Story: Step 2 to a healthy edible garden and citrus
Episode: 3
Presenter: Trevor Cochrane
Air Date: 1st of April 2023

In this series, on the first week Trev shared his first tips towards creating a healthy garden, and the key message he hope you took home is that a healthy plant only occurs when it grows in a healthy soil!

• One leads to the other.. gardening shows often talk about all the hard work.. additives like soil improvers, manures, composts, mulches not to mention nutritional additives like fertilizer’s and trace elements
• They are all important but adding them can be costly and exhausting. It’s especially important in a typical backyard because growing a beautiful garden is in many ways the most intensive farming on the planet.
• Don’t get me wrong, adding compost to soils before planting, mulching your topsoil in spring and autumn does a lot of good things, it smothers weeds, it reduces evaporation saving water keeping soils moist longer, and it provides the all essential organics or soil carbon referred to in permaculture as critical to soil health.
• You should be boosting soil organics and there’s a lot of ways to do it.. chop and drop, when pruning adding the reduced prunings to soil provides food to soil microbes.. these in turn convert it into soluble nutrients for plants to take up
• But how do you boost the beneficial microbes to outnumber the harmful ones like root rots which are a form of fungi. Mulching and adding composts to garden beds also do the same thing.
• But it’s most noticeable in a garden where crops have been grown continuously were diseases start to occur, plants become more prone to pest attack, and this is due to the lack of essential nutrients. You know the story of scurvy with sailors.. insufficient vitamin C brought on this disease, and it was easily cured with a regular intake of oranges or citrus species, know to be high in Vc.
• In a domestic garden the natural process of boosting soil microbes and enhancing the mineral nutrition of soils can be enhanced using a technology that works with nature, its developed here in Australia and making such an amazing difference to the results Aussie gardeners are enjoying… it’s called Troforte M or Troforte technology .. it comes in a range of specialized mixes for lawns, vegie gardens and even native gardens. This one for citrus and fruit is essential to deliver strong healthy trees, avoiding many of the common diseases and pest gardeners experience.

For more information, head to:
www.troforte.com.au