Out with the old… May 9, 2010

I’m a bad person. We have a bulk greenwaste collection this week so took the opportunity to cut down 4 healthy trees in the front yard. That felt wrong.  They’re pencil pines and totally unsuitable for the 0.5m wide garden bed they’re planted in. Space is at a premium here folks. We thought it was better to get rid of them now, while we can still use a little manual hand chainsaw (have you seen those things – they are nifty!) instead of paying someone once they’re too big. There’s also a cape lilac and freaking horrid lantanas. Basically your typical grow-like-wildfire Australian suburban garden. I’ll replace them with some fruit trees or something useful.

The raised garden beds have been pretty much planted out and they are going strong, mostly green leafy veg, herbs and brassicas. Is it wrong to feel proudest of those plants that I’ve raised from seed vs the bought seedlings? Go you little seeds! The lettuce and pak choi are the oldest grown from seed and are lookin’ good (see photos). We haven’t had any snails or slugs yet (touch wood) hence the lush leaves 🙂

I’ve potted a dwarf lemon, dwarf lime and a curry leaf tree (the three pots behind the bed) so hopefully they’ll stabilise before it gets chilly here. I’m surprised that things are actually growing in the shady part of the beds too. Things besides mint too (though that’s there too). Awesome.

Settling Down April 20, 2010

The raised garden beds have been in for almost two weeks and are starting to settle down. They don’t stink as much, as evidenced by Amy, Queen of the Poo, shown below. She loves rolling in it on sunny days. Disgusting cat 🙂

I’ve planted a few things: a borage and greek basil I bought recently, and some lettuce seedings that were just-about-big-enough. The plan was to interplant with strawberries, but the mushroom compost is quite alkaline – pH of around 8.5 when I tested it fresh! Hopefully that will go down over time or I”ll have to add some sulphur. Strawberries like slightly acidic conditions so I’m thinking instead maybe I’ll put  them in pots on the front veranda. Besides watering my seeds and watching them germinate and grow (marginally more interesting than watching grass grow) I haven’t done a lot to the garden.

I have finished Stupid Shawl. Only stupid because it took SO FREAKING LONG to finish. The pattern is actually really nice, and is exactly what it says it it – a simple yet effective shawl!200g of 4ply in a straight either stockinette or garter stitch really did my head in after  a while though. My fault for deciding to double the pattern, really. I like the finished product though, in the end:

To recover I’m doing some much shorter projects for a while including some quick presents, a slouchy beret for me and a cream Biggles scarf for Pilot Boy as a congratulatory present for when he gets his private pilot’s licence very soon 🙂 Actually it’s a nice suave herringbone pattern but I”m calling it a Biggles scarf. Dammit. I’ve also ordered stupid amounts of yarn lately. Bendigo Woollen Mills have brought out this cashmere blend that is rather lovely and soft…and I’ve somehow ordered 43 (just added them up…oh dear) balls over 3 orders. *scuffs feet* they’re only 50g balls…ahem. Not to mention the lovely 4 skeins of Lush yarn that are staring at me, waiting to be put away. It’s infinitely pettable. Do they have a Yarn Anonymous? My name is Wendy, and I have a problem.

No Dig Garden Beds Finished – Hooray! April 6, 2010

Huge Easter long weekend over here, garden wise. As Ringo said: “I got blisters on my fingers!” but it’s all worthwhile in the end. We managed to get the raised garden beds out the back built and filled with poo and hay in the no dig style. I used Stephanie Alexander’s method from her bible, er, book The Kitchen Garden Companion. Love this book. It’s got the most awesome recipe for a silverbeet tart *drool*. Ingredients are listed alphabetically and it includes details on how to grow, harvest and cook each one. It rocks. Not just taking a cook’s view on gardening here, the same method and poo and hay layer thicknesses are noted on this cool no-dig garden website.

So to start we ripped up the existing paving and made some raised beds (wow, that sentence doesn’t match the amount of effort at all – this took 2.5 days in total…)

I feel kinda sorry for the previous owners who laid all this paving. Ahem.

I’m really happy with the way the beds turned out. Doesn’t look like the lack of mortar will be a problem and it’s easy to shove ’em back in place! Love the bricks too – very pretty colours and much nicer than the paving.

The black blob is a seriously unphotogenic cat. She is a ninja. A very ungraceful ninja. Quite surprised she’s managing to keep her balance there to be honest.

With the beds built, a trip up to Greenlife Soils for bales of straw and pea hay and a trailer load of poo was in order.

Aaaand if you look to your right – straw!

10cm sections of the bales laid out tighly in  a mat. I watered in some seasol over this. These beds took 3 bales.

The pipes sticking out are for the greywater irrigation system that Pilot Boy is going to install when we get over the bruises from this weekend.

Next comes:

POO!

Around 5cm or less of blended sheep and cow manure, to be precise.

Can’t say I smelled too pretty at this point.

In fact, by way of a ‘good morning’ my retired neighbour came out and said “I love the smell of napalm in the morning!”. We have awesome neighbours 🙂

On top of the manure is a dense 20cm mat of pea hay.

I just peeled off the bale in sections.

These beds needed 6 bales to cover them: the rectangular bed has an area of 2.5sqm and the alien shaped one is 5sqm.

I love this photo. It looks so snug sitting in there 🙂

More seasol applied and we’re ready for….

…

…

MORE POO!!!

’nuff said.

Another <5cm layer of manure went on top.

We took yet another trip up to Greenlife for a trailer load of mushroom compost. This was spread in a 10cm layer and given a good soaking. Actually I watered in each layer as I chucked it down.

Aaand, we’re done! This will settle down to about the height of the beds once the material starts decomposing. A nice, rich organic mixture ready for planting! I’m going to leave it for a couple of weeks, although you can plant in it pretty much straight away by digging a hole and putting some potting mix in with your plant. The only upkeep they need is some more compost and mulching with pea hay every cropping season.  Very happy with the final result. I’m going to ram some stakes down the holes around the outside of the beds to help steady the bricks and fill the holes up with some fine gravel. This will also hopefully help with any excess drainage issues as well as looking good.

Now I’ve got to sow some seeds and get ready to plant. I have some pak choi, lettuce, a few carrots and one lone, surviving basil ready to go. Seedwise I’ll sow some spinach, silverbeet, snowpeas, beetroot, parsnips, herbs, rocket, broccoli…..and we’ll see what comes up!

The garden takes a back seat March 30, 2010

I took the day off work today. Looks like another virus was sneaky and took hold while my immune system was busy elsewhere. Since I’m confined to the couch I spent the day knitting my first shawl – it’s just a simple triangle  (version of this one) but the colourway I chose is rather…pink. No idea why I seem to choose bright freaking pinks for my big projects. Can’t wait til it’s finished though. It’ll be the last time I do a project with 200g of 4ply! I’m also working on one of Kelley Deal’s bags. Yes, Kelley Deal from The Breeders is a rabid knitter and designs bags and this is proof (in my eyes) that knitters are indeed the coolest kids. Now if only Kim Deal would come out and announce that she’s a closet crocheter my theory would be complete.

I started ripping up the paving on the weekend. The design has changed yet again into a kind of space invaders like shape to avoid the soakwell altogether. The unbonded bricks seem to be working ok so far so there’s a win. I spent way too much on another Diggers order as well, but soon a cherry, two peaches, an apricot and a plum tree will be winging this way along with some more strawberries, a replacement guava (I shall not kill you this time, little bush) and some hybrid echinaceas. The free seeds this month included Warrigal Greens, which I love – a native spinach that’s pretty drought and salt tolerant and makes an excellent groundcover. The leaves need to be blanched before eating – they can be poisonous raw.

Back to the Never-Ending Shawl, more Project Runway and even more nurofen plus.

Best laid plans March 26, 2010

Perth had a ripper of a storm this week. My old uni stomping ground, UWA, was really hit hard, including a library full of mud and the gorgeous stained glass windows on Winthrop Hall smashed to smitherines. Sad. Lucky our house was unscathed besides some topsoil washing away in the front yard and  some paving washing away in the backyard.

Our courtyard is teeny and totally paved. so my Grand Plan involved using a friend’s free (very important point) pavers to mortar together into some nice neat raised garden beds. Pretty. Also appeals to my nice neat Capricorn nature. Turns out this freak storm let me know something: there’s a LOT of sand movement below said paving! The soakwell overflowed and there’s a volcano of sand and bricks. There’s a nice big hole just outside the back door where the sand has disappeared under the house. Logic tells me it’s a bad idea to build garden beds that are just going to crack when the sand moves. So, new plan: since the bricks are already sitting there I’m going to try stacking them in a Flemish bond pattern and only a few bricks high, line the inside walls with a heavy duty plastic and maybe put planks of recycled wood on top to sit on while gardening. I’ll also use the no dig garden format, which is a lot lighter than soil as it’s basically layers of poo and straw rather than soil. Original plan was to do a bed of each and see which one worked best but oh well. My soil science experiments will have to be limited for now (my degree has to be useful for something, right?). One bonus is that I can start right away. We were trying to get irrigation sorted first etc etc etc because once you cement in bricks you’re kinda stuck with it. Now I can just remove a section if need be 😛 This could all fail miserably and in fact it’s highly possible but I’ll let you know.

Since I’m meant to be doing this tomorrow I got out my original plan and had a look. Still pretty happy with it but the width of the garden bed walls will now be doubled and I’ve decided to lop of the north east end of Bed 1 so that it’s in line with the patio and fill Bed 2 out to make a rectangle to make room for a future Bed 3 to the north. The beds are in the “winter sun” zone, which means they’ll get sun all year round, and morning sun at that. The house shades this area from the sizzling Perth afternoon sun. Hooray! So I’m very excited about finally starting these beds.

I’ve found a simple greywater system to buy – a Holman Arid Gardener for about $400 which will only filter our laundry water. The two of us do two loads a week so that should be sufficient. I had to be mindful of not creating too much greywater for the small area of garden otherwise the water “pools” and creates a nasty pathogen-friendly environment in the soil. It also means that we can’t grow root veges in these beds (edible bits in contact with greywater = not great!) so any sweet potato will be in the existing bed next to the shed and I’ll grow carrots out the front with the rosemary. Apparently they’re friends and complement each other.

It’s getting late and I still want to do some knitting before bed. Finally getting the urge back to do some after being sick for three weeks straight and knitting constantly. Bad associations now. Stupid brain. Wonder if security will let me take my needles into the Pixies gig tomorrow night? 😛 I wish.

Where to start…? March 12, 2010

So I decided to start a blog.

That was back in September and this is my first post. Life kind of gets in the way 🙂

I figured this was a good place to chronicle my gardening adventures and make note of things that work and things that don’t work for me along the way. Also just to write and share and ramble and all those other good things.  Knitting will probably also rate a mention occasionally. It tends to do that, somehow. I live in a 2brm weatherboard cottage on a 290sqm block in an innercity suburb of Perth with my partner and three cats.  This is my first home, meaning the bank owns the vast majority, but I own a very, very,very small proportion of it, which allows me to tear down walls and rip up backyards and do whatever the hell I want with it. This pleases me.

In the last few months  I’ve been toying around with the “garden” (can a fully paved courtyard out the back and a small square of lawn out the front be considered a garden?). I’ve found a lot of things in the “don’t work”  category mentioned above. Summer, for instance, paired with nice little seedlings nurtured from seed combine to make crisp pieces of ex-vegetation if left in the sun on a 42 degree celcius day. I’ve also discovered that one of my cats, Lilly (aka Sleepy) will not let vegetable seedlings get in her way if she wants to use *that particular spot* to go to the toilet. Remaining seedlings now have protective plastic drink bottle shields. I’ve found that a mix of potting mix and compost was too strong for my recently departed guava. RIP little bush.

On the upside, however, I’ve discovered that passionfruit vines grow *really* quickly  and that chives are really hardy. I’m getting satisfaction from systemmatically ripping up the Useless Lawn(TM) out the front and replacing it with garden beds. We’v got rosemary, a curry plant, french tarrogan, asparagus and oregano in the first one. I love picking strawberries by the front door and admiring the beautiful artichoke. I enjoyed eating the grapes out the back, but I’ll know this winter to the prune the bejeebus out of it and then give it lots of food and water next summer when it’s fruiting.

It’s all a learning experience after all.

Tomorrow we’re going to the chilli festival in Freo, where I’m hoping to pick up some chilli plants and I’m sure my partner is hoping to eat his weight in chillis. Maybe on Sunday we’ll go get the rest of the bricks a friend is giving us to build some raised garden beds in the backyard. Maybe. I’m full of grand ideas but sometimes can’t get past the Lazy Sunday. Ah well 🙂