Frost is your friend
SERIOUSLY!
A little known fact is that lots of vegetable, fruit and berries actually need chill hours to produce the best, tastiest, plumpest tucker.
Some produce extra sugars to beat the cold like celery. The flavour of celery is so much more delicious in winter than the stuff grown in summer, or up north and shipped to a supermarket near you. The taste and texture experience is so remarkable, its almost like a different plant.
Others like blueberries need chill hours during their dormancy in order for them to produce fruit the next season and it can make a big difference to the flavour too.
A good apple won’t crunch unless it gets enough chill hours hanging on the tree. and nut trees…
Are you starting to get the picture?
One of the most common things we hear people say, living in our Unpredictable Highland Climate, “ i’m done trying to grow food here, Im going north!
HIGHLAND BENEFITS
The thing is, it might be easier to get ripe tomatoes by xmas up north, but you’ll be missing out on over 250 different fruit, nut, berries and vegetables if you do make the move, and not everything in your garden will taste as it could or would in the mountains.
You might not get mangoes in the highlands, but avocados, dragonfruit, passionfruit, citrus are all good to grow up here in the right microclimate.
And if the climate crisis continues we may be living in banana country yet. although Diggers Club have cold climate bananas available. We haven’t given them a go just yet. but watch this space, we likely will.
Don’t listen to the nay sayers, you can grow just about anything up here at around 6-700m. We Do. When we first moved to Braidwood folks were convinced that you couldn’t grow a lemon up here.
Most of the gardening shows are filmed at or near sea level, and a lot of gardening mags and books are written at the same kinds of places. So if you follow them in the highlands you will likely be met with disappointing failure. and not understand why. Here at Bombay Seed Traders we work to dispel the myths and folklore about growing in the highlands to help your grow and eat food with less toil and dissapointment.
popular myths
Theres the old myth about not planting tomatoes until Melbourne Cup day. We’ve been planting them around fathers day a whole month earlier for the past decade with good results. tomatoes can take more than you think. only a few years ago our tomatoes copped 3 sets of hail with no protection and they still provided a few tomatoes at Xmas.
So don’t believe everything you hear. If you want to eat it, give it a go. It might not work the first time, but with a few attempts and some local knowledge, you will find or design the perfect microclimate to grow almost anything.
The 5 Pillars to Success are sunlight, water, soil condition, local stock and timing. get these right and you can grow almost anything at your place.
what are you growing that’s out of area?