Annuals

The seedling section of your garden centre is where you go to dream. To dream of how wonderful you could make your garden. We can all appreciate the enormous amount of work which goes into the floral displays which are often highlighting public parks and gardens. Areas such as these make a positive impact upon you as you’re driving or walking around them. They can be so inspiring. Colours might be blended to complement each other, other patches may be a beautiful burst of every colour imaginable and you may even have a mix of colours which you wouldn’t have ever considered; but somehow, they work.

Continue reading

Winter Organics

Spring and autumn have been the traditional times when gardeners feed their gardens. At Neutrog, we believe that it’s because we can see a reaction in the garden – plants are actively growing, flowering and fruiting. As they say, ‘spring is in the air’. We recognise that they need nutrition to bring out the best that our plants have to offer.
If that is an accurate assessment, then the opposite is true for winter and to a lesser extent summer, as many gardeners don’t apply fertilisers during these periods. We tend to think of these times more in the way of maintenance, but in actual fact, applying nutrition to your soil and garden is as important – if not more so – during winter and summer.

Continue reading

Old garden restoration in the Adelaide Hills

Brenton Roberts and his wife Libby have restored an old garden in the Adelaide Hills. Watching over the property is a beautiful old stone home which is also under restoration.

Brenton grew up in the area, and as many people do, moved away with work to further his career. This took him to Ballarat and Melbourne for 8 years, but the goal was always to return home.  Brenton tells us, “We knew what we were looking for; a few acres and a home which matched our style.  We found our dream property, which although affordable, was run down and quite overgrown. We knew this would mean a tonne of work – especially to make more bushfire safe. Whilst I’d been living in Melbourne, I studied at Burnley Horticultural College and undertook a Graduate Certificate in Garden & Landscape Design, and our new property was the perfect opportunity to allow me full reign with my ideas, whilst incorporating our family’s needs and wants”.

Continue reading

Geoscience, Microbes & Compost

This week I want to talk about microbes and waste disposal – or more accurately composting. Last year it was announced that geoscience researchers at Penn State University in the US are finally figuring out what organic farmers have always known: digestive waste can help produce food. Although farmers here on earth can let microbes in the soil turn waste into fertiliser which can then be used to grow food crops, the Penn State researchers are trying to find a way in which edible microbes could be grown in a minimal space using human waste as a food source, so that the spacecraft wouldn’t need to take as much food into space. Obviously, I am not trying to convince you to try this at home, however it’s just another amazing example of what microbes can do. What I found so interesting was the way in which the researchers were able to optimise…

Continue reading