I’m inside writing for a couple of hours today because it’s too darn hot to be out in the sun. It reminded me though to post about growing sunflowers and how I’ve been impressed by how hardy they have been through dry weather. I sowed these seeds back in September when there was still some moisture from August’s rain in the ground, expecting that we would get the usual return of rains in October, but it has been extraordinarily dry. They are in a plot down the hill, two hundred metres or so…
Read MoreMonth: October 2014
And more compost.
The dry weather means I’m not digging beds so much, and as I mentioned in my last post, my thoughts turned to making more compost. My friends Phil and Lindy have a most impressive setup, with masonry bays, chutes and what have you, but they have a lot of animals and a big family. For me, it’s just important to get started, and I can upgrade later. My resources are; waste hay from the chicken pen, hay from slashing, and muck from the bottom of the dam. To make the whole…
Read MoreCompost – dam, slashing and chickens.
The soil in my vegetable beds could do with a lot more organic matter, so I’ve been on a compost mission in preparation for the next warm season planting. I had dug in some alpaca manure (very like sheep manure) for my beets, tomatoes and tomatillos, but wanted something more like a soil conditioner for the next bed. Another task was clearing some of the dam. It is very overgrown, and in order to launch our little boat to get out and fix the pump I first had to clear a…
Read MoreThree sisters
Now that I have space and chickens, I thought I might try growing the traditional North American trio of maize, beans and squash. A handy website Renee’s Garden outlines a planting scheme for a ten foot square patch, so I doubled that to 6 m x 3 m rectangle. The bed is up by the chicken coop, on a bit of a slope and well drained, so rather than using mounds I have made level patches with some cut and fill. The three sisters legend says that maize, beans and…
Read MoreMarans chicks; one week old!
Our ten marans chicks all made it to 7 days, albeit with a couple of near-tragedies. The hen has been marvellous, and it’s fascinating to watch them in action and how they respond to her cues. They are housed in a shed with a door we made to fit, with a small yard outside that I wired in and part-covered with old weed-cloth. I had all sorts of worries; that they wouldn’t be able to get over the threshold, or that they would get out through the chicken wire and…
Read MoreLast of the winter lettuce.
My first sowing of lettuce grew to be a rewarding first crop. From a couple of June sowings and a slow start, they did well through the dry, cool weather and provided more salad than we could use. I got three types for Winter sowing; Australian Yellow, Lollo Rosso, and Marvel of Four Seasons, all from Eden Seeds. The idea was to get a variety of shape and colour to mix in a salad, and it worked well, although I reckon you could mix any 3 different types from the catalogue and…
Read MoreBorage
One of the first herbs I planted back in May, borage is an old favourite. Here it grows through winter, spreading to a rosette of hairy leaves, then in spring it sends up shoots that bear the blue flowers. The bees love it, but for us the flowers are also the useful part, to put in salads. The flowers and leaves taste of cucumber. For picking the flowers,the blue petals are easy to separate from the hairy calyces, just hold the central dark part and gently pull down. The leaves are…
Read More21 days later. Marans chicks hatch.
It was 21 days on Saturday since I got my fertile Marans eggs from friends Phil and Lindy, and put them under my broody hen. Right on time, 9 of the eggs hatched, and another hatched a day later. Ten out of twelve is a pretty good success rate, so fingers crossed that we can keep them all well. As the hen went broody under our house stairs I let her brood there, but had a shed ready to move them too, with weed mat over the concrete and a…
Read MoreGrowing carrots; not the easiest vegetable
Maybe carrots are a veg that some people grow easily, but I’m having trouble with them. At least the few that I have pulled have been nice ones, but it would be nice to have more. The local ones at the community market tend to be gnarled, with as many arms and legs as a ginseng root, so I was expecting something similar. These are the ‘All seasons’ cultivar, which, according to my seed merchant is the most common commercial variety in the region. I also planted ‘Little finger’, which I…
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