Growing Gardens

with Julia Hancock

Time to Tidy Strawberries

The new year is an excellent time to go through the garden and do some restorative work to get everything off to a good start. Strawberries are best grown as annuals in this climate, and it is a good idea to plan ahead to next season's crop by boosting your parent plants now, as follows.

1. Lift off nets or other bird-deterring coverings and store them away for next year.

2. Scrape aside any mulch and lift weed mat, polythene or newspaper you've used around each plant.

3. Remove all foliage from the plants to approximately 7cm above the ground, trimming away all diseased and dead leaves. Burn or bin the refuse rather than putting it in the compost heap.

4. Remove any weeds from the beds.

5. Select the healthiest runners and peg them down to encourage them to root prior to transplanting in autumn. Do not detach them from the parent plant at this stage.

6. Give the strawberry bed a good soak and follow up the next day with an application of liquid seaweed fertiliser or fish and kelp emulsion to encourage good roots to develop on the runners and to minimise the risk of disease.

Over the next few weeks select a new area of the garden for next season's strawberry crop, because it is always better to rotate rather than replant in the same soil to prevent the proliferation of soil-borne disease. For the same reason, avoid planting your runners in soil that has been used for growing potatoes the previous year.

Prepare the new bed by digging in lots of poultry manure and compost, and if your soil is very poor give it an additional dose of granulated complete fertiliser. By April the runners should be established enough to plant in their new, beautifully fertile soil.

Lismore Garden Club News

The next meeting is Thurs, Feb 5, at the Lismore Workers Club at 1pm.

As for gardeners, had far too little of the rainy "good days", but reminder to do your individual best to conserve water.

Only water gardens during the recommended hours - late afternoon is best. Recycle the grey water onto the garden and mulch, mulch, mulch.

In a garden magazine, I was interested to read a question from a reader asking if Glyphosate herbicide was harmful to lizards. The answer was "Glyphosate will harm lizards and that may not be all. Swedish researchers are currently investigating the safety of glyphosate, which theoretically decomposes harmlessly in the environment within one or two days.

In reality it's sufficiently active for 40 days to inhibit germination of seed and feeder root activity. They also believe that glyphosate may cause non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma, a very aggressive cancer." Gardening Australia, p 23 April 2003.

Tip

Alternatives to using glyphosate on weeds are: using a line trimmer or brush cutter, hand pulling weeds, steam or hot water treatment.

Happy gardening
Ron Burns