Autumn Organic Gardening

Organic gardeners can create a healthy and productive garden with a few simple tips:

Turn your back on cool season vegies like cabbage, broccoli and kale and caterpillars can rapidly skeletonise leaves. If you've noticed small white butterflies hovering around the vegie patch, these are likely to be 'cabbage white butterflies'. They lay small yellow oval-shaped eggs on the leaves, which hatch into very hungry caterpillars! Organic gardeners can control caterpillars effectively with OCP eco-caterpillar killer, which is based on a naturally occurring beneficial bacterium that only affects caterpillars. Spray foliage every 5-7 days, including the undersides of foliage where caterpillars often lurk, to help keep caterpillars under control.

Yates Organic* Garden Pest Killer, made from blue butterfly pea extract, can also be used to control caterpillars on tomatoes and brassica vegetables like broccoli and cauliflower.  

* Approved for use in organic gardening. 

Alternatively, a ready to use product to control caterpillars is OCP eco-pyrethrum PLUS. Based on an extract from the pyrethrum daisy plus canola oil and seaweed, it controls caterpillars and other common insect pests on vegetables, fruit and ornamental plants and is approved for use in organic gardening. 

If you have deciduous trees at your place, they can provide you with wheelbarrows of fantastic fallen leaves during Autumn. Don't leave them on the lawn as they can shade the grass and create bare patches. Rake them up and scatter them over the top of garden beds as leaf mulch. Another easy way to quickly tidy up leaves on the lawn is to run the lawn mower over them. They'll be chopped up finely in the catcher. These too can be used as a leaf mulch or better still, mixed with kitchen scraps, garden prunings and a few handfuls of Yates Dynamic Lifter Plant Food & Soil Improver Pellets and turned into compost. There are lots of different composting  systems available, ranging from enclosed compost tumblers to do it yourself bays or frames in the back corner of the yard. Autumn leaves are high in organic matter but low in the nutrients needed for effective composting. This is where Yates Dynamic Lifter comes in. It's rich in organic nitrogen, which helps to feed the composting microorganisms as they start to break down the Autumn leaves into fabulous compost that you can then mix into vegie and flower beds in a few months time.

Aphids are commonly attracted to tender new leaves and stems of cool season vegies like broccoli and kale. Aphids are small sap sucking insects that can multiply rapidly deplete the plants of energy. Organic gardeners can control aphids quickly with OCP eco-insect killer, which is an insecticidal soap that targets soft bodied insects like aphids. Spray foliage each week, including the undersides of foliage where aphids hide, to help keep aphids under control.

OCP eco-caterpillar killer (Dipel), Yates Dynamic Lifter Plant Food & Soil Improver Pellets, OCP eco-pyrethrum PLUS and OCP eco-insect killer are all approved for use in organic gardening by Australian Certified Organic.