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 MoreYear: 2014
Three 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…
Read MoreGrowing orchids in trees
We don’t have a lot of shade in the garden yet, as all the big trees are sensibly well away from the house, but there are a couple of small rainforest trees above the house, and I’ve used them to house some of my orchids. The Dendrobium nobile is looking quite happy way up in this fork, and has started to flower. I’m afraid I don’t know yet what the tree is, but it is quite common in the region, and holds a lot of lichen on its bark, so…
Read MoreHow do you know your daikon is ready?
With carrots you feel round the collar, same for beetroot and turnips, but daikon turn out to be easier to tell when they’re ready; they stand up out of the ground. I had no experience with them, and harvested some small ones a while back, but these, planted quite densely on a small terrace, left no doubt when I pulled the leaves back. It was good timing, as I have plenty of wom bok (chinese cabbage) to pick, although it isn’t in classic heads, so I included most of the…
Read MoreFertile eggs.
We have a broody hen. She was the last of them to insist on laying under the house as I was re-training them to use the laying boxes in the coop, and that was OK since it’s easier to collect those eggs. But then one evening she was still there, sitting so still that I thought she was dead at first, as she didn’t even move or cluck when I went to pick her up. I put her in the coop for the night, but next day she was back,…
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