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Surviving the heat wave

I don’t get frost in my sub-tropical garden, so winter is a good growing season here. It is the frizzle days of summer that are the challenge, when a whole garden can be wiped out in one brutal day. But just like gardeners in frost-prone climates, you develop a range of strategies to work the odds.

Goodbye Brassicas

There are many, many organic remedies for cabbage moth caterpillars (and the web moth caterpillars that will be next to arrive). There are nets and traps and fake moths and eggshells and trichogramma wasps and dipel. But the only one I reckon is worth the time and effort for results is timing.

In Season: Berries

Strawberries should be a luxury food. A couple of months of indulgence a year, sweetened by a whole year of waiting. There’s this thing with seasonal luxury foods, that they start out expensive and the price encourages every kind of scammy hereticism, pushing them to grow until you get something that is cheap and very very nasty.