Monday garden report

Spring makes to-do lists like they're going out of style.

Things I hoped to do on the weekend:
prune rosemary and strike
prune lavender and strike
plant Meadow flowers under apples,
trim Lucerne,
cover front fruit trees
fertilize avocado
collect mexican marigold seeds
fertilise sugarcane
set up black compost frame behind banana circle
move equipment back into tank area
set up frames in backyard for fruit trees
water brassicas with brassica water
repot elder shoots
fill white poly boxes with soil
sort out pots in corner
raise chookhouse tarp to top of lattice
add chookhouse vertices

I got almost none of it done due to my period turning up on Saturday with a distinctly vicious edge.

weekend gardening

Weekend was warm and sunny before a cold front bringing rain was to hit us mid-week. So it was a good time to get stuff done in the garden.

Did/Done List
1. Removed a wire fence from behind my two driveway bed apples. It was useful back when I was using it to confine the chooks, but now that we have so many more chooks, weeding is going to be a lot faster: done in a couple of days rather than over the course of a cople of weeks. The fence wasn't helping guide the apples anymore, and it was detrimental to netting the trees, so I replaced it with two wooden posts to string some wire between for netting to cover the apple trees.

2. Planted out my mother's black lilies in between the apricot and the elder tree
3. Planted ranunculus bulbs in front of the multi-stone in the backyard.
4. Grafted two apples - don't know if they'll take: I can't get the whip-and-tongue grafts to fit properly enough that the cambium layers match. I might have to stick a butterfly clip on it to properly pin the surfaces together.
5. Planted out a 'green fodder' bed in the second chook yard.
6. Planted blue turmeric and galangal, and I did the ginger just this morning.
7. Set up the north side garden beds - including the turmeric, galangal, ginger beds - ready to be watered from the kitchen vegiewash run-off. I'll need more soil with which to fill out the polyboxes that I'll be doing the growing in (insulated), and I need to better work out the watering system so it more evenly distributes, but...it's a start!
8. Attached chook wire to the new midpoint post of the chicken yard. Now I just need the hardware for affixing the beams and bracing them against each other so they stay square and don't sag.
9. Moved the composting frame from the compost in the chook yard to the banana circle (where it's blown over in the present winds). The plan is to get mostly garden clippings and stuff from the neighbours and toss it in there to decompose and rot. I may need to put a wire base on it to keep the rats out.
10. Closed up the fruit fly netting around the peach/nectarine and set some traps for them within the netting to catch the ones that had already turned up.

Planned to do but did not
I was also planning to repot the black sapote, but that didn't happen and now I'm out of soil. I'm going to have to dig out the chook yard shortly, get all that good chook poop and soil for it to grow in. I doubt I'll get any fruit from it - I think it's too cold through the year for it.

We had rain all of Tuesday, along with gusty winds, our water barrels filled up and our soil soaked it up. Hopefully this means there'll be a lot more growing in the coming month, and then some more rain in late September/early October to give bulk to the fruit that's setting even now.

Gonna have to get my nettings on over all the fruit trees. And that's going to be a job and a half, oy.

Spring makes its inevitable march; unfortunately, the warm temperatures we're having now promise a burningly hot summer. It won't be pretty at all.

wiritjiribin: the cold and windy

Wiritjiribin is the name for this season in the language of the Dharawal people who lived from the south of Sydney harbour down to the Shoalhaven and the start of the Wollondilly river network. The season is characterised by cold weather and high winds, and we're certainly getting both!

I've just gotten a new phone, and because the cameras differ between phones, I'm taking a quick photo of the backyard with it:

It's been a pretty dry winter. Some rains, yes, but by and large not enough to really penetrate the soil. I've got a number of leafy green plants in and am mostly hand-watering them with homemade seaweed solution and worm juice. But the truth is, I'm not very good at eating my leafy greens from the garden, which is a pity because they're growing pretty well this year!

Gardening is a process of learning from your mistakes, and I'm learning that I can grow green leafies, I just need to sow them pretty thickly and give them time to go hell for leather. And then I get a pretty decent crop!

Root vegies, on the other hand, are still touch-and-go. Carrots did marginally as usually (I really should give up on carrots, they never turn out). Parsnips were okay - nice big tops, at least to start with. Turnips didn't do well at all - only the size of my thumb and about as long before they developed really fine roots. Beetroot...not really. But the onions... I think I have the onions worked out now. Sow pretty thickly, leave to do their thing, then thin the small ones ASAP and let the others grow to a medium size. I planted the onions late last year, and so they only really got to golf-ball size. This year, the plan is to get some to tennis ball size!

The brassicas continue to be attacked by aphids and I don't seem to have sufficient ladybugs or lacewings to deal with them right now. I really have to plant some land cress to attract the white cabbage moth (although I did catch one the other day, killed it, and am now displaying its body on a fine copper wire in order to deter other cabbage moths). But I bought the land cress and then simply haven't planted it!

This winter, the tomatoes have done better than tomatoes usually do in my garden through the summer. I'm not entirely sure if it's the soil, the cool, or that it got a pretty decent raining on when it was about 5 weeks - 2 months old. Might have to try that with my summer tomatoes. Also: mulching. Mulching mulching mulching.

Beans and pumpkins: not together, but I have some fairly specific (and limited) heirloom types that I plan to grow this year. The squashes I've decided to grow are one maxima - golden nugget, one moschata - gramma, one pepo - zucchini. I don't think they can cross-pollinate, so we should be safe! This year I have two climbing beans and two bush beans, and I'm going to keep them in very specific places: climbing beans in the front, growing up a trellis, bush beans in the back in the annual beds.

I bought some hops rhizomes, and they're going to grow up the front of the house, and hopefully provide a little shade against the harsh western sun. That's the plan, let's see if it manages to come to fruition! I have the containers prepared, but they're definitely going to need some good watering, and I think it's going to have to be with 'waste' water from the kitchen, because I'm bad at regular watering like that.

Corn: I plan to grow at least two types - the extremely pretty glass gem corn, and another heirloom type that I bought last year and didn't grow. I would really like to grow the f1 sweet corn again - that stuff was goooooood - but I think the heirloom types store better over winter, and have better flavour that way.

Structure plans: setting up the watering sink on the front porch (pour a bucket of water into it and it will water the various plants in the front), improving the watering system down the driveway side of the house (from the kitchen sink), a growing frame for the squashes, a suitable frame for the beans, strings for the hops to grow up. That's for this year. So many plans, and the uncertainty of whether or not any of it will come to fruition or if I'll just end up exhausted and out of it. A little each day is doable. Just a little.

Mulching, fertility, nutrients: with between four to six chickens feeding the soil over the last year, a visible frame for the garden beds, and a significant improvement in my composting systems, I'm hoping that the backyard beds will do far beyond my expectations. Soil fertility for annual vegetables is a big issue in the rough clay of this property, and while last year was better, it's not the degree of growth that I've been hoping for. The fruit trees have always done well, but the vegies have been touch-and-go. I have three bales of lucerne for mulch, the laying box hay, and I've been tossing the 'night chaff' into the tractor in between adding it to my composts. Five full-grown chooks excreting half their daily poop should do a decent job of fertilising the ground. Now to see what comes of it!

Have a picture of Hainan chicken perched in the chicken tractor over a garden bed:

through the winter: chicken edition

It's been a while since I showed off the chooks around here:

Look at how Goong-bao has grown! She was a teeny tiny handful, and now she's magnificently fluffily plumaged, and gorgeous to boot!

She's a little bit independent minded, too. While she and Siyao (the mostly-black, gold-laced Barnavelder) hang out together, Siyao is always where the food is at. Goong Bao hangs back a little, watches everyone else snatch up the food, and then comes in for a nibble - usually too late!

Above are the four chickens of the apocalypse. LOL. Well, maybe not quite.

Here are Coldie (white) and Siyao (black) queueing up for the laying boxes.

And here are Goongbao (mostly black) and Shantung (brown) occupying the laying boxes.

And here's what happens when you don't collect the eggs for a day!

(Wait, how many chickens do we have?)

Honey Soy Chicken, one of our two Original Recipe, is gone, alas. She never quite recovered from her bout of peronitis (egg infection) earlier this year. When faced with an operation that might or might not help vs. putting her to sleep, we chose to put her down. She now rests in a deep hole in the front orchard/triangle garden, with an apricot tree in a pot on top of her to keep any other animals from trying to dig her up.

RIP Honey Soy. You were the peckiest chook there ever was, a hard-core layer from beginning to end, and a great scratcher of the soil. Your eye for a possible food source was unerring, and your saurian origins never in doubt!

Interestingly, Hainan chicken's implant ran out and she laid an egg! It was very unexpected, and a little unwelcome since we don't want her to lay herself to death. We got a new implant put in, so she doesn't keep laying, and we'll hopefully get to keep her a couple years more.

On the whole, the chooks are all getting along. Everyone is roosting together, nobody is getting picked on. The sorting out of the pecking order was pretty hilarious to begin with. Pecking order is dependent on a whole range of factors, including age, laying status, size, breed, and personality. The babies (Goongbao and Siyao) were at the bottom of the pecking order, but Goongbao grew large, and she's a Wyandotte and apparently they're more likely to end up pretty high on the pecking order. But everything's still a bit young and unsettled for the moment. Everyone but Hainan is laying - four layers, and we're running out of eggboxes fast - and Hainan has the grumpy old lady schtick down pat, and the other hens fear her!

Anyway, it's going to be a high-egg season, I think: with five chickens, four of them laying.

to do / done list of June

So many things to do in winter.

I'm very bad at resting.

to do:

spray trees before bud swell

stick some trimmings in soil for sprouting - no longer necessary

make up winter garden bed in orchard triangle

make up leafmulch compost in chook yard

trim fence bed

plant out seedlings (well, mostly)

refresh front wicking bed

trim front fence bed

dig out compost and sieve

make leafmulch compost

make more leafmulch compost

trim fruit trees (too late)

trim pomegranate: 5 leaders, open goblet shape

July/August to do:

make hot compost in empty compost bay

build structures for growing vines on north and west

feed and mulch: fruit trees, asparagus

brace/cross-brace chook yard posts and fit a netting roof on top

find out how much to strip house walls and insulate

send out email asking for neighbours to donate their food scraps, lawn clippings, autumn leaves

pay someone to do under-floor insulation

pruning fruit trees

PLUM A plum tree with two different plums on it has produced me all of one plum.

I may have been pruning it wrongly.

The types are 'Mariposa' (a Japanese plum) and 'Flavor Supreme' (a pluot hybrid, also from a Japanese plum).

Apparently Japanese plums fruit on the previous year's wood. Best pruned in summer just after the tree is harvested. Cut back all shoots by at least half, while opening up the centre of the tree by removing inward growing branches.

After seeing a seriously amazing espalier at the SEGT (I managed two gardens on Sunday after opening my garden on Saturday), I am very tempted to start espaliering my backyard trees. It would mean a few years of very limited harvests, but the results could be really good for a small backyard, rather than the crazy shrubberies that I'm having to deal with.

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APRICOT

Old Apricot Tree Pruning from SFGate.

OTHER

Central leader

This requires a central framework where the most growth is at the trunk of the tree, growing upwards in a balanced fashion. Make sure the branches have lots of space so they have enough room to expand as they age.
Apple trees:tip or spur bearers (goes to FB, but short version: most heritage are spur bearers, most common backyard are tip.
Cherry trees
Mango trees
Mulberry trees
Avocado trees
Pear trees

Open centre The open centre structure system looks like a vase, keeping the centre of the tree as clear as possible. You start by pruning a young fruit tree at its main trunk but maintaining the ones that surround it, giving more open space to the central part of the tree.
Apricot trees
Nectarine trees
Peach trees
Plum trees
Olive trees

from here

SEGT 2021 - FINALLY

Weekend went well, had about 50 people come through my garden, most of whom I got to chat with, some whom I didn't.

A quartet from the Central Coast, a couple from the Blue Mountains, a couple of twenty-thirtysomethings who came from 'a very long way away'... And some locals, too - at least one family from the local area who I'd spoken to the woman before about chickens on FB and we finally got to meet in person. It was good!

Some friends from childhood came to see with their daughters, and that was lovely to catch up.

Overall, I think people were most impressed by the way I managed to get so much into such a small space, and by the way I kept chickens.

And, three weeks later, I'm finally posting this. Everything's just been crazy busy and hectic.