permaculture

Rain!

After weeks of not being able to garden thanks to the hot, windy weather, we finally had rain (over 80 mm already!) and cool temperatures over the Xmas break. The garden is looking better already, and we should soon have plenty of tomatoes, zuchinnis, cucumbers, peppers and aubergines.

I've been trying to buy less food and eat more from the garden. That's been difficult, given that the only edible things we have at the moment are herbs, snow peas, a few berries and some spinach. However, for Xmas lunch I made rice paper rolls, which included our own Thai basil (planted years ago in the pond but never used), mint and snow peas. Here are some photos (click on the photos to enlarge the images):

The edge of the pond (an old bath tub) in Mandala 2, with the basil tucked in among the reeds.

A circle in Mandala 1, with tomatoes, cucumber, some corn and lots of potatoes at the back.

A similar circle in Mandala 2, but with lots of sunflowers (from seeds left over from the chook feed).

A healthy looking dwarf nectarine, planted this year in the edge strip around Mandala 1.

A pathetic blueberry, planted about 3 years ago in the edge strip around Mandala 1. The berry fence around the outside of Mandala 1.

The berries were looking great a few weeks ago, but got too hot and dry.

 

More chicks

We have had 2 lots of chicks hatched this spring. Bruce organises this side of things, and he seems to be getting better at it as the numbers have increased - 8 in one hatching and 10 in the other. The white hen shown in the picture is our best 'mother' - she is always the first to go broody each spring. I've also put in a photo of some of the lovely produce we've been harvesting. It was a great year for cauliflowers, and I've been making huge quantities of roast cauliflower soup.

I don't have an answer to Lenore's query about a self feeding box for wild pheasant, but I know that Earth Garden carries adverts for a chook-feeding box similar to the one she describes (ie one that opens when the birds stand on a platform and closes when they hop off), so maybe that would do.

Click on photo to enlarge image

 

Chook heaven

A friend texted me this evening to alert me to Costa's Garden Odyssey, which had a segment on chook domes in a mandala garden at Purple Pear Organics in the Hunter Valley. The garden looked fabulous; it followed the Linda Woodrow design, but didn't seem to have the 1-m strips round the edge of each circle. Also, their gardens were much neater and tidier than mine!

Our mandalas have gone wild in the recent rain, and last weekend we moved one of the domes onto an extremely verdant circle. Bruce wasn't sure that the chooks would cope, he also thought they'd escape as we lifted the dome up to get it over all the plants. Happily, his fears were groundless. The chooks were so excited by all the greenery that they plunged straight into it, apparently with no thought of escaping, although one did get stuck between the wire of the dome and the plants pressing against it, so I had to go in and knock over a few plants to free it. Within days, the chooks had stripped all the leaves and the cirle is now looking quite bare. Here are some photos of the chooks when we first moved the dome, plus me trying to get back out of the dome (the door is just a bit too high for me).

 Click on photo to enlarge image

 
 

Small scale and square!

Over the years, several people have commented that they like the mandala system but don't have room to set it up. Well, here's a solution. The friend who first put me on to Linda Woodrow's book has set up a mini-system in the back yard of his townhouse in Canberra. He likes straight lines, so has created a set of squares in a patchwork layout, rather than a circle (he did the same when he was running a full-size system, using a dome with a square base).  At present he is running the system with two chooks - a bantam and a young standard barnyard chook that will grow to a medium size - but is thinking of downsizing to a single chook. 

 Click on photo to enlarge image

Sump oil and chook feet

I've mentioned a few times on this blog the problems our chooks have with scaley leg. Over the years, we've been treating it by dunking the chooks legs in vegetable oil (an operation that requires at least 2 people) and dusting the perches with Derris dust. I later had the good idea of trying spray-on oil cooking. It was great - the spraying was much easier than finding a suitable size vessel for dunking the legs, and it used less oil; the only downside was that it didn't work - the oil just didn't go on thickly enough.

Recently, the problem has re-emerged, and at the same time we've had our local vet out on the property giving the donkey injections for an abcess on her leg. Bruce raised the question of scaley leg with the vet, and she told him that we weren't using the right materials. She recommended sump oil rather than cooking oil (because it's so thick and heavy, it sticks well to the legs), and tobacco juice rather than Derris dust. You take a packet of rolling tobacco, soak it in water overnight, strain the tobacco out, then paint the resulting foul-smelling brew onto the perches. It's apparently extremely toxic to all sorts of bugs.

We have tried this approach with great success (although I made the mistake of stirring the tobacco in with my hands, which left them smelling as though I had a 50-a-day habit!). The chooks perked up almost immediately after the treatment and are looking really good a few weeks later.

Foxes, protection and potting mix

To answer the many questions from Janelle:

• Foxes - The dome is not fox proof. Last year we lost several chooks one night - a fox got in through the lid of the old oil drum we were using as a nesting box and yanked out 3 or 4 chicks. At the time, the dome was parked at the far end of the garden (away from the mandalas and way past the end of the dog's running chain). We moved the dome closer to the mandalas and extended Woody's running chain, and have had no more problems. So, we think that the only thing keeping foxes at bay is the dog.

• Protection - I used to worry a lot about the chooks not having enough protection from the weather, and I put up some shade cloth around the base of the original dome, but now they have very little protection and must be reasonably happy because they are producing lots of eggs.
  The flatter, geodesic dome works better for us than the original design - the flatter top makes it easier to give the chooks protection with the tarpaulin that goes over the top. We extend that tarpaulin to the ground on the side where the wind usually comes from, we also spray them with water when it gets really hot. I have thought of experimenting with sacks filled with straw, to make some sort of cover for the top, but haven't got round to that yet.

• Spreading out scraps  - our mandalas are on a gentle slope, so all the material we chuck in ends up in a heap at the bottom. We just pull it all to the middle of the circle and redistribute it before planting.

• Potting mix - I used to make potting mix to Linda's recipe (one third each of compost, sand and worm castings), and her seedraising mix (which I think was pulverised cow manure and sand). However, I've lost my enthusiasm for seed raising, so I buy seedlings from the local farmers market instead (where I can get all sorts of heirloom varieties), and just throw a handful of worm castings into the hole when planting out the seedlings.

Mindful mulching

Over the past couple of weeks I've been getting the edge guilds (the one-metre strips around the edge of the mandalas) into shape, as they were quite overgrown. We've had a fair bit of rain, which has made it easy to pull up the huge clumps of grass and other weeds, to reveal some fabulous soil - black, rich and deep - it looked good enough to eat!

I'm currently doing a mindfulness meditation course, and part of the homework is to do activities throughout the day 'mindfully' (ie being aware of your thoughts, feelings and sensations as you do something, rather than dwelling on the past or worrying about the future). So I turned this morning's mulching activities into a mindfulness exercise, and focused on the feel of the soggy newspapers as I dragged them out of the wheelbarrow, the sound of them as I slapped them down onto the ground, and the satisfaction of covering them with straw to produce a lovely mulched bed. 

I've planted a couple more dwarf fruit trees, and several fejoias in the edge guild of mandala 2, and need to plant out more perennial herbs to fill it up. I've done all I can for the moment, and am now waiting for the asparagus to come up (it's just started to appear) so that I can mulch around it.

Overdose of greens

The comments have been coming thick and fast recently. Thanks to all who have commented, and particular thanks to Nick for providing a copy of Robert's plans for building a geodesic dome, I was beginning to think that I'd need to go out and measure the domes in the garden to get the dimensions.

Meanwhile, the garden is absolutely bursting with cabbages, broccoli, cauliflowers and feral parsley. Bruce took these lovely shots of a couple of circles in mandala 2:

 

 Click on photos to enlarge images

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.