early sowing

I am planning to plant seeds of:
- tomatoes
- tomatillos
- eggplant
- corn
- loofah/pumpkin
- cucumber
- zucchini

These will be planted out in the front bed (north west facing) in mid-august when the ground has heated up sufficiently.
(loofah/pumpkin/cucumber to go along the south orchard edge for growing up a fence).

Some things for the permabee would be:
- An edible hedge along the front picket fence, install watering system:
o south of path: loquat, macadamias, lilly pilly
o south groundcover: cliveas, holy basil, nasturtiums, comfrey
o north of path pomegranate, kumquat, avo, acerola cherry
o north groundcover: holy basil, fruit salad plant, salvias
- A three-unit composting setup behind the shed.
- Create chicken run along outside fence
- Dig paths and fill with woodchip mulch.
- Two bathtub setups – one aquaculture, one bathtub garden (possibly on the verge?)

Plumber?
- Modify the washing machine outlet to disperse in the garden.

Builder?
- Move the lattice gate further west (line up with the house edge) (maybe ask Simon B)
- Enclose orchard garden (maybe ask Simon B)

starting on the front lawn...

I've put the mulch up against the picket fence, and under the flame tree. It's not really good enough to do a proper job of composting, but we'll see what horse manure I can bring back from the rural areas I'm going to tomorrow when B, her hubs C, and their kids come to visit. We'll go up that way to check out a park and have a picnic.

For nitrogenous matter, I've realised that the local fruit shop tosses a lot of their fruit matter away into an open and openable bin, and it's not locked. If I go with enough of a trailer, then I might be able to salvage enough green wastes to make compost with. There's actually a fruit shop that's even closer, but I don't know how much green wastes they have, and I'm not sure if they'd be willing to let me take them.

I'm looking at a local nursery for fruit trees, and they have mostly dwarves, but some full-sized trees (apricot, almond, walnut, mulberries, olives, kumquats). I've been thinking about dwarves vs full-size, and thinking:

What if for every graft I planted, I made sure to plant a straight seed? (Perhaps plant in a large pot until the first flower/fruiting)
- lychees
- avocadoes (have one growing from seed even now
- apricots
- apples
- olives (should be able to buy these ungrafted)

Some thoughts on corn in the coming season.
1. Grow the coloured "glass gem" corn in front yard for grinding and gifts. Which means prepping the ground now - with chickens, but also compost heaps – hence the need for the fruit shop bin wastes.

2. Grow the regular yellow stuff in the back yard for eating. Which bed? Well, I'm inclined to think the plum-stone bed, although maybe those should be tomatoes and zucchini?  

Compost:
- woodchips (easy to get by the 8 cubic metres)
- horse manure (harder to come by - need to go up rural way)
- vegie waste (very close: local shopping centre, nightly throwout. With suitable bins/storage, could easily collect enough through the week to make a compost by Saturday.

Chickens I'm really going to struggle to keep them in greens this summer, I think. I need to find somewhere to put them that means they won't fry, and I suspect it's going to be the lower cherry-peach bed. Also, I need to plan better for when plants come out of a bed and they go onto one...

the Midwinter Garden

I'm becoming increasingly bad at keeping up this blog. So many things to do!

Wednesday night:
- plant all the brassicas & legumes that might grow at this time of year

Thursday night:
- prep epsom salt water for the citruses
- load of mulch for avo tree

Friday morning:
- water citruses

Weekend:
- put spare compost bin up by avo tree (fill with chips and horse apples)
- use coffee containers for garden additives (dolomite, lime, phosphorus, etc.)
- mulch to go on either side of fence (in ditch, particularly)
- mulch for passionfruit vines

future
- put the ribbed metal edging around the fence verge and fill with mulch

March garden

Made peach and bourbon jam. (4 cups peaches, 2 cups sugar, 6 tbsp honey bourbon, 1 tsp citric acid. Chop peaches, mix ingredients together, boil for about 2 hours, or until a teaspoon of the stuff doesn't move when you put it on a cool plate and swipe your finger through. Jar in sterile jars. Eat at leisure.)

Struck apple, bay, and curry twigs.

Planted out parsley and thyme.

Thinking about the garden this morning:

- chooks off the current bed in a week (need mulches to throw them, move them off, leave the bed for a couple of weeks, then...? Parsnips? Broadbeans? Onions? Carrots? Jerusalem Artichokes? Kohlrabi?)

- garlic & leek in among the two brassica beds, winding their way between the various plantings.

- nasturtiums under the apple tree, maybe also the alyssum?

- I keep trying brussel sprouts. They never head, but I really really want to grow my own brussels sprouts...

- still need a source of straw to throw in the chook pen, my last supplier has gone silent. Maybe I should offer her eggs in exchange?

- need to get the chickens to scratch through the compost heap and eat up the curl grubs. Need to work out logistically HOW to do this.

The persimmon has fruited, quite expansively, and although there are some fruit flies, they're not doing very well. The fact that it fruits now rather than in early spring probably helps.

Winter is coming.

Jan 2018 planning

planting plan
-Onions and parsnips in the centre of the central bed, particularly once the chickens are moved off
-Melons and cukes along the fenceline (all fencelines) and in the front garden
-Tomatoes & zucchini and eggplant along the path edge
-Flowers/herbs/ along the path edge and the fenceline (comfrey in particular?)
-Side boxes: melons and cukes up the back, vegies up the front?
-Vege pod: tomatoes, zucch, eggplant in here, too – anything else?

To Do:
-Current chook station: Put up the wicker screen against the current chook station for the crazy hot days, brick it and wire it fast.
-next Chook Station: failed top garden space (zucch, corn, cukes, lettuce asp) – the centre bed ones are probably best for the really hot summer days. Scatter spare seeds of any type?
-Automatic Chook Door installation (Tuesday PM?)

need more compostables
-Coffee grounds
-Vege matter
-Woodchips as pathway (dig out the grass, put the chips down – at least until we can get some sawdust down)
-Horse manure/compost (Ingleside, if going to St Ives for honey/Davidson plums)
-Rabbit straw (Berowra)
-Sawdust

state of the chooks:

It's been so crazy hot that I've set up a shade over the coop so they have somewhere to retreat from the heat.

Hainan: a chook perspective [guest post]

Hi! I'm Hainan the Leghorn, and I'll be taking you on a tour of the garden I live in today...

The first picture there is me (aren't I pretty?) with my companion Honey Soy, an Isa Brown, in the background.

Here's a better one of Honey:

We run around in a moveable chook 'tractor' which we scratch around in most of the day, connected to our coop/house by a series of tunnels:

Our chook tractor is made without a bottom so we can dig up the soil. Our droppings combine with the straw and other clippings that are tossed in, and they fertilise the ground which can then be planted out with seedlings.

Here you can see the patches which have been planted out - the first one with corn and tomatoes, the second one with corn and pumpkin, and the third one waiting. We're not allowed into the planted out patches, which is really unfair! I love sitting on a plant and scratching it into submission while pecking at the leaves and destroying the plant! It's one of my favourite things to do when I escape!

This bed, with the corn, cucumbers, and tomatoes, is the first bed that Honey and I were set to scratch out - look how well it's doing after around 6 weeks!

More corn, and pumpkins. Although, as chooks, we're supposed to love pumpkin seeds, Mummy tossed us a whole heap of seeds and we didn't end up eating them! So they lay in the compost until our chook tractor moved on to the next bed, and then they sprouted. But Mummy is keeping them. (Maybe she shouldn't keep quite so many of them - one vine grows quite long!)

And this is what a garden bed looks like after the chicken tractor is moved off:

Lots of space for planting things!

At night we get locked up in the coop away from cats and foxes and other urban predators, and in the morning we lay eggs and make very noisy clucking sounds to let everyone know what we've done! It's a hard-knock life for a chook.

more chooks

How much happens in only a matter of weeks!

The girls are still with us, still scratching away, a lot bigger.

We had a dip in egg production for a while - Hainan laid three eggs - one with a weird 'soft' shell, one that came out crushed and bloody, and one that was normal. And then she stopped. And Honey stopped egg production, too. For about a week, I was worried at first that they were egg bound, and then I was worried that Hainan had torn something up inside her laying that broken egg, and then I was worried that I'd hurt them or injured them while checking that they weren't egg-bound...

The local vet where we take our cats was very helpful. Right in the middle of fretting about it, I called the vet and the tech there was so helpful and lovely and encouraging. I needed that - to know I wasn't a failure at chook management. So I'm feeling a bit better about it all now...

Anyway, we got back into egg production about three days ago, and yesterday we had a breakthrough: TWO EGGS! (Okay, so one was weird and long and was shaped like those really smooth river/sea stones, but still...an egg!) Hopefully we'll see another two today. They've sure been swallowing the curl grubs down something fierce...

They sat on the 2nd bed for 2 weeks, happily picking and scratching and grumping and clucking back and forth, although I think at the end of the two weeks they were getting a little bit bored with the space - I haven't managed to grow much inside or around the cages as yet, you see. So it's a bit of a wasteland beyond grass and dirt and the mulch I throw in semi-regularly.

So I moved them on from the 2nd bed on Sunday, but I've found the grass isn't as torn up as I'd like, and I'm thinking I probably should have left it there for three weeks at a time, rather than the standard two. But what's going in there will mostly be corn and beans and cucumber and fruiting vegetables.

One of the things about the chook run/pen is that it's pretty small and rather low. It's not easy to climb into and fix things, and it felt kind of poky. So I added another 'level' to it.

Behold Casa de Chook, now about 1.5m tall, with a lot more airspace (even if no more floorspace) and the potential for perches and wing flapping! I can also climb into it without catching on anything, which will be a relief. Fewer scratches (we hope)!

I finished it just last night, and while it does need a little more work on it to neaten things up, I'm pretty happy with it right now...