permaculture

Grass seed

After months of dry weather, we've finally had some rain, so the grass is growing well on new grass path. Madeleine asked what grass seed we'd recommend - we're using Hortico Lawn Seed, and it seems to work well.

We've had a delightful German WWOOFER staying with us for 10 days. He has mulched the edge guild in both mandalas with wood chips from our property (we had professional tree fellers in to cut down a large pine tree that was growing too close to the electricity line).

New path

The path in Mandala 1 has always been a problem. When I first set up the permaculture garden, I followed Linda Woodrow's book to the letter, so I dug out a path and filled it with sawdust. Only months later a windstorm arrived that destroyed both the original chook dome and the path. Most of the sawdust was picked up by the wind and distributed either over the garden beds or into the pond in the middle circle. Bruce then had the bright idea of constructing a bark path, using the bark from the pine logs we cut for firewood. This turned out to be highly labour intensive, and the first job for our WOOFERs was to weed the bark path. Meanwhile, in Mandala 2, we simply left the grass to grow in the paths, and that's been much easier to maintain - we just mow it regularly. 

Last month Bruce finally admitted defeat and decided to swap the bark path in Mandala 1 for a grass one. Our French WWOOFER, Aud, did a great job of clearing the path of bark and weeds, then sowing it with grass seed. Now we have the first green shoots appearing. Here are some photos of the newly cleared path, with our fantastic crop of sunflowers (all self sown) in the background.

  Click on photos to enlarge images

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.

Huge progress

With only 3 weeks to go until we run our CIT course, which will feature a tour of the permaculture garden, I have been hugely focused on getting the garden into shape (luckily Bruce has too, he did a fantastic job of mowing the entire back yard). Jobs that had been on the 'to do' list for more than a year were to complete the edge guild around the second mandala and set up a fence to grow berries around that part of the garden.

The Permaculture Home Garden contains little advice on how to set up the 1-metre edge strip, so my approach has been to just dig up the grass or weeds, lay them on the soil (to give the worms something to digest), add a dripper hose, cover the lot with a thick layer of wet newspaper and then pile copious amounts of straw on top of the paper. I've got this process down to a fine art, and by putting the newspaper into a wheelbarrow of water (rather than laying it down and then wetting it), I can even do this on a windy day, which is just as well, since last weekend was horribly windy. Amazingly, I managed to rope in my teenaged daughter to help with laying down the wet newspaper (a major achievement, given her aversion to anything concerning soil!), and the edge guild of mandala 2 is now complete.

Here are some photos of manadala 2, the forest of peas that I mentioned in my last blog (finally producing actual peas), and a couple of asparagus plants - we actually had enough to make asparagus soup recently).

Click on images to enlarge photos

 

Not quite sharing ...

Things are a bit confusing in the garden at the moment. First, I spoke too soon when I said that Bruce would take on half the circles. It turns out that when he said this, he was only referring to mandala 2, which we were standing in at the time, whereas I, with my more holistic view of the world, thought he was referring to both mandalas! In fact I'm quite happy that he's not prepared to venture into mandala 1, as I was already somewhat regretting my decision to let him into my garden as well as the rest of my life. So, I'm just going to have to find other ways to make sure the garden achieves its full potential.

The other problem is timing. I planted snow peas into a circle in mandala 1 several months ago; suddenly they are bursting with flowers and are no doubt going to produce masses of snow peas (so far the peas are few and far between), but the chooks are due to move onto that circle next weekend. I think the chooks will just have to have a 3-week stint in their current position rather than the normal 2-week period, because I can't bear to have them shred the peas that will soon be so productive. 

Sharing the circles

It was very exciting this week to have the garden feature on the front cover of Earth Garden. If I'd realised the photo was going to be on the cover in full colour I'd have made more effort to tidy up the tarpaulin that covers the dome! (I'd probably also have edited out Woody, the dog, who is currently in disgrace for breaking into the grass catcher and eating all the eggs - he is lurking behind the grass catcher in this photo.)

Another momentous event in recent weeks was my decision to give my partner, Bruce, half the circles in the two mandalas. If you've read the Earth Garden article, you'll know that I started the permaculture system after a dispute with Bruce over how closely to plant tomatoes. Since then, we've resolutely stuck to our different parts of the garden (me with the mandalas, Bruce with the septic tank overflow).

Eventually I have had to admit that the mandala system could be a lot more productive if I only had more time to work on it, so it makes sense to give Bruce every alternate circle to cultivate. We've hoping that this arrangement will allow us to get more produce from the system without disrupting domestic harmony - I'll still be able to plant my tomatoes close together in my circles, and Bruce can continue to do the opposite in his circles.

Given that my gardening style is somewhat haphazard and Bruce's tends to be more regimented, it will be interesting to see what the whole mandala looks like as our plantings develop. As the resolution of GoogleEarth improves, no doubt it will eventually be possible to determine which circle belongs to whom from the satellite images!

Mandala 2 takes shape

This blog has been a bit quiet lately because I've been away for a month, visiting relatives in the UK. I was a bit shocked to come back to find the second mandala transformed - a neat brick edging now surrounds the middle circle and the top half of the whole mandala, and two new pathways have been added. We had agreed before I left that Bruce would do a bit of work on it in my absence, but it was still a surprise to see it so transformed! Here's how it looks now:

Click on image to enlarge photo

There's always a bit of tension in our garden between Bruce's neat and tidy ways, and my rather more lackadaisical approach. But I have to admit, it's nice to be able to see where the mandala starts and finishes, and to have the middle circle clearly defined. The two white posts in the middle circle are our own little Siev X memorial.

As you can see from the photo, the second mandala looks a bit bare, but the first one is thriving, with masses of broccoli and cabbage, and a beautiful globe artichoke (the only one I've managed to grow) in the edge of that mandala.

     

Click on images to enlarge photos

Second mandala

It's nearly 2 years since we built the chook dome and started the first mandala. During that time, we've usually moved the dome every 4-6 weeks, rather than 2-weekly (as suggested in Linda Woodrow's book). This weekend I decided it was time to start following the book more closely, and that the best way to do this would be to have a second mandala, with the dome spending 2 weeks on each of 12 circles (6 in each mandala), which would leave 22 weeks growing time for each circle.

When we created the first mandala, I spent weeks measuring the area and trying to work out where to locate it. This time around the process seemed much simpler (probably because we'd got the existing mandala to use as a guide). Within a couple of hours of making the decision to start a second mandala, we'd paced out the new area (adjacent to the first mandala) and moved the dome. There was a slight hiccup when all the birds escaped as we tried to manoeuvre the dome over the edge guild, but we eventually caught them all and they are now happily esconced in their new location.

Learning from previous experience, we've started the second mandala by putting the dome in the middle circle (we didn't do that the first time - we just moved the dome round the outer circles). The chooks will only go there once, to get the ground prepared before we put in a pond and plant some flowers. The other thing I'm going to do differently this time is to spend as little money as possible. The first mandala is a luxury one - it's had large amounts of money spent on mulch, materials for the paths, a pond etc. This time I'm going to see what I can do by simply scrounging things. In keeping with this intention, the pond in Mandala Mark 2 will be an old bath that Bruce had lying around the farm.

Full circle

Finally, a photo of the whole circle (or at least, most of it - it's hard to get high enought to get a good view of the whole thing). It probably looks a bit bleak in this picture - but we are in the middle of winter here.

What you can see on the left of the picture is the new berry fence (you can't see the newly planted berries yet). There's not a lot growing in the circles - just a few peas and some cabbages that survived the onslaught of about 100 sheep, who got into the garden through an open gate a few weeks ago. The little 'tunnel' is covering some silver beet, which gets shredded, possibly by birds, if left uncovered.

Click on image to enlarge photo