permaculture

Geodesic dome plans needed!

Good to have lots of comments on the blog recently (although I would point out that my name is Hilary, not Denise!). Thanks to Megan for the information about the permaculture course in Canberra - I'm disappointed that I don't have the spare time to attend the course.

The garden is looking great after recent rain. We're harvesting cauliflowers, fantastic broccoli and cabbages, plus masses of feral parsley.

However, the main point of this post is to respond to Donna's comment about the geodesic dome plans, which has disappeared from the web. It's several years since I built my dome, and I no longer have the print out of the instructions from Hall's Creek. A friend built a slightly smaller dome at the same time (and eventually passed his dome on to us) - but he too discarded the instructions. So, if anyone out there can help, it would be great to get a copy of the plans.

Circles

Hugh asked about the reasons for using a mandala. In The Permaculture Home Garden, Linda Woodrow gives several explanations:

• the circles require less path than rectangular beds of the same area
• you can reach several areas from a single spot (for planting, weeding, etc)
• the design neatly allows for permanently planted areas (in the edge guild - the one metre strip around the outside of the mandala, and in the centre circle) and areas that are regularly worked over by the chooks and then replanted (the six outer circles)
• the chook dome has a circular base, so it makes sense for the whole thing to have an overall circular shape.

However, having said all that, the friend who introduced me to the system is a straight-line sort of bloke, and he created a polypipe and wire chook pen with a square base, and set up a system with a series of squares instead, and it worked beautifully!

Hugh also asked about the size. The mandala is about 15 metres in diameter, made up of:

• the 1-metre edge guild on each side of the mandala
• three circles (one on each side and one in the centre), of nearly 4 metres each
• the 0.5-metre path on each side of the inner circle.

A milestone!

A special day today - the 100th post to this blog! I've just looked up the statistics and seen that we've also passed another milestone - more than 30,000 hits. Thanks to everyone who reads the blog and sends in comments - it's always good to know that people are finding it useful.

Bruce kindly climbed up on the roof to take this photo of the two mandalas (complete with me gardening in Mandala 2):

Click on photo to enlarge image

The photo shows more clearly than any words how horribly dry everything is - really depressing.

As I mentioned in a previous post, we've now got a dome on each mandala, and in the left-hand corner of the photo you can see we also have a 'nursery pen', currently full of young chicks and their mothers. It's impractical to keep a hen in a dome once it's gone broody, because the other hens continue to get into the nesting box and lay new eggs, so the broody hen ends up sitting on an ever increasing number of eggs. Another problem is that, once the eggs are hatched, little chicks can often find ways to get out of the dome, and then can't get back in again. To solve these problems, Bruce built the nursery pen, which has several places he can shut off, so that a broody hen can sit in peace on a clutch of eggs. He also reinforced the wire round the bottom to keep the little chicks in place.

We've enjoyed chook breeding, but have decided to kill off our roosters and just buy in new hens if we need them. We realised that we were putting in a lot of time, effort and money (in buying grain) to raise chicks that we didn't really need.

Water worries

The garden has been a bit depressing lately, because it's so dry and dusty, and the extreme heat has made it unpleasant to work outside for long. Also, with everything being so dry, it's been hard to find enough mulch to throw into the main dome for the chooks to turn over. This weekend, we decided on a change of plan. For the past couple of years, we've been moving the main dome round two mandalas, keeping it on each circle for about two weeks. We've also had another dome, donated by a friend, which has been sitting near the pumpkin patch. Now we've decided instead to put a dome on each mandala, and move them once a month instead of every two weeks. I'm not sure whether this will actually be more effective, but it seemed a good idea at the time!

In spite of the heat and drought, mandala 2 is still producing amazing tomatoes, zucchinis and cucumbers. Here are some of the tomatoes:

Click on photo to enlarge image

Nectarine harvest

The Permaculture Home Garden suggests planting a miniature fruit tree behind each of the circles in the mandala - in the 1-metre strip around the edge of the mandala. The book recommends selecting varieties that fruit at different times, sequenced in such a way that, as the chooks move from one circle to another, they arrive at just the right time to feast on any fallen fruit. That sort of synchronisation is beyond me, but I have planted a dwarf nectarine and several feijoas around mandala 1, and a dwarf lemon and more feijoas around mandala 2. The nectarine is several years old and has never produced anything of note, but this year it finally came good (probably because Bruce went to the trouble of netting it) - here is a photo of this year's harvest:

  Click on image to enlarge photo

I was delighted to read Naomi's comments about the blog. In response to her questions, I would say that if the chooks need to be in a place that doesn't get much sun, it's better to grow the veggies elsewhere, then just dig out the chook pen a couple of times a year and put the soil onto the veggie patch. If you have a small area in the sun, another approach might be to just have a few chooks in a small dome (ours is the largest size, you can make one for just a couple of birds).

We don't let our chooks out of the dome, but they seem happy there, especially when we move the dome onto a new circle, which gives them access to fresh greenery and insects. Before we started the dome system, our veggie garden was a large, enclosed rectangle, and the chooks were free range. They roamed about the garden (ignoring and ignored by the dogs and cat) and went into the chook house quite happily at night, but did spend a lot of time attempting to get into the veggie garden.

Cabbage harvest

Lots of photos in this post. After a couple of weeks of intermittent rain the garden is flourishing, particularly the cabbages, which are huge. The green drumhead cabbages are particularly huge; we also have red drumheads and green sugarloaf cabbages. As there is only a certain amount of cabbage one family can eat, we've been giving a lot away to friends and workmates. Here are some of the sugarloaf cabbages.

    Click on photo to enlarge image

The middle circles of each mandala are also looking good:

 

and the corn and cucumbers I planted a few weeks ago in Mandala 2 are doing well:

Permaculture in the ACt

I was interested to read Glenn's comment about a permaculture design course happening in Canberra next year - I hadn't heard about the course but it sounds really good. In response to Glenn's question, we're situated about 30 km north of Canberra, on the way towards Yass, so are probably in a similar climatic zone to his property near Goulburn.

After getting off to a fantastic spring start, our garden has been struggling a bit due to the extreme heat and lack of rain. Happily we had ~15mm on Monday night and the garden is looking better for it. The soil is still pretty dry, but the rain did at least wash the dust off the leaves. The tomatoes are flowering, we've got lots of snow peas and cauliflowers, and the first strawberries are ripening. Our fruit trees were looking great, but are now covered in aphids - we're spraying with Natrasoap to get rid of them.

Update on the bird scarer

Sara posted a comment asking about the hawk bird scarer.  It scared off the smaller birds, but wasn't so effective with the parrots, which were the main things eating our fruit, so we ended up netting most of the trees. It did make some difference, because we didn't have so many problems with birds getting caught inside the nets as in previous years. The other factor against ithe hawk is that you can't put the hawk near the chooks, because it scares them. We could only use it because our orchard is some way from the mandalas.

Our chook breeding system has started early this year, with two chicks hatched over the weekend by our Orpington, who is the best mother among our chooks.

Spring arrives

Spring has arrived with a vengeance. Only a month ago, the garden was looking quite dry and dusty, and there wasn't much sign of life. Now, after a couple of days of rain and lots of sun, the mandalas are completely transformed and are bursting with life, as you can see from the photo. The area around the pond in Mandala 1 is looking particularly good - I planted quite a lot of natives there last year and they are doing well.

Click on photo to enlarge image

We've been eating lots of stuff from the garden - mainly cauliflowers, asparagus, silverbeet and lettuce. The asparagus around Mandala 1 that I thinned out earlier this year is looking somewhat spindly, but some of the plants around Mandala 2 are throwing up really thick shoots.

Jen commented about mint - I sympathise, but haven't got a good remedy. I made the mistake of planting three sorts of mint in part of the edge guild of Mandala 1 when we first set up that mandala. Once it started making its way into the asparagus bed I decided it had to go, but it took me days to dig it all up, and months later I'm still picking out stray bits of mint. It had out-competed even the comfrey, but now I've removed most of the mint, the comfrey is flourishing again. We're allowing mint to grow near our water tank, which is a few metres away from Mandala 1, and we won't let it spread anywhere near the veggie garden.

Oiling the chooks

From time to time our chooks suffer from scaley leg (an infestation of mites that make their legs look lumpy). There are a range of different treatments, but the one we've used successfully in the past is to cover the legs with cooking oil. We would fill a small container with the oil, then Bruce would hold the bird while I 'painted' the oil onto the legs using a shoe brush. The whole thing was very messy, and we often ended up tipping over the oil container, or dripping oil onto our clothes.

At the backyard chook course I attended recently, we discussed scaley leg, and Glynda, our instructor, mentioned that someone she knows sprays WD40 onto the birds' legs! This sounded a very blokey thing to do, but Glynda pointed out that a spray can of cooking oil would probably work just as well. So today I bought a large spray can of canola oil from the supermarket and we've just oiled all the chooks in the main dome. It worked a treat, used a lot less oil, and made it easy to coat all parts of the chooks legs (doing the underside was a challenge with the shoe brush method).