permaculture

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

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:

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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.

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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.

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.

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.