Gardening Australia episode 9 2021

Gardening Australia episode 9 2021

Gardening Australia episode 9 2021: Costa Georgiadis builds a new garden bed, Sophie Thompson meets a Philodendron fanatic, Tino Carnevale demonstrates different ways to support plants, and guest presenter Luke Mitchell shows how to care for secateurs.


 

 



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 9 2021

 

Plants on Parade

Costa plants out a new verge garden at his place, perfectly enclosed by a home-made woven fence. Costa’s verge garden is a bit on the wild side and is packed with plants, but there’s always room for more, and Costa has plans to create a new spot to provide for pollinators.

He has cleared a section on his street front beside a busy road and facing due west. It is sandy and dry, so he has picked a mix of native perennial shrubs to cope with the conditions. As an experiment he will sow beds of everlasting daisies too.

FAQs – Feijoa | Indigenous plants | Subtropical tomatoes

Millie explains why a feijoa might not be fruiting, Clarence explains endemic plants and Jerry shares his favourite tomato variety for the subtropics.

Supporting Plants

Tino demonstrates the different ways you can stake, support and structure plants so they will fit your space and thrive.Many climbing plants use tendrils leaves and stems to climb but need some form of support to clamber or twine around.

Cultivating Creativity – Gardening Australia episode 9 2021

Millie meets a ceramicist whose creations are strongly influenced by her love of plants and gardening. The half-hectare block was a bare, flat paddock when they first built their mud-brick home in 2010. The first thing she planted was an olive tree and she became quite emotional thinking that she would actually get to see this tree grow to maturity.

Tania says her childhood was quite traumatic with not much money and many moves to different places, “but my mum would always garden – she loved gardening and was always trying to improve things”.

She never knew her father but recently met his family and learnt that he was a green thumb too. The vegie garden is very productive, especially her tomato plants that are twined around a single string buried under its roots and tied to an overhead structure: “You get less fruit off each plant but you can grow more plants and get better airflow around each one, so less diseases,” she says.

There are native plants for cut flowers include Billy Buttons, Poppies and Tea Tree, and she uses Snow gums a lot in her work.

Bloomin’ Herbs

Herbs can bring fragrance and flavour to a garden, but Jane looks at another of their attractions – the colourful flowers they produce, some for many months. Jane is in the Herb Garden at Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens, which looks and smells divine. But today she’s taking a closer look at the lovely flowers that herbs can bring to a garden.

These provide pollinators with food for much of the year.

Kings Park Conservation

Josh discovers a collection of rare and unusual plants that aficionados once travelled for days to see in the wild – and which are now on show in central Perth. Western Australia is home to more than 8,000 known plants and the south-west of the state is recognized as a biodiversity hotspot. More than half of WA’s plants grow nowhere else on earth, and Kings Park, Perth, has a number of display beds to showcase them, especially the many that are becoming rare or threatened in the wild.

Josh meets Senior Curator Grady Brand to explore the collection, specifically the Conservation Garden. Grady says: “This is the heart of what botanic gardens worldwide represent – the care for the rare and the securing of plant diversity for both people, and the planet”.

A lot of people may never have the opportunity to see these plants and the Conservation Garden presents them for visitors to see. It includes about 400 species, all arranged by their origin or type of country.

Lime Detective – Gardening Australia episode 9 2021

Jerry investigates an issue with his lime tree. He has spotted a caterpillar of the Citrus Orchard Butterfly (Papilio aegeus) on a makrut lime tree in his garden. They feed on the leaves of all citrus plants but don’t do any harm. Jerry also grows makrut lime for its fruit, as it makes a fantastic marmalade, but he can’t this year because each of the fruit is brown and rotten inside.

A possible cause of this damage is the native two-spined citrus bug, which feeds on citrus fruit, but if that was the case there would be damage on the rind and rotting inside the skin, not in the core of the fruit, which is where Jerry’s fruit is damaged. Instead, he thinks the problem is nutritional – most like a deficiency in boron.

Plants need boron to build cell walls and for cell division and it’s particularly important when they’re being pollinated and are developing fruit. If there’s not enough boron in the soil at this time, this sort of damage can happen.

Philodendron Phanatic – Gardening Australia episode 9 2021

Sophie meets a mad-keen backyard gardener, whose love of exotic philodendrons has seen him become a global expert on them. Neil started his collection at university when he bought a plant to sit on his desk – it was a philodendron. There are nearly 500 recognised species. Neil says he loves “the diversity of the leaf colour, the texture. There’s so many species, I wasn’t going to run out of plants to collect…one species might have hundreds of forms, how could you ever get bored?”

He creates tropical conditions in a greenhouse to create the right levels of heat and moisture. He aims for 80% or more by using misters. Feeding is crucial – he fertilizes weekly but weakly with a mix of liquid fertilizers. Only use free-draining potting mix with lots of large bark pieces; Neil adds perlite and horticultural charcoal as well. There should be no pooling when you water plants.

When propagating cuttings, Neil pots cuttings into sphagnum moss then puts the whole pot into a ziplock bag to keep it humid and moist. Once established, they can be potted up. Some can be grown outside – especially the thicker leaved, more robust tree species. Those with thinner leaves are more likely to dry out.

No-Spill Fertiliser Lid

Jane has a smart, simple tip for avoiding garden spills by replacing a fertiliser bottle lid with a sauce one!

Mr Fix It – Secateurs

Guest presenter Luke Mitchell shows how to sharpen and restore every gardener’s favourite tool – your secateurs!

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