Dear Diary: 24th June 2024

OBSERVATIONS:

GOLDEN PEACH has started flowering and showing green tips. (I sprayed it for leaf curl, should have done it earlier, probably should have held off now.)

TULIPS: I bought a big bag of tulips and kept them in the cool through to June. Then one morning I popped them in the freezer, intending to come back in an hour and plant them. They were there for a WHOLE DAY. Goodbye tulips! GRARGH. I seem to have zero luck with tulips and other bulbs, but I love them so much and just want some pretty spring bulbs, ARGH.

CHOOKS:

Tractor has been moved to AVO-SHED and the chooks are occasionally sitting in it.

Okay, the chook situation: at some point in May or June, we got two chooks from the postman. Literally, the postman. The 'Posties' had names, but we ended up renaming them Daofu and Haamyu (Tofu & Black Bean). They're down the lower end of the pecking order, and they haven't laid. We had them set up in the separate space for chooks for about four weeks, and then we started mingling them with Siyao, Goongbao, and Carambar.

It's always interesting watching chooks blend and mix. Goongbao is the prettiest and the top chook. Carambar is next, and then it seems like it's Haamyu, Siyao, and poor little white Daofu is at the bottom of the pecking order.

Well, sort of.

Because hard on the heels of getting Daofu and Haamyu, we also got two new chooks (new new chooks from a local girls school. They are collectively known as the “Lockdown Ladies” - Gladys (Berejeklian) and Kerry (Chant). I have no idea why we landed on those names, but we have and that is what they will be known as going forward. They have already started laying, which is a good sign. They're pretty happy digging everything up quite devotedly, and they have a voice and they're gonna use it!

Chooken Siyao is still with us, still holding on, still going about as strong as she's ever gone. Took her back to the vet, she got an ultrasound, the cyst had vanished. They think, however, it might have burst and caused general inflamation around the abdomen, which is why she's still not comfortable. We are giving her anti-inflammatory painkillers, and she seems to be doing okay.

Generally, the chooks are all doing about as well as one expects in the middle of winter. They seem pretty healthy, even if everyone but the Lockdown Ladies aren't laying, nor as active. (The Lockdown Ladies are pretty young – maybe a couple of years old.)

Today, I took away the old feeder that the Posties learned to feed from. They're still learning how to eat from the 'Grandfather feeder' – not to mention, we're running out of food! The remainder of the food in the bucket is mouldy and they shouldn't be eating it. Not quite sure what to do with it – compost, I guess?

Going to start them chooks on Vella food tomorrow: it's cheaper, and we'll see how much they like it.

On Sunday (Saturday?), sister and I cleared out the chook house of six months worth of cardboard and chips and poop. There are bags and there are buckets and I am hoping that there are no mites. I'm pretty sure I sprayed for mites a couple of months back, but I don't have a record of it anywhere, dammit!

COMPOST:

Would like to make some compost from the chook poop we cleared out, add with some chipped branches, and maybe some woodchips.

Am making leaf-mulch in the “display composter” between the APPLES and the DUAL STONE. Need more leaves.

PREPARING:

Lime Sulfate: Sprayed the TWO-STONE, the DUAL STONE and the Delicious/Dorset APPLE, then realised I wasn't supposed to spray that APPLE and quickly rinsed it off with water.
ETA: 25th: Sprayed the PLUM, STONE, CHERRY, and DONUT PEACH in the back (lightly). Also the PERSIMMON and a few of the leaves of the MULTI-CITRUS. Early morning, everything was still damp, may not have been the best choice. Sprayed the APRICOT in the front once the sun was out and the branches dry.

SEEDS:

Going to toss down some flower seeds along the fence bed: POPPIES, ECHINACEA, and some other stuff.

SWEET PEAS. Those need to go out ASAP.

PLANTING OUT:

Two ORIENTAL POPPY plants. Got to decide where they go and FAST.

FREESIA bulbs which look like they might have survived the freezer... Maybe?

HARVEST:

Occasional CHERRY TOMATOES from the small vegepods. Could (and should) probably try the CABBAGE in the CREPE-APRICOT (which is no longer a CREPE-APRICOT, but a CREPE-LYCHEE), and start harvesting leaves off the SILVERBEET and the other BRASSICAS. Also occasional PEAS which are growing in the dining room VEGEPOD

Still can pick some KALE, also CORIANDER.

Dug up a heap of SWEET POTATOES from under the mango. May need to dig some more out of there – they're pretty solid, and cutting back the space might give the mango a bit of space.

FEEDING:

Dug out the contents of two worm boxes, put them in another container (covered against rain), then rinsed out the worm boxes over the GARLIC bed.

PRUNING:

Gave the RASPBERRY patch a pretty good trim on the weekend. Also, a pretty severe one. Still have no quite worked out which are the autumn-ones and which are the spring-ones. Need to mulch that patch better, too.

Pruned the DUAL STONE, but very badly. Frankly, I'm surprised it survives, I've hacked it so many times. There's definitely some wounds that are bleeding gummosis, and I should really start looking at those.

In BACKYARD
Pruned: FOUR-APPLE
Still needs pruning: STONE (apricot branch). PLUM, DONUT PEACH.
Haven't decided on: CHERRY. I don't even know if this tree will produce anything in the coming years.
Need to decide on a time: AVOCADO. It keeps sprouting right as I think it's time to prune it!

THOUGHTS: Maybe put the new Lockdown Ladies in the ASPARAGUS beds and see how they go there. They're diggers, they might like that.

Need to think about how much space I need for the trees in the front bed. Might have to take the garden beds out, no matter how good and useful they are there!

dear diary, 24th February

CHOOKS

Dusted the coop again. Won't have a chance to properly wash-and-dry it again for at least another week. Need to dust the girls before this weekend.

PREPARING

Dug out the first northern lawn edge up against the triangle garden, dug out comfrey and planted.

HARVEST

2 Braeburn apples, 4 golden delicious (still green). Tomatoes still not ripening.

NOTES

Grain mites transferred inside the house. Most likely off a bugspray can - at least, that's what I'm hoping. Doesn't seem to have hit any grain yet, but the other problem is that the place is a dust-trap. God only knows what bits and pieces of food, crumbs, scraps, whatever, have gathered in, under, over, around the dining table where I discovered the mites on a bottle of tequila and margarita mix. Wiped down what I could up the end, but we're probably going to bomb the kitchen-dining-lounge-hall tonight.

on the dangers of half-assing prevention

I am swimming in nectarines right now

This is the first day of actual picking of nectarines: the first day...

It's so much that I've started out by bottling, to get the biggest and nicest fruit bottled for later:

People on the gardening groups I'm in keep asking me how I keep fruit fly from my fruit. But when I tell them I net the entire tree, they keep on going back to smaller options.

Can't they put out traps?

Can't they net the individual branches?

Why does it have to be the entire tree? Isn't that a lot of money and effort?

Yes, yes it is. But it's more money and effort to throw out an entire harvest that you've spent 8 months of the year preparing for because the fruit fly got to it. It's the effort and money that you spent for those 8 months of the year, because you couldn't be bothered spending 2 hours setting up a frame for netting to go over the tree.

The first year I didn't net a thing. Everything went to fruit fly. I didn't get a single fruit.

The next year, I set traps - dozens of traps. That didn't work either - again, all fruit was riddled with larvae and inedible.

The next year I netted individual branches. That partially worked - I got about 40% of the harvest.

And then last year, I netted the entire tree.

100% harvest. Every fruit on that tree was edible. They weren't always pretty and some of them developed mould before I could get around to picking them, but they weren't riddled with fruit fly the way the previous harvests were.

This year, again, I've netted the tree, and it's been ~99% effective. The 1% is because the tree is now too large for the net I had for it last year and there's a small crack in the net. But if I spot the holes, I feed them to the chooks, and the chooks are making short work of them (and they love the fruit flesh).

So when I say to fully net your tree, I'm saying I tried all the other steps and found that only fully netting the tree worked. I tried nickle-and-diming it back in the beginning, but I had to go all-out to successfully get a crop from non-sprayed trees.

Maybe you could get a good crop just by hanging up traps, but I can guarantee you a good crop by fully netting the tree with fruit fly exclusion netting.

Is it pretty? No, it's not.

But is it effective? Absolutely.

chooks in the garden

One step closer to chooks in the garden! They’re being delivered on Thursday morning, which means I need to work out where they’re going to go to start the rotation. (and, perhaps, to deal with the fruit flies and slugs!)

I have some planned-out chook stations, which I think will need to be better considered once the coop is actually in the garden and I have the size and scope of it all. In a circumstance that slightly complicates things, I planted out one of the beds on the weekends, and the growing period is nearly upon us (from Saturday for 10 days). It’s also the bed that has the most slugs in it, thanks to the leaf litter that I dumped on it a week ago.

The plus side of parentals moving: they’re not going to need all the mulch they’ve been making for the last couple of years. And I am going to be quite shameless about co-opting it for my garden, thank you!

(Which means woodchips for the paths, I guess. Luckily there’s no shortage of those around the place...)

The fruit trees are being...interesting this year:
all the Nectarines: fruiting really heavily but also fruit fly invasions
all the Peaches: doing pretty well thank you
Apricots: NOPED RIGHT OUTTA HERE
Plums: WHAT ARE EVEN FRUIT
Cherries: *waves a couple of fruit lazily*
Avocados: Three are 'fruit, what fruit?' and one is "I'm givin' her all I can, Gardener!"
Apples: One is "wait, I'm supposed to do WHAT?" Two are "...Oh wait, you want fruit? Come back to us in a month..."
Citrus: "yeah, yeah, we have flowers, talk to us in autumn"
Fig: "you put me in the ground three months ago and you want WHAT?:
Established Passionfruit: "HAHA I'M WILD, I DON'T ACTUALLY FRUIT IN SPITE OF PUTTING OUT REAMS OF FLOWERS"
Still in tubes Passionfruit: "PUT US IN THE GROUND AND LET US GROOW, LET US GROOOOW CAN'T HOLD US DOWN ANYMOOOOORRREEE!"
Sultana Grapes: "Hey, I got leaves, don't ask for more this year!"
Red Seedless Grapes: *dead*

I do wish I'd gotten the chickens a few months earlier, though.

pests, weeds, and harvests

The worst part about garden maintenance is the question of what to do about pests and weeds. It causes all kinds of issues in my indecisive brain, along with the eternal guilt of "maybe if I ignore it, it'll go away?" And the permaculture principles which is that weeds are plants in the wrong place, and pests are a food source for predators in your garden and therefore to be encouraged.

The biggies this year have been mildew on the zucchini (thankyou, Bunnings) and pumpkin (thanks to the zucchini), slugs on the corn (dealt with via beer), and now pests in the corn silks - including a few worms in the ears.

The mildew is being dealt with thanks to bicarb soda spray - 1 tablespoon bicarb, 2 tablespoons olive oil, mix well, add 2L warm water, shake and spray. I do need to do the whole garden a thorough going-over but with some cutting and trimming and spraying it's being dealt with. Mostly.

I put a whole bunch of mildewed leaves (as well as the zucchini stalks) into the latest compost which seems to be getting pretty hot, although I don't know if it's hot enough to kill the mildew. I had to pull up the zucchini to make space for other plants - they were getting outtahand.

The slugs eating my corn silks I got with beer traps. Most of them. They seem to be somewhat fewer these days - possibly because the caterpillars, bugs, and ants have moved into the corn silks. I tried spraying with vinegar and the corn husks went yellow and dried out. But it seemed to slow down the pest activity. However, recommended was to rub the tops of the corn together to kill the pests in the top which I will be trying with the corn in future. Or maybe a drop of olive oil.

But by far the worst offender - not in the backyard garden, but in the frontyard orchard, is what my mother calls 'onion weed'. The stuff is a noxious weed all over the place, whose 'use' is mostly attracting pollinators. That one's going to be a horror to clear out, because you need to pick out all the little bulbs and there are a lot of little bulbs! *sob*

Finally, my multicitrus graft is not doing so well in its new position - I'm not sure if it's because it's not getting enough nutrients or something else, but I'm going to have to take action soon...

In more positive news, the garden is producing madly: the zucchini are still huge and flowering and producing like crazy.

The gherkin cucumbers are growing so fast I think I"m going to have to do some urgent pickling pretty damn soon.

The pumpkins have been trussed and are being trained up lines and across gardens.

And, pests or no, the corn is ready!

And delicious!

The tomatoes are ripening - I seem to have tiny red grapes, tiny red cherry, and larger ones growing in the front orchard. Some of the seedlings I was growing back in November have finally gotten big enough to be planted out, so hopefully there'll be a harvest from them later!

In the area of neighbourhood foraging I found a lilly pilly overhang in the walk-through on the way to the station. Might nip out and grab a few berries for a try this evening!

And I have a lovely-smelling plant that I think is lemonbalm but which I'm not entirely certain...