Compost harvest time

One of the really handy things about some blog postings is that they are a diary entry that I can refer back to months or years from now. So let it be noted that on this beautiful, warm and sunny Saturday, April 9, 2011, I 'harvested' my latest batch of compost. Whoopee! Well, I don't think it's going to make the 6 o'clock news, but if I say so myself it might just be my finest batch yet, and I have scientific evidence to back up this claim. I had better start explaining, though...

This is only some of the latest batch, but as this is the nicest photo in this set (and let me tell you, compost is not photogenic) I will start with this one. This is compost as I like it: dark, crumbly, gently earthy in smell without any really noticeable smell, and certainly without any kind of unpleasant 'pong'. And while I'm lingering on this shot, aren't trugs wonderful things? I have several, because my garden is too small for wheelbarrows. Anyway, back to the compost, please projectionist!

Told you it's not photogenic. But here's the compost being extracted from my large 'tumbler' bin which does all the composting work around here.

And this is where the latest batch of compost goes: into my original old 'Dalek' bin, which is a pretty hopeless compost bin, but a perfectly good place to store lots of ready-to-use compost. The tumbler bin is a much better bin because it's easy to spin it around to aerate the compost. Air is one of the most important ingredients in compost and Dalek bins are fairly hopeless because it's not easy to use a garden fork to get in there and 'stir' the contents, to introduce air into the heap.

At the end of the half-hour operation to transfer all my made compost into the Dalek bin, the tumbler is ready to do it all again. I always leave a couple of shovels-full of made compost in the tumbler, to help get the breaking down process going again on the new stuff. And here's the first lot of ingredients ready to go in: vegie scraps from the kitchen (these are fresh 'wet' ingredients) and to balance them out some 'dry ingredients', fallen leaves from around the garden. When there aren't fallen leaves available I use a couple of handfuls of straw garden mulch from the mulch bag, or if I'm really desperate, shredded newspaper (but the newspaper always seems to take ages to break down, so it isn't my favourite). However the main thing is always to balance out the 'wet' with the 'dry'. Maintaining this wet-dry balance and aerating the heap are the two main basics of composting to pay attention to.

However there is another magic ingredient which has turned this compost batch (I only make one a year, on average, by the way) and that is lime. And here's the 'proof' I was talking about earlier.

Go on, call me 'a bit keen' but I pH test my compost! It's a bit hard to see the colour of the compost sample in the photo, but in natural light it's speckled with darkish green dots, and you match the colour of the sample to the chart provided to establish the pH reading. Here, the acidity of my compost is somewhere between 6.5 (very mildly acid) and 7 (neutral).

This pH testing idea occurred to me a few years ago. I thought that with so many kitchen scraps in our compost, there was a chance it might be too acid. And pH tests confirmed the hunch. It's just silly to dig in stacks of overly acidic compost when what you're really trying to do is improve your soil, not ruin it. And since then I have been adjusting the acidity of my compost as I go, by adding in some dolomite lime from time to time.

You can use horticultural lime to raise the pH reading if you like, but I prefer this stuff, dolomite lime, which is essentially just rock crushed down to almost a powder. It is slower and gentler in its action than lime, but it gets the pH adjusting job done. As the packet says, it's also a good source of magnesium and calcium.

I don't add in the dolomite lime every time I add some vegies and dry stuff to the compost bin, but I do probably end up doing it once a month, roughly, just whenever I remember. A good handful each time.

What do I use compost for? I dig it into vegie beds as part of soil preparation. I mix some in with potting mix to beef up the mix with some home-made goodness. When planting seedlings I like to dig a hole, fill it with compost, then plant the seedling into that. Vegie seedlings always seem to belt along when planted into compost. You can use compost as a mulch, too. It's great stuff, just not photogenic!

The Black Lagoon

It's great how words get hijacked and reinvented down through the years. I was thinking about the case of the word 'trug' while I was enjoying a late afternoon beer, watching the bubbles come up from the pot of chives I was drowning in a dark, slightly smelly, black liquid that half-filled my indispensible trug. (I'll get onto the story of the chive-drowning in the Black Lagoon in a moment.)

The word trug seems to me have been hijacked here in Australia by the good folk who make the versatile plastic trugs pictured below. A lot of gardeners overseas would think of a trug as a handy small wooden basket, but here in Australia our trugs are luridly colourful, bendy plastic tubs with handles on the top. I couldn't do without mine, and in fact I have four of them, and I'm going to sing their praises for a moment.

Three of my trugs are the same size as the orange one on the left, and I found this smaller, snazzy purple one at Officeworks (a chain of supermarket-style stores for small business supplies – fabulously good fun to shop in with a trolley and a credit card). As you can see it's the purple one where I'm drowning my pot of chives.

Here's the Black Lagoon. Now I am being kind, not cruel (well, except to ants, I guess). All my potted herbs are not looking all that terrific at the moment, and I'm too lazy and busy to repot them as I have done in previous years. (Standards are slipping around here.) And so I am trying to rewet the soil inside the pots and hopefully drown some ants while I am at it.

The evil black solution is a product called Seasol Super Soil Wetter, so it's a combo of the popular seaweed product Seasol (a soil conditioner) and a soil wetting agent. I mix up two 9-litre watering cans worth of the stuff to fill the trug, then add the pot. It takes about a minute or two for it to sink to the bottom, then the bubbles keep on coming up from the pot for another 20 minutes. After another half an hour I remove the pot, put it back in its spot (on pot feet so all the liquid drains off), then water it with clean water to get the soil wetter muck off the foliage. Then I add the next pot to the Black Lagoon. Hopefully it should work well. It has worked a treat with my larger potted cumquat, which I blogged about here earlier this year.

As well as drowning the chives I also gave the pot of tarragon the same treatment, and immediately after its soaking both pots look dreadful. Well, I'd look dreadful if was soaked in a Black Lagoon for half an hour, so fair's fair.

This is how the same pot of tarragon looked in March this year, so it's a shadow of its former self at the moment. If the soaking doesn't work, I guess I'll repot it in autumn, like I probably should anyway.

It was while I was watching the tarragon and chive pots bubbling away in the Black Lagoon that I started thinking about how fabulously useful tugs are.

My garden is far too small for wheelbarrows of any kind, and so my trugs are my wheel-less barrows. Here they are doing great service during my annual 'harvest of the compost tumbler bin'. One tumbler bin easily fills these three trugs, and the vegies and all other plants just love the compost when I spread it around.

When I need to make up a specialist blend for a potting mix (for example, bromeliad mix, which is 50:50 orchid potting mix and ordinary potting mix) or as pictured here, my 50:50 blend of straw and compost for hilling around potatoes, the trug is where the action is. I use trugs for repotting, carrying tools, dropping weeds into, mixing up any liquid concoctions in bulk – you name the job and the trug is always close at hand. I simply couldn't do without my little bendy, colourful, plastic trug.

And finally, for a complete change of topic, before I sign off on today's post. I'd like to direct all of you over to Lanie's blog at Edible Urban Garden for a moment, as she is being featured not only in the latest issue of a stylish magazine, but her posting also includes a great linky to a little video all about her wonderful kitchen garden right here in the inner-west of Sydney, where I live too. It's a cute video and a lovely, lovely garden. Well done, Lanie!

Powdery mildew controls

(Every now and then a garden blogger has to narrow down his or her focus and talk to the locals, and so this posting is probably aimed at gardeners on the east coast of Australia more than anywhere else right now, but I guess it applies to anywhere when the rain doesn't stop, the humidity rises and the vegie patch takes on a grey dusting of powdery mildew disease....)

Powdery mildew. It attacks all sorts of plants. I was even reading about it attacking mighty oak trees earlier today. It's a fungal disease that's like having zillions of tiny white mushrooms infesting the leaves on your plants. It looks like the foliage has been dusted with talcum powder. (But unlike Ogden Nash's lovely little rhyme that: "A little bit of talcum is always walcum", a little bit of powdery mildew is never really walcum in the garden.)

Of all the plants it attacks, powdery mildew loves the vegie patch most: zucchinis, cucumbers, pumpkins, squash and melons are its classic victims, but it attacks many others, too. Well, I think I have found an organic product that works very well to control powdery mildew, isn't too much of a hassle to use, and is worth mentioning here. And no, this isn't a paid ad, as you (and its makers) will soon discover.

Here's my zucchini plant from last summer, its leaves dusted with powdery mildew. It's the white stuff. It doesn't actually kill your crop. You still get zucchinis coming through in droves, but upstairs the plant looks dreadful. And I like pretty plants, so this bothers me. When powdery mildew gets really bad, it can harm plants' health and shorten their season.

Sydney has had a ridiculous amount of rain recently, and this cucumber plant has no reason to look this healthy, and that is due to the product which I'll tell you about a bit later on.

No, this isn't it, but it is one organic solution that is sort-of worth a try. It's milk, diluted 1:10 with water, and used as a spray. If you do a Google search you'll find a fair bit of literature saying it works. I have tried it for two years and it just barely works. You need to re-apply it constantly, especially after every shower of rain. So it's a pain to use, as it's so much work. And if powdery mildew sets in for any reason (ie, you have a weekend away), it cannot stem the tide. As far as I am concerned, it's not all that effective, but it's not hopeless, either.

This is what's working for me this time round. The mob who makes Eco Fungicide also makes Eco Rose, Eco Oil and a range of other certified-organic 'Eco' products. To be unfair, it's a glorified bi-carb soda mixture, but I have tried the home-made bi-carb soda recipes and this one works better than them. There must be something else in it, but I'm not sure what it is (EDIT! See Alexa's comment below – it's potassium bicarbonate, not the common kitchen stuff sodium bicarbonate – thank you Alexa). It's not cheap, but one 500ml jar should last me several years, at the tiny rate at which I use it in my small garden. This 500g container cost $19.85 at Bunnings (our mega hardware chain, for overseas readers).

For each spray I use here (and there aren't many) I allocate a cheap pump sprayer, and never mix anything else in it. You can't store a mixture of Eco Fungicide for any time, so you just mix up a batch and use it all, each time. For this one-litre bottle of water, I add one level teaspoon of Eco Fungicide powder, plus 2mL of horticultural oil.

If the people who make Eco Fungicide were thinking this is a great free plug for them, they'll be horrified to see the opposition's product here! Eeeek! The Eco Fungicide people make Eco Oil, which is a vegetable based, organic horticultural oil. The opposition product, PestOil, is petroleum-based, but it's a very very mild oil that does an almost identical job to Eco Oil, and it's what I use, and what I have a 500ml bottle of already. And I only need a tiny bit, so it'll do me, as it always has done. Fab product, PestOil.

As for only needing a tiny bit, this is where my policy of "never throw out a measure of any sort" came into its own. Isn't hoarding great when it pays off? Yippeee! Anyway, this is a measure from an old packet of trace elements, and this little 1mL cup-ette is perfect for adding a tiny bit of oil to the one-litre bottle of Eco Fungicide mix. Just shake up the water, Eco Fungicide and the oil, then spray all over the foliage. So far the results have been great. The product label says to spray about once a week, which is much more user-friendly than other 'organic' sprays which have to be re-applied constantly.

I thought I would finish off with a few words in favour of powdery mildew, such as this stuff on my zucchini leaves.

The more powdery mildew you have the more ladybirds the plants attract. My zucchini foliage last year was covered in ladybirds, so every cloud has a silver lining, as they say.

Here's one more option for you to try, if a $19.85 jar of stuff sounds a bit too expensive for you. An expert gardener to whom I was speaking on Saturday night (at an excellent party hosted by Zora and Sean - well done, you two) told me that she puts the well-known seaweed product Seasol into her sprayer and uses that to control powdery mildew in her vegie garden. So if you have a bottle of that on hand already, give that a try and let me know if that works for you. You might save some other gardeners some money, some heartache and most important of all, some crops.

If you want to read a bit more about Eco Fungicide, here's a link to their website.

Germ-free repotting

I was reading in a history book recently about the dreadful standards of hygiene in hospitals back in the 18th and 19th centuries, and it occurred to me that sometimes the standards of hygiene in the plant hospital out in my own backyard were little better. So, while I knew that I should sterilise secateurs when moving from one plant to the other during a pruning frenzy, I wasn't all that meticulous about it. Just think about it. A doctor comes in and says he's going to operate on you, using the same, uncleaned, instruments he used to operate on the previous patient. No way! The same goes for the hospital beds – you wouldn't want to get into the same, unmade hospital bed previously occupied by someone else. Yuk!

So, repotting my recent purchases was the perfect opportunity to put my new-found zeal for cleanliness into action, so here's how the germ-free repotting at Garden Amateur's reformed 21st-century plant hospital went.

Told you the standards of hygiene have improved. Bucket of warm water with a couple of glugs of disinfectant Pine-O-Cleen added. Scourer pad awaiting duty.

Six previously used pots to clean. The first step is to wash out all the old soil and scrub it down. (This is my birdbath cleaning brush, worn down into a birdbath shape over many years.) Once each pot was mostly clean, it then got the scourer-and-disinfectant treatment to get it up to hospital standards.

And here they are now, clean, germ-free and ready to take on their new occupants, hopefully for several years at least. All this cleaning is important. Just like people, plants get sick, suffer diseases, viruses and other ailments. The pathogens can lurk in the leftover potting mix and will potentially attack any new plants added to the pot. So, a bit of cleanliness lowers the overall mortality rate, just as it did once reforms to hospitals were made.

I love my plastic trugs, they get used for so many jobs in the garden. I have three in my shed, and two of them were indispensible this afternoon. This green trug was my repotting area for the orchid, catching all the old orchid potting mix, so I could work without making a major mess just outside the back door.

Unpotting plants is one of the most revealing things you can do. This is not the first time I've unpotted an orchid and found styrofoam chunks instead of orchid mix. I just don't like the look or the idea of styrofoam, even if I suspect it works quite well to improve soil drainage.

This is the dendrobium orchid after repotting. I use a specialised orchid potting mix for all my orchids. It looks and feels like composted chunks of bark, and it's very coarse indeed. In nature, orchids don't grow in soil, so ordinary potting mix isn't right for them. Orchid 'roots' cling onto branches or trees or rocks in nature, and so orchid potting mix is just a coarse, very free-draining medium for the roots to cling onto.

For the bromeliads, I mix up ordinary potting mix with orchid potting mix in a 50:50 ratio. Again, I use a trug to make this job easy, just adding three scoops of orchid mix to three scoops of potting mix, and mixing it all up well. Like orchids, bromeliads don't grow in soil in nature – they also cling onto tree branches and rocks, and the main thing they need is very free drainage in their growing medium.

Succulents do grow in soil in nature, but usually it's sandy, crappy quality soil, and so for them I use a specialised cacti and succulent mix. However, you could use a home-made 50:50 blend of ordinary potting mix and clean, coarse sand. The specialised potting mix is very coarse and sandy, providing the excellent drainage that succulents like. I only use the specialised stuff due to a certain laziness, I guess. I really should mix up my own stuff and buy less 'product'.

It only took about an hour from beginning (scrubbing) to end (taking this photo), but I am always very pleased to see plants in nice terracotta or glazed terracotta pots. I'm not sure whether it is OK to repot native orchids when in bloom, but I repotted the ones I bought in bloom last year, and that didn't affect them then and they are blooming nicely now, so I just figured they must be so tough even I cannot kill them.

Instead of just doing a blog about repotting, I thought I'd introduce the 'hospital cleanliness' idea as well, because reading that book about the appalling hospital standards a couple of hundred years ago did make me think about my standards. That's because the only things I am ever going to 'operate' on are plants, and as they are living things just like me, subject to diseases, they really do deserve at least a basic level of good hygiene, and in return more of them might thrive here in my garden.

The three-year itch

You've all heard of the seven-year itch? Somehow Pammy and I have racked up 20 years of happy marriage with my rapidly receding hairline as the only visible sign of irreversible damage, but as for my relationship with my potted citrus tree, we've got a bad case of the three-year itch. Not happy, it's not, and it reckons it's all my fault. Everything had been going swimmingly between us, until about four weeks ago. And then the symptoms began. Falling leaves. Curled-up leaves. Falling fruit. No smiles, no warm greetings in the morning. There was trouble between us.

Here's the miserable grouch yesterday morning. I had tried lightly feeding it, as well as watering it in my usual way, until water flowed freely out the drain holes at the bottom. And that only seemed to make things worse. I inspected Grouchy for pests and found nothing.

The change from happy to sad was rather sudden, too. Look at those inwardly curled leaves, and their sullen, droopy demeanour. I suspected the problem had to be out of sight, in the potting mix. My prime suspect was the dreaded curl grub, which I have blogged about before, here. So, instead of just watering and hoping things might come good, I decided that the only solution for our relationship was a visit to the therapist. Step one, remove plant from the pot.

The big surprise was... no curl grubs, but the problem was embarrassingly obvious, too, and it was all my fault. The potting mix was bone dry and ants were busy turning the plant's root-ball into a bustling, ant-filled metropolis. No wonder Grouchy wasn't happy! Would you like ants in your pants all day long?

Here's the plant and its root ball. The plant was a tight mass of roots competing for the inadequate water available. I couldn't believe this was the problem. I'm very conscientious about watering all my potted plants, and feeding them too. And this is when it dawned on me that the poor plant had simply outgrown its pot, and needed more room in which to grow. So, the solution was obvious. Buy a bigger pot, and repot it, Jamie. However, a bit of rehab prior to repotting was in order.

Step one, re-wet the root ball. This looks like a radical thing to do, but it's essential. I put the plant into a plastic trug and filled the trug slowly with water. It kept on bubbling away for a few minutes as water soaked back into the parched soil. I left it there to soak for five minutes.

EDIT: I've since learned that soaking it for one whole hour is a much better idea, and soaking it in a solution of water and wetting agent mixed according to packet directions also improves your chances of successfully re-wetting the ultra-dry potting mix.

How do you like my sophisticated anti-lean technology? The plant kept on flopping over in the loose fit of the trug, so I kept it upright with my nifty baked clay stabiliser units.

Step three, buy a new pot. Now, this isn't quite what I had in mind, but in a quick expedition-cum-mercy-dash, this was the best I could find. It's terracotta, 10cm wider at the top and 10cm taller than the existing pot, plenty of room to grow into, and very importantly, it's straight-sided, so repotting will be easy enough in a few years' time.

If you think soaking the whole root ball in water is radical treatment, you'll hate this next step. I used a little sharp knife to cut a few vertical slits in the root ball, to encourage new roots to grow out into the new potting mix. Then I just potted it up, as per normal.

As this terracotta pot has just one, very large, drain hole, I placed a square of mesh in the bottom to prevent potting mix flushing out too easily during watering.

Here it is in situ. The next step is to place the existing root ball into the pot, measure how many inches it sits down from the top of the rim (in this case it was about five inches) then place a bit less than that amount of new, fresh potting mix in the bottom (in this case about four inches of potting mix). That worked nicely, then I filled in the sides around the root ball with new potting mix, making sure that there were no air pockets left over.

A light watering-in usually exposes any air pockets in the new potting mix, and so I then top up those spots with more mix. The important thing is to not cover the top of the existing root ball with new potting mix at all. There is a system of fine feeder roots very close to the soil surface, and covering these over with new potting mix would be harmful to the plant's health. Two more things remain to be done, though.

One is to use a seaweed extract product to encourage the roots to grow. I used Seasol. One 9-litre can of this mixed in water now, and probably another one next weekend, too, and another one a month later should get things growing well again.

Finally, some slow-release fertiliser, to trickle down some goodies every time I water the pot over the next few months. This one is formulated for citrus, and it's a good way to provide the steady stream of food these greedy plants need.

Hopefully, this repotting will do the trick and save the relationship. But it did get me to thinking about not only the three-year itch with pots, but also where I went wrong, as it really was all my fault, and the citrus tree had every right to be grouchy.

As for the three-year itch, for fussy citrus, about three years is as long as they'll be happy in a pot before some kind of trouble sets in. Yes, I do have some other potted plants which are still healthy and happy and haven't been repotted in many years. One good example is my cast iron plant, the aspidistra on my front porch, which has been in the same pot for at least nine years and is still doing fine. But it's a low-performance tough guy foliage plant. However, high performance fruiting plants like citrus need everything to be hunky dory pretty much all the time. When it strikes they get the three-year itch big time, baby!

I've probably made things worse by spoiling my potted citrus with the best of everything: food, water, and sunshine. This good care has seen it grow rapidly, and as a result it has outgrown its pot rapidly. I realise that in two to three years from now, this same citrus plant will need repotting again, when it gets that three-year itch once more.

I got myself into this high-maintenance trap of a relationship and so I can't complain (well, not much). Now I know the ground rules, I'll be on the lookout for more trouble in about, say, three years from now.

Wilting in the humidity, beating root rot

In many senses February is the worst month for garden plants here in Sydney. I've had more plants die on me in February than any other month, and it's always that killer combination of heat, humidity and a lot of rain that sees some plants saying: "This is nothing like my natural homeland's dry summers, buddy, I'm out of here!".

I can't count how many lavender plants have failed to see out a Sydney summer over the years, but some Australian natives struggle at this time of year, too, because they come from places with hot but dry summers and Sydney doesn't really suit them at all.

Yesterday I was surprised to see our tough old Correa alba wilting with symptoms that had all the suspicious signs of root rot. And if you're on Australia's East Coast in particular and reading this blog, here's a big tip. Spray your wilters and those plants showing signs of fungus disease right now. Not tomorrow. Right now. Here's what I did, and I hope it works as well as it did last time.

First, let me set the scene. Correa alba is one of the mainstays of our front garden. Pam chose it, so it's one of 'her' plants. It's the greyish-green dome-shaped thing behind the blue-green Cootamundra groundcover wattle. Never had a day's illness in its life, until today. It flowers unspectacularly in autumn with little white star flowers, and so it's main job is foliage colour contrast, and it does that very well.

We've been having record rainfall lately, and lots of heat and humidity too. Classic fungal disease weather, and not all fungal diseases are visible. A lot of it goes on underground, around the roots. The disease is generically known as root rot, and a classic symptom is wilting foliage. When native plants die, they do it in days, not weeks, so you have to act fast. The first signs of wilting appeared on Sunday, and so yesterday I sprayed it. I'll spray it again in a few weeks' time.

Now here's the good news. The spray I used, called Yates Anti-Rot, is a remarkably safe spray to use. It doesn't have a withholding period when used on fruit trees, and so you can even spray it on citrus and other fruiting trees. The substance it's based on is phosphorous acid, also called Phosacid, and it's a relatively new-generation fungicide that is replacing many of the nasty, toxic older-style fungicides that I would never dare or want to use.

I'm hoping the Anti-Rot will work as well for my Correa as it did for my extremely sick grevillea last year. Check out this previous posting from last year, which shows the dramatic turnaround in the grevillea's fortunes, following the spray treatment. But I certainly hope the correa doesn't get as sick looking as my grevillea did last year!

Finally, I also played it safe and sprayed both my lovely backyard grevilleas as a preventative treatment. The product, Anti-Rot, is readily available at most Australian garden centres, but just in case you're not sure what to look for, here's a link to the product listing at the Yates website. I use the concentrate, which comes with a little measuring cup. I mix 5ml of concentrate in a 1-litre spray bottle of water. I used 1 litre of spray per plant, so the concentrate is easily the most economical option.

And no, this ain't a commercial! I just like the way the product saved my grevillea last year, and hope that some of my blog readers might find it a life-saver in this horrible, humid weather, too.

Organic fruit fly controls

There's one thing getting in the way of Australia's great tomato-growing climate and us enjoying bumper crops of tomatoes – and that's the fruit fly. This tiny insect likes to lay its eggs in all sorts of fruits, including tomatoes. When the eggs hatch into grubs inside the fruit, it is quickly ruined. It's so disappointing to cut open a tomato and find someone else, a lousy little larva, already enjoying it. Fink.

The closer you get to the tropics the worse the problems with this pest become, but temperate Sydney is plenty warm enough for this insect to be a serious pest here too. As most of us backyard food gardeners are doing everything organically, the big problem is controlling insect pests organically. It's not easy.

It certainly can be done, but it needs persistence to succeed. Fortunately I am just the sort of persistent nutter that organic gardening needs as a recruit, and so I thought I'd do a blog about the two different organic pest control methods I am using this summer to control fruit fly. One is hi-tech and uses modern, organic, low-toxic products which are the results of excellent science. The other is low-tech and comes from my kitchen cupboard. Both work.

First, the hi-tech gear. Both Nature's Way Fruit Fly Control and Eco-Naturalure are based on Spinosad, which is derived from naturally occurring soil bacteria. This ingredient is now widely used to control various insect pests in gardening and commercial agriculture. When you open the bottles, both products are a thick black gloop which you mix up in a small spray bottle with water, and spray near (but not on) the crops you want to protect.

You should not spray the product on the fruit itself, as it is designed to attract the insects. Once they ingest the liquid, it then kills them. Pictured here, it's sprayed on an outlying tomato plant leaf (I spray it in several spots each time, and not in the same spot repeatedly, as doing that can lead to other problems such as sooty mildew).

Each product sounds great in theory and works OK in practice, but they do wash off in rain, so you need to re-apply them after rain. And you need to reapply them after several days anyway. You absolutely need to fully read the label before using either product. They are safe to use and won't harm you or your plants, so that isn't why you need to read the label. You just need to mix it up correctly, then re-apply it fairly often in the right places and at the right time. Use it incorrectly and it might not work, and as they aren't cheap that's just a major waste of money.

However, as a back-up system to the fancy products I have also set up a Vegemite trap for fruit flies. This worked well last year, but be warned, it catches lots of ordinary flies, not just fruit flies. It's gruesomely effective! So here we go...

If you don't know what Vegemite is you obviously aren't Australian. Ask an Aussie about it the next time you meet one. It's a breakfast spread for toast or bread. However, it is an 'acquired taste' that should be spread very thinly, especially if you're a Vegemite newbie. I love it, as many Aussies do. For a fruit fly trap you need 1 heaped teaspoon Vegemite, dissolved in 500ml warm water.

The warm water just makes it easier to dissolve the Vegemite. Give it several good stirs, as it does take a while for all of it to dissolve.

Next, pour the liquid into your trap. To make your trap you'll need a couple of clear plastic soft drink bottles and a bit of wire to hang it up somewhere.

This is a fairly deluxe Vegemite fruit fly trap, actually. We cut the top few inches off one plastic drink bottle to make our 'entrance' funnel, then cut a hole in side of another bottle and stuffed the funnel in. A simpler design is to just make several holes around the middle of the bottle to allow the flies to enter the bottle and find out what is that alluring smell in there!

As you can see, this large entrance funnel just makes it a little easier for the flies to land and wander in. Or at least that's the theory.

In the top of the bottle, just under the screw cap, we punched a hole in either side and threaded some wire through to make a handle to hang the trap somewhere. Last year we hung it near some tall staking tomatoes, and God it looked ugly!

So this year I have discreetly placed the aesthetically-challenged killing machine very close to my Alaska tomato plants and hopefully it will prove as deadly and attractive as it was last year. I've watched these fruit flies in action, and they are great wanderers and seekers. I am sure they will find my trap, check in but never check out.

Finally, the reason for all this dastardly insect warfare – my babies. The Alaskas ripen daily, so too the Beaver Lodge Slicers across the way. The taste test is only days away, and I don't want to cut open my first tomatoes and find grubs inside. Now that would be a horror movie!