31 August, 2018

out of winter and into spring

First day of (calendar) spring tomorrow!

I love how chickens can be used as weeding labour.

My mother was advising me that I had to weed the front garden bed where I have the fruit trees if I wanted to have a good orchard come spring. I hate weeding that front bed. It's full of nut grass, and things with crazy roots, and it's a losing battle for a human gardener.

Enter the chooks, stage left:

Chooks in the front.

I put up a fence around the garden bed, and would move them into the 'yard' (manually, by hand - inconvenient, but necessary since they couldn't be trusted to make their own way there) for a day's scratching and pooping, after they'd laid their eggs for the day. They loved it. Green things to peck at! Holes to dig! Mulch to disperse! HAPPY HAPPY CHOOK CHOOK!

About a month later, mum was around again.
Mum: "Oh, your front garden bed looks really good - did you weed it?"
Me: [ahahahahaha] "No, that was the chooks." After the chooks are gone, this is the garden bed:

Garden end of August

Thoroughly weeded, turned over, composted (chicken poop and vegetable scraps thrown to them), and (with the addition of woodchips and oaten hay) mulched! The still-green sprouts are deep-rooted lucerne plants (nitrogen fixers), and I think I might need to sow a few more of them along the driveway edge this summer. They were excellent mulch harvest last summer, and the chooks trimmed them down during the winter, ready for the spring comeback.

So the front garden bed/orchard is fully weeded and mulched, the chooks had a lot more fun doing it, eating insects, worms, and greens besides, and we got eggs. BARGAIN.

Spring Plans 2018

The garden at the end of June:

Garden winter 2018

I've decided there's no point in trying to make things grow when there's just not enough sun for them. So next year I'll move the chickens through the backyard in the autumn/winter, and sow green mulch everywhere before planting brassicas in the middle of them. I suspect that the plants I grow in the backyard in winter will need some 'shelter' - and a green mulch growing around them is more likely to provide that.

Spring Things

1. Net the fruit trees: dual stonefruit, bi stonefruit, multistone, donut peach (maybe others if we have the netting)

2. Plant out seedlings for midsummer: anything that will grow in the front bed.
zucchini plants along the front/edge
corn in the middle - both seedlings and seeds - plant with a double-handful of worm-castings and compost
pea seedlings around the apple trees (one type of pea)
pea seedlings around the fuyu (another type of pea)

3. Prep the ground for later plantings
west lounge room wall - north of rosebush for raspberry canes
west lounge room wall - south of rosebush for trombocino, melons, luffa (to grow out across the lawn, or up and over the front porch stair railing)
- make a 'border/edge' for the rosebush bed
- trim the rosebush down
- dig out the bulbs and move them?

4. Prep seedlings for later planting
tomatillos and tomatoes: repot seedlings up to the first leaves

5. Calculate what will be needed for the permabee in December
- chicken wire for tunnels, wood/aluminium framing for the edges
- wood framing for composting bays (how long, how many, need wide-and-thin panels)
- wood framing/bricks for bathtub pond (where's it going to go, make a wire frame for it, fill it with pebbles, settle the bath in it?)

6. Move parental plants (discuss with B1)