I Would Love to Keep Chooks, But…

One of the approaches to gardening that I find most appealing is permaculture. It seems to make total sense. Why work against the natural processes when you can be more productive working with them? At least in theory! I’ve never tried it so don’t know whether it would work for me. If there are any shortcomings with permaculture I would be the one to find them.

I’ve done a little reading on the topic to see whether I could use permaculture principles for my own garden, but have found that it seems more applicable to larger properties.
Yes I know how some people have transformed their ¼ acre blocks into permaculture paradises (see here http://www.happyearth.com.au/ ) but they didn’t have MY block to work with.

Unfortunately there are a couple of vital aspects of a permaculture property that I would find troublesome. One is installing some kind of a pond (Gloria even objects to having water in the bird bath, fearing its mosquito breeding potential). And the other is keeping chooks.

I would love to keep chooks but… and there are several reasons I hesitate…

1) Where would I put them?

2) I’d have to build a suitable enclosure and my DIY skills have never successfully stretched that far

3) The responsibility of keeping something alive! Its one thing to kill a lettuce through careless neglect, but an animal is something else.

4) Their potential to attract pests and vermin, which in turn have the potential to attract snakes.

5) We regularly go away for the weekend to visit family – how long can they (the chooks not the family) be left unattended while we are away?

6) We are not allowed to keep livestock on our block (a legal aspect of the property contract that we weren’t aware of until before purchasing the house) – which may or may not extend to poultry.

7) How would they cope with the frosts and -6 degree temperatures that we regularly get over winter? (And frosts can extend from mid autumn to late spring).

8) How would the neighbouring dogs react (we’re surrounded by them).

I’m sure a couple of chickens could provide many benefits, eggs, manure, pest control… but would those benefits outweigh the problems?


photo: Hen by Darren Hanlon

Time to Rethink

I think I saw the DVD Food Inc at the right time, when I was reconsidering what to do with my backyard. The film has reinvigorated my desire to turn it into something much more productive.

It is now almost 5 years since I started the garden and my approach has always been uncoordinated. I hoped something worthwhile would evolve as I tried a bit of this and a bit of that. My hopes haven't been very fruitful.

When we moved from out flat in Sydney I had three things in mind for our first garden. I wanted natives (especially Grevilleas), I wanted Roses, and I wanted to grow my own veggies.

I now have a promising native garden growing in the front of the house as well as a variety of Grevilleas near the fence at the back. Some of them weren’t placed very wisely and have grown much larger than I made allowance for, but at least they provide thick cover for birds and attract a variety of honey eaters.

Roses have been more of a struggle. They don’t cope too well with the weather extremes. We get a wonderful show of flowers for a week or so in spring and then they get knocked about by the heat, the rain or the wind. They have been a disappointment but I don’t want to give up on them.

The vegetable garden has given mixed results. At times we don’t seem to have enough room to grow what we want – and at other times we struggle to make use of the space we’ve got. We’ve also had a lot of failures; some things just don’t want to perform well.

Along with all of this I’ve tried to add a few flowering plants. While a few pockets of this ornamental part of the garden have been pleasing, we have far too many areas that haven’t worked.

I mentioned in an earlier post that the latest veggie season hadn’t been the best. At least the failures have given me the chance to clear up the veggie beds and start over again.

At the moment I have a bed of zucchinis, squash and pumpkins that are coming to their end. It will be ready for re-use in a few weeks.

The other three main beds were empty up to last weekend. One I have planted with garlic, taking up most of the room I had intended for onions. Another I plan to use for broccoli, which are the only brassicas that I’ve successfully grown.

The third has become a dumping ground for grass cuttings, leafy weeds and other organic material, along with an application of manure and blood and bone. I have now thickly sown broad beans on the top of it all and have covered the beans with some cheap potting mix. This third bed has become a no-dig project. When the beans have grown sufficiently I’ll either cut them down and mix them in, or I’ll flatten them and pile biscuits of straw on top.

Meanwhile I will be looking at the rest of the garden and thinking of how to reorganise it, to give more room for other edibles.

Surely next season HAS to be better!

We’ve just had the worst vegetable season since our move to the country almost five years ago. It’s the first time we haven’t needed to give away a surplus of zucchinis. We’ve barely had enough to keep ourselves going, even with the addition of three plants of button squash filling the shortfall.

Our butternut pumpkins have also been very disappointing. We’ll be lucky to get 10 pumpkins this year. In previous years we’ve always exceeded 50.

Tomatoes have never been much of a success at our place, so even the poor crop we got was a slight improvement, but it ought to have been much better. Gloria pulled up the last couple of plants yesterday.
And our corn was possibly left too late before being picked – it was very dry despite having more than ample water with the record summer rains.

Our main successes have been onions (even though they were down on previous years), garlic, beans (lazy housewife and purple king are still pickable) and several cucumbers (the most we’ve grown so far).

I now have three empty veggie beds. One has been enriched with homemade compost and several bags of cow manure. On another I’ve been throwing prunings and grass clippings. I’ll top that with straw when I get around to buying a bale or two and hopefully will make it into a decent no-dig garden. The future of the third bed is still to be decided.
The only bed still in use has the last of the zucchini, squash and pumpkins. With frosts not too far away the productivity of that bed is also close to an end. So soon I’ll have a totally blank canvas to start all over again.

No More Cabbages!!!

I’m giving up on cabbages.
I am also abandoning cauliflowers.
Both continually disappoint in my garden.

This year the cabbages seemed to be doing really well. I grew them under netting which was very successful in keeping them free from caterpillars. However, when the cabbage moth couldn’t spoil the crop, the slugs “stepped” in to take their place. And earth worms haven’t helped either. Both have made their home between the leaves. It’s impossible to use the cabbage without removing each leaf separately to pick off the slugs and worms, this really spoils the appetite.

Instead of wasting more time and garden space on leafy veg failures, I’ll stick with things that do well. This year we tried Kale for the first time. It crops prolifically a short time after planting and it provides a very worthwhile alternative to cabbage.

We’ll also stick with broccoli. The netting idea has helped prevent last years problems in which the broccoli heads were infested with caterpillars. The net keeps away the butterflies, preventing them laying their eggs on the veggies, therefore keeping them free from caterpillars. I’m not sure what type of plants we used this year, but the broccoli heads are massive – dinner plate size – and the smaller side shoots which are usually broccolini-like, are more the size of the normal broccoli heads sold in the supermarket.

The Alternative Kitchen Garden an A-Z

I’ve tried a few times to start this review but haven’t been happy with any of my attempts so far. So I decided to stop trying any “cleverness” and to come to the point. The Alternative Kitchen Garden an A-Z is an excellent book.

It is a joy to read, it is informative, encouraging and entertaining. It can be read one topic per sitting if time is short, or if circumstances and several free hours permit it could easily be read from cover to cover with barely a break.

Emma Cooper is an enthusiastic amateur gardener sharing her experiences and discoveries. Many gardening books have left me discouraged, making the garden seem like an alien environment needing detailed technical knowhow and abundant finances to maintain. This book helps make a successful garden seem more attainable.

There are sections covering many gardening related topics arranged in alphabetical order. A quick count reveals around 150 separate topics are covered. Different kinds of vegetables, garden pests, soil conditions, gardening practices, environmental issues and helpful resources are all touched upon in sufficient, but not overwhelming detail, most of them across two pages.

Cooper seems to have a particular interest in trying the unusual, from exotic fruit and veggies to using a Grow Dome instead of a traditional green house, but this does not distract from more common and widely familiar plants and gardening experiences.

While many readers wouldn’t see the need to grow Quamash (”an edible bulb, a staple food of native Americans”) or Tiger Nuts (an edible tuber related to papyrus), Cooper still makes them interesting topics to show we don’t need to stick to the common and predictable within the garden. Experimentation and discovery can add a new dimension of interest and maybe extend our diet beyond the handful of familiar veggies we tend to stick with.

The Alternative Kitchen Garden is a very personal account of gardening, and as the title indicates it relates mainly to the growing of edibles. I’ve wanted to increase the productiveness of my own garden by incorporating more food producing plants and I appreciate the help and inspiration this book provides.

For a very good idea of what the book’s content I recommend a listen to some of the Alternative Kitchen Garden (AKG) podcasts. The link will be provided below.
The podcast was my introduction to Emma Cooper. Her short broadcasts, and now her book, have been very helpful for my own gardening journey. Somehow she manages to discover and share basic information that the gardening “experts” somehow forget to tell us.
Before I discovered AKG I had been puzzled by the round garlic-lie balls that had grown in my garden. These I found are the product of bulbils, tiny cloves that grow on soft-neck garlic. If left in soil they grow into the single balls of garlic that I had found. When these balls are left a further year (or when replanted) they form into the more familiar segmented heads of garlic cloves.


Link to The Alternative Kitchen Garden Podcast:
http://coopette.com/akg

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Asparagus and a fine weekend

It is now the start of the third year the after planting of our two asparagus crowns and we have reaped our first harvest. The total first crop is illustrated in the accompanying photo.

There is another spear on the way, but it’s not quite ready to cut. Hopefully it will be ready soon enough to prevent arguments over who gets to eat. A second spear would at least give us one each.

Saturday and Sunday were the first fine weekend we’ve had for some time and I was able to get a few things done. However I didn’t get round to weeding a narrow garden alongside our boundary fence. It is getting quite overgrown with a healthy crop of low growing weeds. If only the veggies thrived as well.

Maybe I’ve been bit too optimistic, but I planted out two Roma tomato plants. I’ve given them a little protection with plastic guards in case we get another frost. One of the unfortunate things of our location is the unexpected frosts, which often come in October and even into November. So any planting of frost tender plants has an element of risk. But the alternative is leaving planting until very late Spring or early summer.

I also sowed seeds into a few punnets.
I’ve had very little success with growing from seed. In the past pumpkin, Zucchini and beans have done very well. Onions have also succeeded. But everything else has been very hit and miss. On Saturday I sowed some Rhubarb and Asparagus as well as some ornamentals: Penstemon, Larkspur and California poppies. To (hopefully) improve their chances I’ve placed them in a temporary “green house” made out of an upturned plastic storage box.

It’s now been a couple of weeks since the shed was built and I’ve moved the mower, mulcher and kettle barbecue into it. That has given me a lot more room in the garage. I haven’t totally solved the problem of the leaks, but I have an idea where some of the water has been getting in and I’ll attempt to fix that before too long.

I did notice one little pool of water yesterday that had no logical source. I checked all around the concrete outside the shed, I checked the walls, and the roof and the pool seemed to have no source. The only conclusion I can draw is that it’s coming up out of the floor itself.

Reviewing The Shed

Before buying a book a CD or a DVD, or before seeing a movie, we can refer to reviews to get an idea of whether it suits our tastes and requirements. There are even reviews of restaurants and wines which can help us make informed choices. But as far as I know, similar resources are not available to help us choose a significantly more expensive and long lasting item - a garden shed.

One thing we overlooked when we bought our house was its lack of storage, and in particular outside storage. For four years our gardening equipment has been taking up room in the garage, at times making movement around the garage difficult.

A few weeks ago, after considering a lot of different options, we were seduced by a glossy advertising leaflet that came with the junk mail. Several different sheds were offered at sale prices. One looked particularly attractive, was the right size and came with a window panel. It also had a 20 year warranty. It looked to be exactly what we were looking for so we placed an order.

A week later the kit was delivered and we arranged for a suitably skilled friend to assemble it. Last Friday he came around, and when I got home from work the shed was finished – but what a disappointment.

1) The paperwork with the shed said the warranty was 12 years and not the 20 years in the leaflet (which we no longer have).
2) The panels were joined together with self-tapping screws, which mostly had their sharp points exposed inside the shed.
3) There were a couple of sharp edges exposed on the door.
4) The next morning the inside walls and roof were dripping with condensation.
5) Despite sealing all around with silicone, after the weekend’s heavy rain the floor inside was soaked. We were able to remove half a bucketful of water.

When I consider the cost of the shed alongside the disappointing product, for not much more I could have had a much more suitable and efficient shed custom built.

End of Neglect?

Over winter the garden has been a little neglected. This has been reflected in the lack of gardening content on this blog. Now winter is coming to a close but its last effects remain.

We’ve had only five rain free days this month (and eight last month) and our water tank has been continually full and overflowing. If only that overflow water could be saved until it could be put to good use in summer!

A 10,000 litre tank seemed to be a good size but it fills quickly with steady rain and empties equally quickly during dry spells. But what more can be done on land in town? Even if we could afford more tanks where would we put them?

I can only wonder what can be expected in summer. How quickly will the garden dry out again once the temperatures start rising? Will we go from one extreme to the other?

At the moment the veggie garden is starting to show a little promise. A bed of onions is coming along nicely, and for once my brassicas aren’t looking too bad. I’ve been growing most of my cabbages and broccoli under bird netting to prevent access by butterflies. Last year we had a lot of trouble with caterpillars. I’m confident that the netting will keep the butterflies out. The holes in the mesh are about 1cm in diameter.

I also have another bed with Kale, lettuces and more cabbage which will need to be netted soon. So far it’s been too cold for butterflies to cause a problem with more newly planted seedlings. The covered bed with more mature plants was established earlier while there were still a few butterflies around before the real cold of winter hit.

This year’s crop of garlic is showing mixed results. I have Russian garlic going well and I also have Silverskins and Australian Whites. One of the latter two has been growing quite strangely (I don’t recall which one at the moment). It has sent up leaves like clumps of thick grass. Gloria told me that when she used that type of garlic in her cooking, each individual clove tended to disintegrate further into separate, thin little bulbs. I also found the same thing when I planted some of them. I’m not sure that I’ll grow that type again – even though they didn’t show that characteristic last year.

Another plant that is causing me some concern is the raspberry. I planted it last year and had no fruit at all over summer (which would probably be normal) but now it is sending suckers everywhere and little shoots are springing up a metre and a half away from the parent plant, even in my garlic bed having tunnelled under a small brick retaining wall.
I’ve decided to leave it alone for the next growing season, hoping to get enough fruit for it to repay the cost of purchase. Then after fruiting I’ll rip it out. Even so I’m sure it will be quite some time before we no longer have to deal with its offspring.

Earlier today I received an email to let me know two apple trees I’ve purchased have been mailed. I ordered a Fuji and a type I’d not previously heard of, a Winchester Pearmain. They are only small trees so will take a few years until they fruit. Hopefully they will eventually be productive enough to give us a decent crop of apples each year.

Blogging My Obsessions…

My profile description exposes me as a man of “diverse obsessions”. My primary obsessions can be determined from the content of my three blogs.

At the top is faith in Jesus Christ. My first blog “Onesimus Files” (focused upon that faith) has now been going for 5 years. It’s something I take very seriously and I have deep concerns about the extent that church tradition and theology have moved away from the foundations of simple biblical teaching. So often theologians spend time explaining why the bible doesn’t really mean what it clearly says and “Christianity” today is far removed from the teachings of Jesus and the writers of the New Testament.

Where the "Blogs Have No Names", is the second blog I started. It has no specific theme, but it became a record of my move from Sydney to the country with a lot of emphasis on my gardening attempts.
I haven’t written much about my garden recently because, over winter, there hasn’t been much to write about. The garden is merely less productive and more lifeless than at other times of the year.
Winter has allowed me to make a start on my front garden – reclaiming more lawn to establish a new native garden bed. Unfortunately winter isn’t the best time for planting. The frost has hit things hard and some of my new plants may not survive.

The blog name was clearly influenced by the U2 song “Where the Streets Have no Name”, and I came up with it on the spur of the moment when I couldn’t think of anything clever to name it.

My most recent blog is “Out of Shadows”. A “literary blog” dealing with books I’ve been reading as well as some thoughts about writing and storytelling. When I started that blog I was going through a period of frustration. Several times in my life I have tried to change career direction, but every time I seem to travel full circle and end up back where I started – and again I’m back in an administrative job little different to every other job I’ve had.

“Out of Shadows” was initially a tool to revitalise the only career ambition I ever had – to be a writer. The first step on that journey was the revival of my interest in reading. I had to find books that I could enjoy, that would maintain my interest until I reached the end. I’ve started far too many books that were eventually abandoned or perhaps more correctly: forgotten through disinterest.

So far I haven’t done too badly with the reading part. By keeping a list of completed books I can see the progress I’m making, but there is the temptation to inflate the numbers through choosing “easy reads”.

Looking over my reading for this year I can see that the majority has been non-fiction, so I’ve drifted away from the aim of re-inspiring my desire to write fiction.
Authors are always being asked for advice from people like me who have writing ambitions, and one of the common pieces of advice they give is to read. I guess reading other writers is supposed to provide inspiration, but there are so few writers today who I would find inspiring.

Yesterday I looked over the list of the fiction I’ve read recently, trying to select my three favourite books. I struggled. There was only one clear choice, and a second that made the grade with a couple of minor reservations. For a third I had to compromise a little by choosing a book I ‘d recently reread – one that I had enjoyed years ago, but not quite so much the second time around.

I was intending to write an article about my top three choices (three fiction and three non-fiction) but have decided to wait until I finish reading Slam by Nick Hornby – I’m enjoying it so much that I can already see it will easily push the compromise book out of contention.

Reading back over this article I can see how easily I become distracted. In what was intended as a look at my diverse obsessions, I have touched on merely a few. Maybe a clearer idea of the things that interest me would be found in reading through earlier posts, both here and on my other blogs. And perhaps the books I’ve been reading will also give a clue to some of my many interests.

Lopping, Shopping, Birthdays and Bargains.

Our local council announced it would be conducting a pickup of green waste over the next week. It is the perfect opportunity to deal with some of those bigger pruning jobs and dispose of the waste unsuitable for the compost bin.
The announcement seems to have mobilised most of the town into gardening mode. I’ve never seen so many people in their gardens with secateurs, loppers and pruning saws, and roadsides are piled with prunings. In our street it looks like someone has been planting mature kerbside shrubs and gives an idea of what it could be like if the grass nature strips were replaced with verge-side plantings like those created by Josh Byrne on Gardening Australia.

To take advantage of the council pick up we decided to deal with a few things we’ve been putting off for a while. Between our place and next door we’ve had some kind of native tree with a collection of long skinny trunks topped with fine foliage and occasional creamy coloured brush-like flowers. There were two significant problems with the tree. Firstly it was planted on top of the water and gas pipes supplying the house. Secondly, parts of it were leaning over the neighbour’s place. The latter problem has been the reason it was left alone for so long. I didn’t want to hack away at it and have it fall through their roof.

After work on Friday I made a token attempt to cut some of it back, tackling some of the lower, untidy branches leaning over my neighbour’s property. On Saturday we went out for the day and on our return found that our neighbour had continued what I had started and had removed those parts hanging precariously over his house, leaving the remaining tree looking very untidy. Sunday therefore turned into a day of tree lopping and armed with a handsaw I spent a couple of hours cutting the tree back until I was left with five, two and a half metre high stumps. It took me 45 minutes to cut the first one down as low as I could and every muscle and joint was aching. I wasn’t looking forward to the other four stumps.
At that point the neighbour across the road started up a chain saw to attack his own garden and offered to come over and finish my job. Two minutes later and it was all done and all that remained was a stump barely 30 centimetres high.

All of this was much more work than we had intended to do, but at least a major job has been completed with a lot less effort than I’d expected.

Our day out on Saturday that allowed next door to make an assault on our tree was a trip to Canberra. We did a circuit of antiques shops and galleries hoping to find a bargain or two, and since it was Gloria’s birthday we had lunch in a café at Beaver Galleries opposite the Australian Mint. We’ve been to the gallery before to look at the art glass on display but we’d never been to the café.
We both ordered Vegetable Lasagne and were amazed at how good it was. At first the serving seemed a bit stingy, with a solitary rectangle of lasagne in the middle of the plate, but the value was in the tasting and the serving size was more than adequate to satisfy our appetite (which unfortunately led us to miss following up with a serving of one of the tempting cakes on offer).
Each layer of the lasagne contained a different type of veggie; with eggplant, yellow and red capsicum and zucchini being accompanied by a subtle but tasty tomato sauce. Additional flavour was provided by a spoon of green pesto on top. It was the kind of meal that makes you want to take your time and enjoy the different flavours in every mouthful.

Our shopping trip wasn’t quite as successful as the lunch, but for the second time we unexpectedly stumbled across a piece of Helmut Hiebl glass. Until recently Hiebl was a renowned and respected glassmaker with some of his work being held in Royal Collections. I have heard that poor health has caused him to stop practising his craft. The two pieces of his work we have found recently would probably be classed as paperweights. The first shaped like an apple was purchased without realising it was his work. It was signed but we didn’t recognise the signature until we got home and compared it to a piece we already owned. On Saturday we found another signed paperweight in the form of a mushroom, however this time I recognised the signature as soon as I saw it.
In the last couple of months we’ve had quite a bit of luck with finds of art glass. Gloria found a signed piece by Peter Crisp for a few dollars in a local antique shop; we found the two signed Helmut Heibl paperweights and also, the find that most excited me was an early signed piece by Setsuko Ogishi, made in 1984 while working at the Jam Factory Craft Centre in Adelaide prior to the 1987 opening of her own Hunter valley studio and gallery.
Awareness of an artist’s work and recognition of their signatures has allowed us to find pieces priced well below their real value, although (while appreciating the lower price) the real joy is in finding and recognising the piece in the first place.

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photos:
1) roadside prunings
2) the remains of our heavily pruned tree.
3) the Palette Cafe
4) Maureen Williams glass from her exhibition at Beaver Galleries.

Roses are Red – according to the promo material.

My imagined perfect Rose garden didn’t translate as desired from my mind to the garden, but I can’t deny that occasionally we get a stunning display of roses. Usually this is for a couple of weeks in spring – until the first unseasonable heatwave scorches the flowers, or they are battered by wind and rain. Considering the damage that steady rain can do to roses, I wonder how they can do well in places like England where they have been adopted as the national flower.

We also get some decent flowers in autumn, and in preparation for this year I gave mine a hard pruning in February. Maybe they haven’t flowered any better than previous autumns, but the pruning has done them no harm.

In the back garden I have a selection of David Austins. These are old-fashioned looking roses, many of which have a very pleasing fragrance. They have a reputation for having a long abundant flowering period in contrast to those genuinely older style roses that they resemble.

In my small collection I have a variety of shades of pink and two different types of white. Some of the darker pinks were supposed to be a deep red, but they didn’t live up to the advertised descriptions. Those pictured are the pale pink “Heritage” and the white is “Winchester Cathedral”.

I also have a “New William Shakespeare”. This is supposed to be a deep red but isn’t. It is also supposed to be quite resistant to problems but a little earlier today I noticed it has a terrible case of blackspot.
Others in the collection are “Hero” which has refused to flower for the last two years; “Othello” – a lovely dark pink with a very sweet fragrance like lemonade; “Mary Rose", with a VERY pink flower and “Glamis Castle”, a prolifically blooming white.

While these roses can flower profusely, I have found that the flowers are extremely delicate and drop petals very easily. Successful deadheading needs a very light touch, otherwise the scale of the task is increased; as one spent head is removed the displacement of petals leaves more heads to be dealt with.

Neglected Blog Updated

This blog has been suffering more neglect than my garden. At least the remains of my veggie patch has been getting some occasional water from the tank.

The vegetable crop has been a little disappointing. We had a reasonable supply of Lazy Housewife and Purple King beans, but not as many as last year. Corn was very disappointing with less than 10 cobs out of three separate sowings. The last lot attracted a lot of bugs – Gloria refers to them a stink bugs, green things about the size of my little finger nail. I can appreciate the reason for Gloria giving them that name. A few months ago one flew into my mouth and the taste it left was revolting.
We also found the silk ends of the corn cobs were being eaten by something. What we managed to salvage were very juicy and had good flavour, but there were far too few to keep us satisfied.

We had far less zucchinis this year, but that lack was more than compensated for with our yellow button squash. We are still getting a few of those each day even though everything else has given up the ghost.

I’ve now sown one whole bed with seed I saved from my broad beans. We didn’t really like the beans but they’ll make good green manure. They are growing quite healthily. I also put in some green feast peas and snow peas. Those are two regular failures that I’m hoping will give us better results than usual. The only other things on the way are a few rows of carrots, beetroot, turnips and radishes. We always do okay with beetroot and had the best harvest of carrots we’ve ever had over summer.

One thing I want to try again is cauliflower. I’ve tried them every year and had only two successful heads. This time I want to read all of the books and make sure I do everything right. If I fail again we’ll have to resign ourselves to buying them instead of growing our own (which will be no change from the current situation).

Yesterday afternoon I was pleasantly surprised to find a few goji berries on our bushes. I’d been wondering whether it was worth keeping the plants because they were a bit straggly and have demonstrated a tendency to send out vigorous runners. We’ve had a few new shoots emerging a metre and a half away from the parent plants.

There wasn’t much fruit but we had enough to have a taste, and if they become more prolific it will definitely make it worth keeping them. The fruit was very pleasant: sweet and juicy but I’m not sure what the flavour could be compared to. The bright red-orange fruit would make a very interesting addition to a fruit salad. The fresh fruit is nothing like the dried examples we found packaged in the supermarket. As a dried fruit I found them tasteless and splintery. Gloria tried to re-hydrate some and describes the result as smelling like an old wet blanket, and tasting exactly like they smelled.

Last weekend I reduced our lawn by several more square metres. I laid down heaps of newspaper and had some topsoil trucked in. I think I’ve almost decided on the layout for that part of the garden. Part of the remaining lawn will be turned into a paved or gravelled area suitable for an outside table and chairs. I’d prefer gravel but I’m concerned about its potential to get weedy, and if I change my mind it’s much harder to remove gravel than it would be to pull up paving.

I now have quite a large area of bare garden beds. I’ve held back from planting anything until I decide what kind of plants would be most suitable. At the moment the whole area is covered with sugarcane mulch waiting for me to be hit by some inspired planting ideas.

For the last few days we’ve had swarms of locusts all over town. You can’t walk anywhere without stirring them up. We’ve often had patches of them outside of town but this is the first time I’ve seen so many in around the town itself. I tried to photograph them in the garden but they don’t come out clear enough in the photographs.

Sunday turned out to be a day marked by weird coincidence. In the morning I started reading a book called Blackout written by Connie Willis* In the evening Gloria and I were watching a new TV series called “Survivors” about the aftermath of a catastrophic plague that kills off most of the population of the world. Of course, as a result of the plague all public utilities including electricity collapse. Just before the end of the episode our own power was cut off, blacking out our part of town.
It was annoying to miss the end of the show, but there was some compensation for the disappointment: on a moonless, powerless night, the stars have never looked more brilliant.


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* review to come on my other blog as soon as I finish it.

Mixed Vegetable Results

My other two blogs have been getting more attention than this one recently. So what have I been doing this year so far (apart from writing elsewhere)?

I haven’t been doing much in the garden apart from collecting a few veggies as they appear. Our yellow button squash are by far the most productive thing and I’m keeping work colleagues well supplied as well as having plenty for personal consumption. However it’s the worst zucchini year I’ve had – but there have been plenty for our own use at home so I can’t complain.

Corn has been a failure with maybe only six half decent cobs being produced, however I’m hoping that the late sowing of the last of my seed may produce a bit more.
This season I tried purple beans for the first time and had a reasonable supply for a couple of months, but there haven’t been any to pick for a few days now and the plants are starting to shrivel up. I had a much better crop from my regular bean – the Lazy housewife, but again there has been little to pick recently. But those bushes are still very healthy looking so I might get some more out of them.

The plants I’ve been most concerned about are my tomatoes. They’ve had an abundance of fruit but it’s been very slow ripening. I’ve mentioned before that they were grown from seed given away with Burkes Back Yard magazine. Maybe the biggest disappointment has been one called Yellow Stuffing. They are refusing to ripen on the bush and so far I’ve seen only one fully ripe example – one I picked early and kept in the house for a couple of weeks.
I wasn’t impressed with the resulting fruit. It had hardly any flavour and was quite dry in comparison to the other varieties. If we had more ripe fruit to try we would put its name to the test. It is clearly a fruit created for stuffing, consisting mainly of a firm fleshy shell, hollow except for a small ball of seeds in the centre. It is very capsicum like in appearance.

Another type I’ve been able to pick is a large orange/red variety whose name has eluded me at the moment. It has a large pumpkin shape fruit. The ones that have ripened on the vine have been quite soft. I’m not sure whether that should be the case. I tend to get worried about soft tomatoes after a fruit fly infestation a couple of years ago. So far we seem to have avoided that problem – although I think I did see a fruit fly inspecting the fruit a few weeks ago. I also salvaged a couple of fallen fruit that were swarming with tiny little maggots. They were quickly dropped in a plastic bag and left in the sun for a couple of days.

Gloria has been making good use harvested tomatoes, using them in salads, on sandwiches and for a salsa-like creation for use on pasta. I’m only hoping she is being vigilant enough to notice the presence of grubs should they be in the fruit. But as the old saying goes, what we don’t know can’t hurt us and maybe the addition of a little protein to the vegetable pasta would add to the nutritional value.

I also planted a Black Russian tomato purchased from BigW – but the fruit from the plant has not been the right colour. It has remained a common red instead of the darker colour expected of a genuine Black Russian. Most of the fruit we’ve picked so far have been from this pseudo black Russian plant and most of it needed to be picked earlier than I’d like because the blackbirds quickly attack the red fruit.

Garden Habitat Again

My previous post mentioned the various creatures that make their home in or near my garden. I now have some recent photos of some of them.

The blue wrens seem to nest in some dense bushes in my neighbour’s yard but they spend a lot of time in my garden. The male bird tends to be a lot more timid than the female. I guess this is because his bright colouring makes him more noticeable and vulnerable to predators. The female (and her young) think nothing of coming within a couple of metres of me when I’m working outside.

I have seen a book listing 100 birds you must see before you die. The list includes all kinds of exotic birds from around the world. This particular wren is listed among that 100 and it is very satisfying to know we have a family of them that call our backyard home.


Not quite as pleasing to the eye is this creature. I’m not sure whether it is a frog or a toad. It would be a little bigger than my closed fist. It likes the area around my veggie garden because of the regular watering.

I took these photos yesterday. I was picking beans and when I heard something hit the ground I thought I had dropped some, but it was the frog/toad moving around near my feet. Hopefully he is earning his keep by eating some of the less welcome residents of my veggie patch.

Garden as Wildlife Habitat

How many of us recognise that our gardens provide habitat for a variety of critters?

I know mine often gives a home to all manner of bugs, slugs and caterpillars that are hopefully grateful for the feast provided for them in my veggie patch. They must feel more at home than they should – at least until I bring out the white oil, derris dust and other safe means of deterring their presence.

How easy it would be to resort to more lethally effective means of ridding the garden of these pests. But then, an indiscriminate nuking of the garden would also rid the place of those living things I want to encourage, such as bird life, lady beetles and of course the essential bees.

To an extent those pests provide an attraction to some of the life I want in my garden. Where would the ladybirds be without an occasional outbreak of aphids?

Years ago I worked for a man who had created an amazing little ecosystem in his garden – all by providing a seed tray to feed small birds. This is how it worked:

The birds came for the seed and scattered some across the ground below the tray. The fallen seed started to attract mice at night, which in turn managed to attract the attention of a local owl that started perching near by waiting for a nightly snack.

Personally I prefer not to provide things like seed trays. Instead I’m trying to provide native plants to provide a more natural source of food for visiting birds. If I tried my former employer’s approach I suspect it would result in the attraction of snakes rather than owls to take advantage of the mice.

While I have not seen any owls being attracted to my garden, I have a list of almost 30 birds that I’ve seen visiting or flying in close proximity to my home. While I can’t claim that my garden had anything to do with the presence of a pelican flying past, there must have been something to attract most of the other species on my list: from the ducks and hawks that have made rare visits to the more common honey eaters, parrots and the ever present blackbirds.

Visitors other than the bugs and birds have been less noticeable. Apart from an occasional neighbours pet we have mainly seen small lizards of various kinds, several frogs huddling in unlikely damp spots and twice I’ve come across a larger frog-like creature that may have a been a toad.

Last Post for 2009

Almost Christmas again and I’ll be away from my computer until after the New Year holiday. I haven’t contributed much here in recent weeks because I’ve been concentrating on my newest blog which is devoted to books. One of my recent entries on that blog is a review of Linda Cockburn’s new novel Who Killed Dave which many will find to be an entertaining read but overall was not to my taste. Some will know Linda through her blog, her articles in Organic Gardening, or her previous book Living the Good Life.



According to recent weather reports we can expect some heavy rainfalls over the Christmas break as the remains of tropical Cyclone Laurence head into NSW. A decent downpour would be very welcome to top up my water tank. It is now down to half full, the lowest it’s been since it was full to overflowing a few months ago.

The most productive things in the garden at the moment are the yellow button squash. We have three plants that are bearing more than enough fruit every day. We are also getting a good supply of zucchini, but they have not yet reached the fruitfulness of previous years.

This year I have tried a new type of bean. It has purple pods that are supposed to turn green when cooked. We have now begun to pick the first of these, but so far haven’t had the opportunity to try them. We also have our usual “lazy housewife” that is beginning to provide a promising number of beans. Its still early days, and I sowed fewer seeds this year, but we will hopefully get enough from the plants to meet our needs.

Last week I harvested all of my garlic. It is now hanging in the garage to dry. Likewise my Barletta onions were ready and are also drying out a little more under cover. The rest of my onion crop has also done very well but needs more time in the ground.

We had expected to get our first reasonable sized blueberries this year, but we were too slow in netting them and every bit of fruit disappeared thanks to the birds. Fortunately there weren’t many on the bush so there weren’t many to lose – but it would have been nice to at least get a taste.

At the back of the garden I have two Goji Berry bushes. Be warned – if you are thinking of growing them they send out vigorous suckers. That’s not the kind of thing they list on the label when you buy them. Ours are now entering their second year. I’m not sure when they are supposed to fruit but we’ve had no sign of anything yet.

Our Raspberry is also looking very vigorous, but again no hint of it fruiting. It also has new growth springing up everywhere in its immediate vicinity; but at least I was aware that it would send out suckers and the many new shoots were no surprise.

I now realise that I’ve overplanted my tomato patch. It is very congested and hard to see the fruit. Most of them were from seeds that were free with Burkes Backyard magazine but I did buy one Black Russian plant from Big W. That plant is doing very well and being on the edge of the garden I can a lot of good sized fruit waiting to ripen. Hopefully we can avoid fruit fly this year. It’s been three years since I last tried tomatoes, hoping the break might help us to avoid the problem when we tried again. The first tomato crop we grew wasn’t helped by the fact that a peach tree had been neglected in the garden prior to our move into the house. The peaches became infested with fruit fly so we decided to cut it down and to rely on the many nearby stone fruit orchards for our summer fruits.

Costa In Town!

Costa, from the SBS gardening show Costa’s Odyssey was a surprise participant in last weekend’s Cherry Festival parade in Young NSW.


Instantly recognisable due to his very serious beard, Costa “drove” a tractor down the town’s main street during the celebration of Young’s 60th Cherry Festival. His “drive” was being recorded by a camera crew so expect to see his visit as apart of a segment on the next series of his show.



I’m still wondering whether success in the garden is proportional to the quantity of one’s facial hair.

Heat Effects and Death to the Lawn!

Apart from a short post about kamikaze insects I’ve neglected this blog for a while. With a couple of weeks of extreme heat, gardening hasn’t been very appealing and a as result the garden itself has taken on a neglected look.

It’s been hard to keep things in order when the temperature made it too uncomfortable to spend time outside. And there was just no way I could keep dehydration of the plants at bay with the hose. Now, most of the roses have crashed and my potatoes are very bedraggled after a very promising and healthy looking start.

With the lack of recent gardening inspiration I have been spending time starting up my new “literary” blog: Out of Shadows and I’ve tried to catch up on some of the books I’d been neglecting. But my garden was not completely abandoned.

On some of the cooler evenings I did venture out to reclaim some of the lawn area by creating two new garden beds. The first of these was next to the new water tank (which is now half empty again). We had three cubic metres of garden soil delivered and only half was needed for the tank area, so I used the rest to extend an existing garden.

To create the first bed I put layers of newspaper over the grass, piled a good thickness of the soil on top and added a covering of sugar cane mulch. Towards the back of this garden I planted a fuchsia that is supposed to grow up to two metres tall. If that height estimation is correct it will make quite an unusual looking plant because its flowers are tiny. Unfortunately I’m not very confident of its future, it seems to be struggling. Planting during an extended period of extreme heat perhaps didn’t give it the best start – although it is in one of the more shaded areas of the garden.

The second garden bed will be left for a while. I approached this one differently. Firstly I marked its borders by digging up the grass around the edges. I then placed the clumps onto the garden area grass side down and covered them with thick biscuits from a bale of “lucerne” straw. [I put the lucerne in quotes because there seemed to be more oats than lucerne in the bale – with an occasional hint of “Riverina bluebell”!]. I covered all of this with a good thickness of newspaper and topped it all off with the rest of the delivery of soil. I won’t plant anything here until the various layers have settled down significantly giving the area a bit more stability. I also used the last bit of my sugar cane mulch to cover half of the bare soil.

Looking at the back yard now I can see it taking the shape I’ve been looking for. After more than three years of planning and replanning, I feel like I’m finally getting somewhere. There were two clear turning points that started to move things out of my head and onto the ground. Firstly was the relocation of the old Hill’s hoist clothesline which had been right in the middle of the garden, limiting access and mobility. We replaced that with a removable clothesline to the side of the house which opened up many more possibilities. It also improved the view from the windows in our family/dining room.
The second turning point was the installation of the water tank. Now that the tank is in place we can attend to the area that was needed for access for the tank delivery.

Eventually I will reclaim all of the lawn at the back. Most will be converted to garden beds, with a small open paved/gravelled area in the middle. We’ll need to shade that area in some way, but the means of doing that will be considered later.

I’ve written quite a lot here without including any photos to illustrate the things I’ve been writing about. I haven’t taken any photos recently because the decline of the garden (after such a promising start in early spring) has been a bit discouraging. But now the weather seems to have cooled off a little, and after a decent rainfall yesterday, I might take the camera out again in the next couple of days to take a few more photos to post at a later date.

Insect Conspiracy

What’s going on in the insect world? Is there a conspiracy against me?

Yesterday I was digging in the garden making the most of the cooling evening temperatures when a bug flew half way down my throat. I was able to cough it up and saw it was a green stink bug (also known as a shield bug – but the “stink” version was definitely more appropriate for this one). It was bad enough knowing I’d almost swallowed the thing – but the aftertaste of it being in my mouth!!!!! (And no, considering the experience, the use of so many!!!!! is not excessive).
I couldn’t get into the house quick enough to get to the mouthwash.

But you may say that one unpleasant insect experience does not make a conspiracy – but how about a second?

This morning at work I went to the water cooler to fill a mug to take to my desk. An ant was wandering around the top of the water cooler. As I started to fill the mug the ant actually RAN to the edge of the cooler and launched itself into the air towards my drink

Tax, Zucchinis and the Effects of Rain.

This afternoon I have an appointment to do my tax return. My last return was wonderful. Having been unemployed for most of the year I got all of my tax back. It was the best tax refund I’ve ever received.

Things will be different this time. For part of the year I was working two jobs, and one employer wasn’t deducting the correct amount of tax out of each pay, so I’m not looking forward to the outcome. I’ll certainly have to pay the Tax office instead of having them pay me.

If only our bills could be paid in produce rather than $$$. With the Zucchini season starting I can imagine that I could more than pay any pending tax bill with a suitable quantity of zucchini. They’ll be growing quicker than I can pick them in a week or two.
We’ve already picked the first small ones. They were barely 5cm in length but I thought I’d grab them before they shrivelled up. Last year we lost a lot of the first ones to appear. I’m not sure whether it was because they weren’t fertilised. At the moment we don’t have many male flowers on the plants to do their job

The last week has seen some significant growth in many of the veggies, which is probably due to the massive downpour we had one day last week. We had 46mm of rain in around an hour and parts of the town temporarily flooded. The rain has also given life to the lawn. Over the past few months I’ve used the lawnmower more times than in the previous three years and I’ll have to mow again this weekend if I get the chance. Two weekends in a row is a bit excessive in my opinion, so it’s time I moved onto the next stage of lawn replacement by extending the garden beds again