permaculture

More on asparagus

Julie is one of the friends we gave the asparagus crowns to. In response to Julie's question about whether she can plant the crowns under her plum tree, I was tempted to fire off a quick response saying I was sure that would be fine (because the roots of the asparagus aren't very deep - they spread out rather than down). However, I thought better of that, and instead consulted some of the huge array of gardening books that I've collected over the years.

As usual, Jackie French had some simple and straightforward advice. In The best of Jackie French she says 'Plant in full sun, though we also grow asparagus in the mulch under apple trees - the plants aren't as productive but they have sweet, fat spears'. In Organic gardening, Peter Bennett says 'A sunny position, preferably free from strong winds and potential competition from trees ..'.

So, the answer seems to be that Julie can certainly plant her asparagus under the plum tree, but will get a better yield if she chooses a sunnier spot. The other advice from both books is not to harvest in the first year.

Working on the asparagus bed

A few weeks ago I caught the ABC's Gardening Australia progam and saw a feature on how to deal with asparagus. I knew that the plants are supposed to last about 20 years provided they are fed regularly, but hadn't realised that they need to be dug up and separated every so often. I've got two asparagus beds - one in the edge guild of each mandala - and I'm very proud of the plants because I grew them from seed (although I'm not sure why I bothered given that it's much easier to just go and buy the 2-year old roots from the garden shop).

The asparagus in the first mandala were planted about 4 years ago, so I decided to dig those up and attempt to separate them. When I saw what a state they were in, I realised I probably should have done this a while ago. I had to get Bruce to come and help me dig some of them up - adjacent plants had grown into one another, creating a huge mat of roots - no wonder they weren't producing much. Once I'd prised them apart and separated the really big ones, I ended up with about 100 plants. I replanted about a quarter of them but didn't have room for the rest, so I've passed them on to various friends. One of the teachers at my daughters school took some to plant in her orchard. Asparagus need lots of food, so I gave those I replanted plenty of sheep manure and shovelfuls of mulch from one of the domes.

Beans, dill & berries

As you can see from this picture, the broad beans are looking good in spite of the lack of rain.

The picture shows the back of the third circle in the second mandala. Behind the beans is a healthy mass of dill. Last year I put a small dill plant in the edge strip behind this circle and it thrived. Unfortunately I hadn't got round to using any of it in cooking when Bruce over-enthusiastically cleared the circle in preparation for the dome moving onto it, and pulled up the dill plant by mistake. Anyway, the plant had partly gone to seed, so we left it on the edge guild and, as you can see, it has produced a forest of dill.

In the background of that photo is the berry fence around the second mandala. We put in the fence about a year ago, and a few months ago I put down a thick layer of newspaper covered with straw ready to plant into. Sadly I missed out on getting the berries that were on offer from the Diggers Club - I left it too late and they'd all gone. All I could find in the garden shops in Canberra were raspberries, so I bought a selection of those, but I really wanted a range of different berries. On a trip to Bega last weekend I was delighted to find loganberries, boysenberries, youngberries and a thornless blackberry. I bought several of each, and this weekend I planted them around Mandala 2.

You'll see from the photo below that I have taken the intelligent step of putting the labels on the fence rather than leaving them on the berries where they'll disappear among the foliage. I'm hoping that once these plants bear fruit, it will mean I can identify the berries I planted round Mandala 1 (I managed to lose all the labels off those, but I'm pretty sure I have the same range of berries in there somewhere!).

Feijoas

First to answer Andrew's comment about the course I went on at CIT Solutions. It was called Urban chook pen and was run by Glynda Bluhm of Alpaca Magic. I can't find it among the recreational courses on the CIT Solutions website, I think because next semester's brochure has not been published yet. I'd highly recommend the course and have already put into practice some of what I learnt - we killed 3 young roosters recently and I was able to use Glynda's method of skinning them as they were rather than plucking them first. This saved a lot of time (at least, it did on the second two birds, the first had so many feathers that I had trouble finding the end of the intestines to cut round and remove them, so ended up having to pull off a lot of feathers anyway!).

Now to what's growing, or rather, what grew this summer. I have lots of pineapple and strawberry guava shrubs planted in the edge strips around the two mandalas. They've had beautiful flowers in the last couple of years, but did not appear to have produced any fruit. However, at the weekend I was clearing some of the vegetation off a circle before moving the chooks onto it, and found at least 20 feijoas on the ground near one of the shrubs - it's one of the first that I planted and is probably at least 3 years old now. I think the fruit has probably been sitting under the shrub for a while, but it tasted really good.

The main things growing at the moment are broad beans (which are getting lots of flowers), snow peas, cabbages, garlic and broccoli. The broccoli is beset by thrips, but at the weekend I attempted to fix this using a recipe from a book of green gardening tips. I steeped chopped onions in boiling water overnight, strained and diluted the liquid and then poured it around the plants. It's hard to see how this could have any effect on the thrips, but I'll wait and see.

Lots learnt about chooks

I've just been on a backyard chook course at Canberra Institute of Technology. I attended the course because I wanted to find out more about keeping ducks; after all, we've had chooks for years now, so I thought I knew most of what I needed to know. Well, I was wrong, there were lots of useful things about chooks that I should have known, but didn't. The main things I learnt about chooks (and ducks) were:

• don't use straw for the nesting box - mites and other insects live inside the stalks and infest the birds; instead, use a mixture of things like shell grit, sand and wood shavings
• if you're delousing a chook, you only need to powder the underside, not the whole bird
• if the chooks have scaly leg, you can spray their legs with cooking oil from a can (I already knew about the oil, but had been trying to put it on from a container with a shoe brush - spraying it on sounds much easier) 
• chooks drink first thing in the morning, so if you want to worm them, you take the water away at about 4pm the night before, then give them fresh water containing the worming chemical the next morning and they'll all dose themselves on it
• a 2-L plastic milk carton with part of the side cut out makes a great drinking vessel for chooks (keeps the dust out of the water)
• if you're killing a chook to eat, don't feed it for 24 hours (so that the intestines are clean), then once it's dead, you can remove the skin with the feathers on as an alternative to plucking the bird (saves a lot of time and mess if you're only going to throw the feathers away anyway)
• ducks don't need a whole bath full of water, just something deep enough for them to put their heads into.

There's still another session of the course to go, so no doubt I'll learn even more useful things at that.

Feeding the chooks

There hasn't been much activity on this blog of late because we have had problems with our internet access for some months - very frustrating. However, our chooks continue to flourish. We've given two hens away to the neighbours and will soon be getting a new rooster from them in return (we decided it was time for some fresh blood in the flock), and there are some young roosters almost ready for the pot. Our local vet has instructed us in the art of chick sexing so now we don't have to wait for them to crow or lay eggs before knowing which birds to keep and which to eat.

I was delighted to get comments from a reader in China! In response to Lale's comment, we buy organic chook food and get through several kilos a week. That's supplemented by our food scraps and some greens from the garden. In addition, we have 3 families around Canberra saving their food scraps for us, so once a week we visit them to pick up a full bucket compost and leave a replacement bucket and some eggs or produce from the garden. This helps to give the chooks a more varied diet. Of course, the chooks in the main dome also get to feast on greenery, worms and insects each time the dome moves, which is generally every two weeks.

Thanks to CRTOMIR for all that information on raising chooks - it sounds as though you've got a really good system going, with some very contented birds. Ours don't have much protection from the weather, so they are not so good at laying in the height of summer or winter.

Reaching full capacity

Our poultry population continues to expand - the broody chook I brought home from work (which Bruce has christened 'Janet', after my boss) successfully hatched six eggs and we still have two of our own hens sitting on yet more eggs. I thought we were doing very well until I saw Rose's comment that she has 67 chicks - can't compete with that!

Actually the domes are nearly at full capacity. The Permaculture Home Garden suggests a maximum of 12 birds per dome, and we've currently got:

• 8 hens and 1 rooster in the main dome that's travelling round the mandalas
• 4 hens and 1 rooster in the smaller dome that sits next to Bruce's veggie patch by the septic tank, plus 13 chicks ranging in age from about 2 to 6 weeks
• 2 broody hens sitting on eggs in the A frame that we use as a maternity ward.

That makes 29 birds altogether, plus whatever hatches from the two broody hens, which is way too many. So, once the chicks get big enough, we'll eat any that are roosters, and keep the female ones to replace some of our older birds that aren't laying very well. We'll also do a rooster swap with our neighbours, to get some new blood into our flock, which is getting rather inbred.

Yet more chicks

This blog has been a bit quiet over the past month, it's been too hot to do much in the garden, and when I could get outside I've been busy building a mini-oven, as a practice for building a wood-fired pizza oven in the backyard.

We've got a great crop of tomatoes this year, including some really large ones (normally our tomatoes aren't too successful, and those we do grow are rather small). Bruce weighed one of the bigger ones and it was 420g, and amazingly it hadn't got any insects eating it from the inside (another common problem with our tomatoes). We've also got massive zucchinis - although we're trying to pick them when they're a reasonable size, many of the circles are so overgrown that it's easy to miss the odd zucchini, and by the time you find it, it's huge. As we've also got some egg-plants and basil, we'll be able to make a few good batches of ratatouille.

Here are some of our latest group of chicks. We've had 2 lots hatch already this summer (three chicks in the first lot, four in the second), and we've currently got two more broody hens sitting on eggs (including a hen that belongs to my boss - as she doesn't have a rooster,  it was sitting on infertile eggs, so I took pity on it and have put it onto some of our fertile eggs).

Click on image to enlarge photo

Supplementing the xmas fare

The great rain that we've had recently, coupled with some hot sunny days, means that the garden is thriving. Both mandalas are really taking shape, and the garden probably looks better than it ever has.

We managed to get plenty of our own produce into the xmas dinner. I went out on Christmas Day morning to dig up potatoes and harvest zucchinis. We also had our own eggs, onions, herbs (parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme and chives), a few little tomatoes, and loads of berries. The berries, which are planted as a 'living fence' around the first mandala, have taken a couple of years to get established. Unfortunately, during that time they've lost their labels. We've been able to identify raspberries, boysenberries, cape gooseberries, red currants and black currants, but there are several other plants I can't identify. I think I planted silvanberries, a thornless blackberry, jostaberries (pronounced 'yostaberries') and loganberries. However, some of the plants died, and I can't work out the identity of most of those that survived.

I'm going to have to take some cuttings into the farmer's market (where I bought some of the plants) and see if one of the plant sellers can tell me what they are. We did this with the herbs and it was very successful - thanks to the herb seller at the markets we now know what we're growing in the edge guild around both mandalas.

Here is a photo of two of our latest brood of chicks (three survived from this clutch and we have another chook sitting on eight eggs that are due to hatch on New Year's day):

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Sunflowers

We've had some fantastic rain and the garden is flourishing, although the weeds are, of course, growing at the same rate as (or even faster than) the veggies, so there's lots of weeding to do. Our zucchinis have been really early this year, we've been harvesting them for nearly a month now - this is in stark contrast to last year, when late frosts killed about three zucchini plantings and I almost gave up trying to grow them.

I didn't get round to taking any photos this weekend, but as we've got lots of sunflowers looking as though they're about to burst into flower, I thought I'd throw in this photo of one of last year's sunflowers. I'm not sure what variety it is - I did plant some seeds from Diggers, but we also have sunflower seeds in the chook food, so it could have come from there. Last year, someone at a writers' group Bruce attends asked whether there was a limit to how many heads a sunflower could have. One of the group thought the answer was 18, so Bruce snapped this picture to prove that it was actually many more (I gave up counting when I got to 50).

Click on photo to enlarge image