permaculture

Disappearing pond

In typical Canberra fashion, we have gone straight from summer to deepest winter - tomatoes, pumpkins and capsicums that were struggling from the heat are suddenly a sodden mess after a few sharp frosts, and we're lucky to get one egg a day from our eight chooks. However, the first mandala, which has now been going for about three years, still looks quite green and lush. These photos show the area around the pond (the pond itself is in there somewhere, it's just not visible through all the vegetation).

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In contrast, the second mandala, which was established only about a year ago, is looking rather bare. Also, the pond in this mandala (an old bath) is all too visible. It's got a slow leak, so we need to let it finish leaking and repair it before we fill it and start planting around it.

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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.

New pond

With the dome now in the last position (circle 6) in the mandala, I have decided to focus on the peripherals; that is, the areas between the six circles, the one metre strip around the edge of the garden and the central circle. Last October my parents helped me put a shallow, circular pond into the central circle, and I sowed a few spring seeds around it. However, the disasterous wind storm in early November blew away a lot of the seeds and filled the pond with sawdust from the paths. Then the really hot weather came, and our two dogs started cooling off in the pond, so it hasn't exactly flourished as an aquatic environment!
Last weekend I bought a new pond - kidney shaped and much deeper than the previous one. On Sunday Bruce and I extracted the old one (and were amazed to find that the two goldfish that I'd put in a couple of months ago had not only survived, but had actually flourished!). We redug the hole and put in the new pond, managing to preserve most of the 'spring' flowers that had finally bloomed in mid-summer ...

And here is circle 5, which has been the most successful so far, with flourishing zucchinis, cucumbers, beans, corn, tomatoes, lettuces, radishes, cabbages, carrots, spring onions and peppers.