Spring

Hints and tips for Spring

The beautiful spring weather has arrived and it’s a great time to be out in the garden, so let’s get into it!

Chickens

• Make sure the chickens water bowl is shaded, keeping the water cool. Ensure water is kept fresh and changed regularly.

• Throw your old expired broccoli, beans, cauliflower and brussels sprouts to the chooks, they will love them! Anything they don’t eat will mix with a bit of fresh chook poo to help activate the breakdown process.
• Place orange halves in your veggie garden for effective slater traps. Check on them each morning and brush the slaters you catch into your chook pen. Slaters have to be one of the chooks all time favourite treats! The orange halves are useful until they dry out with lemons and carrots cut in half also making good traps.
• Spring is a great time for lawns, which usually get a few extra mows and a top up feed with fertiliser. However be mindful when giving your chooks fresh lawn cuttings if fertilisers have recently been applied. Give the lawn two mows after any fertiliser application before giving cuttings to the chooks.
• Ensure your chicken coop has plenty of shade, spring can deliver surprise hot days and it is important that the chooks have a place to cool down.

 

Fish Farms

• Spring marks the beginning of the end of the trout season so if you haven’t started already, its time to start harvesting. You want to have 2-3 fish meals a week rather than harvest all in one weekend.
• If your fish tank is out in the open, beware of surprise spring hot days. Keep an eye on the forecast and shade your fish tank for any days over 30 degrees.  
• Grow cucumbers along the edge of your filters and allow the vines to grow out of the filter, with the fruits suspended above the ground. Try growing some Thai basil, whose pretty pink flowers will attract bees to pollinate your fruiting vegetables.
• It’s common to come to the end of the trout season and have all of your fish harvested before the water is warm enough for your next barramundi season. It doesn’t matter if you fish tank has no fish during this period as there are plenty of residual nutrients to keep your plants happy until the barramundi arrive.  The older the system the longer you can go without fish and up to a month is fine.
• Baked with parsley and lemon, fried in butter and garlic or smoked – trout are a superb eating fish!

 

Vegetable Gardens

• Don’t be too kind to newly planted seedlings. They don’t need a lot of water and it is important that they learn to search for water.
• Broad beans are producing profusely right now and are soon coming to the end of their lifecycle. When ready, cut the bush at base, leaving the roots in soil and use branches as mulch, either straight on the soil or cut up and spread over soil surface.
• Make borders around vegetable plants keeping water and nutrients around the plants root zone. Use an old pot with the bottom cut out, slide over young seedlings and pushed half way into the ground.
• Dig a bin with no bottom into the soil, fill up with kitchen greens and when it is ¾ full pull the bin out and cover with soil. Move the bin to a new spot and plant over the top of the compost.
• Don’t throw out any expired plants, chop them up loosely and apply as a mulch to the soil.
• During times of water restrictions you need to get more creative with the ways you water. Use pots around plants, use soft drink bottles as drippers or dig in lengths of PVC pipe to deliver water direct to the root zone.
• Fertilise a little often. Add small amounts every week rather than one big scattering.
• You can dig manure into the soil or spread it on top for the worms to bring down into the soil. However manure exposed to air will lose nitrogen so cover with a little soil or mulch.
• Shade is as important as anything in keeping healthy productive plants in summer. Structure your plot planting heat sensitive plants such as celery, silverbeet and lettuces in the areas with the most shade. As a long term project, plant a grapevine in your vegetable garden. The leaves provide plenty of shade over summer and when they drop in autumn, provide plenty of sun for the sun lovers in winter. Shade sails are a great way to shade your veggie patch.
• Great time of year to brew some weed tea, the warmth of the daytime really gets the microbes active! Crops love a good dose every 2-3 weeks. Apply to the soil only and give some distance between the tea and the base of the stem of your plants.
• Seedlings need nutrients to give them the best possible start. However seedlings don’t need a lot of nutrients, so keep the bulk of your composts and manures on standby until the plant really needs its nutrients – when in its growing and fruiting phases.
•  Don’t over water your plants you don’t want important nutrients to leech away.
•  If you notice an area of you veggie garden that always seems to have a lot of weeds, the weeds are telling you that the conditions here are good. Weed the area and plant veggies in this spot. Throw the weeds to the chooks, under a fruit tree or in the compost.
•  Great time to apply fresh mulch - Just make sure water can penetrate through to the soil underneath.
• For taller vegetables such as tomatoes, put your stakes in when they are seedlings. This way you avoid damaging the roots when the plants have established an extensive root system.
• Nasturtiums are thriving this time of year and you can eat the leaves and flowers or wait until the flower turns into a berry to make a nasturtium caper! Nasturtiums distract a lot of the pests around at this time of year sparing your new season seedlings. When ready, chop up your nasturtiums to return nutrients back into the soil and create mulch.
• With the weather warming up, the later planted vegetables tend to catch up with the earlier planted ones. Tomatoes planted 6 weeks apart in spring may only fruit 2 weeks apart in summer.

Spring Vegetetables and Herbs to plant now

Asparagus spears (won’t harvest for a couple of years but plant now)

Basil

Beans (climbing/runner)

Beetroot

Bok Choy

Capsicum

Celery

Chillies

Chives

Coriander

Cucumber

Egg Plant

Kale

Leeks

Oregano

Parsley

Pumpkin

Rhubarb

Rocket

Rock Melon

Silverbeet

Spring Onion

Sunflowers!

Tomato

Watermelon

Zucchini

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