In line with the Victorian Government’s latest direction to prevent the spread of COVID-19, our Campbellfield retail store will be closed from Thursday the 6th of August to all customers except for genuine tradespeople (builders, landscapers, developers, farmers etc).

You can continue to purchase plants from us online via our website, or over the phone on (03) 9359 3331. Our retail store’s customer service staff will switch focus to answering your phone and email inquiries. We will continue to offer our contactless delivery service throughout metro Melbourne and regional zones, as well as posting smaller plants across the East Coast of Australia. In support of all those people doing the right thing and staying at home, we have decided to continue to offer free delivery on all orders over $300 within Metro Melbourne and to most regional Victorian centres, despite the cost to our business.

In the last few weeks we have received an unprecedented number of orders for delivery, but we are confident in continuing to fulfill your orders. There may be some delay as we adjust our business to face these new hurdles, re-deploying staff and managing the change. But we have met the challenges this year has thrown at us so far, and our 6-vehicle fleet will keep doing laps of Victoria from morning to night 7 days a week. We have maintained growing at our own farm in preparation for Spring despite these uncertain times, and we are working closely with dozens of suppliers and small Victorian growers to maintain availability of the broadest possible range of plants.

As the Victorian Government has announced, we can & will also continue to operate a Click & Collect service, allowing you to pick up your plants from our Campbellfield store. If you are picking up from us after Thursday the 6th of August, you will receive special instructions on how to safely do so. However, if you do select this option, please ensure that you are not violating stay at home restrictions by visiting us to collect your plants. Instead, it’s safer to select one of our contactless delivery options.

It is not unusual at the moment for all of our phone lines to be busy with customer inquiries. If you cannot get through to us over the phone on (03) 9654 8655, please email sales@hellohelloplants.com.au for general inquires, to check the availability of any products or to make an order. For an existing order, please email orders@hellohelloplants.com.au.

You can also still get a free Garden Design Consultation and we will be delivering these via video chat (Zoom, Facetime, etc). We have limited places so it’s best to book in advance.

Please be kind to our staff. They all want you to get your plants, and they are working extremely hard to make sure you do so.

Keep calm and garden on Victoria, from all of us at Hello Hello Plants.

Hello Hello, dear gardening friends! August is here and we start yet another exciting month in the garden. We are still getting a few frosty mornings in Melbourne, but the days are getting noticeably longer. This is the last month of cold Winter days, and soon we will be in jumping into the most exciting season: Spring! But before Spring gets here, there is a lot to do in the garden, to get it ready for this magical time of the year!

Right now native plants, Azaleas, and Camellias are reaching the end of their flowering season. Acacias and Hardenbergias are putting on dramatic displays and deciduous trees such as cherries and magnolias have swelling buds that are getting ready to burst open revealing their great unique beauty and delightful fragrance.

Despite the cold, we know how eager you are to get into the garden, but where to start? Here are some things to do in the garden:

Bare Rooted Plants

• Now is the best time to get your bare-rooted plants while it is still cold, to give them the best start possible. They will have sufficient time to harden off, get their roots growing in their new spot, and be ready for a Spring explosion of growth and bloom. That includes beautiful weeping cherries, Standard Roses, Ornamental Pears, Mop Tops, and Silver Birches. (Click on the links to view the products)
If you have already purchased and planted your bare root plants, remember to keep it moist. Even though they have no leaves, they still need water to grow a nice root system. If you are still planning to get some bare-rooted plants, here is a practical guide about how to plant them properly. Click here.

• Bare Root fruit trees will be here very soon! In about a week we will have a fantastic selection of apples, pears, apricots, plums, etc. The next two months is the best time to plant them.

Flowers, Bulbs and Seeds

• There are several perennial flowering plants that are just about to flower, that you can easily pop in your garden to give you some beautiful colors.

• Now is a good time to plant spring-flowering bulbs such as Dahlias, Liliums, Lily of the Valley, etc. (We do not sell this in-store yet)

• You can now plant Spring/Summer flowering annuals such as Snapdragons, Hollyhocks, Verbena, and Lupins. You can start sowing Marigold and Petunias in the coming weeks but you will need to provide protection from late-season frosts. Marigolds are also a great companion plant for tomatoes and capsicums, as they deter many pests. (We do not sell seeds in-store yet)

• We have an incredible range of deciduous magnolias in store right now that are about to burst into bloom in the next couple of weeks! Click here to see them.

Fruits

Protect yourself and your family with some extra Vitamin C and natural anti-oxidants by growing and eating fresh fruits right in your garden. If you have limited space, ask us about our dwarf varieties, which are specially developed to stay small but still produce big crops of fruit. Here is what you can grow right now:

• Citrus plants. Right now is just perfect for planting citrus. We have a great selection of dwarf and full size trees such as oranges, mandarins, limes and kumquats.

• Berries are so yummy and easy to grow. We have lovely varieties of strawberry, blueberry, blackberry and dwarf mulberries.

• Stone fruit are about to flower and put on a beautiful show for us before giving us some amazing summer fruit, starting with the lovely pink apricot blooms! We have some amazing varieties right now that are ready to fruit this season and they are on sale right now In-Store Only, from $̶5̶9̶.̶9̶9̶ to Only $29.99. This includes Plum (Angelina, Santarosa, Satsuma), Apricot (Moorpark, Travat), and Pears (Triumph and Beurré Bosc)!

Vegetables & Herbs

• As we still have about a month of cold weather left you can grow lettuce, leek, spinach, peas, rocket, Asian greens, silverbeet, onions, parsley, radish, beetroot, parsnip, broad beans, Jerusalem artichokes and Asparagus.

• You can also grow potatoes although make sure to grow from potato seed and not store-bought ones as they can spread disease in your garden.

• You can still grow winter crops such as cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower if you already have them in the ground but it is not worth starting them from seed right now or buying small seedlings. Actually, in the next couple of weeks, it would be ideal to harvest them all from your garden to prepare the soil for the Spring and Summer veggies.

• Spring/ Summer veggies. If you have a glasshouse you can try your luck at getting an early start with sowing seeds of tomatoes, capsicum, zucchini and eggplants. The seeds can also be germinated on a sunny windowsill indoors and once spring is here you can pop them in the garden for some early crop. (more info about preparing soil below)

• It is always a good time to plant herbs. We have a fantastic variety in store, such as mint, oregano, marjoram, verbena, chamomile, etc

Pruning, Repotting & Weeding

• If you forgot to prune your roses at the end of the last flowering season, you can still do it now, to get them ready for the new spurt of growth in Spring. Make sure to use clean secateurs. Pruning is best done mid to late Winter or early Spring – remember to hold off until the most severe frosts have passed in frost-prone areas.

• Apricots are best pruned in Autumn, but you can still do it lightly once they have started flowering, which is right about now, to keep them tidy and manageable. Avoid pruning if your area has late frosts. (Pruning in Winter allows entry of bacterial gummosis in many stone fruit. More about this lower in the article). Other Deciduous fruit trees could also use a fresh trim now!

• Winter-flowering natives and non-natives can be pruned back and deadheaded to keep them nice and tidy. It is also a good time to prune back your evergreen trees to encourage new growth this Spring.

• If some of your potted plants have become overcrowded or looking sad, now is a great time to split them up and re-pot them. The sad-looking ones are usually root-bound and could use a light root trimming and potted into a bigger pot perhaps, or the same one with some fresh potting mix. Keep them partly shaded and protected for at least a week, then you can give them a liquid or foliar fertilizer feed. Also remember to remove the dead, damaged, and excessive growth to improve air circulation. Your succulents can be divided up and put into new pots. More plants!! YAY!

• Scraggy plants. In their prime, they looked fantastic! But now some plants are not performing well despite being pruned, fertilized, and taken care of. They are prone to disease and put your other healthy plants at risk. They could be old and have dwindling strength. Consider pulling them out and replacing them with something that will perform for you. Remember to rework the soil and let it settle for a week or two before putting a new plant there. If you are unsure if your plant can bounce back, you can always send us a photo of the plant with some details and we will give you some advice.

• Stay on top of the weeds and pull them out as soon as possible, as with the longer days they will start to set seed! And you do not want that to happen, as you will be fighting weeds all Spring and Summer long if they start dropping in your garden.

Soil, Fertilising, and Mulching

• If you have poor soil in your vegetable beds, with a couple of small Winter crops still growing, you could start harvesting and emptying the beds to prepare them for Spring vegetables. Throw in generous amounts of rich compost, manure and blood and bone meal and turn it over to mix it thoroughly. Let it settle for a week or two and it will be perfect for your tomatoes, eggplants, and capsicums during Spring and Summer. It is also a good idea to test the PH of the soil and amend it as necessary. Remember that the PH will change with the new additions so test it at various intervals. The aim is to get a neutral Ph of 6-7, which vegetables thrive in. Sulphur (liquid or pellets) and pine mulch make your soil acidic whereas lime and mushroom compost increases alkalinity.

• Over the winter the microbial activity in your soil is very low because of the cold. In the next couple of weeks, you can prepare some nice compost tea to give it a microbial boost for spring.

• Put some rich compost or well-aged manure around your fruit trees, to give them the well-needed boost for the Summer fruiting season.

• It is best to give some liquid feed to Winter/Spring flowering annuals every two weeks with a complete liquid fertilizer.

• You can put some fresh mulch around your plants to keep weeds at bay. If you are putting mulch for the first time, make sure to choose the right ones as they change the PH of the soil when they break down.

Pests & Disease

There are always pests and diseases lurking around, but we do not see them a whole lot in Winter. Thankfully the cold gets rid of a lot of pests and gives us a nearly pest-free garden until the temperature starts to rise.

• Citrus gall wasps emerge in Spring, often timing emergence with the onset of a flush of new growth. You should inspect your citrus trees and prune off of any galls you see. Some extra protection can be given with some wasp traps.

• There are a lot of fungal diseases that can attack your rose plants such as black spot, rust and mildew. If you have noticed any disease in the past, now is a good time to spray them with some organic copper based fungicides.

• Leaf curl is mainly a disease of peaches and nectarines, though it may also affect almonds and apricots. It’s caused by the fungus Taphrina deformans and occurs wherever peaches and nectarines are grown. Some symptoms are leaves that are entirely or partially curled, distorted, and are initially pale green in colour before turning red or purple. This will result in fruit that has raised, irregular rough patches, usually red in colour. Such fruit often falls prematurely. You can treat this with commercially available copper or lime-based fungicide sprays just during bud swelling, but before they have opened. Once opened it is too late to spray as the leaves will get damaged.

That’s all Folks!

You probably thought that there was not much to do in the garden at this time of the year, but hopefully, this article has given you some insights and motivation to get a smashing start to Spring! See you next month and happy gardening lovely people 🙂

Gardening August Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

Victoria has gone back into lockdown for 6 weeks.

As previously during the original lock-down period, retail stores can remain open subject to social distancing, which we ask you to follow if you decide to visit us in store, to keep yourself and our staff safe. But we also encourage you to place your order online or over the phone for delivery or collection.

The good news is that we learned a lot and have spent this period improving our order fulfillment process and adding more staff to cope with a higher demand. Along with our existing cheap delivery fees, we have decided to continue our offer of Free Delivery for orders over $300 to Metro Melbourne and Victorian regional centres.

We know that gardening is a great way to pass a lock-down, whether it be making your surrounds beautiful or finishing off that project, so we are committed to helping you get your plants. Winter is a great time to plant as there is plenty of rain to keep your plants moist during their first few weeks in the ground. Many plants are dormant or semi-dormant and are quite happy to be transplanted or sold and transported bare rooted. This usually equals a saving cost wise, and your plants are well settled and ready to burst into life come Spring.

Some things to know:

• We are open from 9am to 5pm every day at our store at 1477 Sydney Road Campbellfield until further notice.

• You can visit us in store, but please stay home if you have any symptoms of illness. Maintain social distancing at all times, use the hand sanitizer provided, and be courteous to our staff.

• You can call us to place an order over the phone on (03) 9359 3331, or place your order online via our website.

• You can still get a free Garden Design consultation via video chat (Zoom, Skype etc). Simply complete the preliminary questionnaire and request a Garden Design booking.

• For existing orders, we will contact you the day your order will be delivered, or as soon as it is ready to pick up. To inquire about the progress of an order, please email us at orders@hellohelloplants.com.au

Stay safe and garden on Victoria! And we’ll bring the plants!

World Environment Day is celebrated worldwide on June 5. A platform for action, World Environment Day is the United Nations day for encouraging worldwide awareness and action to protect our environment.

Origins of the World Environment Day

It’s the 48th World Environment Day this year, and the first one took place in Stockholm, Sweden in 1972.  Back then, it was the first major conference of it’s kind. The aim was to focus on the development of environmental politics, environmental issues, and encouraging worldwide awareness and action for the protection of the environment. The responsibility for the primary celebrations rotates to a different country each year.

Theme and Host Country for World Environment Day 2020

World Environment Day 2020 will focus on Biodiversity and will be hosted in Colombia in partnership with Germany. This year World Environment Day 2020 theme is “Celebrating Biodiversity”, with the slogan “Time for Nature.”

“With 1 million species facing extinction, there has never been a more important time to focus on biodiversity.”

Colombia has put together a wide-ranging series of events featuring experts on biodiversity issues from across the globe. Click Here to view the programme.

Threats to Biodiversity

‘Many of the Earth’s ecosystems are nearing critical tipping points of depletion or irreversible change, pushed by high population growth and economic development. By 2050, if current consumption and production patterns remain the same and with a rising population expected to reach 9.6 billion, we will need three planets to sustain our ways of living and consumption.’

Human activities have significantly disturbed three-quarters of the world’s land surface. Two-thirds of ocean areas are also impacted by human activity, through overfishing, industrial pollution and oil spills, and garbage accumulation. Wildlife species are disappearing tens to hundreds of times faster now than in the past 10 million years. By 2030, the world may have lost one out of every four known species. Scientists have declared this the sixth mass extinction event in world history. At current rates of species extinction, the sixth event is on track to be more severe than the one that wiped out the dinosaurs.

Here are the 6 main threats to Biodiversity:

1. Climate Change
   Increase in the temperature of the atmosphere has major effects on the environment such as the seasons, rising of the sea levels, and glacial retreats, floods and as we have seen here in Australia, more bush fires and droughts.
2. Habitat Loss and Degradation
   Habitat loss are sometimes caused by natural events like geological calamities but more commonly by human activities such as deforestation, diverting rivers, mining, fracking and many other destructive behaviors.
3. Pollution
   Be it in water ,air, or land pollution, all forms of pollution are a threat to all life forms on Earth. Recently with the Covid 19 pandemic, we have witnessed a decrease in pollution due to a slowing down in human activities, and that was refreshing, but on the other hand we saw many plastic gloves and face masks washed up in the ocean and killing wildlife.
4. Invasive Species
   An exotic or unnatural species can be any kind of organism that has been introduced to a foreign habitat. This introduction can cause major threats to the native species. For example Cats are a major threat to our native bird population here in Australia.
5. Over Exploitation
   This refers to the act of over-harvesting species and natural resources at rates faster than they can actually sustain themselves in the wild.
6. Other Threats
   There are many other threats such as the spreading of diseases from farmed animals to wild animals. The impact of roads and highways reduce the habitat area of many species. Noise and perturbations to the environment such as sonar uses in the sea that disrupts cetacean species communications and many more.

Australia’s Biodiversity loss

Since the arrival of Europeans in Australia, just over 200 years ago, there has been an extraordinary increase in the rate of environmental change and in the loss of biodiversity in our ecosystems. One of the main threats to Australia’s biodiversity is habitat loss, and land-clearing is happening at a staggering rate. Projections suggest that 3m hectares of untouched forest will have been bulldozed in eastern Australia by 2030, thanks to a thriving livestock industry and governments that refuse to step in.

Some of these ecosystems lost include:

• 75% of rainforests and nearly 50% of all forests;
• over 60% of coastal wetlands in southern and eastern Australia;
• nearly 90% of temperate woodlands and mallee;
• more than 99% of south-eastern Australia’s temperate lowland grasslands;
• over 83% of Tasmania’s lowland grasslands and grassy woodlands;
• about 95% of brigalow scrub that originally grew in Queensland;
• over 90% of Victoria’s grasslands.

We concluded that exactly 100 plant and animal species are validly listed as having become extinct in the 230 years since Europeans colonized Australia. You can read more about this here.

Clearly, human activities have the most significant impact on biodiversity loss. At present, our planet continues to face these threats to biodiversity.

IN THE FUTURE, YOUR CHILDREN OR THE YOUNGER GENERATION MIGHT ASK YOU A QUESTION ALONG THE LINES OF, “WHEN THE CRISIS ON BIODIVERSITY BECAME SO RAMPANT DURING THE EARLY 2000S, WHAT DID YOU DO ABOUT IT?” WHAT WILL YOUR ANSWER BE?

Things you can do to help biodiversity and the environment:

• Reduce, reuse, and recycle. Cut down on what you throw away. Follow the three “R’s” to conserve natural resources and landfill space. Reduce your use of water, electricity and other non renewable and recycle everything as much as possible.
• Volunteer and Educate. Volunteer for cleanups or tree planting in your community. Teach others, especially children to help them understand the importance and value of our natural resources.
• Conserve Water & Energy. The less water you use, the less runoff and wastewater that eventually end up in the ocean. You can also save grey-water from your sink to water your garden. Energy efficient light bulbs reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Also flip the light switch off when you leave the room! Does your WiFi or your phone need to be always on?
• Shop wisely & Choose sustainable. Buy Local, buy organic.Learn how to make smart food and seafood choices. Buy less plastic and bring a reusable shopping bag.
• Drive less. Bike or walk more, and use your car sparingly. Do some car pooling with your mates and use public transport.
• Plant as many trees as you can. Go for Native trees and flowers that support the local wildlife the best. Trees provide food and oxygen. They help save energy, clean the air, and help combat climate change. They help the biodiversity and ecosystems to survive and thrive. If you have land, seek your local council or nurseries to see if there are any free or cheap plants. If you have limited space, consider pots. And if you do not have space, volunteer some time or money to tree planting organisations. Click here for our big selection of very cheap plants.
• QUIT the use of pesticides and petroleum based fertilizers in your gardens. These often have knock-on effects in wildlife populations and run off into water courses with adverse effects for the plants and animals living there. Ask your Local Authority to do the same.
• VOTE! Find out about legislation affecting biodiversity, make contact with your local political representatives, tell them how you feel and ask them what they will do to help.
• Support people and groups who are acting on long-term ecological sustainability. Find out about activists group and share their message and donate to their cause. This is vital for our future!

20 Cents For a Native Plant!

For this long Weekend only (6,7 and 8th of June) and to promote biodiversity we will be selling native plants for the symbolic price of 20 Cents for Kids only. As children are the future, they should be taught and encouraged to plant!

That will be an Economy grade plant that is Native to Australia such a Kangaroo Paw or Callistemon. There is a limit of one plant per child and isthis offer is IN store only at 1477 Sydney Road, Campbellfield.

We hope that this article gave you some inspiration or incentive to make changes to your lifestyle. Thank you for your time and remember that: Protecting our planet starts with you!

Some plants that are great for biodiversity:

Low growing flowers and herbs such as Daisies, Lavenders and Thyme are excellent for bees and other beneficial insects in the garden.

Flowering shrubs and trees, especially natives such as Grevillea, Callistemon, Corymbia, Gum Trees, Banksia, Westringia, Tea Tree are all excellent for native bees and birds!