Season summary for my food garden in Ballarat (Victoria), Summer, 2024-25. This is mainly of relevance to food gardeners in the Ballarat area, but it might be a useful comparison for those living further afield.
This summer was unremittingly hot. The average maximum temperature for Ballarat was 3 degrees above the long term average with December being 3.7 degrees above. To make matters worse, while much of the east coast of Australia was literally drowning in water we had just 60% of average rainfall.
The official weather statistics for spring as recorded by the Bureau of Meteorology’s Ballarat airport site. Click HERE to see a higher resolution PDF of this weather chart.
vegetables
It was not an easy summer for my veggie garden, the hot dry weather meant a lot more watering than usual and some vegetables struggled with the heat. But heat loving vegetables such as eggplant, capsicum and chilli did tremendously well and the corn harvest was extremely early. The zucchini crop has been good and the tomato crop was reasonable but the pumpkins have struggled a bit in the heat and it looks like pumpkin numbers will be down on last season. The size of the potatoes I have just begun to harvest are smaller than average but the carrots are doing well. The bush beans were reasonable however the climbing beans did poorly, although the climbing bean harvest is yet to finish.
My eggplant crop was excellent this year and for the first time ever my greenhouse grown eggplants didn't do as well as the ones I grew in the vegetable garden. This set of photos is of the Black Beauty eggplant that I grew in the vegetable garden.
LEFT: One of my Giant Russian sunflowers that I grew. While their heads (I grew four sunflowers) were of a reasonable size the plants themselves were not very tall, this year they were less than two metres tall but in a normal year they can grow up to three metres.
RIGHT: 50% shadecloth over lettuce seedlings. I normally temporally put shadecloth over seedlings in summer but this year I have had to cover plants with shadecloth more frequently and for longer due to the heat.
While the tomato crop was only middling it still produced a reasonable number of peeled tomato jars and passata bottles.
Despite the hot dry conditions this summer’s harvest was still pretty good.
The fruit tree harvest is yet to be completed, that won’t happen until the middle of autumn, but overall it has been a reasonably good start. The Nashi fruit have been smaller than usual but hugely abundant, however I have lost a fair number of pears due to rats. The apple harvest has been good with plenty of the fruit being turned into stewed apples and preserved using the Fowlers process. For the first time in years I grew strawberries and the result was excellent.
LEFT: Damage done to one of my Packham pears caused by rats. I lost about 30% of these pears due to rats. The pears on my Trixzie Pyvert pear tree suffered less damage but the yield was down on last year.
RIGHT: The nashi pear harvest, the pears were smaller than usual but the crop was still heavy.
I hadn’t grown strawberries since the millennial drought, but this first season of strawberries was way beyond my expectations.
chickens
My five hens averaged 4.4 eggs per day for the summer, which is a pretty good tally. They are in their second year.
No sign of pests or diseases. I dosed them against coccidiosis once during the summer as a preventative measure. Night inspections of their feathers revealed not lice or spider mites.
My Hyline hens on the prowl. They have been in good condition throughout the summer.
