Sustainability Archives - Page 2 of 5

Rosella jam and cordial from the one batch.

May 12, 2015December 17, 2015 Stephen Carlin

Rosella (Hibiscus sabdariffa) makes great jam and cordial, and here’s a way I have found to make both from the one batch. The cordial is refreshing and slightly astringent, which I find perfect for a rehydrating drink on a hot day. The jam is a little like plum jam, with an intense red colour. I took our third picking of rosellas the other day, and thought I would try cordial again, but this time with a recipe suggestion from Hip Pressure Cooking. Her recipe is for blackberry essence, but it…

Getting carrot growing right

May 6, 2015December 29, 2015 Stephen Carlin

It was encouraging to see a post by Penny Woodward in Organic Gardening Magazine (Australian) where she writes that she used to think she couldn’t grow carrots, but then found the tricks (and made the beds) that give her successful crops. A lot of sources just say ‘Carrot growing is easy, go grow them!’ in a very encouraging way, but actually I have found them tricky too.

For everything a season.

May 4, 2015December 29, 2015 Stephen Carlin

The famous line from Ecclesiastes has many metaphorical applications, but it has very literal value in the garden. Sometimes when a plant is hard to grow it can just be down to daylength or temperature, not soil quality or the other things we try to get right. Things are perhaps a little more straightforward in cooler climates where you just need to ‘plant after last frost’, or catch the last warm days of Autumn to get winter crops established. In the subtropics the seasons are long and the planting times ambiguous.…

Okra and rosella seed saved

April 28, 2015December 30, 2015 Stephen Carlin

Seed saving is important for all sorts of reasons. There is the worthy argument that you are preserving heritage cultivars and sticking it to multinationals, but a more practical reason is that it gives you the opportunity to try out as much planting as you care to. My two star performing hibiscus relatives, okra and rosella, have just provided me with more seed than I could use. The okra pods are in the main photo. The plants had grown more than two metres tall and had given us a massive…

Growing chia

April 22, 2015December 30, 2015 Stephen Carlin

Here’s a plant that I’m growing for the first time but I think I will be growing chia continually, as it’s not only attractive and useful, but hardy. Chia (Salvia hispanica) burst onto the stage not many years ago in Australia as a new wonder food, and it’s still expensive in the shops compared to other seeds like sesame or linseed. I wanted to give it a go as a potential chicken feed, in the line of trying a wide range and seeing what grows easily. Growing chia I grew mine from chia seed from the…

Grass seed as chicken food

April 17, 2015December 30, 2015 Stephen Carlin

This morning I had an idea for bonus chicken feed. We have many types of grass here, but there is one that grows in shady spots on the forest edge, and lately it has been shedding a lot of seed as you pass it, so much that you can hear it scatter. I know that the chickens forage keenly for grass seeds, so thought I’d see how well collecting it for them works. Ideally they would forage themselves, but the grass is outside the chickens’ range. I took down a…

Mung bean final harvest

April 15, 2015December 30, 2015 Stephen Carlin

The mung bean bed at the Mid-levels got too overgrown. It was lush but crowded, and the plants were spindly and falling over each other in a tangle. What’s more, there didn’t seem an end to the flowering, with old pods spilling while new ones formed. So I figured it was time to treat it like the cover crop it was, pull it up, pick the pods, and dig the plants in. I ended up with a decent haul of beans, which the chickens loved in two feedings.

Time to plant tomatoes

March 27, 2015 Stephen Carlin

It’s great being on the Web and seeing posts from around the world. The gardening blogs and posts from the Northern Hemisphere have swung into Spring preparation, which includes getting your tomato seeds sprouting indoors, but it turns out that for us here in northern New South Wales the garden advice is to plant tomatoes too.

Growing buckwheat as a cover crop

March 16, 2015 Stephen Carlin

Buckwheat has been a useful crop for me, and I’m sure it will be one of the staples here. I’ve planted a few stands, starting back in Winter, so I’m getting a feel for growing buckwheat in our conditions.

Sunflower harvest.

February 9, 2015 Stephen Carlin

This week I started the sunflower harvest in earnest. I’ve grown sunflowers before but harvesting them is new to me. Sites I visited said that they are harvested earlier than I would expect, some say as soon as the heads turn down or turn brown on top.