Another Job For Delegation

I've just realised what a great time this is to start a rain diary at the property.
MyMan was most upset on the weekend to find that both his rain guages had different results and even made a phone call to neighbours to check which one was most likely correct.
So, I think I will purchase him a little diary and he can start keeping our garden weather record.
Yup - definitely a job for the man of the Shouse.

Something to Think About...

Looking at the vast array of seeds in my collection, and thinking back over the many times I've handed them out to friends, schools, kindy...well, it made me think when I came across an entry in Nadja's Blog about onselling seed for both herself and Greenpatch.

My garden's seeds are viable (as proven in my window boxes) and there's always a small demand isn't there?
Maybe nothing huge but that's the joy of living in a country community where once or twice every month you can flick open a card table at a fete or market or church sale.

Is this an option for me?
Could I be a seed saver in the future?

And how about that article I read about growing and selling herbs - which, hey, I could do?

I mean, let's face it, I don't have ANYTHING to show for it yet, but I just bought myself a 'vermihut' online and 3000 red, blue and tiger worms so I could even sell worms for people's gardens and fishing...hypothetically.

I could be a garden entrepeneur!
I could sell herbs and limes to my local pubs, lemons to the local fish & chip shop, I could set up a herb stall at the local church stalls and package up my little seeds (let's face it, I'm more likely to let things go to seed than get there in time to sell the actual produce).

But what about all that waffling around with camel-hair brushes and gauze boxes and paper bags rubber-banded over the heads of onion flowers? Am I up to that when I haven't even got my random peas in the soil yet?

Oh, the big dreams.
But, it's something to think about eh?

Ultimate Mushroom Lovers Inc.

It's been a week!
From online order to PayPal to fungi.net.au and their faraway realworld site (which I imagine is dark and moist and mysterious) to Australia Post and back to me...OK, a week's not a long time, all things considered, but I hate waiting! *insert child-in-the-back-seat-on-the-way-to-a-birthday-party moan here*

I'm waiting for my ultimate mushroom lovers combo kit.
Am I an ultimate mushroom lover? Maybe not.
Am I fascinated with how they grow and over the moon that I can now try growing the hardwood parasitic versions as well as my standard buttons-in-a-box babies? Why yes I am!

According to the fun guys at fungi.net.au *tee hee*:
The Ultimate Mushroom Lovers combo will set you apart as a serious mushroom grower.
Enjoy an extended period of growth from your pack and grow year round.
White Button and Swiss brown kits will store well at room temperature and Shiitake and Oyster bags will store fresh in the fridge until ready to use.
You'll be the envy of your friends with your abundance of fresh produce.

Did you read that, all my friends? Be prepared to be envious...in another three to 12 days, assuming prompt postage.

Hard Work & Grand Results

So MyMan and I had a riproaring shoutfest the other weekend – the result of trying to live one life and four jobs with three kids at two different houses – and instead of gardening as planned I spent my Sunday at home sulking and catching up on some much-missed ‘nothing’ time when I really should have been washing, cleaning, anything-ing other than snoozing and mooching. Oooh it was lovely though.
Just to sleep. I miss sleep.

By contrast, MyMan spent his day clearing a mountain of white rocks and rusty wire from what will one day be our orchard and my much-anticipated veg garden. Today he showed me the photos of his work and I didn’t recognize it.
Where before there was tangled wire, hidden stardroppers and toe-stubbing rocks lurking in the moist depths of waist-deep marshmallow and chickweed – now there is a groomed stretch of lawn reaching all the way back to the scrubby fenceline.
Guilt much?

Much to my delight, the area will, indeed, get a lot of light and some minor protection from the sea winds.
A local farmer has already delivered our four-tonne of soil, some of which has already made it to the rose garden and my sweet potato hillocks and my Ag business boys have sold me four bags of over-priced cow poo for my strawberries. In the spirit of fairness, I’ll also have to buy four bags of chicken poo (at half the price) from TheBoy’s Year8 fundraising crew, despite MyDad having a whole chook shed just waiting for TheBoy to visit with a shovel and old grain bags.
The potatoes are still chitting (although there’s more on the way), peas are still sprouting (time to plant another round, and then the beans) and it’s almost time to relocate my lovely window box herbs and strawberries into permanent beds and start again from scratch with fresh potting mix.

There’s a mushroom-growing combo kit on its way (promising a multicultural mix of Swiss, Portobello, Button and Asian Oysters) as well as three Walnut trees – a impulse buy after MyMan casually mentioned they’re his favourite nut.
The big issue is they grow up to 30mx20m and poison any growth around their roots…so we’ll have to be very choosy about where we plant them. I’ve spent a few weeks pricing vegie plots – everything from wooden planks with H-connectors, to plastic-lined apple crates and shiny corrugated rims made by tank companies.

Whatever the option, considering the extensive size of our plot, it’s going to cost us around $200 per bed which isn’t a very affordable option considering we’ll also have to crusher dust a walkway between the beds to suppress the weeds, fence out the rabbits and future chooks (with a dog-run buffer between) and continue to landscape at my house as well.

But, while I’m all for reuse and repurposing, I’m not keen to cut down old tanks for my beds as I’m worried about rust and sharp edges even though MyMan assures me he can cap all the edges with split hosing.
Then today we heard rumours of a pile of railway sleepers discarded at an old siding where the line is being upgraded in anticipation of more local mining exploration. Local farmers have been invited to ‘help themselves’ so that means a late-night spotlighting tour of the boondocks tomorrow night, in between training and tutoring.
So we’ve compromised (although he doesn’t know it yet), the unused tank in my townie backyard will be cut into threes for permanent beds – that’s my strawberries, asparagus, rosemary and thirsty mints. But I really want sturdy, rectangular, raised beds as well – and sleepers will be perfect. If they’re in poor condition we can always upgrade them in the future when our money isn’t all being funneled into renovating two homes.

I’m a bit neurotic about wasting time or money on something that isn’t going to be permanent.
 I’m very aware that there is always going to be more than enough work out at the block without doing something that will need to be redone in a year or a month.

Horticultural Homicide

Many years ago I hired a friend’s teen son to whipper snipper my lawn and, much to his mortification, he shaved down my burgeoning frangipanis. He’s felt awful about it ever since, and even asked me not to mention it when I gave him a job reference a handful of years later. Last week, in a twilight frenzy of ‘getting in there and getting it done’ MyMan did the same to my newly-planted passionfruits and hardenbergia violaceas, which were tucked up against my townie front fence in anticipation of a spectacular summer growing season. I couldn’t help but laugh and, in memory of that teen friend we keep referring to his red-faced plant massacre as ‘Josephing’. I think MyMan expected me to sulk or roar but you just can’t be angry at someone who is feeling that bad and, after all, he doesn’t know just how many other plants I’ve killed through neglect (as opposed to decapitation) over the years. Then, if you take into account that he was cleaning up my yard at the time after finishing his two jobs and is responsible for the window box watering system that has my thyme and coriander thriving, well…let’s just say he’s still ahead in the plant-killing stakes.

From Little Things...

I like to think of my townie window boxes and pots as a microcosm of my future garden at EastWinds.
Realistically, perhaps I should restrict my growing obsession to what I have, which is both manageable and sustainable…but I have grander plans.

Every day when I wander out to my car or mailbox my little garden reminds me how marvelous nature is.
After all, I shouldn’t be surprised at reseeding tomatoes; strawberries that produce both runners and seedlings; or coriander that pops up after six months and a sunny week - but I am.
I shouldn’t be smugly jubilant that chives that were shaved down to nothing are now poking through the soil like so many green hairs; or that the parsley is escaping its pot; or the lettuce has finally made it to an edible size – but I am.

Corianders, tomatoes, capsicum and basil are all shedding their seed pods like winter caps as the sun begins to last longer each day, the soil warms up and all those discarded seeds in my overcrowded window boxes begin to obey their natural biological clocks.

When I begin to suspect that my roses, planted barely a fortnight ago, won’t last out at the block, I take a look at the garlic that went from wilt to wonderful after a few weeks in my pots, or the flooded beetroot that have bounded back after MyMan and I spent a lunchtime knocking nail holes in the bottom of their metal box.
It gives me hope.

Water, sunshine, manure…then just add seeds. It’s a miracle every time!
We can put them in pots or contain them to plots, we can line up green things in rows; but there’s no denying, Mother Nature is still running the show.

The Random Peas

The ‘random peas’ are poking their heads up from their egg-carton beds. Another fortnight or so and I’ll plant them out against MyMan’s newly-painted frontyard fence (made of repurposed roofing iron) before planting another succession set. The challenge is to see how long I can keep them going before the heat hits. They obviously reseed easily if my window boxes are anything to go by and I guess they’re good green manure if nothing else. According to my Diggers guide, I can start planting beans in the next month, so that’ll be the next challenge. I might even intersperse beans and peas just to hedge my bets…and hedge my beds.

To Do

NZ gardener and author Sarah O’Neill has the best and simplest idea for her garden shed, a blackboard ‘To Do’ list. I’m definitely going to adopt that idea in my own workshop one day soon, until then I have a list going on my phone. At the moment it says: • More spud towers • Straw & soil for spuds • 2 more roses for block garden • Rosemary for hedging. • Fertilise passionfruit • Mushroom kits • 4 grapes for dog fence • Strawberries & spring onions for wheelbarrow • Divide variegated lemon thyme Now it’s the last one that’s worrying me. This was the plan right? Get herbs and veg started in pots or window boxes and divvy them or tease them out for the garden. But I didn’t really expect things to survive, but it’s thriving. And I love my lemon thyme. More than any other plant (athough the passionfruit and sage come a nostalgic second and third) lemon thyme makes me happy and it seems to thrive despite my neglect. So I don’t want to actively kill it by tearing it in half and re-planting it. But grown-up gardeners have to do this *sigh* and one day, that’s what I want to be, a grown-up gardener who propagates and grafts and collects seed and cross-pollinates…when I find out what all those things are, and why we have to do them.

The Dog Fence

My dog is a Houdini. The mad, parti-eyed Husky can escape anything, and has, until finally my home began to look like Stalag 19 with six feet of double-layered mesh reaching above the colourbond fences and another three feet of chicken wire dug in or zip-tied around the lower edges of the yard and building. We named him Sid Vicious – because he was dark, demented and destructive. We even taught him to pull sandboards up and down the dunes, although we couldn’t teach him to come back when he was called. Now he’s a little older, a little less erratic, but still we’ve lost six chooks to him and a neighbor-cat’s tail so I dread taking him out to the block, which is surrounded by sheep. There was a time when we couldn’t walk him past the neighborhood horses without him almost pulling the kids through the fence like cheese through a grater. In fact, we used to joke that he thought they were caribou and was just reverting to his roots. It’s not so funny now that there’s only thin electric fences between us and 1000 head of sheep, valued at $80+ each. If he ever got out we’d have to have his dead doggy carcass and a wad of cash waiting to assuage the current owner before he even discovered the losses. There’s no second chances for sheep-killers around here. Before Sid, I had a Dingo-Coolie cross we called Sabre (why, I don’t know, except the kids insist all our animals have ‘s’ names) who grew up with TheBoy, the way Sid is now a mascot for TheToddler. In fact, TheToddler enjoyed chasing Sid up and down the trench Daddy was busy digging today (to lay the chickenwire, to stop the dog getting under the fence that Jack built) and throwing clods of dirt at his shaggy companion if he looked like winning the race. When Sabre died, age 16, of stomach cancer, I was easily talked into a puppy for ‘the kids’ sake’. Especially when the breeder convinced me that Sid, with his crazy eyes, would never be able to be shown and might even have to be put down (soft, so soft!). That won’t happen again. When one day Sid passes (or commits suicide by sheep) I’m going to enjoy a dog food/bone/biscuit-free budget and going away for weekends without guilt. In the meantime, we’re going to need a giant dog run, a tracer line and a whole lot of luck before we move Houdini out to sheep-central.

A Tale of Two Houses

It’s strange being torn between two homes. In my experience you often don’t get all the jobs done at a house until you’re trying to sell it or leave…but now with MyMan’s handyman skills and slightly OCD time management it seems that both houses are quickly becoming something I can really love, or more importantly, both gardens. He tells me not to worry, that renters will love a vegie garden. But what if I don’t want to hand mine over to an un-invested tenant? At the same time, I don’t want to waste any more…well, time. With six more months or so here, before TheGirl leaves for school and the rest of us move out to the block, well that’s enough time to grow watermelons, cucumbers, tomatos and beans, even plant a half dozen more passionfruit on the dog-proof fence…which I’m sure the renters will love, after all.

Hi, My Name is Gypsy, and I’m an Addict

I paid for the privilege of becoming the member of another garden club/supplier/enabler today on the lure of ’12 free packets of seeds’ which, not surprisingly, also come with a catalogue, from which I will undoubtedly buy more stuff. These companies are pushers. They know I’m addicted and they take advantage of my sickness. But in my case the free ‘taster’ is a paper envelope of Thai chili seeds. My kids are starting to complain about the obsessive way I’m photographing my seed/seedling/gardens/windowboxes/rose bush collection from three different angles every time they see me unfold the camera bag. But, for the first time in a long time, I can see that what I’m planting now will have a future home in my garden in 10, 20, 50 years time. And that’s because MyMan handles the infrastructure – I just get the fun parts; planning, planting and gloating about my harvest before finally showing it off at the dinner table. Life is good…for an addict. In the meantime, I’m looking forward to receiving my 12 packets of: Thai & Hungarian Wax Chillis, Kentucky Wonder, Royal Burghundy & Rocdor Beans, Green Gem & Marketmore Cucumber, Hawaiian Sweet Corn, Cipollini Red & Yellow Onions, Sugar Loaf Cabbage and Purple Beauty Capsicum. And then, I will rationalize the purchase by comparing the results of one organic supplier against my usual heritage nursery with a few supermarket/Mitre10 varieties thrown in on top. Makes it sound like science then doesn’t it?

Family Fruit

One day MyMan and I will get married out at the block, and instead of traditional presents, we’ll ask people to bring us fruit trees and rose bushes to add to our collection. Then I’ll use an engraver’s drill write people’s names on metal tags so we’ll always remember where the fruit came from. I also intend to collect up all my old cutlery when I leave this house and stamp herb and veggie names into the handles, blades and spoon bowls. I’ve seen spoons flattened out then metal-stamped letter-by-letter – although unless I can find a clever metal worker, or metal stamps on eBay, I’ll be sticking to the drill.

Fine Companions

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of companion planting, which fits right in with the permaculture mindset that made ‘food forests’ popular (although I do laugh that in agri-science, we tend to mimic nature – except in neat lines). So, while I can’t get out (not without a loader, fencing and truckloads of dirt) to start my own food forest) I’ve been enjoying reading the works of other gardeners, who are obviously also insane. I enjoyed Sarah O’Neil’s ‘The Good Life’ but didn’t want to get my hopes up that one day I’d be able to recreate a similar garden when her greatest issues are related to soil sogginess while I live in the driest region of the driest state of the driest continent on Earth (excepting Antarctica – sorry, I’m a Geography teacher these days). I also love Jackie French’s ‘Chook Book’. But my top favourite at the moment is ‘The Little Vegie Co.’ by F Capomolla and M Pember. The only problem is I’ve had to re-borrow it three times from the library. (I gave both books to MyBrother and his gorgeous Aussie-Italian wife for their engagement and they are busy establishing and maintaining their own kitchen garden now – although I can’t take the credit.) Well, ‘The Little Vegie Co.’ are fans of companion planting for all the scientific and anecdotal reasons alike. So, for my future reference, when I have to return the book to the library, I’m listing here the companion combinations they recommend, for the plants I hope to grow: APPLES – garlic, onions, chives & nasturtiums. But apparently you must never plant alliums and legumes together? Is it a nitrogen v bulb issue do you think? ASPARAGUS – artichoke and tomatoes (artichoke? really? would I bother planting that dinosaur of a vegetable for the sake of something I have to carve and preserve? I guess we’ll see how carried away I get). BEANS – corn and marigolds (now this one I love – the marigolds are to attract pollinators, but the corn acts as both shade and stakes for the beans – how handy is that?!). BEETROOT – onion. Which is interesting, because both can be stored underground if needed. BOK CHOY/PAK CHOI – celery, onions. Now I’m not looking forward to growing celery which I cook with constantly but all that talk of blanching…well frankly it makes ME blanch. BROCCOLI, CABBAGE, CAULIFLOWER & BRUSSEL SPROUTS – onion, dill, chamomile. Broccoli will be a family necessity, it’s our favourite green. It might even be worth growing a little chamomile just to check out if it really does have calming effects in tea. Dill does not make an appearance in my kitchen, ever, and sprouts are strictly a grown-up treat, although I’d love to grow the Ruby variety as well. CAPSICUM & CHILLI – parsley, basil. Well, you can’t have too much basil can you? And if it grows as easily as my new pots suggest it will then we’ll have to develop a taste for tabouleh I think. Or at least parsley-butter for all the fish MyMan will pull in when I finally let him out of the garden. CARROTS – radish, leeks and onions. Radishes are fast-growing, onions take all season – I wonder how long carrots take? CELERY – tomato. Oh, well now I HAVE to grow celery. CUCUMBER – corn, eggplant. EGGPLANT – cucumber. Well maybe I’ll trellis them along the edge of my food forest, in the sun eh? And the cucumber will be a living mulch beneath them. GARLIC – carrot. ORANGE, LEMON & LIME – nasturtium, marigold, lavender. Oooh – great, finally! Something I can grow with lavender. Oranges like garlic too. LETTUCE – radish, bean, carrot. My understanding is that this fast-growing vegetable is a great space-filler in between those slower-growing veg. OLIVES – they’re loners apparently. ONION – carrots. PARSNIPS – parsnips help fruit trees by attracting strongly-scented flowers. I desperately want to grow these root vegetables but they rely on frosts. I won’t try this until my beds are established and I certainy won’t pin any hopes on parsnip soup any time soon. PASSIONFRUIT – marigold. PEAS – beetroot, potato. Well, how is that going to work if I’m going to grow my spuds in chickenwire towers? Plan peas in rotation with tomatoes, eggplants or capsicum. POTATO – horseradish, beans. PUMPKIN – sweetcorn. Again, one grows along the ground and one grows straight up…both take up a LOT of space. RADISH – carrots and lettuce. SILVERBEET – herbs, onion, beetroot. SPINACH – strawberry. SPRING ONIONS – lettuce, chamomile, beetroot, tomato. SQUASH – corn, nasturtium. STRAWBERRY – apparently these guys love the onion/allium family. Who knew? I thought the rule was to grow vegetables/fruit alongside herbs that complement them. See – basil and tomato makes sense. Garlic and carrots even. But I don’t intend to try shallots and strawberries any time soon. SWEETCORN – beans. TOMATO – basil, marigold. TURNIP – tomato, onion, pea. ZUCCHINI – corn, radish, celery. A long time ago I remember creating a list like this on this blog – I should go find it, just so I can compare the recommendations.

Tree Trials

It’s very hard to restrain myself from buying an orchard-load of fruit trees and lumping them out at the block. If you could only hear what I tell MyMan you’d think I was the restrained one. I say ‘let’s not overinvest before the sale goes through’, ‘there’s no use planting trees before we get stuck into the soil and put in watering systems’, ‘we don’t want to plant something now that we’ll have to rip out later on’... But if you could hear the voice in my head, it’s squealing ‘look! look! heritage apples for sale – you’ll need at least SIX pollinators!’ and ‘red grapefruit, surely we’d learn to love grapefruit if it was red!’ and ‘well surely just a few olives and then we can cold-press our own oil, I’m sure they can’t be THAT big a weed problem’. And then I stamp down hard on those urges and redirect them by drawing another orchard design on my big scrap pad and coloured textas. It’s not OCD (well, not much) it’s a communication tool – because if I show MyMan enough times, I’ll show up the block one day and there’ll be a loader, reels of soaker hose, a trailer of dirt and bundles of fencing wire all just waiting for a willing forewoman to point out where they should be. One of MyMan’s few stipulations is that the chicken coop his father built more than 35 years ago has to stay. I inspected it the other night and, I tell you what, the FatherInLaw built to last. That thing is fox proof, storm proof, has escaped the termites and doesn’t seem to rust even. So the coop will be situated in the orchard run. FatherInLaw – who spent the last 10 years running his own successful orchard in the Riverland – tells me that he and other citrus growers run melons and pumpkins between their trees. This got me reading about food forests. So, ideally, my cucumbers, pumpkins, melons, zucchinis and other cucurbitae will be planted in trenches between the trees. I mentioned pegging chicken wire down in a tunnel over them while they’re young to keep the chooks away and MyMan promised frames…I’m not sure he and I are working on the same scale right now lol. Then I could plant woody herbs like sage and basil, nasturtiums, maybe even mints in the shady places to attract pollinators, using the shade of the trees to protect them a little from the harsh sea winds and hot summers. I need to research a little more what will grow under the trees. I wonder how strawberries would do. I intend to grow grapes, kiwi, passionfruit and cane berries on the fence that will separate the orchard from the natural scrubline and keep out the GreatMadHusky. I’d like to experiment with running a shallow water trench (perhaps using concrete, plastic sheeting or poly-pipe) through the trees and give ducks a go – but that’s a conversation for about 10 years from now. Apparently the duck nutrients are great for the trees, and the water could be diverted onto the trees with soaker hose or perhaps just holes in the trench. The usual watering regime would help fill the trench, we could divert catchment off the sheds and chook pen, and the ducks would keep down my pests. The orchard will incorporate the ancient basketball slab and ring (the Orange Court) in its very middle – I can imagine future teens escaping the adults in that shady, tree-proofed little rectangle. It will run right up against the garden, which will be built in the remains of the old sheepyards FatherInLaw also built. I love the old timbers and the shape of the original sheep run. The sheepyards back up against the new machinery shed which will protect from the winds and yet radiate heat over the garden. I’ll grow more vines over that shed eventually – maybe even some wisteria. I’m a bit of a sucker for those weepy blossoms like wisteria, crepe myrtle and I wonder if lilac or clematis grows here? Strictly to attract pollinators, I promise. But right now we should really concentrate on the original house and yard…and frankly, there’s no use investing much in the house. It’s not one of those historic, stone-walled, timber-floored farmhouses that I yearn for and others hate…it’s an asbestos-filled, termite-ridden Shouse. But once upon a time it was well-loved, you can tell that because, outside the kitchen window, which stretches the width of the house, someone has planted a fig, a mulberry and an almond tree. MyMan is already busy giving himself a crick in the neck, chainsawing dead lichen-covered branches back to see if he can revitalize them before spring hits. And in the meantime I can at least dream about nut trees, red pears, green apples and golden citrus…until MyMan gets the hint and breaks out the loader at least.

Slow Starter

This is the reason my window boxes took so long to get started last year.

The Snail Shell Flamenco

MyMan pops around in the mornings before work when he stays out at the block. However, this morning his visit came early because the forecast for rain had him out spraying weeds before dawn at the local oval, where he is groundskeeper. Instead of cuddling up together or having a morning cuppa and chat, as the sun came up behind the rainclouds the pair of us were busy picking through the lettuce leaves for snails. I wonder what the neighbours thought seeing us out at the window boxes – him in his hi-vis vest, two jumpers and a beanie and me in my jammies and uggies, both searching through dewy seedlings for shell-backed marauders amidst cries of ‘ah hah’ and intermittent stamping. Maybe I can convince them it’s a new dance routine we’re working on.

Sunday, Sweet Sunday

I spent my Sunday at the block. No appointments, no big plans, no big kids and simply gorgeous weather. I had the loveliest day. I dragged one of the comfugly chairs under a tree within gossiping distance of MyMan who was dedicating his day to fencing (again) and had given TheToddler his own toolkit so he could join in the working bee. Spud Towers now has 12 apartments and the sweet potatoes have been evicted out of the towers and relocated against the fence because my lazy day of YouTube research revealed that you mustn’t cover over sweet potatoes like spuds – so there goes that plan. The other slips were dug into the rose garden. The towers garden gets some wind and sun protection, the roses don’t. The towers slips are mounded up, the rose ones are not. So it’s a bit of an experiment to see which will work out best. The roses are taking a bit of a beating at the moment but there’s small hints – buds, fresh leaves, firmer posture – that they just might make it through. The herbs, on the other hand, look marvelous: the caraway thyme, which was a pitiful tangle of twigs when it arrived, is now bursting through the peastraw in little green starbursts; the cardamom is pushing up new lime-coloured runners; and the purple sage is looking sturdy; although the neighbour’s cat has taken to sleeping on the catmint.

Spud-tastic!

The spuds are here! The spuds are here! And because I couldn’t wait until I could bludge an empty egg carton they are sitting and ‘chitting’ on my kitchen table in TheToddler’s matchbox car case. (My eggs are still sitting in Tupperware in the fridge because the last batch of cartons are currently nestling snow pea shoots.) I’ve got my first trial ‘spud towers’ on the go at EastWinds and will build another half dozen this Sunday, seated in the garden in my ‘reclaimed recliner’ (a street curb rescue pair that are now permanently situated between the wool bales, the Bondwood and the cement mixer firepot for working weekends) with a pair of (new!) pink tin snips. That alone should speed the job up, which I’m grateful for, because it was excruciating last week using the side-blades of an old pair of pliers. I think I’m still suffering from the RSI. I’ve got two varieties of sweet potato on the go – an orange and a purple variety – and both the local Mitre10 staff and my South African (SAFA) friends insist I can simply treat them the same as potatoes, although the books insist their a completely different tuber. But, the whole point of this blog…the spuds are here! I’m a little disappointed that I don’t have my coloured flesh spuds (I think I ordered the wrong set) but I have the very cool Pink Firs – which are long and nobbly, the dark-skinned Royal Blue and red-skinned Mozarts. However, after MyMan got stuck into the half-fenced garden at my town house this afternoon after cooking for four hours at the kids’ sport, I can see that it wouldn’t hurt to make another internet order and fill both gardens with spuds. Everyone loves potatoes, right? Right!

Building a Worm Mansion

This weekend, MyMan and I intend to co-opt all the polystyrene boxes from MyDad’s kiosk shop and turn them into a worm mansion. The Little Veggie Patch Co. recommends turning the first box upside down and drilling a large hole at one end of the second. The first box is only a ‘plinth’ to support the system, the second is placed just a little to one end on the platform, so the hole sits out over the first box’s edge, like a shelf, and collects the worm wee which drains out the hole into a container or watering can. The third and fourth boxes need to be punched full of pencil-sized holes, then they are lined with old newspaper and pea straw, wet down liberally, and layered with some compost – but not too much, you need to leave space for your scraps. When the three boxes (wee box & worm homes) are balanced on top of each other and topped off with a lid, you can then add your worms to the compost in Level 2 (let’s think of that first foam plinth as the ground floor foyer). When the worms (tiger/red worms they have to be – I intend to buy 1000-2000 of my own in Adelaide next month) have settled in you can start layering shredded food scraps and newspaper on top of the compost. Eventually, when the worms have worked their way through the scraps and compost, apparently they’ll move house up into the next level, leaving behind a box full of castings (a euphemism for poo) which is amazing fertilizer and soil conditioner for the garden, as is the worm ‘tea’ (it’s week, let’s call a spade a spade gardeners). Then you simply empty the castings into the garden, or under a fruit tree, or stockpile them if your worms become too prolific for just one mansion and you have to develop new property. So, if I have worm wees and poos, if I have mushroom compost from my little fungi farm, if we have chooks to eat our scraps and provide some raw-state dynamic lifter do I really need a compost pile? A smelly, fly-attracting, labour-intensive compost pile? I’d rather deal with wee and poo than rotting scraps and flies, that’s for sure. SA has enough flies without me running an incubation operation for them. Worms lay one egg per week. They love: coffee grounds, fruit & vegie scraps (shredded – smaller pieces means faster digestion), tea bags, leaves, paper and cardboard, eggshells. They hate: animal manure, alliums, citrus, dairy products and meat.

Good News, Bad for Budget

We made our usual Saturday morning pilgrimage to Mitre10 Mecca to check the Lotto and pick up a hose-fitting. MyMan talked me out of buying a handful of strawberry runners, more potting mix and mulch, insisting that he would organise a local farmer to deliver a load each of soil and pea-straw – then promptly walked 10 metres further down the aisle and found a half-price 10L tin of off-white paint, and another 6L of fencing paint, totaling up to about $160 before we got out the sliding doors. Add this to Thursday’s day-trip to take TheToddler for his tonsil check-up, which just happened to coincide with late-night shopping at SupaCheapAuto (the garden shop wasn’t open late, damnit!) and our budget has taken a walloping this week. The(Tired&Whiny)Toddler and I dragged up and down aisles behind MyMan (every aisle, in order, one after another) while I complained that he’d already acquired all my tools, why would he need even more? His response was to throw a pink ‘ladies’ tool kit on top of the steadily growing pile of screwdrivers, shifters, tin-snips and pliers. He even grabbed a kit for TheToddler complete with fireengine-red hard-hat and half-sized hammer (and that was AFTER the rock incident – I can see it all ending badly). I know he was just diverting me…but it worked. I’m ridiculously tickled by my new pink-handled tools in their snazzy doctor-style bag. I’ve already cracked the box open to slice into several brown-paper-packages of seeds and spuds with my pink stanley knife and christened the girly-weighted hammer on the dog fence.

Pining for Greener Pastures

I've been pushing so hard for more work at the local school, beyond my two-days-a-week contract but; together with a week's work in the Science department, a specialist visit for the little rock-thrower and all the time we've spent out at the block; my lounge is slowly disappearing under a mountain of bookwork, clean washing (because I can manage to get the dirty stuff into the machine and out again, I just haven't translocated it to the drawers) and dirty socks (because the kids' process ends at 'remove clothes' and ignores the laundry, machine, washing, drying stages). And, while I know it's time to spend some quality house work time in town, I'm already wishing I was back out at EastWinds with its dingy almost-outside-dunny and off-kilter doors and wavy floorboards. I'm a little strange I think.

The Ship Has Sailed

The ship skeleton that overshadowed MyMan’s house is gone now. It pains me, because I loved the idea of saying to people “head inland 3km and turn left at the ship”. The previous tenant of the Shouse was a fish farmer and had grand plans to rebuild the behemoth which ended up rusting quietly for almost seven years. Now it is nothing but 10tonnes of twisted metal and a cheque. How very Ozymandius it all is.

Farmers Are Fun-Guys

I’ve always loved growing mushroom – long before I developed a taste for them. The tiny little round helmets poking through the mulch, doubling in size overnight. I even moonlighted as a mushroom picker when I was starting my own business in the 20s. Years ago I saw a news article about a Melbourne company growing European and Asian mushrooms on the damp hardwood of the old train tunnels. But getting spore for those types was almost impossible legally. Now it turns out I can buy all sorts of mushroom kits and inoculated wood…and I’m going to! I’m just waiting for MyMan and the current Shouse owner to empty the wool and old Bondwood caravan out of the shed before I abscond with his under-worksurface storage.

Seeing Stars & Blue Moons

My son tried to kill me yesterday. The little one, not the teenager (which surprises me). We were finally putting in MyMan’s rose garden at EastWinds. I’d insisted that if, if they were going to have a chance of surviving, we needed to take advantage of the coming rains. The boys had been collecting rocks out of the paddock we call the ReunionOval – this is where we will eventually build our house and it is named the ReunionOval because MyMan and I’s relationship is something of a reunion after 25 years living in different states, and because the paddock is going to be the family football oval until we build (we’re even putting in white poly-pipe posts before TheBoy’s 13th birthday party). So the boys had been collecting rocks to make it safer for their sister to mow the oval and they had been creating a border for the rose garden. Meanwhile I was elbow-deep in a muddy hole planting the ‘Blue Moon’ rose when I felt TheToddler looming over me with a small boulder. The words ‘move away from me with that rock, the last thing I want is a boulder in the head’ had barely left my lips when I felt a clunk against the front of my skull that made my stomach roil and knocked me off my knees. I could hear MyMan telling The(Evil)Todder off and requiring him to apologise as, sobbing, I lifted my head from the mud. All I can think is it must have looked like a horror movie, the rain commingling the streaks of blood and mud and sending them washing down my face in rivulets. Blood dripping onto my hands and the still-bare roots of the rose. Together, the pair of them let out a shocked ‘oooh’ – horror movie style. Today, I am teaching agriculture (for the first time) to Year 10s who are truly tickled by my black eye and lumpy forehead (one of them even has a matching shiner from a sheep-handling incident). TheToddler’s ears are still ringing from the berating he received. MyMan’s new St John’s First Aid Kit got its first try-out and the ‘Blue Moon’ received a little extra blood and bone in its planting diet.

Childhood Gardens

MyDad and MyMan share the very practical ‘why water it if you can’t eat it’ mentality. I remember as a child that my father cut a rectangle out of our clover-filled backyard to fill it with vegies, until the next time he was called away on a minesite job and the tropical rains came, turning the garden into our own personal slip’n’slide. But we were surrounded by retired farmers and Italian families who knew the obsession of a well-loved garden. Uncle Cec next door had a fence full of tomatoes which, if they escaped to our side of the chicken wire, were doomed to end messily. We’d sit in the shade wiggling our fingers into the wire holes to pluck pear-shaped yellow and red tomatoes. I grew up thinking I love tomatoes and then being disappointed at the taste of the supermarket fruit I bought for my salads and bruscetta. It wasn’t until I grew a poor neglected tomato in a pot which – in the heat and dry of my desert town – only created a single fruit. And that fruit, which I picked without thought on my way into the house after work, briefcase in the other hand, was red gold! The best thing I’d ever tasted. I WILL grow tomatoes like that again one day, just like Uncle Cec. Across the road, Aunty Amy’s husband had developed agoraphobia after his years in the war and his picket fence marked the boundary of his world. As a result, it was a haven of cottage-garden varieties I’d never seen before in the tropical wilds of Mullumbimby: snapdragons, poppies and the entrancing pink snowflakes of crepe myrtle. Our own yard sheltered a chook shed between a spreading mango tree and a sprawling choko vine. At night we’d listen to the fruit bats’ wings as they whop-whop-whopped down in amongst the sun-warmed fruit. MyDad ran pubs for a big part of a childhood, including our local MiddlePub (every Aussie town has one) so he was on good terms with most of the community’s farmers including a household of retired brothers who lived two houses down from us and ran a market-garden-sized veggie patch around the edges of an enormous Mulberry Bush. Uncle Algie and his brothers never had children of their own and seemed to love the parade of pre-adolescent mulberry-pickers and silkworm-collectors that roosted in their tree every Summer. I would sprawl out on those giant branches, dreaming of the Faraway Tree’s inhabitants and home-baked turnovers. I loved how those houses were built on sprawling half-acre blocks when I was a child. Now, despite the fact that most of those Mullumbimby blocks now house two buildings instead of one, today I live in the same kind of pastoral town with big yards and fruit trees and front-yard-gardens that are grown from cuttings that retire to ‘town’ off generational farms. It was easy to grow almost anything in NSW. I remember cracking macadamias with a hammer in dimpled concrete, not realizing it was a ploy to keep us kids busy while the grownups enjoyed their BBQ and a few beers. And I remember being dragged, sulkily (because almost everything I did at age 11 and 12 was done sulkily), along to a visit with one of MyDad’s work friends on the block they were still establishing and the friend’s wife took me for a walk through the beginnings of her herb garden where she took the time to show me how to crush the herbs between my fingers and breathe in their scent. I’ve been in love with lemon thyme ever since. Throughout my life, no matter if I had pots or a front yard or a sprawling farm garden, I’ve always had a lemon thyme. Now my family has their own requirements for a garden. TheBoy wants chilies, lots and lots of chilies. So he can spice up our dinner menu. He’s also a fan of stonefruits. While MyMan and his daughter demand mandarins. TheGirl wants cucumbers and an apricot tree, so she can continue the summer holiday tradition of pulling the trampoline under its branches and talking and reading and eating fruit straight from the tree all day and into the hot, still evenings.

All A-Buzz

MyMan and I are in a power battle at the moment over whether or not to keep the LazyBeeChair – the reclining chair we found at the block, whose hollows are filled with a buzzing mass of bees and honey. He has no interest in bees or the potential for stings and yet I’ve always dreamed of my own hive, ever since our aging neighbor Uncle Cec used to let me lay down on the concrete under the honey-press in his shed and he’d press the honey right into my open mouth. Apparently I’d go home with my foot-long locks stuck out like Pippi Longstocking. So my compromise is to smoke up the LazyBeeChair, drugging its residents so I can haul it into my garden where – I keep assuring MyMan – its busy little pollinators will ensure the success of the orchard and our vegies. I will even have the help of a local apiarist, smoker in hand. In the meantime, I just have to make sure neither the current owner, the scrapmetal guy or MyMan take it into their heads to ‘deal with’ our little insect ‘problem’. Do you think it is counter to my long-term purpose for me to keep mentioning anaphylactic shock?

Farm Tales

MyMan tells a lot of stories about growing up on a farm. He has no doubt that if his family had stayed on the land he would have been the one to take on the property, and buying EastWinds now is probably his way of reclaiming his roots. One of my favourite stories is about him raising his own pigs so he could buy a motorbike and then sulking to his father that the bike he wanted had already been sold - only to find it on the back of the farm ute when he was sent out to do the morning chores. When I collected together the pile of random mixed pea and lettuce seeds that had escaped their envelopes to pool at the bottom of my seed file, he got very excited at the idea of planting out those ‘random peas’. Apparently his brother (now a doctor of history) had an entrepreneurial streak as well and, after finding an ice-cream bucket of peas in the shed that had been earmarked as green manure for the farm decided he’d like his own pea farm. A giant square of sod was cut up in the middle of the house yard and hundreds of peas soon became a wild bramble of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ proportions. I must admit some of my favourite memories of the Flinders farm were of TheBoy as a toddler, sitting beneath my snow pea frame plucking the pods and eating them warm from the vine, his face in shade but his little feet poking out into the sunlight. In memory of both those special moments, the ‘random peas’ have now been planted out into egg cartons for relocation to the block. Looking through the packets, we have a possible lucky dip of: dwarf & climbing sugar snaps & snow peas, purple-podded dutch, golden-podded and greenfeast. In my (limited) experience the purple and golden need a little more loving than the others but it’ll be a real rainbow feast if I get a whole heap of young ones to eat in the pods!

A Growing Obsession

Is it possible to become obsessed about a garden you don’t yet have? I guess so, because I am. Instead of saving for the new bathroom & kitchen fittings for my little home, so that I can rent it out and move out to the farm full-time with MyMan and my garden – I’ve been internet shopping for herbs, seeds and rose bushes (despite insisting that I don’t like roses and it’s all for MyMan’s garden). It’s hard not to, plants are so rewarding so quickly…unlike bank accounts. This morning the herb fairy arrived, dumping a giant box of greenery (well, mostly) on my doorstep from an interstate organic supplier. (Does organic usually mean ‘a bit dodgy and sparse’?) Small Beginnings I didn’t think I’d ordered that much online but now it seems like EastWinds will be getting a good start on the kitchen garden this weekend. For the first time, Saturday sport is just down the road from the block and I’m looking forward to getting time with both my kids and my friends on the sidelines, and still being able to squeeze in some digging and dreaming. In the meantime, my window boxes are being overtaken by snails for the first time. In my past life earwigs were my nemesis, but here it seems that snails are going to be the ones to mow down my lettuce seedlings and self-seeding peas. So, despite all my plans to be ‘mostly’ organic I was so incensed by the sight of my leafless peas that I invested in snailbait, coupled with morning and midnight visits into the garden to crush any slimy invaders. Oooh, I find the crunch of their shells chilling. One day I’ll raise ducks and that’ll be one less job I have to do myself. My windowboxes are seated on a white-painted north-facing colourbond fence and represent the only garden I currently have at my little town house despite equally empty chicken coop and tractor tires out the back, waiting for attention and occupants alike. The plastic-lined willow-weave baskets were an impulse buy (they were on special!) and MyMan hitched up a reliable watering system for me after the first neglected lettuces began to wilt. Next thing we knew, with the addition of fish emulsion and regular water TheToddler and his babysitting buddy were expecting a strawberry or snowpea every time the car door opened alongside the garden. Basil and an ongoing supply of yellow and red cherry tomatoes made for lovely home-made bruscetta, although the capsicum succumbed in the last days to a hot wind and caterpillars. So a few weeks ago I took my little safety scissors (I really must invest in some grown-up gardening tools) and hacked back the basil bushes, gloated over the sturdy lemon thyme, and tidied up the strawberries. Now, the boxes have been replanted with lettuce, coriander, tricolor sage and pansies – only for me to discover that the capsicum, tomatoes, peas and lettuce have all self-seeded. As the weather warms up I often spend my mornings worrying whether I’m pulling out a fledgling ‘red leprechaun’ or nurturing a dandelion. Noticing that the weeds beneath the boxes, on the driveway’s edge were benefiting parasitically from the extra water and my CharlieCarp regimen, I dragged out the terracotta pot collection and placed them strategically to catch the overflow and associated nutrients. I’ve planted them with a self-seeded curly-leafed parsley plant that was languishing beneath the strawberry runners, sage, Vietnamese mint, garlic, spring onions and Vietnamese mint. I’m worried that the bulbs are a bit crowded but it’s a start. I also ‘rescued’ some 5-colour silverbeet and mixed beetroots from the $1 basket at the local Mitre10 nursery which I don’t have high hopes for in the pots, no matter how deep they are. One bunch of beetroot has become waterlogged in an old metal tin that journeyed here from the original farm garden and I’m waiting for MyMan to return my tool kit so I can punch holes in the bottom of the tin. That’s one downside I didn’t expect from having a partner again – he’s commandeered the many tools I’ve slowly collected together for myself over the past six or seven years. I really should have invested in one of those pink-handled tool sets. Perhaps now is a good time to start hinting to the kids that that’s what I’d like for Christmas. I spotted a pink shovel at the Mitre10 that would be handy this weekend when we start the kitchen garden – and I’d never lose it in the overgrown grass would I? I console myself (and MyMan) that every pot or basket I plant here will be the beginnings of a garden out at EastWinds.