Skip to main content

Garden

Our property is in Kumbia in the South Burnett region of Queensland Australia.  The climate is sub-tropical, we get hot summers, which can be very dry or very wet.  We have cold winters and can have frost at times.  As we are relatively close to the equator, day length does not change much - in Summer it gets light around 5am and dark at 630pm, in Winter its more like 6am and 530pm respectively.

I'm still learning what grows well here and a lot of things have been a bit backwards, for example, Winter is the season for strawberries!  Here's a bit of info about about climate:

Is it winter yet? Cold weather preps
Surviving the QLD Heat Wave(s)
Growing food in the sub-tropics - the vege garden
Winter vegetable gardening in the sub-tropics
Frost preparations
Summer harvest, Winter planting





This is what I've learnt so far:
  • Spring - warm days and cool nights, minimal pests, so a good time to get plants established
    • Harvest silverbeet, mustard greens, spring onions and broccoli, herbs start regrowing
    • Start planting seeds and seedlings for summer!
  • Summer - hot and humid, slugs and powdery mildew are a problem, but if plants get established in Spring and are nice and strong they can survive and produce well
    • Tomatoes, zucchinis, squash, silverbeet, corn, eggplant, beans, capsicum
  • Autumn - still warm, but nights cooling off again, time to prepare for winter frosts and bring in the last of the summer harvest, time to plant winter crops including:
    • peas, brasicas and root crops
  • Winter - expect heavy frosts, nothing tender will survive to be eaten, put effort into silverbeet, brasicas and root crops, watch out for bandicoots!



I do try to follow organic principles where possible and my two best allies for adding fertility are mulch and compost/weed teas.  More on compost here.  And I have a worm farm.

Some other garden posts that you may find useful:

Hydroponics basics


Some fabulous gardening books that I refer to frequently (Thank you for supporting my blog by using my Amazon affiliate links)


     




Book reviews:

A Postage Stamp Garden - book review
The history of heirloom vegetables
A garden book and a cook book that I think you'll ...



Popular posts from this blog

The new Eight Acres website is live!

Very soon this blogspot address will automatically redirect to the new Eight Acres site, but in the meantime, you can check it out here .  You will find all my soaps, ebooks and beeswax/honey products there, as well as the blog (needs a tidy up, but its all there!).  I will be gradually updating all my social media links and updating and sharing blog posts over the next few months.  I'm very excited to share this new website with you!
4 comments
Read more

Chicken tractor guest post

Sign up for my weekly email updates here , you will find out more about chickens, soap and our farmlife, straight to your inbox, never miss a post!  New soap website and shop opening soon.... Tanya from Lovely Greens invited me to write a guest post on chicken tractors for her blog.  I can't believe how many page views I get for chicken tractors, they seem to be a real area of interest and I hope that the information on my blog has helped people.  I find that when I use something everyday, I forget the details that other people may not be aware of, so in this post for Tanya, I tried to just write everything I could think of that I haven't covered in previous posts.  I tried to explain everything we do and why, so that people in other locations and situations can figure out how best to use chicken tractors with their own chickens. The dogs like to hang out behind the chicken tractors and eat chicken poo.  Dogs are gross! If you want to read more about chicken tractor
15 comments
Read more

How to make soap with beer (and tallow)

I may  have mentioned this before.... soap making is addictive!  Once you start, you just want to keep making more soap.  And not the same soap, you want to try all sorts of different soaps.  I made the mistake of joining a facebook group called Saponification Nation  and now my facebook newsfeed is full of glorious soaps, in all colours and shapes, which makes it even harder to resist the urge to experiment.  One soap that kept popping up a few weeks ago was soap made with beer. I generally prefer not to use ingredients just for the sake of it, I like to know that they are adding something to the properties of the finished soap.   As you know, I don't like to use artificial ingredients either (colours or fragrances).   When I read about beer in soap I found out that beer adds sugar to the mixture, which increases lather.  I use tallow in my soap, which has limited lather, so anything that adds lather could improve the soap.  It also contributes a tan or brown colour to
6 comments
Read more