OCTOBER 2022

FIRST QUARTER 3rd October

Garden

  • Keep planting salad greens every month
  • Foliar feed before full moon
  • Major time for bed preparation and taking care of seedlings and newly transplanted seedlings
  • Continue transplanting out into beds all your seedlings
  • Quite a few of your perennials will be feeling the ground warming and will be sending up their first shoots (e.g. echinacea, stevia, bergamot) and may need checking for slug and snail damage (especially stevia).

Perennials

  • Take care of all the perennials you have planted well
  • Plant runner bean seed
  • Continue bed prep for your perennials keeping in mind they will be in these beds a long time so do it well

Temperate Forest Garden

  • Watch for water stress and try to avoid it by careful watering, time watering will be time not spent dealing with pests and other associated problems
  • Watch for Bronze beetle attack on apples, feijoas, and all trees that are likely to be water stressed. You may need to spray – garlic and pyrethrum will kill them because they eat the leaves but if you add Neem oil you will do a better job of stopping the new few generations as well
  • Good time to foliar feed for tree health

FULL MOON 10th October

Garden

  • Good time to foliar feed or spray
  • Direct sow carrots and parsnips
  • Plant maincrop potatoes (onto comfrey and or seaweed), carrots, beetroot, jerusalem artichokes, yams, all tubers and root crops
  • If your waterchestnuts have not been planted into a tub or plastic lined growing trough then  do it now. They need 20cm of water fed with lime and cow manure.
  • Plant kumara when the Pipiwharauroa puts a tail on his call
  • Continue bed preparation, loads of work with seedlings, snail patrols
  • Keep all planted beds weed free and aerated every week if possible on the waning moon
  • If your dahlias over wintered in the ground then now is the time to lift and divide and replant

Temperate Forest Garden

  • Good time to foliar feed for health
  • Moisture levels critical for shallow roots. If any of your trees are looking unhappy then carefully check their roots: are they too dry, are they repelling the water you’re putting on because they are too dry?
  • Time to set possum trap lines outside fruit tree area to catch roving possums before they damage trees or eat fruit

LAST QUARTER 18th October

Garden

  • Continue pricking out seedlings and transplanting
  • Mound up earlier plantings of potatoes, critical that you either mulch or mound up well to obtain heavy crops and avoid potato worms

Temperate Forest Garden

  • Don’t stress about long grass, it is best to leave it long now to keep disease out of setting fruit.. we’ll cut it later when the soil fungi need feeding. Dig up comfrey root, cut into 3-5 cm pieces and plant into seedling tray to get roots before transplanting into orchard. If soil conditions are good you can directly plant the pieces of root straight into the ground now.
  • Make sure all the irrigation systems are working well now
  • Weed and feed comfrey borders and barriers, pull back kikuyu if this is a kikuyu barrier
  • final chop and drop or support species pruning before Summer when we want shade
  • Time to set possum trap lines outside fruit tree area to catch roving possums before they damage trees or eat fruit

NEW MOON 25th October

Garden

  • Last time to plant comfrey root cuttings
  • Prick out and transplant all seedlings ready to go into the garden
  • Prepare beds for late spring planting
  • Plant seeds for summer/autumn flowers, sunflowers, zinnias, cosmos, love lies bleeding, nicotiana, gaillardia
  • Plant more corn, beans, courgettes, cucumbers, late tomatoes, lettuce, basil etc
  • Mulch as many of your vege beds as practical, corn, pumpkins, tomatoes, climbing beans and peppers are easy to mulch, with comfrey, alfalfa, ramial wood chip (once crops are well away)

Temperate Forest Garden

  • Check moisture levels under young trees and water where necessary
  • Mulch deciduous orchard areas
  • Time to cut grass one way or another to feed the soil fungi who feed the tree roots in a biological system
  • Time to set possum trap lines outside fruit tree area to catch roving possums before they damage trees or eat fruit

Berries

  • Mulch berry fruits and organise netting