Gardening Australia episode 24 2020: Josh Byrne gives his tomatoes a head start, Tino Carnevale discovers some living plant fossils, Costa Georgiadis visits a super-productive small garden, and Jane Edmanson explores an amazing succulent garden.
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 24 2020
Attila and Michele’s Wonderland
Jane visits expert succulent growers Attila and Michele Kapitany to see their colourful, and unusual, garden. Nearly 10 years after her first visit, Jane Edmanson is back at the superb succulent garden created by Attila and Michele Kapitany, to see how it’s changed and grown.
This acre of garden is planted as a xeriscape – one tha minimises water use – around a central lake.The whole garden is filled with about 10,000 plants propagated by the Kapitanys – except for one Brachychiton rupestris, which stores water in its swollen trunk. For many years, Attila ran a leading cacti and succulent nursery and he and Michele have published a number of books on these plants.
But Michele admits “when we started this garden, we were actually looking for a change from succulents”. Their initial plantings at the block included azaleas, citrus and camellias but, due to lack of rainfall, the slope of the site and the poor soil, they perished in the first couple of years.
FAQS – Cyclamen | No shoots on bare-rooted trees | Lime trees
Gardening Australia presenters answer commonly asked gardening questions.
Vegie Plants for Chooks
Tino gives his vegie plants a second life and keeps his chooks happy too! When your broccoli plant dies off, you can pull off leaves for your chooks (or the neighbour’s chooks) and put the rest in the compost.
But what Tino likes to do is dig up the whole broccoli plants, roots and all, and replant it in the chook run. Tino has noticed his chickens prefer to eat food that’s up off the ground, so it’s good food and entertainment for them. It also gives the plant time to produce some seed that Tino can use next season, without it taking up lots of space in his vegie garden.
Backyard Bliss
Costa visits a small but perfectly formed Sydney garden that punches above its weight when it comes to growing food for the family. The small garden is typical of the suburbs – it’s awkwardly shaped, with hard and difficult surfaces, overlooked by a block of flats, and shared with some very busy boys and a pup … But as we know, that is no barrier to growing! “I grew up in East Germany, where my family food security came from growing it,” Katja says. “We lived in an apartment but had an allotment to grow food and foraged a lot. Preserved our own meat. It is just something I have always done.”
Tip Top Tomatoes
Josh wants to grow enough tomatoes this year to make passata, so he’s starting early and going big. He has chosen Grosse Lisse tomatoes because they’ve performed well for him in the past and planted up seeds about six weeks ago. They are a dual-purpose variety: tasty enough for the table but with enough texture for sauce.
Although Josh’s soil is already friable and rich after years of development, but tomatoes are hungry plants so he adds pelletised chicken manure for extra nitrogen, compost to improve water retention, potash to aid fruiting and rock minerals for trace elements that can be lacking in sandy soils.
DIY Seed Propagation Tray
Millie repurposes a timber pallet into a seedling tray for propagating plants.
Precious Paleoendemics
Tino explores the world of plant fossils – including the living ones you can grow in your own garden. Tino is at a native nursery near Hobart to discover how Tasmania became a global hotspot for some of the world’s oldest living plants, and to learn how the nursery is playing an important role in their propagation. The nursery specialises in plants endemic to Tasmania (those found nowhere else in the world)
Many plants can trace their ancestors back to plants that were alive when Australia was part of Gondwana, the super-continent that took in modern-day Africa, South America, Antarctica, Australasia and the Indian subcontinent. However there are some truly ancient plants that actually existed on Gondwana, and are still alive today. Because of its relatively stable climate, Tasmania is a hotspot for these plants, called paleoendemics.
Rooftop Resilience
For apartment dwellers battling windy conditions on exposed balconies, the stars of Clarence’s rooftop garden offer hardy colour and style.
A Yam I Am
What is a cocoyam? Jerry shows why they should be in every productive tropical garden.
Hip Hip Hypertufa – DIY Lightweight Cement Pots
Sophie experiments with a new way of making her own pots and gets some great results.
