Until this summer I had never grown Zinnias before, but after listening to a podcast about them and hearing how tough they were, how spectacular their flowers are, we decided to give them a shot at growing them and they were well worth it. Zinnias were easy to sprout from seed, grew easily in the heat with no extra watering, handle the hot weather with ease and put on flowers that made me awe and enjoy. We recently had a weeklong heat wave with temperatures around the 40 degree Celsius and the Zinnias planted in the full sun handled the heat no problem and just continued to flower. Zinnias, a ..read more

Here in Perth, Western Australia we have found there are two main growing season, winter and summer. We start sowing our seeds in late winter so our seedlings will be ready to be transplanted in early spring, allowing the plant to establish before the heat of summer comes on top of us. Every year that we grow plants, we look back on the last growing season and ask ourselves, what can we do better, what did well and what can we do to make our life easier for next year. From there we build a seed list, order our seeds and start sowing. Most of our seeds came from the seed collection, our corn an ..read more

Snow peas, what isn’t there to love about them, they are easy to grow, produce large amounts of peas, great for your health and are great as a snack, in a salad or as a side on a meal. Our son loves to go out and pick his own snow peas and snack on them giving the odd snow pea to his side kick, our dog Sherlock. So far, we have had great success with growing all varieties of snow peas, however the variety I order year after year is mammoth melting. This variety of snow pea is prolific, tough, readily available and even if the pods get too big, they don’t seem to get stringy. Snow peas are real ..read more

Welcome to our Gardening Attraction and Events page, this is where you will find out places we have been, events and nurseries. In the below articles you find information about the places, costing and relevant information. Just click below and get started on your gardening journey. Yates Springtime Festival at Araluen Botanic Park Hidden in the hills of Perth is a gem of place called Araluen Botanic Garden, which annually has the Yates Springtime Festival. This is a great place to take your family, to see some amazing gardens and plants, take some amazing photos and make some wonderful memor ..read more

If you garden for long enough you will pretty end up at sometime dealing or seeing every pest and disease plant can get, this year we have had a massive whitefly problem. As much as this has turned into an infestation and all of our broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage and potatoes are covered in whitefly, it has been a opportunity to try out many techniques which the internet has recommend to see which ones will control whitefly. When its one or two whiteflies on plant you can simply just squish them to control them avoiding harmful spraysHow Can You Recognise Whitefly Whiteflies are very small sap ..read more

Jerusalem Artichokes are a root vegetable that look like a ginger tuber but have a soft creamier inner which taste similar to potato. They are a great potato substitute, meaning you can use them in many ways that you cook potatoes. We recently had this recipe with potatoes, and it was no other than delicious, so we had to try it with Jerusalem Artichokes. Crispy Jerusalem Artichokes with Thyme ButterPreparation Time: 10 Minutes Cook Time: 45 minutes Serves: 4 Ingredients 500 grams of Jerusalem Artichokes 2 tablespoons of butter 1 teaspoon of Thyme 1 Teaspoon garlic powder 1 teaspoon onion powd ..read more

Jerusalem artichokes are an easy plant to grow and there is always an abundance of their tasty tubers in our garden during the winter months. When cooking this recipe, we recommend in finding the larger tubers as its easier to cut them up and leave the smaller tubers for other dishes. You can either cut your jerusalem artichokes into chips, slices or wedges. If you don’t have any Jerusalem artichokes you can substitute it for carrots, parsnip, butternut pumpkin, beetroot or wurzel. In the spice blend we used rosemary, sweet hungarian paprika and panko crumb, but you could also use oregano inst ..read more

Cosmos are one of my favourite flowers in the garden, especially the deep pink flowers which just look spectacular. Cosmos has ferny foliage, grows to about 1 meter tall, they are easy to grow and can be grown in various styles from pots, densely planted or planted as a singular plant. We have grown several varieties in our garden which are sensation, dwarf vega and bright lights. Bright lights which is an orange flowering cosmos can become a bit weedy as it self-seeds easily. We grow bright lights in the vegetable garden to help bring in beneficial insects and find it flowers all winter long ..read more

Lilly Pilly trees are an Australian native tree which there is over 60 different varieties of. Lilly Pilly’s are a hardy evergreen tree that can be grown into hedges, windbreaks, as an ornamental or for there fruit. We are growing them both to cover our rear fence and to use their fruit. We first started off with buying 2 established lilly pilly trees and planted more self seeded lilly pilly trees so we will have full coverage of our fence. So far, we have not had any issues with growing our lilly pilly trees and have been a great success in our backyard. We use the fruit for making jams, chut ..read more

We have been growing cornflowers at our house for many years now, it is plant that puts on a great show with its flowers, flowers for a long time, easy to grow, tough and is great for attracting beneficial insects. Blue cornflowers are important to Katelyn and I as its one of the flowers we had planted for our garden tea before we got married. We chose to plant blue cornflowers for our garden tea, as there flowers make a statementWhen to Plant Cornflowers Cornflowers can be grown all year round, just avoid sowing seeds and transplanting through hot or cold weather. The best time to sow seeds a ..read more