tino learns how to make easy and delicious ferments using left over produce. Adam James is a full-time professional fermenter, who has converted his small home in Hobart into a small-scale fermentation station, packed with jars of colourful ferments. Tino and Adam gather end of season produce from a friend’s local farm. The produce has past its prime and can’t be sold at restaurants or shops, but they are perfect for fermenting.
Fermentation is one of the world’s oldest ways of preserving food, transforming produce that would typically go to waste into delicious & nutritious preserves. If your kitchen bench or fridge has ever overflowed with a glut of fresh produce, then fermentation is for you!
Digging Up Dahlias – Gardening Australia episode 12 2020
Jane tells us how and when to dig up dahlias. Over summer and autumn, dahlias are wonderfully rewarding plants, but over winter they go dormant. If you live in a frosty or wet area, it’s important to dig up tubers over winter otherwise they can rot in the ground.
Tiptoe Through the Tulips
Costa meets a local legend and her supportive gardener and uncovers the inspiration behind their famous front-yard tulip display.
Plant Profile – Tassel Fern
Guest presenter David Fripp talks about this amazing plant that pre-dates ferns by 40 million years!
Learning by Doing
Jerry shares his tips for growing some unusual plants that don’t come with an instruction manual!
Jerry’s garden is home to a variety of familiar food crops, things like eggplant, chilli and limes. But Jerry’s also a renowned fan of the weird and wonderful. Less common food plants like cocoyam, cranberry hibiscus and elephants foot yam are also key crops in Jerry’s garden.
He learned to grow these foods through scouring the internet, rifling through seed catalogues and raiding libraries. But what about foods so obscure you can’t find growing notes printed on the back of the label? Or what about growing plants in your specific climate? Jerry’s learned for some plants, the best way to learn is to get growing, and figure it out along the way!