Garden of Sel videos

My permaculture group ran a Video Editing Course. Kind of self-taught, kind of group-encouragement.

I figured I'd start a video series about my garden. It's something to do, and if I never have a following of hundreds of thousands like those YouTubers who you see pop up in your 'recommended for you' list, it'll be fun and stretch my skills at video shooting and editing.

My first video is about the chicken tunnels in my garden, a series that I've called "Real Chooken Keeping" which will deal with the good and the bad of keeping chickens in suburbia.

And I've made one short video about my garden beds.

I have plans for short videos on 'Sun', 'Soil', and 'Water', and maybe one on composting, and striking plants from cuttings, but definitely another Real Chooken Keeping video.

The Chooks Of Sel - early 2021 edition!

First we had Hainan and Honey - the Original Recipe.

Then we got Sussy and Tjatse - the New Shanghai.

After they died, we (more or less accidentally) acquired Shantung and Coldie - the Banquet.

Now we have two new girls - a Barnevelder and a Wyandotte, both gold-laced. Heirloom breeds that will hopefully live long and prosper!

They're in between names right now - my sister wants to call them Si-Yow and Goong-Bao, but I personally prefer the names Coco and Chilli. So it's all a little confused right now.

Having this many chickens at once has presented an interesting question of life and death.

To some degree or another, I've had 'succession planning' in mind ever since we got the Original Recipe: they were layers whose breeding is basically to lay as many eggs as possible until they collapse from the laying and pretty much die. In industrial farming, Hainan and Honey's breeds - a Leghorn and an ISA Brown - would lay heavily for 18 months and then they'd be either killed off or farmed out, to be replaced by younger models. I knew this fairly early on, and always planned to slowly increase the brood.

What with one thing and another, we only started adding to our flock last year, and then all of a sudden we had chickens right left and centre! It's been pretty busy around here, bringing in the new chickens and acclimatising them not only to each other but to the setup of the garden.

However, both Hainan and Honey have had issues with their reproductive tract in the last six months, requiring a visit to the vet and medical decisions regarding their care. Now both of them have a hormone implant that keeps them from laying, and Honey may very well need surgical intervention.

Which brings us to a question that most urbanites don't actually ask themselves: Are these backyard chickens pets or are they productive farm animals?

How much are we willing to pay to keep them alive, even after their egg-laying days are done? Are we willing to put them down when their time is over, and if so, when is their time over?

And that leads into a question that is even more fraught: What are the end-of-life options for your backyard chickens?

I'm fairly sure I could kill a chicken if I had to. It's not the death that bothers me, or even the taking of it. An animal deserves a swift and as-painless-as-possible death, whatever the purpose of that death - whether simply to put them out of pain or to put them in the pot. The part that worries me a little is possible emotional connection with chickens that I've grown attached to, and the prospect of screwing it up, or of making a mess.

I don't expect everyone to think the same way, either. My own attitude is that they're partly pets and partly farm animals. I'd like to keep them alive with a good quality of life as long as possible, but I'm not entirely comfortable with - say, medical intervention to the degree of surgery. And, to be honest, there's a personal component to it. Both Hainan and Honey are our first birds, we've spent time with them, cuddled them, they have wonderful personalities that I've gotten to know in the last three and a half years that we've had them. The next couple - Coldie and Shantung - I am less personally invested in. Chances are, once they reach failing age - that is, once they start getting sick beyond basic care, we may simply say "such is life" and end their days.

I don't think the killing of animals is morally wrong, by the way. I am an omnivore, and acknowledge that many things die to provide the protein which I am fond of eating. Do I have issues with commercial animal production and slaughter? Yes. But also, humans as a race have been bringing up animals for slaughter and food since Day Dot, and so long as the care of the animals in life is good and their death is swift and not for pleasure or pride (eg. trophy hunting), everything lives and dies. *insert The Circle Of Life song*

But, yes. The questions regarding the responsible way to deal with the end of a productive animal's life rears its head. I have some answers to those questions, and I will live with them, but they're not comfortable - not for an urbanite like me. That doesn't mean I get to ignore them.

The Sydney Edible Garden Trail is here!

I'm really good at dropping the ball around here, aren't I?

*sigh*

So, the Sydney Edible Garden Trail is on again! Over 60 gardens open through the Sydney North, West, and Inner West - including mine!

There are two trails happening this year: the Virtual Trail which takes you on virtual tours of the gardens, and the Physical Trail which allows you to go and visit the gardens which are open for the physical trail in person.

The Virtual Trail was on the 21st, 28th-29th March, with three hosts on the different days visiting different gardens across the Sydney area and livestreaming the visit. It's a great option if you're housebound, unable to physically travel around Sydney, or have health concerns regarding COVID. (It may have been 50+ days since a community transmission case in NSW, but I don't blame anyone for being cautious.)

The Physical Trail is coming up on the weekend of the 20th and 21st March, and there are still some tickets available, and plenty of gardens to see!

The Tricky Coil of Good Soil

Soil is one of the most ubiquitous and yet most difficult things to manage in the garden.It's that thing in the garden that's almost never seen, but which affects every part of growing food.

Is the acidity of the soil correct? Are there sufficient nutrients to grow vegies? What about trace elements that many plants use to finish off their crop? And where, oh where, can we get good soil in our urban spaces?

Did you know Australian soil is among the least nutrient-rich in the world? Our soils lack many trace elements that are abundant in other soils around the world and so vegetables that prosper easily in other countries don't always grow so well here.

The most important thing in soil is that it should have a lot of organic matter in it as possible, and as few toxic chemicals as possible.

Organic matter is pretty easy - leaves, food scraps, your neighbour's lawn clippings, coffee grounds from the cafe...

Toxic chemicals? Those are much harder to avoid. So many things these days are grown in a chemical haze of poisons that kill off the weeds that aren't wanted in commercial crops, but which can often remain in the soil long after they've been used. And we can be unaware of what's in the crops until there are consequences.

How Wet Can You Get?

In Australia, one of our most precious resources is rainwater. In the last twenty years, we've experienced two 'official' droughts in Sydney. Technically, I think we might still be in one. Certainly, in spite of the periodic rain, other parts of the country are still in drought.

Did you know that if all the water on earth was represented by a single bucket, the volume of drinkable freshwater would amount to only a single drop? And we run that freshwater over our vegies and bodies and driveways to clean them, and let it run off our roofs and into the gutter to flow out to sea, mixing with the undrinkable water - much of which is stained with undrinkable and inseparable pollutants.

Did you know that the best place to hold water is not in a tank...but in the soil itself? How do you hold water in the soil? You add organic matter to it. You keep it from drying out. You slow down the movement of water through it so the soil has time to absorb it. There's some excellent work about this - an Australian, Peter Andrews, does what he calls 'natural sequence farming' and worked out how to store water in drought-ridden farm soils. You can find out a little more about it here: https://www.nsfarming.com/

This property is not yet waterwise. We collect water from the carport, but not from the gutters at present, although the plans are ready to go. This year will be the year.

Here Comes The Sun!

The sun is one of the key properties of any edible garden in the world. Along with water and soil, it's one of the three key components to growing edibles. How much sun does a garden need? Some of that depends on what you're growing, the soil that you have, and how well you water it.

Our houses here in Australia - and most countries - are built to face the street. Do you know which way this street faces? It runs roughly north-south, which means the front faces west. So the Australian summer sun warms the front yard in winter and bakes it in summer. In the southern hemisphere, the sun travels across the northern half of our sky, so a north-facing garden is an excellent idea. As you'll see, the northern side of my property is lined in cement, which absorbs the heat of the sun and then radiates it back into the garden. This is excellent in winter for added warmth, and for growing things along this side of the property; but in summer, it's baking hot.

Some plants take well to the heat - the lucerne hay that's growing beside the driveway, the apples, peaches/nectarines, the persimmon tree, and the lemongrass. I find it changes the seasons in this section of the garden, quite significantly. While other people in Sydney are still waiting for their stone fruit to grow to full size in November, I have a full crop and am desperately picking fruit as fast as it ripens.