Segment: Trev’s Choice: my garden
Episode: Spring 2019, Ep13
Presenter: Trevor Cochrane
TX Date: 7th December 2019

Here’s a couple of jobs Trevor is working on: planting tubers like galangal, ginger etc and protecting his baby apricots from fruit flies.

• Plants like galangal, ginger, turmeric and cardamom leaf can be purchased from good garden centres but they can also be grown from corms and rhizomes.
• Planting them is simple: each nobbly bit is a plant so you can break them all off and put them straight into the soil (they will also do well in light clay) or in the hydroponics section of an aquaponics system.
• White shadecloth filters some light but its ability to disperse light into the growing area means more compact, bigger, lusher plants.
• The only way to prevent fruit flies from getting into fruits like apricots is to bait them by either painting the branches of the tree or setting up traps.
• Painting a substance containing a pheromone-activated insecticide over the branches gets the fruit flies before they eat the fruit, but the product needs to be reapplied if it rains.
• The trap option is easier: put at least a tablespoon of vegemite in each container together with 5ml of insecticide. Add some water, mix it up and hang it from the tree. Replace it fortnightly for best results.
• There are two types of fruit flies to look for: the Mediterranean and the QLD one. They affect fruit right across Australia everywhere except from SA, where they continue to bait and try to stop them coming through the borders.