Gordon and Jane Brown's place in Allens Rivulet,
not too far from Hobart,
is the most southern tea farm in the world.
The cool, temperate climate
perfectly suits Japanese camellia,
Camellia sinensis, which can produce both green and black tea.
MAN: Oh, the climate's almost ideal for it.
Everyone says, "Tea - that grows in tropical countries."
But you think seriously about it -
Darjeeling, Nepal - they're all way up in the Alps.
And when you look at the temperature range here,
we're almost identical in summer, and almost identical in winter.
And when there are temperature fluctuations,
tea seems like a pretty forgiving crop.
If we have, say, a frost at this time of year,
which is probably our highest risk
because we've got these young shoots coming up at the moment
and the frost could actually burn these,
but the tea will come bouncing back again,
unlike other crops where maybe you'd lose your whole season's crop
if you had a frost.
So it's, um... it is resilient, yeah.
Jane and Gordon are both scientists
with background in food and horticulture.
And their current occupation as tea farmers
is the result of an old government experiment.
Ooh, the history of that goes back to the 1990s
when I actually had a job employed by the Department of Agriculture
as a research scientist.
And I got involved with actually processing the tea
for the research project
and then assessing it for quality.
And we sent samples off to Japan for assessment
at their research stations.
And after being on this project for five years or so,
I thought to myself, "I like tea!"
(LAUGHS)
"It's got features that I really love.
"It's just a box hedge. It's beautiful.
"It's part of an ornamental garden. I've got an ornamental garden.
"Why don't I just have a go at growing tea on our property?"
At the end of that project there were leftover plants
which I negotiated with the Department and took possession of,
which we brought back here, and we planted them out
and sat back and watched them for a while.
It was a bit of a hobby, initially, and in more recent years
I've actually turned into a true tea farmer,
so I actually now spend time on it and look after it.
A good cup of tea is usually accompanied by something sweet,
and the same is true for a good tea plantation.
The tea here is surrounded by two acres of diverse flowering gardens
to bring in the bugs.
We're trying our best to be pesticide free
and environmentally friendly,
so we don't apply any fungicides or insecticides.
We do get some aphids periodically at this time of year.
But if you ignore them - and that can be hard sometimes -
we find ladybirds come in
and they polish them up in a matter of moments.
And you're generating your own power here as well.
Yeah, yeah.
We've got enough power to actually grow the tea and to process it.
Large-scale tea plantations have serious machinery
that can pick 4,000 kilograms of leaves per hour.
On this farm, the tech of choice is a modified ride-on tea mower.
What an impressive bit of kit!
(LAUGHS) Glad you like it.
This is actually the cutting deck that was underneath the mower,
which I brought and put on top of a crane
so I can raise it and lower it and tilt it and angle it.
And I had to make - home make - a grass-catcher, effectively.
Or we should call it a tea catcher.
So it just throws all the leaves out and into this.
It might look homemade, but, gosh, it works well.
How many have got a solar panel attached?
Well, we have to charge as we go along. (LAUGHS)
We start harvest in the middle of November.
Last harvest is April.
Just a continuous process for the summer months.
The main harvest chops the leaves up a fair bit,
so it's very hard to get an intact leaf.
Our daughter is using
a little hand harvester that we imported from India
and this we actually use for little special runs
when we want an intact leaf.
We harvest about a tonne of fresh leaves in a year
and that turns into about 250 kilos of dried leaf in a year.
Today, we're making black tea.
We've put it through the mincer a few times.
If we were going to make green tea,
we would need to blanch or steam the leaf straightaway
to denature the enzymes.
But as we're making black tea, we want oxidation to occur.
So oxidation occurs when you damage or break up the leaves
and the tea starts...the tea leaves start to blacken,
a bit like if you bite into an apple, it starts to go brown.
And then we put it into the heat temperature dryer
where it takes about a week.
And that gives it the sort of roasted flavour
that's characteristic of our tea.
If we were making green tea,
it would go into a cooler temperature dryer
and again, it imparts a different flavour.
We presently make three different varieties -
black tea,
green, which we've been doing for nearly 30 years now,
and we have oolong tea.
I suppose we could also call it a winter tea
because we harvest in winter
and it has different characteristics of flavour at that time.
It's interesting what you can get out of tea
by just doing a different process
without adding or taking away anything.
So how do the world's southernmost tea-growers
see the future for the Tasmanian industry?
I think it's got a really good future.
A few years ago, we decided to start selling cuttings
to encourage the industry and to get more people growing tea.
So we've been doing that over winter each year,
we heel in the...the cuttings and get them ready for sale.
Mm, yeah, look, I visualise that tea today in Tasmania
is a bit like the wine industry was 30 or 40 years ago,
with just one small grower.
And what I'd love to see in this state
is thousands, let's say thousands,
of small tea growers all doing our own thing
all with our own little cellar door
so we can have a tea trail as well as a wine trail,
or better still, a tea and wine trial.
In Australia, we're a tea-loving folk.
We drink over 16 million kilograms of the stuff every year.
Most of it's imported.
Now, Tassie may not be steeped in tea-growing tradition,
but I reckon a brew
that hasn't travelled thousands of kilometres to get here,
well, that's pretty refreshing.
Every year, you can pretty much guarantee
someone, somewhere,
will be looking forward to a great harvest of mangoes,
custard apples or avocados,
and when they go to pick them,
they find the fruit are bruised and spoiled
and not worth eating.
Anthracnose disease is the common cause,
and the problem with this disease
is you can't start controlling it
when you see the symptoms on the fruit.
Control starts now,
when the plants are in flower.
And the sort of control I prefer to use
is an organic fungicide called wettable sulphur.
Now, you apply it in the morning before the bees wake up
and you repeat applications once a month
right the way through spring.
Now, if you check, you'll find that copper is often suggested
as a traditional organic remedy for the same disease,
and it works just as well.
But copper is a heavy metal
and it accumulates in the soil with regular spraying,
and that's not healthy for your soil or your food.
So my advice is if you want to control anthracnose,
use wettable sulphur.
On a sandstone escarpment above Sydney's Northern Beaches,
overlooking Pittwater,
All animals, and that includes us,
rely on plants for their habitat and food.
And one very precious species relies on just one plant for its survival.
Let's join Sophie now,
who's definitely ticking one off her bucket list today.
and best of all with their 2-year-old grandson Jesse
who loves nothing more than helping his grandparents in the garden.
You like smelling flowers, don't you?
So, I'm here to visit this gardening couple
whose love of a wide range of plants
is now spreading across the generations.
I'm in the behind-the-scenes area of the Adelaide Zoo,
meeting Wang Wang and Fu Ni
and before they head outside for the day,
they're just having some breakfast.
This must be Jesse. What are you doing?
Digging some worms. Oh!
We've got little bades.
Is that a bade, is it? Yeah.
Well, you know what? I actually bought you a bade.
For you. That's so special.
Look at that. Here you go. See if it works.
What did you say, Jesse?
(MUTTERS)
Where did your passion for plants and gardening begin, Nancy?
I think I've always had a love of gardening
because I used to visit my grandparents in the country
and they had a lovely garden.
And then when Ted and I got interested in
moving to a bigger property and we ended up on five acres,
a native plant garden, then I became in love with native plants.
What was this property like when you first arrived?
It was totally overgrown with weeds.
You could not walk through it. It was impenetrable.
So what did you do? (BOTH LAUGH)
Well, so we started clearing it, and it was such a big job.
We bought a backhoe and that helped us clear it
and make it so that it was workable for us.
People pay big money to bring stone in
to do some landscaping,
and you've got these massive rocks that are just part of this landscape.
Yeah, we've sort of built up the rock here to make gardens
where we could put in some soil,
and so we built up the garden up here as well.
I mean, I just feel like I'm wandering through the bush here.
Yeah, we tried to make it feel like that.
With the rocks and the lichen and moss on there,
and just beautiful, random arrangements of orchids.
Yeah, rock orchids - happy on rocks.
There's so many different species here.
What are some of your standouts?
We've got a lot of prostantheras,
the mint bushes, through this area here, it's fairly shaded.
The philotheca through here, which is really nice.
So that's just a lovely sensory sort of an area of the garden.
And then further over, we've got lots of different types
of grevilleas and westringias.
It's like a supermarket of horticulture here.
Every aisle, there's different options.
But their garden is made up of so much more.
Such a different feel in this part of the garden, Nancy.
It's really quite humid and moist. You can feel it in the air.
Yeah, yeah. A lot of moisture seeping through the rocks below.
Hence, these sorts of species. Yeah, they're beautiful.
Dicksonia antarctica, the tall tree fern.
Look at the pattern when you look up. Isn't it beautiful?
And here, flowering, colour - the stromanthe.
It's really happy in this understorey, isn't it?
Yeah, great plant. That's an indoor plant too.
While the lush plants of the subtropics get Nancy fired up,
Ted's greatest passion is hoyas.
Someone offers you some hoyas and you go and build a shadehouse.
Like, have you thought that that's a little extreme?
It is extreme. (BOTH LAUGH)
Where did it begin?
It started off, some friends gave me some cuttings.
This all happened about four years ago,
and I didn't look after them very well to start with.
But now I've sort of got a lot keener
and I've done a lot more cuttings from what they gave me.
And then they have such a lovely flower.
I really like that umbel-type flower.
Now, I haven't had many flower yet
because I've only been growing them for about four years,
and, you know, they take five to seven years to start flowering.
Wow. That's an investment. Yeah, that's right.
You might be able to see this one -
there's a little bud coming on this one here.
Yeah, wow. So that's Hoya serpens.
It's only a little flower but it's really quite pretty.
Propagating plants is a passion they both share,
and Ted even built a propagation station for Nancy.
How long will it take
before you can move to the next stage?
About a month after you've done this.
Depends on the type of cutting.
You could just give them a little pull,
and if they're not coming away easily,
that means it's got roots forming.
So then you gently prise the cutting out of the sand.
How often do you water them once they're in the pot?
You have to keep them moist, not dry out,
because there's no root at this stage
to take up moisture to the greenery.
So at least three times a day I'd spray this,
and I'd give it a fairly good spray.
So you start small in a tube-style pot?
Oh, I do. Some people go straight into a bigger-sized pot,
but personally I prefer not to go to this size
because there's too much potting mix in there,
which gets too wet, and that amount of moisture
could rot off the new roots.
Once the root system is formed there,
that's ready for potting up in the garden.
Ted's also a dab hand with the odd orchid.
Ted, who in your family passed down this compulsive behaviour?
You're not only a hoya hoarder but you're also an orchid obsessive.
(LAUGHS) What's going on?
I can't blame any of my relatives for this.
It's all my own doing.
You don't do things lightly. This is serious.
Oh, no. There are a lot of orchids in here.
There's about 800, I think, at this stage.
Most of them are hybrids,
and they come up with some beautiful colours.
You know, we've got oranges, forms of orange,
but the red ones are really so nice.
And then the white ones are the more traditional-type colours.
Yeah, just a lovely, delicate flower.
How long do these take to flower?
They'll flower probably within two years,
and then the main thing with them is just don't pot them on too much
and let them sort of fill out the pot,
then they seem to flower better.
There's no end to your creative construction.
What's the story behind this structure?
We have wallabies in this area,
and the flying foxes love the tomatoes,
and the birds come in
and they were causing a lot of damage to the plants here,
so we decided to put this up.
So how big is this structure of yours?
Yeah, so, this is nearly 20 metres long and nearly three metres wide.
Yeah, it's a good, solid construction,
but it certainly keeps... That's a very humble description.
It may be hard to believe, but their interest in gardening
has spread beyond the borders of their property
with active membership in the Cottage Garden Club,
Tropical Plant Society, Orchid Society,
Australian Plant Society,
plus Ted's involved in local revegetation projects.
Gardening really is part of your daily diet.
Yeah. And working in our garden,
it's very healthy for us to be outside here all the time.
We don't get any other real form of exercise.
This is quite enough for us.
So we're doing something we really love doing
and it's good for us as well, yeah.
Do you see the love of gardening
grabbing hold of the next generation?
All our grandchildren seem to have a love of the garden,
which is really nice.
Good for them too, I think. Good for everyone.
Well, yes, they are, and it's a great way to get a harvest
from something that is otherwise ornamental.
They're used to make a fantastic dish called dolmades.
And you simply pick these leaves, you blanch them
and then they can be preserved
or you can roll up some rice straightaway
and enjoy that amazing flavour.
Are earthworms and composting worms the same thing?
Well, no, they're not.
Composting worms are found in moist leaf litter areas
and they eat raw organic matter.
They're the types that you put into worm farms
and sometimes you'll find them on the edge of your compost bin.
Whereas earthworms are deep-burrowing species.
They go down and they aerate the subsoil.
Both are fantastic and do great jobs in our gardens.
You think about out in nature where wallabies and kangaroos nibble
at plants and they naturally prune them.
In a garden of course, with this lemon verbena,
I prune it back every winter.
And see what's happened - new growth is formed,
nice and fresh, and it's not going to be top-heavy.
Don't be afraid of pruning. Get your secateurs out and have a go.
It'll do your plants good.
We all experiment with plants, right?
Some thrive in our gardens and others, well, not so much.
But trial and error is the best way to find the most suitable species
for your place.
Clarence is on his way to the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney,
where some new plants are being put through their paces
to help you pick a winner for your garden.
One of the most exciting things about gardening
is going to the nursery and finding something new to try out,
whether it's a whole new species you've never come across before
or perhaps a different version of an old favourite.
But how are these plants selected before you buy them
and plant them in your garden?
The trial gardens at the Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney,
is one place where they're testing new plant varieties
so you can spend more time enjoying them
rather than just trying to keep them alive.
Bryn Hutchinson is the horticulturalist
responsible for managing the trial garden.
Well, the trial garden operates
so that we can see how plants perform in Sydney's climate
and we can see which ones flourish really well,
particularly for people that might be interested
for home gardening purposes in Sydney itself.
Where do you source the plants?
So, we source the plants from nurseries and breeders
who provide the plants for free for us to trial in the gardens.
And in return, they get some feedback
as to how their plants have grown.
And of course the public gets to see how they perform on site.
We do actually trial plants that are either not grown
in the region normally
or heritage-variety seeds, for instance,
when we're growing things like edibles
just to see how they'll perform in these climate.
Flowers have always been a big part of the trials for good reason.
We all love them.
So, you've got a mass of colour this year.
You've obviously been trialling a few flowers.
What's so special about these marigolds?
Definitely. So these marigolds are
from what's called the diamond series,
and they come in three different colours.
They're a really good plant in Sydney.
They're really great for bedding because they keep their shape
and habit really well.
They've been pest- and disease-resistant
almost through the whole season and they've been really floriferous.
And we've got these lovely tight buns in rich, deep colours.
What other flowers are you looking at in the trial garden?
So, sunpatiens, which are a type of impatien that do really well
in full sun, which is what we have here,
and they also do just as well in full shade.
So really good variety.
We've also got the Salvia greggii Mesa series,
which have a really great selection of warm and cool colours
and loads of flowers.
Beautiful.
All these flowers have made it onto a yearly list
of the top 40 plants in the trial garden,
which you can access on the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney website.
The trial garden, it looks pretty, but it's also a research garden,
so we're mixing, you know, science into the art.
So each time I'll be looking at things like
how much flower is put on, if it's an ornamental flowering plant
that we're looking at, how long those flowers will last.
I'll be looking at the foliage, whether it's a particularly nice
kind of foliage, the form, or the habit,
is it growing the way it's supposed to be growing as that cultivar,
and the pest and disease resistance of the plant
is a really big thing as well.
So, a few natives have made the list this year.
Right. And not all of our cultivars are always new to the market.
This one has been around for a little while.
The Anigozanthos landscape gold,
it's come through as one of the best of the kangaroo paws
that we've tested this year.
And it's really good in terms of pest and disease resistance.
And this is the end of the flowering,
but we had masses and masses and masses of flowers,
and you can cut them back and they'll come growing back as well.
So you get a number of flushes.
Along with the familiar ornamentals,
Bryn and the team are trialling vegetables
for the first time this year.
This is one that people aren't eating enough of -
this is the okra, yeah?
It is exactly, it's okra.
And this has been one of the best plants performing
in the vegetable trial this season.
And that's essentially because not only is it
a beautiful ornamental plant with the hibiscus-like flowers -
or in fact, it is a hibiscus, in the same family -
but it has these lovely fruit
obviously you can boil up and eat.
But it's also a drought-tolerant vegetable,
which is not particularly common.
And a great addition to garden.
Also in the top 40 is a variety of a vegie patch favourite.
Well, we've got these zucchinis.
It's a heritage variety that we've trialled,
which is called Costata Romanesco, and they've been really productive.
We've got six plants.
And when we released the top 40,
I think it said that we got about 42.3 kilos,
but we've had about 20 more kilos since then.
And really delicious eating. Wow. Yeah.
Really productive, really resistant to powdery mildew.
So that's a really advantageous thing in Sydney,
which will, you know, that often decimates your zucchinis.
So it's hit all the criteria, and the fact that it's a Costata,
Costa will be very pleased.
Some popular pants do have the potential to become weeds,
how do you assess that in the trial garden here?
Yeah, one of the main ways that plants get around usually
is via seeds, so you want to make sure that plants,
once they get out are sterile and they won't be self-propagating.
And we're here at the butterfly bush,
which is a really popular plant at the moment, for good reason.
They're really beautiful, they're lovely plants,
but we know that some of them are not sterile,
they're actually self-seeding.
This isn't one of those varieties, so this is quite a good one.
Some of the more unusual plants on trial this year are the succulents.
This is a pretty specky-looking succulent.
I've got way too many questions, but what is this?
So, this is what's known as a mangave.
And its cultivar name is Mission to Mars,
which it's quite an out-of-this-world kind of planet.
It looks really great.
And a lot of gardeners are familiar with mangaves obviously.
This variety has got some really nice variegation on the leaf
with those red splotches.
So structurally in the garden,
especially if you want something that's going to take
lots of watering, that's a really good number.
When you're looking for a new addition for your place,
why not check out the Botanic Garden's Top 40
to find your next winning combination?
It's hard to beat a bright, vibrant bougainvillea over the summer months.
And they scramble up a fence or on a trellis,
and if you don't watch out, they can take up a lot of space.
But if you are in a small garden
and you'd still love to grow a bougainvillea,
then this is the one for you.
It's a dwarf-growing bougainvillea suitable for a pot.
The flowers of dwarf bougainvilleas are just as big
and just as flamboyant as the larger varieties,
and they're available in all kinds of colours.
But they only grow about one to two metres high,
so they'll stay nice and compact.
What looks like colourful flowers are actually bracts.
They're really colourful, but their job really is to protect
the real flowers, and they're tiny -
these little white things in the centre.
Another handy feature of dwarf varieties
is that the thorns which are found on the stems are smaller
and they're not as sharp as the larger varieties.
Well, how do you go about repotting a bougainvillea?
There's no tricks to it, you just have to think,
"OK, it's in that size pot, so one size up will just be fine."
Never put it into too big a pot
because it really doesn't do the plant any good at all.
Their roots like to be restricted.
So that will grow in that size pot for another few years.
Although bougainvilleas aren't too fussy,
it's always best to use a good-quality potting mix
to provide good drainage
and some slow-release fertiliser to keep them happy.
Position the pot near something it can climb on,
like a trellis or a fence,
and full sun is best because they'll flower less in part shade.
The good thing about bougainvilleas
is that they don't need a lot of water,
they actually prefer to be kept on the dry side.
Prune the bougainvilleas when they've finished flowering,
that's generally in winter.
So aim to prune them in late winter, early spring
so that you get a good shape and you can keep them under control.
You can also, over the growing season, just tip-prune them.
Just take out those tips and that'll keep them nice and compact.
It's easy to do.
Also remember to take out the dead flowers.
But these things, they're just amazing,
they'll flower for a good nine months.
So for a big explosion of colour in a small space,
it's hard to go past a potted dwarf bougainvillea.
Apple or orange?
Today, definitely orange.
Dog or cat?
Dog.
Tea or coffee? Well, you know me.
It's got to be tea.
Coffee is a really nice plant and all,
but I'd much rather a garden full of tea.
And Tino's tracked down Tassie's very own grower.
Thank you.
TINO: It probably won't surprise you to learn that
the Gardening Australia team is a tea-drinking bunch.
Ahh!
It doesn't matter if it's poured from a pot with a chunky-knit cosy,
or a thermos out in a windy field.
Cheers!
And don't we love it?
I don't know what it is between gardeners and tea,
but the two are definitely linked.
And today I'm meeting a couple that don't just love drinking it,
they love growing it as well.
Gordon and Jane Brown's place in Allens Rivulet,
not too far from Hobart,
is the most southern tea farm in the world.
The cool, temperate climate
perfectly suits Japanese camellia,
Camellia sinensis, which can produce both green and black tea.
MAN: Oh, the climate's almost ideal for it.
Everyone says, "Tea - that grows in tropical countries."
But you think seriously about it -
Darjeeling, Nepal - they're all way up in the Alps.
And when you look at the temperature range here,
we're almost identical in summer, and almost identical in winter.
And when there are temperature fluctuations,
tea seems like a pretty forgiving crop.
If we have, say, a frost at this time of year,
which is probably our highest risk
because we've got these young shoots coming up at the moment
and the frost could actually burn these,
but the tea will come bouncing back again,
unlike other crops where maybe you'd lose your whole season's crop
if you had a frost.
So it's, um... it is resilient, yeah.
Jane and Gordon are both scientists
with background in food and horticulture.
And their current occupation as tea farmers
is the result of an old government experiment.
Ooh, the history of that goes back to the 1990s
when I actually had a job employed by the Department of Agriculture
as a research scientist.
And I got involved with actually processing the tea
for the research project
and then assessing it for quality.
And we sent samples off to Japan for assessment
at their research stations.
And after being on this project for five years or so,
I thought to myself, "I like tea!"
(LAUGHS)
"It's got features that I really love.
"It's just a box hedge. It's beautiful.
"It's part of an ornamental garden. I've got an ornamental garden.
"Why don't I just have a go at growing tea on our property?"
At the end of that project there were leftover plants
which I negotiated with the Department and took possession of,
which we brought back here, and we planted them out
and sat back and watched them for a while.
It was a bit of a hobby, initially, and in more recent years
I've actually turned into a true tea farmer,
so I actually now spend time on it and look after it.
A good cup of tea is usually accompanied by something sweet,
and the same is true for a good tea plantation.
The tea here is surrounded by two acres of diverse flowering gardens
to bring in the bugs.
We're trying our best to be pesticide free
and environmentally friendly,
so we don't apply any fungicides or insecticides.
We do get some aphids periodically at this time of year.
But if you ignore them - and that can be hard sometimes -
we find ladybirds come in
and they polish them up in a matter of moments.
And you're generating your own power here as well.
Yeah, yeah.
We've got enough power to actually grow the tea and to process it.
Large-scale tea plantations have serious machinery
that can pick 4,000 kilograms of leaves per hour.
On this farm, the tech of choice is a modified ride-on tea mower.
What an impressive bit of kit!
(LAUGHS) Glad you like it.
This is actually the cutting deck that was underneath the mower,
which I brought and put on top of a crane
so I can raise it and lower it and tilt it and angle it.
And I had to make - home make - a grass-catcher, effectively.
Or we should call it a tea catcher.
So it just throws all the leaves out and into this.
It might look homemade, but, gosh, it works well.
How many have got a solar panel attached?
Well, we have to charge as we go along. (LAUGHS)
We start harvest in the middle of November.
Last harvest is April.
Just a continuous process for the summer months.
The main harvest chops the leaves up a fair bit,
so it's very hard to get an intact leaf.
Our daughter is using
a little hand harvester that we imported from India
and this we actually use for little special runs
when we want an intact leaf.
We harvest about a tonne of fresh leaves in a year
and that turns into about 250 kilos of dried leaf in a year.
Today, we're making black tea.
We've put it through the mincer a few times.
If we were going to make green tea,
we would need to blanch or steam the leaf straightaway
to denature the enzymes.
But as we're making black tea, we want oxidation to occur.
So oxidation occurs when you damage or break up the leaves
and the tea starts...the tea leaves start to blacken,
a bit like if you bite into an apple, it starts to go brown.
And then we put it into the heat temperature dryer
where it takes about a week.
And that gives it the sort of roasted flavour
that's characteristic of our tea.
If we were making green tea,
it would go into a cooler temperature dryer
and again, it imparts a different flavour.
We presently make three different varieties -
black tea,
green, which we've been doing for nearly 30 years now,
and we have oolong tea.
I suppose we could also call it a winter tea
because we harvest in winter
and it has different characteristics of flavour at that time.
It's interesting what you can get out of tea
by just doing a different process
without adding or taking away anything.
So how do the world's southernmost tea-growers
see the future for the Tasmanian industry?
I think it's got a really good future.
A few years ago, we decided to start selling cuttings
to encourage the industry and to get more people growing tea.
So we've been doing that over winter each year,
we heel in the...the cuttings and get them ready for sale.
Mm, yeah, look, I visualise that tea today in Tasmania
is a bit like the wine industry was 30 or 40 years ago,
with just one small grower.
And what I'd love to see in this state
is thousands, let's say thousands,
of small tea growers all doing our own thing
all with our own little cellar door
so we can have a tea trail as well as a wine trail,
or better still, a tea and wine trial.
In Australia, we're a tea-loving folk.
We drink over 16 million kilograms of the stuff every year.
Most of it's imported.
Now, Tassie may not be steeped in tea-growing tradition,
but I reckon a brew
that hasn't travelled thousands of kilometres to get here,
well, that's pretty refreshing.
COSTA: Still to come on Gardening Australia...
..Sophie meets one of the world's greatest plant lovers,
who only has eyes for one species.
Most days they will eat between 40 and 50 kilos of bamboo.
In winter, they'll go up to 60, 70 kilos per animal per day.
Josh is renovating one of his most productive little planters.
Whoa!
Check out just how congested this is.
And we meet an artist exploring her connection to growing and eating.
Now I know that fruit and vegetables do connect us to place
and to home and memories.
Every year, you can pretty much guarantee
someone, somewhere,
will be looking forward to a great harvest of mangoes,
custard apples or avocados,
and when they go to pick them,
they find the fruit are bruised and spoiled
and not worth eating.
Anthracnose disease is the common cause,
and the problem with this disease
is you can't start controlling it
when you see the symptoms on the fruit.
Control starts now,
when the plants are in flower.
And the sort of control I prefer to use
is an organic fungicide called wettable sulphur.
Now, you apply it in the morning before the bees wake up
and you repeat applications once a month
right the way through spring.
Now, if you check, you'll find that copper is often suggested
as a traditional organic remedy for the same disease,
and it works just as well.
But copper is a heavy metal
and it accumulates in the soil with regular spraying,
and that's not healthy for your soil or your food.
So my advice is if you want to control anthracnose,
use wettable sulphur.
All animals, and that includes us,
rely on plants for their habitat and food.
And one very precious species relies on just one plant for its survival.
Let's join Sophie now,
who's definitely ticking one off her bucket list today.
I'm in the behind-the-scenes area of the Adelaide Zoo,
meeting Wang Wang and Fu Ni
and before they head outside for the day,
they're just having some breakfast.
Giant pandas are reliant on one particular plant for their survival,
and because they're here in the zoo,
they're completely reliant on humans to grow it for them.
Today, I'm lucky enough to be spending time with these shy giants,
and I'll get to meet some of the team that are working around the clock
to keep them nourished and happy.
So normally, keeping staff come in, wake up the animals.
They give them a little bit of a feed
out the back in the holding areas to get them awake.
Then they come out and they charge up the exhibit with some bamboo
and they put out some treats too.
So part of those treats are panda cake,
which is made out of the excess leaves of the bamboo plants
when they take them back out of the exhibit.
So we pretty much recycle a lot of the bamboo that comes back out.
Because of deforestation and habitat fragmentation,
giant pandas have been pushed to vulnerable status,
with only about 3,000 left in the wild.
The enclosure here tries to replicate their home
high in the mountains of southern China
where bamboo grows as an understorey plant
in temperate coniferous and broadleaf deciduous forests.
One of our key features also,
is the large oak tree that we have in here.
In the wild, when the female pandas come in season,
they climb up the tree, and the male suitors come down
and they scuffle around at the base of the tree
and fight for the right to mate with the female.
And then the male waits at the base of the tree
until the female comes down and is ready to mate.
These pandas are 15 and 16 years old,
which theoretically is prime breeding age.
But Fu Ni is only fertile for a tiny window of 36 hours once per year.
Also, you'll see a lot of rocks in the exhibit
because they come from mountainous regions,
but also it gives them exercise.
So when the animals are walking around through the...the enclosure,
they're actually climbing over the rocks
like they do in natural behaviour.
They're fascinating to watch when they eat the bamboo.
So they actually strip the leaves and roll it into like a cigar shape
and then just bite down on it.
So they don't chew, they just crunch down on it with their teeth
and swallow it whole.
Ten they'll strip the culm down with their teeth
because they got really strong, powerful teeth and jaws
strip of bits of the culm, and they'll eat that as well.
So they pretty much eat the whole plant.
Most days they will eat between 40 and 50 kilos of bamboo.
In winter, when they are putting on weight
and they're coming into season, they eat a lot more.
So they'll go up to 60, 70 kilos per animal per day.
So it makes up a large part of their diet.
This is Jason, who ensures their steady food supply.
He drops off three loads of bamboo most days.
Bamboo is the fastest growing woody plant in the world,
but these two eat so much of it
that they have their very own offsite bamboo plantation.
It's about a half an hour north of Adelaide,
and I want to go and check it out.
The plantation has 20 species of bamboo
growing in rows across nine hectares.
Fu Ni and Wang Wang couldn't survive without this local supply of bamboo,
but planting, maintaining,
harvesting and delivering such a precious cargo
is definitely enough to keep Jason on his toes.
So how did this plantation start?
Well, it started, basically, with us digging bamboo out, golden bamboo,
from resident's homes,
because this is the most common species that we have in Adelaide.
And it was one of the bamboos that we were told by other specialists
that it was going to be a bamboo that they would really eat.
Mm-hm.
Turns out that they don't, really. (LAUGHS)
They'll eat it if they have to, but they don't want to.
Exactly, yeah. Just a few nibbles and then that's about it.
And we should say that this is highly invasive
and not to plant it in your front yard or backyard.
Or the side yards or any of the yards.
It's too aggressive. It spreads like wildfire.
Now, what's this species?
So what we've got here is Oldhamii.
It's a clumping species, but it is a large clumping species.
It's definitely one of the favourites for the giant pandas.
We feed it out all year round and we have a lot of it.
Now, would it be appropriate for home gardeners?
If you've got a little bit more extra space
and you're willing to work to keep it nice and tight.
OK, so it can stay in a clump if you keep it under control.
Yes, it can. And how do you do that?
By keep on pruning it
and knocking off all the new culms that come along,
and that way then you can keep the bamboo nice and small.
The clumping varieties that the pandas prefer,
are also much better options
for anyone wanting to grow bamboo ornamentally at home,
like the Alphonse Karr, which has a beautiful yellow culm
and grows to a spectacular three to four metres tall.
But beware, it'll clump to about two metres wide.
And I also like the fern bamboo,
which has beautiful, delicate leaves.
It grows to three metres high
and forms a clump just over a metre across.
How much of what you're doing is experimental?
I would imagine that predicting the whims of an animal in captivity,
and what they want to eat, is frustrating at the best of times.
It's definitely been frustrating
because sometimes they'll go through one species
and eat it a couple of times a day
and then they'll just turn off of it
and won't touch it again for the rest of the day.
So then we keep about five or six different varieties in the fridge,
so that way we can cope with their fussiness.
Another challenge for Jason, but more importantly for pandas,
is mass die off of bamboo.
What's happened with this bamboo here?
So unfortunately, this has gone to seed.
So when the bamboo goes to seed, it will die.
Here in the plantation it's frustrating,
but a mass flowering of bamboo in the wild is catastrophic for pandas.
It can take 10 years to recover to levels
that can sustain a panda population.
And because pandas are now restricted
to smaller pockets of habitat with fewer bamboo species to choose from,
they're left with nothing to eat.
Over the last few decades,
pandas have been used as a poster image
for wildlife conservation efforts,
a symbol of what we're losing,
but also a symbol of what we're trying to protect.
How does it make you feel
when you go in and you see crowds looking at the pandas
and the pandas obviously loving what you've hand-picked for them?
Pretty good, actually,
because it's something that hasn't been done before or been attempted,
and we've accomplished it.
So I'm pretty proud of the Adelaide Zoo
and the rest of the hort team to get through.
So you should be. Thank you.
Keeping two giant pandas fed and happy
on the opposite side of the Earth to their home range
is no small task,
but having them here gives us a rare opportunity
to learn about and appreciate these beautiful animals.
And that's very much our privilege.
A few years back, I added some terrific trough planters
to my collection of growing containers
on our sunny back deck, made to order from zincalume.
I set them up as wicking planters
by installing a layer of expanded clay balls in the bottom
with geo textile fabric on top of them,
and then quality potting mix.
The clay balls create a water-holding reservoir
and drainage holes ensure that it can't be overfilled.
The soil stays consistently moist,
which is just perfect for plants that love damp conditions.
I put in some betel leaf, kang kong and Moroccan mint.
Well, I'm really happy with that.
The deck's feeling greener already
and I can't wait to see these things really take off
and lush this place up.
And they really did take off
and provided plenty of leaves for picking.
And if you want to see how I made them,
you can go to the Gardening Australia website for a step by step process.
But now, a few years on,
well, the plants are looking a little tired,
which is a good sign that it's time to reinvigorate them.
After this period of time,
these plants will no doubt be root bound
and the potting mix will be tired.
So the whole thing needs a refresh.
Whoa. Check out just how congested this is.
You can see how the roots have grown through
and around the geo textile fabric
and have gotten right in to the clay ball layer.
It's pretty easy to see. This is certainly ready for a revamp.
By standing the slab of mint on its side,
I can easily scrape the clay balls away.
They just need a good rinse...
..and then they can go back into the planter,
making sure they sit at the same level as the drainage holes.
Then a new layer of geo textile fabric can go on top,
followed by fresh potting mix.
Right, well, there's plenty of good planting material here.
It's just going to be a matter of pulling it apart
to free up some material to put back into the planter.
There's no pretty way to do this.
I'm going to pull it apart. There we go.
You can see.
What I'm after, really,
are those lovely, fresh, healthy, pale rhizomes.
They are the pieces of the plant that will take off quickest
and then put new leaves on.
I'm just working my way around
and tearing off clumps with fresh white rhizomes
and some foliage.
The roots can be trimmed back, so they're easy to replant.
I'll give these a good watering once the plant is back on top of the wall
because of the weight,
and the mint will come good within a couple of weeks.
I'll repeat this process for the betel leaf and the kang kong
and my wicking planters will be pumping again in no time.
The question is, can I save the seed and regrow from a pumpkin
that I've grown myself?
And of course you can. They pop up in the compost all of the time.
But the better question is, should you?
Now, these guys come from cucurbita.
It's a really big genus.
It includes things like zucchinis, pumpkins, squash, marrow.
They're all related.
And within each of the species,
there are so many different cultivars,
so many shapes, sizes and flavours.
If you're growing more than one of these,
they have a really bad habit of cross pollinating,
which means the resulting pumpkin that comes from the vine that you get
might be completely different to this one.
If you're a really good seed saver, you would hand pollinate the flowers
and then isolate them, so you didn't get any contamination.
But most of us don't find the time or perhaps the skill to do that.
Unless you have heaps of space for experiments,
the best thing you can do is get some fresh seed
from a really good seed saver.
But if you've got the room, you can always give it a go.
Darwin is such an amazing place.
Not only is it home to an incredible diversity of plants,
it's also a place of great cultural diversity.
Time to catch up with a Darwin local
who's exploring her own roots
through her art and local ingredients.
My name's Tisha.
I'm an artist and a lawyer living in tropical Darwin,
and last year I published a book about fruit and vegetables.
I used to think that fruit and vegetables
were just something that you ate,
something on a poster for national guidelines for health.
But now I know that fruit and vegetables do connect us to place
and to home and memories.
Last year in 2020, I was working in the Supreme Court.
It was mainly criminal work and it really burnt me up.
So in October, I decided to quit early,
and I had nothing to do.
So I looked back at the things that made me happy in the past,
and one of those was drawing these fruits and vegetables.
I had this crazy idea - what if I made a book about this?
So I decided to draw as much as I could,
ask as many questions as I could about the fruits and veggies
and also the stories behind my family and why we came here.
I'm Chinese-Indonesian,
so I was born in Jakarta, in Indonesia in July 1996.
In May 1998, my family and I moved to Darwin
because there was political turmoil going on in Jakarta.
When my family and I first moved to Darwin,
we lived in a caravan in Coolalinga on a mango farm.
But coming here, we didn't have anything.
But luckily there were a bunch of really friendly growers around us,
so whenever they had bumper crops -
which was all the time, because they were all green thumbs -
then they would give whatever they could to us.
A really important part of my story is the Rapid Creek markets
and the Parap markets.
When I had all these questions
about who I was and where I came from,
then I remembered that I would go to these markets a lot
as a little kid,
and all the growers there were part of my story as well.
They all know my auntie and my dad and my mum,
and they produce the produce
that is the subject of so many of my drawings.
Morning!
When I first went to the markets, I didn't really know anyone there.
But coming to the markets with my auntie
is a little bit like going with a celebrity.
I would come whenever I could and just see what's around.
I like to keep an eye out for things that are new to me
or things that are just good to draw.
So what I'll do is I'll spot something unusual,
I'll whip my phone out and ask very nicely,
"Oh, this is great. Can I take a photo of it?"
Maybe I'll draw it or maybe I'll show my parents.
So I'll take a photo.
And then if it's something that is unique,
in terms of dimensions
or I...I want to take it home so I can actually eat it,
then I'll buy it and I'll take it home
and use it as a drawing material, and then hopefully eat it.
What I'm drawing right now is sugar cane.
What I'm liking about this unpeeled version
is all the texture and stippling and dots that are on.
All the blemishes make for good drawing.
So, each of the pocket book illustrations are handdrawn with ink.
First I start off with a pencil outline,
and once I'm happy with the outline,
then I'll start outlining it with ink and I'll colour it in,
and then I'll leave it to dry for roughly around a day
or a couple of hours at least,
which allows me to do these drawings in batches.
Once the ink has dried, then I start erasing them,
which leaves a little bit of a shadow,
and then once the shadow is there,
then I will put on the final details with a little bit more ink pen...
..and then the drawing would be complete.
What about this one here? What's this?
Oh, that is a spinach.
My auntie played a huge role in bringing this book together.
I was so surprised by how much my auntie knew.
For a long time, I always encourage Tisha to draw.
I think she's very talented in that way, you know?
And when she start that thing,
I also brought her to the farm to interview people
and then she said, "Oh, I write this book," you know.
When I first started actually preparing for the book,
it started off purely focused on the fruit and vegetables.
But then I would out that growers could volunteer all this information
that I might have been curious about in the past,
but I would never have gotten otherwise.
They started talking about how they remembered
the way they cooked this vegetable
was the way they cooked it back at home,
or they only at this during a specific time,
or when they were in the war or on the way fleeing the country
and then this was the only thing they could get.
And that's why it's not particularly pleasant or easy to prepare,
but they still eat it and they still sell it
to try to remember what happened in the past.
Like some sweet potato, during the war,
we don't have any food to eat during the war.
With sweet potato leaves and cassava leaves,
that's what we survive on.
So every time I see the sweet potato, we think back,
"Oh, that's my father grow the war,
"and we eat that a lot during the war."
During the war time.
You have to have a passion to do all these job,
because it's a long time to produce every crop.
And we love it and we just love the nature, the environment
and the thing that you grow yourself to eat.
You have, um, a feeling for it.
Yeah, I see in the book and she come ask me a few questions
and I have a few of the... some of the product
that she doesn't know.
And I showed her some ingredient as well, like how to cook.
This one is a bitter spinach. It's Papua New Guinea spinach.
Yeah.
And it taste like Chinese broccoli. Can use this one to stir fry.
Or you should just blanch the leaves,
squeeze some lemon juice and olive oil.
That's all. Very healthy and a lot of iron.
We have a lot of mixed multiculture in, um, Rapid Creek.
We all like family friends.
At the end of the day, we chit chat. Yeah.
I discovered that the community at the markets
is such a rich and such a gossip-ful community,
which is great because being a child of migrants,
it's kind of hard...
I'm Chinese-Indonesian, but if I go to Indonesia or China,
I'm not really Chinese or Indonesian.
I've got too much of an accent.
But then I don't look like your average Aussie either.
So I sometimes felt like, "Well, where do I really belong?
"I'm kind of an imposter in all the worlds
"that I'm meant to be a part of."
But this growers community is full of people
who've gone through exactly the same journey.
And sometimes there is a bit of a language barrier,
but the thing that always speaks to us is food.
Gosh, you're so brave.
I really think one of the unexpected and wonderful things about the book
is how much closer it's brought me to my family.
That's what the book has kind of done to my family,
and it's definitely brought us closer
and helped us understand one another.
I know, I know. You already have a list.
But do you want to see what's on mine?
In cool, temperate gardens, find a sunny spot
and sow seeds of Japanese turnip into shallow trenches.
These fast-growing brassicas
develop delicious, crisp, sweet globes,
and the foliage can also be stir-fried or steamed.
If you love a cuppa in the garden, why not grow your own?
Camomile, lemon verbena, mint varieties
and even rosemary make great herbal teas
and can be planted now.
If your citrus have been impacted by gall wasp,
it's your last chance to shave or remove galls
before the larvae hatch and re-infest.
Always bag and solarise infected prunings before disposal.
In warm, temperate gardens,
treat flowering faves like azaleas, rhododendrons and daphnes
to top-dressing of aged sheep or cow manure,
covered by a luscious layer of mulch.
Now that spring has sprung, show your indoor plants some love.
Refresh tired potting mix, repot pot-bound beauties
and treat all plants to some seaweed tonic -
the perfect pick-me-up after a long, cold winter.
Spring bulbs which have finished flowering
are now developing next year's flowers,
so a light dusting of blood and bone will provide extra nutrients
for next season's stunning spring show.
In the subtropics, it's time to top-up mulch on garden beds
to help retain moisture, regulate soil temperature
and minimise competition from weeds.
Choose local sustainable products where possible.
Speaking of weeds, they're growing at a rate of knots at the moment,
so pull them out when you see 'em
and bin them before they flower and flourish.
As they say, one year's seed's seven years weed.
Start fortnightly foliar feeding roses using liquid seaweed.
Apply half a handful of chook manure around established plants
once every six weeks until autumn.
Tropical gardeners, for a fruit with a difference,
you can't go past the kiwiberry, Actinidia arguta.
Bunches of hairless grape-sized fruits
with the flavour of kiwifruits, born on a vigorous vine.
Pop in a couple today.
Grow your own super snack of edamame.
A large seeded soybean, eaten steamed and salted.
Sow seeds direct in full sun.
They'll be ready to harvest in a couple of months.
Head to the worm farm and clear out some vermicompost.
Pile the castings in the top tray into a cone shape.
Wait 10 minutes until the worms have wriggled deeper,
and remove the castings.
For a splash of summer colour in the arid garden,
sow a seed or two of Sturt's desert rose,
the floral emblem of the Northern Territory.
This small shrub bears showy, mauve flowers
and loves a tough sunny spot.
If you've been harvesting asparagus,
it's a great time to give your plants a good feed with some chicken manure
and allow the plants to recover before harvesting again in summer.
Eucalypts aren't just for large spaces.
Many of these iconic Aussies are great in pots,
particularly the Mallee varieties,
including the gorgeous Rose Mallee, Eucalyptus rhodantha.
What a brilliant time of the year to be out and about,
getting your hands dirty.
Make sure you let us know what you've been up to
on our Gardening Australia social pages.
Oh, I hate to say it, but that's all we have time for this week.
The show, not the garden.
Can't wait to see you next time, when we'll have so much more for you.
See you then.
I'm finding out how a place as big
as the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens
keeps their plants pest free.
Chemical control is an absolute last resort.
COSTA: I catch up with our newest guest presenter,
who has some crafty ideas for the school holidays.
Can you imagine how that's gonna look when it's in the garden?
It'll be amazing.
And we meet a passionate protector of wild urban species
and the spaces they call home.
This is what I live and breathe,
and I can see myself being involved in it throughout my life.
Captions by Red Bee Media