Permaculture Living

Another customer question from my time working in the nursery.

Question: The top layer of my worm farm is full of food scraps and won’t fit any more in. What do I do now?

Answer: The short answer is that you need to wait until the worms have eaten all the existing food scraps before you can add more.

The longer answer: you can also increase the rate at which the worms eat your scraps. The slower way is to increase the number of worms. They will breed and grow more numerous the longer you have the farm – they might only eat a small amount when it’s brand new, but as the population grows they will eat more and more.

The second way is to blend the scraps in a food processor or blender before you put them in the farm. The worms are tiny and seem to prefer slightly rotted food, so if you blend it into into a vegie smoothie it breaks down faster and they eat it much faster than if you were to throw in entire potato peelings or fruit rinds.

Another customer question from my time working in the nursery.

Question: What tomatoes can you grow in winter? Is fruit fly a problem?

Answer: Winter is a good time to grow larger tomatoes (Beefsteak, Roma, etc) in Brisbane. These would normally be susceptible to fruit fly and hard to grow to full size without being stung, but in winter pests like fruit fly are less numerous. The plants and fruit do grow more slowly but on the upside there are fewer pests around.

In summer, cherry tomatoes are the best choice for vegie gardens in Brisbane, as they’re less susceptible to fruit fly. There’s also a bigger harvest of cherry tomatoes, so if a couple of fruit do get stung, there’s still plenty left to harvest.

I worked in the Edible Landscapes nursery for a few days and answered (or tried to answer) a lot of customer questions. The following question about sooty mould on citrus trees was pretty common.

Question: My mandarin tree has a black mould on the leaves and is not bearing as much as usual. How do I fix this?

Answer: It has sooty mould, a fungus growing on the leaves, which means there is a sap-sucking insect problem like aphids, scale, white fly or mealy bugs. The insects suck the sap from the leaves and exude honeydew, which drips back onto the leaves, and the mould grows on the sweet substance.

Spray it with white oil to kill the sap-suckers and thus get rid of the mould. To make white oil, mix together:

- 1 cup of cooking oil
- 2 cups of water
- 1 tsp of dishwashing liquid
- Dilute the mixture at 3 teaspoons per half a litre of water and spray on the affected leaves.

Make sure to use it in the cool of the day so it doesn’t burn the leaves. The mould should then wash off in the next rain (or hose it if you’re impatient and then reapply).