(04-04-2023, 07:50 AM)Bally002 Wrote: Another experiment I'm doing is planting potatoes and sweet potatoes in large boxes on the porch. Never had much luck with them in the past as grubs and bandicoots ripped through the ground.
As for tobacco @"Ninurta"#2 I have grown it in the past and it went wild. Big pink blooms and large cabbage leaves which I dried and mixed with regular tobacco. Fire wiped it out. Currently trying again but no seeds are striking sadly. Some stunted ones but no higher than an inch. Other garden plants are ornamentals such as native orchids, perennials and dragon fruit climbing cactus.
That tobacco sounds like commercial tobacco, nicotiana tabacum. That's what we used to grow all over the place here as a cash crop. When the government did away with allotments, the economic value of it dropped, so most farmers here stopped growing it. I've noticed a lot of fields that used to be sewn in tobacco are now being sewn in corn instead. Others just lie fallow now, and are going back to woods. Some mega huge hemp combines did try to move in and replace tobacco with hemp, but the government restrictions here on hemp growing made that option economically unviable at scale, so none of the farmers took them up on it, and the corporations withered and died. See, the Federal government has restrictions on how much THC a hemp crop can contain, (no more than 0.3%) and if it is tested outside those limits, the entire crop had to be destroyed resulting in a huge loss for the farmer, and no one wants to take that kind of risk when their livelihood is on the line.
The tobacco I'm growing is nicotiana rustica rather than nicotiana tabacum. There are a couple other wild species of tobacco here, like nicotiana quadrivalvis and a couple others I can't recall the name of, but they grow mostly out west, and so are not a threat to a crop here as far as cross pollination goes. Rustica has greenish yellow blossoms and is a much smaller plant, tabacum has big pink blooms and stands about 5 or 6 feet tall with bigger leaves, and most of the wild varieties have white blossoms. ALL of it will self-seed and go feral if the seed is allowed to develop and not collected. When tabacum was grown commercially here, we always "topped" the plants by breaking off the flower heads before they bloomed and "suckered" it by breaking off the developing branches as soon as they appeared. That puts more energy into leaf production and makes bigger leaves.
There is also a species of tobacco native to Australia, but like everything else in Australia, it would probably kill users.
I've always wanted to try potatoes here, but the soil is too clayey and dense for potatoes - I'd never be able to roll them out of the ground. Grace has ordered some "grow bags" made out of some sort of fabric to test out, and I plan on planting those in potatoes to see how it goes. I think they are about 10 gallons each, big enough for a test run.
From the description of what you can grow there, it sounds like you have a "Mediterranean" climate, like Spain or Italy. I've got some seed here for Mediterranean Palms, but haven't put them in the ground since I don't know if they'd survive here or not.
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