Spring is in, which means everything is growing (or going to) and the crops need to be gotten into the soil.
I planted glass gem corn a couple of weeks back, during the fruits/leaf planting period. I planted them out on Saturday in a bighuge block (an entire garden bed). I also shook out a bunch of basil seeds, and planted some beetroot in the 'shallow' part of the bed (where I need access to step over to the brick).
Hopefully they'll be growing pretty decently by Christmas, at which point I can replace it with late summer tomatoes. Or more leafy greens for winter.
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On Friday evening, I got a call from Gardening Australia - one of the people who runs the 'storyboarding' process, looking at the kinds of stories they can run. She'd been given my name and number by someone who'd been featured on the show (and is something of a friend of the show) and wanted me to send pics/video of my garden and particularly the setup with the chooks. They were looking at a 'suburban chicken owner' segment, and wanted to see what kinds of options there were. So I ran the video around the (admittedly less than impressive) garden. It is spring, and the garden doesn't do much over winter (except house the chooks) so things are still in the slow-growing stage.
In the end, she opted to go with another idea for a segment - the secretary of our permaculture group, who's been doing amazing things with his house and yard in the last five years.
But it lit a fire in me to get the backyard looking a bit more decent than it does. More perennials, more chop-and-drop plantings (comfrey; more comfrey!), and garden beds that are made to last longer than a season so they don't look quite so miserable!
That's another project: make more garden bed/chook tractor frames. Use screws to put the panels in, rather than nails (screws will hold better), and paint/limewash the frames so they last longer than a single season! Also, the panels towards the 'back' of the bed frames down the side (apple-crepe, crepe-apricot, apricot-avo, avo-shed) need to be longer, to prop it up higher, because the ground slopes significantly down to the fence.
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On Sunday, my sisters helped me get the tarp to a higher elevation - a less saggy position - and as a result it looks way nicer!
Still need to paint the chook house properly, and add a roof of plastic/corrugated iron that actually does the job of keeping the rain out, rather than the weird green roof thing that is pretty much just slowly growing mould. I don't think I have anything to hand that will do the job, but there's a council clean-up coming and I can probably scavenge a couple of sheets of something. Polycarbonate would be best (nice and light) but we can do corrugated iron.
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I'm going to need to put netting over the trees: this is the last you'll see of the backyard without netting for some months. Unfortunately, the fruit flies are here and they're here to stay, and if I want any kind of a crop, netting is the only way to go.
I'll take a photo at lunch today.
Overall, I feel like I've gotten a handle on the backyard and how to grow things. It certainly helps to have five chooks adding fertility: it seems that almost all the trees are blooming really well this year - so that's hopeful.
