Welcome to Inspirations Garden Centre's. vegetableseeds.net.au. November 2017 Newsletter Gardening Gurus

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1 Subscribe Past Issues Translate Welcome to Inspirations Garden Centre's vegetableseeds.net.au November 2017 Newsletter Gardening Gurus SHOP NOW

2 Gardening is about people as well as plants. Sometimes the passion for gardening can wane, especially if you are like me and you have been gardening for most of your life. The one simple thing, with all my knowledge and experience that I have learnt over all those years is that gardens are always changing. The following are some gardeners that have inspired and encouraged me either directly or indirectly to continue my passion to this day. I hope that one day a professional biographer will do these great gardeners justice. The following are my personal opinions. Share Tweet Forward

3 Peter Cundall When I think of Peter Cundall I think, like most people, of his radio talkback show on Saturday Morning. I regularly listen to this when I open up the shop on Saturday Morning at 9am, and often sacrifice putting our signs out until it is finished in case I miss anything. Peter has done amazing work for the horticultural industry, and gardeners everywhere. His passion for organic gardening and its principles have always been consistently presented in an ever changing world of horticultural trends. Even though he never advertises commercial ventures he has indirectly helped almost every Nursery, Garden Centre, and other horticultural business. He stands firm for causes that try to make the world a better place for all of us, and will fight for these. I respect his privacy, and when occasionally he or his wife Tina have visited Inspirations, I and my colleagues greet them like any other customer and serve them accordingly. It is pretty obvious that his healthy diet has led to a healthy long life, a healthy diet is the best advice for all of us too. Due to Peter Cundall s advice from Gardening Australia and Gardening Talk back over the past twenty years I have gained a greater understanding of gardening practice in Australia than I previously had, most of my experience and knowledge was from gardening in the UK for 20 years before that.

4 Steve Solomon Steve eats, sleeps, lives vegetable gardening. He started and later sold a very successful seed business in Oregon and then retired to Tasmania. His two greatest achievements in Tasmania for the home gardener and horticultural businesses like mine, in my opinion, are his publication, "Growing Vegetables South of Australia", and his "Complete Organic Vegetable Fertiliser" (C.O.F). The book contains all the relevant vegetable gardening information that Steve has in his head from years of personal experience, this is invaluable to home gardeners as it is so accurate. Steve has fine-tuned the C.O.F from years of research and formulas, and he still works on improving it. It works for every gardener, we can prove that when I can say with honesty that not one customer in all the years that we have been offering it has any customer said it did not work. In fact the opposite is true customers keep coming back and buying more. C.O.F is one of those products that on the face of it appears very simple but in reality is very complicated. I first met Steve when he came into my shop a number of years ago and presented me with a bucket of parsnip seed and said something like Put this on your counter and see how it sells. I will come back in a few weeks and see what s left I wondered, who is this guy? People came from everywhere to buy this seed, and then I began to think that this man was no ordinary home gardener. He came back, as promised, collected what was left and said. Oh it worked again, you ve only got a bit left, good and took his money. Sometime later he came to the shop and told me he had had a dream of owning Inspirations once, and specialising in vegetable seeds and seedlings, turning the plant area into a vegetable trial area, and specialising in quality tools, fertilisers and a range of cheap bulk seeds as well as the top quality high germination seed racks. He wondered if I would consider going into the seed business, I said yes I would be interested in the seed business but I was not brave enough to share this vision

5 about the shop. I considered it a risk because we had so many customers who liked the garden centre as it was, with rhododendrons, roses, advanced trees, shrubs, rare plants etc, and to change this was a huge business risk as we could lose a lot of customers. In hindsight, though, who knows what could have happened if I had have followed Steve s dream. Would people have come to get their vegetable seeds and seedlings from Inspirations eight years later from everywhere? We will never know. Steve invited me to his house where I remember he cut up a tomato and said taste this I was aware that he was watching my reactions. I thought OK it s a tomato, so what. How did it taste? he asked. OK, I said, Did you notice it was almost seedless I had not. What he had shown me was one of four cultivars bred by his great friend Dr Baggett, namely Siletz, Oregon Spring, Legend and Golden Nugget. Steve sourced these seeds with help from Tasmanian quarantine to grow for seed in Tasmania, he also suspected in years to come that accessing seeds from overseas may become difficult. How right he was. Steve and I became good friends and he started a trials garden and trialled Brussel sprout varieties, parsley, tomato, capsicum, chilli and many more to show me, and provided seeds of Parsnip Melbourne market, Prize winner runner bean,

6 English spinach, carrot Merida, and all the early tomato cultivars mentioned above. He explained about cool climate varieties and my knowledge increased. I have been in horticulture for nearly 40 years now and some of the things I learnt from Steve I had never learnt before from any professional. Because of Steve we have a successful seed business and because of the point of difference at the shop many more customers. Today the staff and students at the Northern Support School grow all of our vegetable seedlings for the entire year from our seed range. Two things have happened by going in this direction. Firstly we had to sacrifice offering rare and unusual plants, for which Inspirations had previously been well known because it was too hard to build up a seed business as well. Today we have got back on track with the rare and unusual herbaceous plants again. Secondly, Steve s fear that vegetable seed lines would become harder to access due to quarantine restrictions Biosecurity has become a reality. Large commercial seed companies and distributors control the market. Many early varieties that we used to access easily from the UK, America, and Europe are now almost impossible to access. Many vegetables for consumption are grown under glass now or in warm climates, so field grown early varieties are not needed. They still exist in storage banks in the large seed companies but are deleted from their catalogues. For the home gardener to access quality early varieties it is getting harder and harder. So if quarantine pest and diseases are such a high risk, why can we travel freely from country to country, and walk with foreign soil on our shoes back through our ports and airports? Why can we buy packets of nuts, beans, fruit from the super markets? What is to say that the pumpkins and watermelon seeds we throw out after eating the fruit will not develop diseases when they regrow? How do we know that the pests and diseases that are a worry are present or not present in the first place in specific regions? Surely, quality seed from America, and Europe from respected commercial growers, breeders and suppliers is disease free in the first place, why would they jeopardise their own businesses? The bottom line is that the home gardener is being forced to grow from seeds that probably won t work well in their region, so they might as well buy the produce and give up. Seed companies like mine cannot physically grow bulk amounts of good OP cultivars every year, it is not economically possible.

7 However, the good news is that there are good distributors of seed within Tasmania and on the mainland who pay all the costs for biosecurity for farmers, market gardeners and seed companies to access quality seed. In the meantime we will continue to grow as many lines as possible, but we will regrettably, have to cut back on offering all the bean varieties next year as this has become too hard now for us to maintain. Frank Strie Frank and Karen Strie are passionate about biochar. Frank will talk to anyone who is interested about it. The history of Biochar is well documented and available on many you tube videos and web sites. Importantly Frank pioneered biochar in Tasmania, and has been focused on producing quality nutrient enriched char. He now sells it at farmers markets, and through several garden centres including ours. The advantage of bio char over other products for soil nutrition is that the char stays in the ground, it is real carbon sequestration. Frank has achieved practically for farmers what many influential people in the World are still trying to grapple with hypothetically on the political stage, namely carbon sequestration. Now that s impressive. We sell Frank s nutrient enriched char at Inspirations from 1lt packet to 25lt bags, everyone who has purchased it has note the difference in yields and quality of their vegetable crops. Look at our previous news letters on Biochar for more information. Dr David Hessayon A friend of mine knew David Hessyon and asked him once what inspired him to write all those How to gardening books which brought him fame and fortune. He replied that he had never read a clear annotated gardening book for home gardeners, so he painstakingly read as many gardening books as he could and selected the relevant information and condensed it into his own gardening books. This is another one of those, it sounds easy any one can do that moments, but

8 again in realty what he did was a huge task and it took a talented mind to sift through all that information and process it into the works we all know, love and refer to. We use his hard copy of the vegetable gardening guide regularly for customer advice even with all the info on the internet that s available. One of his strokes of genius was that he showed a clearly annotated picture of one tomato plant, rose or shrub, (according to which book) showing all the pests, diseases and nutrient deficiencies on that one plant as a simple reference point. All other good gardening books I have ever seen have diagrams and pictures showing the pest or disease on leaves or plants on different pages so comparing them is actually quite hard. Even using google images can be frustratingly difficult to identify pests and diseases, without accurate scientific knowledge of where to start.

9 Bob Reid Bob has a passion for collecting plants and has many collections of pasture seeds, legumes. Natives, bulbs and much more. We have worked together for several years now on most of the bean varieties we sell, including the cool climate edamame, which he worked with years ago. The millets, achocha, cucumbers, amaranthus, green manures and many other lines we offer are also from his collections and research. Even Bob probably does

10 not fully appreciate just how valuable his seeds are to my business, you just cannot get them from anywhere else, and to trial all the bean varietiess in the world to search for what he knows work in different climates would be an immense lifetime s task. His knowledge of where they come from and their histories is all in his head. I have a great deal of respect for Bob Reid, and I am so pleased that many of you have purchased and had success with his limes. Bob has many, many more lines of beans, chillis, capsicums, tomatoes and much more in storage, and I had hoped to offer more this year, but we have come to the conclusion that it is really hard and not very economically viable to offer everything. We will have to reduce the number of bean cultivars that we offer next year, but will give advanced notice of this. However, we will continue to do trial work and hopefully offer one or two new lines when possible.

11 All the staff and students at the Northern Support School

12 These talented people have made me aware of the skills of minority groups. They have successfully grown seedlings from our seeds for many years now for sale through Inspirations (see previous newsletters). Although slow to get off the ground, and work out what we needed when and where in the shop throughout the year, we now know what we were doing. Year after year customers have had more confidence in what we are offering, and feedback gets stronger. With detailed planting schedules at the school now finely tuned, we grow according to market demand, and after seven hard years, this works. It s a simple philosophy put into practice. It cuts through all the complicated stuff. Thank you everyone.

13 November For November our seedling benches are packed with Tomato plants, Capsicums, Chilli s, Cucumbers, Zucchinis, Sweet Corn, Spring Onions, Parsley, Pumpkin plants, Cabbage Sweet Green, Cabbage savoy, Broccoli, Broccolette, Perennial cabbage (Couve tronchuda), Beetroot, and many more. What to sow now Please refer to our planting guide for November. Beetroot, cabbages, spring onions, and all hardier crops can be sown now. Be careful sowing or planting English Spinach, Pak choi, Bok Choi, Tatsoi, Mustards too late in November. They will bolt to seed. The more frost tender plants like green beans, Edamame, beans for drying, sweet corn, cucumbers, chillis, capsicums, and tomato plants are best sown when soil temperatures are about 19 degrees plus in the day time, usually late October in warmer areas like Deviot or first week of November in areas like Cressy. Early Varieties WILL CATCH up with those sown under glass, you ll be surprised.

14 Happy gardening wherever you may be. SHOP NOW Copyright 2017 INSPIRATIONS GARDEN CENTRE, All rights reserved. Want to change how you receive these s? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list