Eat sheet and die

Today’s garden project: half-baked sheet mulching.  It sounds like a filo pastry recipe but it’s actually permaculture as practiced by the exceedingly impatient.

Proper sheet mulching is a variant of no-dig gardening that can turn your couch grass infested lawn into a fairly weed-free veggie garden, at the same time recycling all those packing boxes you used when you moved in. Done properly it involves ingredients as rich, fastidiously prepared and generously layered as a fabulous lasagne.

However with an epic quantity of washing still to get off the line and some holy card weather on the horizon, speed, rather than accuracy, was my watchword today.

Ingredients

–  Garden soil.  Very very recently limed and ready to off-gas ammonia when hit by the inevitable cow manure.  Because you can’t beat a vegetable patch that smells of a recently cleaned bathroom.  Soil includes plenty of trad (left over treats for the chickens) just waiting to reroot in the moist and nutrient rich environment of the new zucchini mounds.

– Partly cooked compost, still replete with visible kitchen scraps.  Nothing says “urban food forest” like a seed growing mixture that looks like a bin.  In defense of my shonky methods, zucchini will apparently grow happily on a compost heap.  Lucky, that.

– A bale of sugar cane hay, three bags of cow manure and a handful of golden zucchini seeds

– Two large cardboard boxes, recently used to deliver plants.  There’s poetic symmetry here, since these very same boxes may now very possibly be used to kill them.

Procedure

– Amend soil with cow manure and compost.  Best advice is to check soil chemistry first, but life is too short.  Possibly zucchini plants lives may also be quite short.

– Shape into a mound.  Turn your back for a moment.  Reshape into a mound.  Repeat.  Once again, we see the way chickens (and, it seems, brush turkeys) flourish on a diet of ordure.

– Water thoroughly.  Flatten and soak the cardboard boxes/give the chooks a drink.

– Lay the boxes over your mounds and cover with remaining rotten food scraps.  Mulch with a thick layer of straw, or alternatively, whatever meagre quantity of straw you have left after interring the potato plants.

– Plant three zucchini seeds in each mound.  Say a tiny prayer for each of them.

– Attempt to protect your seedlings from resident poultry by either mechanical or psychological means.  You may want to try one of the one of the following: (a) a long arch of  of chickenwire secured with rocks and tiles (b) a broken child-sized camping chair draped with a vegetable net (c) a scary painting of the Cyclops’ eye.

Only time will tell whether the exclusion approaches traditionally used by permaculturalists will be more or less successful than the innovative deployment of one-eyed monsters from Greek myth.  Since I’ve now used up every scrap of chicken wire, trellis and veggie net on the premises, I may be heading in the direction of threatening ancient gods for economical bird protection in future.

Bowerbirds: snacking for solar gain

Before the fall

Before the fall: it’s always sunnier on the other side of the fence

The gang’s back.  Loads of satin bowerbirds in the garden at the moment.  I’ve seen a couple of mature males, with their glossy blue-black feathers and gorgeous indigo eyes, but most of the robotic whistles, clicks, churrs and cracks in the trees seem to be the “greens” – juvenile males and females, hanging out in a pack.

I’ve heard grim stories about the antics of bowerbirds in the veggie garden.  Apparently they like to lull the backyard grower into a false sense of security and then swoop in and devastate your greens.  But I’m feeling kind of relaxed on that front.  After the brush turkeys exhumed my long awaited Hass avocado treelet, and my big girls, the young-bloods, the prodigious egg-layers, started lounging around under the baby banana trees, making eyes at my kale and chomping on every “poisonous” rhubarb leaf the moment it unfurled, I’ve decided to go totally Christo.  Every seed, every seedling, every newly planted tuber has its own little  blanket of horticultural fleece.  Anything growing that’s remotely likely to appeal to the poultry palate is swathed in netting.

The one upside of the chooks’ blithe disregard of the garden fence is the complete and total elimination of trad from the veggie patch.  Three months ago our spindly raspberry canes and brave little Nightingale persimmon were drowning in a lush wash of juicy stems and emerald leaves, even as the ground slowly dehydrated around them. But now – nada.  A few stems scattered around, waiting to reroot after the rain but not a leaf to be seen.  It’s all very satisfying.

So it’s not all bad when your flock take to the greenery.  The bowerbirds haven’t got a chance of getting my broadbeans.  But with their leaf-picking ways, they are doing sterling work for the environment.

Brushturkey in liquidambar

Brush turkey roosting in our poor denuded liquidambar

Their latest hang-out is the neighbour’s liquidambar tree – gorgeous and looming, throwing a great long shadow across our ice-box house all autumn. Basking in the sunshine on the other side of the fence, it steadfastly refuses to shed its leaves, months and months after our poor overhung specimen has shivered and shaken off its own.  And then, when the last ruby shreds are about to be blown from its branches, and the winter sun finally promises to warm our August days, the bloody thing starts growing leaves again!

But never fear, Super Satin Bowerbird is here!  I can’t prove definitively that their main objective was improving our passive solar gain but after closely studying these photographs for insights into bowerbird psychology and culinary habits, it certainly looks like it.

Tropic Snow

First peach blossom closeup

The first peach blossom of spring winter: TropicSnow, a low chill variety.  It has produced Cezanne-worthy fruits from its second year here – but so far I haven’t beaten the critters to them.

This year! This year! Mesh exclusion bags!  Fruit fly traps!  Pheromones!  Chooks given the run of the pepino groundcover – dig, dig my sharp clawed friends! – on the condition that they utterly exterminate all fruit fly larvae.  I’m toying with installing a band of slippery plastic (or inedible metal?) around the base of the tree to at least give the possums and the rats a bit of a challenge (or some core body exercise?).  Tiger poo??  Whatever it takes!

Peaches apparently only live for a few years, and I simply refuse to have the damn thing die before I wrap my laughing-gear around some luscious sun-warmed home-grown fruit.

All-conquering kale and its frenemies

Good friends describe me as “herbal”.  I’ve been a lentil eater for 27 years and my shelves groan with organic gardening and vegetarian recipe books.  And I’m not averse to dabbling in a spot of ancient-learned-women’s-plant-knowedge-as-yet-unverified-by-modern-experimental-science.  But I have to say that companion planting has taken a body blow in our household in recent weeks.  Here’s why:

 Two kale plants, from the same punnet, planted less than a metre apart.  On your left, the kale that enjoyed the companionship of a cheerful red and orange flowered marigold, “Naughty Marietta”.  On your right, the kale out in the cold with no date  (though giant mustard, baby leeks and daikon radish are hanging around in a kind of unstructured way).

It turns out that the vague story I heard about marigolds, with their pungent foliage, as a nifty companion plant is true enough if you have a problem with nematodes, but dead wrong on the aphid front.  It seems that all-female parthenogenic parasites love the cheery flowers of marigolds even more than I do. But not enough to turn down the opportunity for a feast on a superfood.

In fact, I read recently that if you rub some vaseline on a yellow sticky label and stick it in amongst your veggies, the aphids will be lured in and get stuck on the lube so you can dispose of them thoughtfully.  But I’d advise you not to get too carried away with this approach, for a number of reasons: (a) if left long enough your post-it might attract aphids from further afield  (b) striding out back with a bundle of stationery in one hand and a tube of vaseline in the other will raise eyebrows amongst your neighbours and (c) the veracity of this story is no more guaranteed than the one about the marigolds and the aphids.

I’m not dissing the power of the herb entirely though.  It seems the smell of granny’s hanky does distract possums and bandicoots (and perhaps singing mice and super rats) from sniffing out newly sprouted peas and beans.  My broadies and sugar snaps are looking good under a vegenet liberally sprinkled with lavender flowers and leaves. I hold out hopes that this continue to work, significantly reassured by the fact that absolutely no one, as far as I know, recommends these as companion plants.

Vernacular architecture in the suburbs pt.1

Moments of vernacular garden design from around Berowra.  With the council cleanup coming up, I expect to see more suburban creativity soon.

Diggers

Naughty as it is to dig – vandalising the earthworms’ underground cities and all that – I decided to take to the spade today.  The youngsters did a pretty good job in their weeks under the chook dome of clearing that patch of its weeds but excavating the couch grass was beyond them.  And I wanted to work in the chicken manure they left behind: black-and-white gold it might hypothetically be called by some chicken-obsessive. And, let’s face it, I just felt like digging.

And now I have more garden buddies to help out.  The young chickens returned with some enthusiasm to their old stomping ground.  Tragically perhaps, there are few moments when I’m more content than gardening with an inquisitive chook scratching away beside me, perilously close to being whacked by a spade in its eagerness to dart in for grubs.  Today I almost decided that the psychodrama of raising day-old chicks was worth it.  Shyla, raised in the brooder, hung out with me, approaching periodically to inquire, with a dinkum Aussie rising inflection, when I was going to find her something delicious to eat.  Absolutely charming.

Allegedly Einstein said “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.  This aphorism seems appropriate to ANZAC Day somehow.  It also quite accurately describes my approach to planting broad beans.  I’ve had two goes at getting my broadies going with minimal success, but now the human and chicken digging is done, I’m trying again.  The humane traps are in the post, and in the mean time I’m hoping a well secured vege net will keep critters at bay.  With luck aromatherapy will be my ace in the hole.  The beans planted right by the lavender hedge seemed to germinate unmolested – benefiting, I suspect, from distracting smell of the companion plants.  This particular net was draped right over my “Frenchette” lavandula dentata for the last three months.  It’s as delightfully scented as your granny’s hankie: hopefully rats don’t favour potpourri.

If that doesn’t work, perhaps I should leave out some of the unexpected harvest that appeared underfoot today. One scraggy looking stem of jerusalem artichoke, sprouted from peelings I chucked to the chooks, produced two double handfuls of dangerously more-ish tubers.  Blow on winds of winter, the artichokes have arrived!  This bounty was greeted with groans in the kitchen.  I love the taste and try to sneak them into to soups and bakes and stirfries, just one or two, cut up small so no-one will notice.  But the post-prandial flatulence that inevitably ensues is a dead give-away.  If they have a similar effect on rats, this could be our secret weapon in organic pest control.  Maybe if we leave them scattered around the garden-robbers will gorge themselves on that toothsome but indigestible inulin and simply explode.  If the decorous aroma of lavender  doesn’t work, perhaps the more prosaic accumulation of gas in the alimentary canal is the way to go.

Bean thieves

I’ve been a little obsessed with brush turkeys lately, in case you haven’t noticed. As yet I haven’t set up a nanotechnology lab to investigate the remarkable hydrophobic properties of their eggs but perhaps that’s only a matter of time. In the interests of keeping them from scratching everything up, the garden is an “homage de Christo” at the moment, swathed in vege nets and scraps of daggy horticultural fleece. That’s in addition to chicken wire hoops over my garlic, rocks and tiles around the baby citrus, and a trellis trapdoor over germinating sweet peas. And my new strategy: distraction. The brush turkeys have been having a grand time digging through a recently applied layer of wood chip mulch on the garden paths. Since “tidy” is not my watchword this is all to the good, keep them from pondering on what mysteries might lurk under the sugar cane mulch elsewhere.

However, while I’ve been congratulating myself on my success, other produce snackers have been at work. A few weeks ago I put in a couple of patches of broad beans, and for good measure some lupins as green manure. I spent some time fretting that lupins could become a garden escape, spreading through the sclerophyll forest of the Hawkesbury sandstone like the blue carpeted uplands of New Zealand’s South Island.

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I really shouldn’t have bothered. A week or so later I peeped under the fleece to find a neat sequence of holes in the loam. I actually wondered if I’d forgotten to fill in the divots I’d made with my dibber, but no. Apparently lupins make a fine high-protein rodent snack. Sadly broad beans seem to be haute cuisine too – though they weren’t nibbled til they had sprouted. It seems the local rats are health food freaks. Mental note: don’t bother planting quinoa or a goji vine.

There’s a lot in the permaculture literature about the virtual cycles of animal-botanical interactions. Your chickens in their upcycled chook tractor convert scrap to crap, dig up your weeds and move on to clear pastures new. They are a serious danger to your slug population and their bedding makes a fabulous mulch.

Not so much lyrical celebration of the rats that come to eat those scraps and also make short work of your seedlings.

It is particularly irking when these inconvenient animals deploy a pincer movement, the sad story of last year’s voluptuous TropicSnow peaches being a case in point. Protected by mesh exclusion bags, they were safe from fruit fly, or so I thought. But the bags were short work for the local rat pack, and once they’d had the pick of the ripe fruit, the fruit fly came in to clean up the rest.

This is where the food web shows its grimmer side, at least from the human harvester’s perspective. We could put out poison for the rats. But what if bandicoots are also fond of RatSak? And when the rats pop their clogs unobserved, what if the tawny frogmouth or Snakey the diamond python decide groggy and voraciously thirsty rodents or still warm corpses are an easy snack? The poison’s up the food chain and the next thing you know a White Bellied Sea Eagle has carked it on top of your washing line.

Snakey has made inroads on what I should perhaps refer to as our “organic” rodent population.

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Unfortunately with that slow reptilian metabolism one rat a fortnight is the best you can hope for.   I like to think that Grandpa’s chook feeder with its foot pedal operation has made things a bit more difficult for the rodents, since I’ve not yet seen them jumping up and down en masse to access the delights inside.

Beans and sky

So, over the last month I’ve managed to raise my first green (and purple) bean crop for years. I’m not quite sure why the critters left them alone. There seems to be an element of the stochastic in all this. Things emerge and grow peaceably and then, bang, the satin bower birds have macerated your greenery. Are the beasties lulling us into a false sense of security? Waiting for the precise moment when everything tastes its best? Or are they just a bit flakey and take a while to figure out that beans are once again on offer down the bottom of the yard?  For all I might be a bit skeptical about the “we sow the seeds, nature grows the seeds, we eat the seeds” hippie vibe of permaculture, there is a lot to be said for stealing a march on the predators by simply baffling them with a jumble of plants: an odd collection of survivors and accidental successes.

Cherry blossom in autumn

What’s the difference between a good gardener and a bad gardener?

Two weeks.

That’s me, at least two weeks late with everything.  Most of the autumn planting happened today, in delicious sunshine after three days of deep, seeping rain.  Peter Cundall says my newly sown carrots (should they germinate, always rather unlikely – I got one solitary seedling out of the batch sown a month or so ago) will be pale and thin.  Gothic carrots.  Hopefully the spindly survivors will be the purple ones: seems more appropriate somehow.

I’m not very optimistic about my garlic either.  In previous years I reaped, almost to the clove, an identical amount of garlic to the quantity I planted six months before (I have a similar success rate with potatoes).  However, I live in hope that all that will change in 2014:  “The Year of Lime”.  I have been very slapdash with soil preparation in the past, hoping that cow manure and lucerne-and-straw mulch, with the odd splash of comfrey tea will do for pretty much everything.  This year I’ve taken the same approach to dolomite on my leeks and garlic, that the Scottish other half takes to salt on his dinner: more is more.  Hopefully it will make a difference. I’ve also put in not just the usual Italian White but also a day-length neutral type, Glen.  Perhaps its not me that is harshing my garlic, but my latitude.  Now I have a controlled experiment to settle it.

Having discovered the implausible passion of brush turkeys for the allium family, I’ve gone for a belt and braces approach to protecting seeds and seedlings.  This year I’ve draped my usual little hoops of wire fencing with vege nets, partly to keep out the beasties and partly to shade the newbies in what’s been an unusually warm March.  My home grown brassica and fennel seedlings are working with that same goth aesthetic and I fear that one sunny day might be the end of them.   The nets have done sterling service with the beans, which are up and cropping well.

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So since we’re in the dying days of March, it may be that my celery and rainbow chard, broccoli, kale and fennel are destined to spend the next six months in suspended animation waiting for the sun to hoist itself above the trees and get things going again on our chilly south-west facing slope.  But then, I noticed only a few days back that the little pot-grown cherry tree that has, for the last five years stubbornly refused to flower or fruit, has spluttered into bloom at this most inpropitious time, and that the strawberries beneath the custard apple have sprung little white petals and even greenish fruits.  I’m not sure what all this portends: the unnatural beginnings of climate change or just the confused reaction of temperate plants to subtropical seasons.  Either way I’m hoping for a harvest.

It’s not easy eating greens

Maybe it’s a careless-vegetarian-with-low-level-iron-deficiency thing, but I’m often hankering after greens. Thankfully, the green leafies seem to be one of the few foodgroups to which brushtailed possums, rats, bandicoots, brush turkeys and chickens – the non-human beneficiaries of my most of my horticultural efforts – all seem relatively indifferent.  When things were very barren in the yard recently, my sorrel plant, a marvellous perennial that, with the deep taproots of a potential weed, soldiers on with minimal attention, was munched by something with a sophisticated palate for citrus flavours and a high tolerance of oxalic acid.  Occasionally some beastie has a light snack on my other trusty standby, the rainbow chard, but on the whole my favourite  greens seem immune to animal predation.

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Having failed to grow them from seed, the Warrigal greens I bought from Daleys have been a cracker.  They’ve threaded their way through a garden bed that, with only a couple of hours sun a day, has pushed the envelope for even shade tolerant plants like Davidson’s plum, macadamia and callicoma serratifolia.  Andy Ninja regularly scratches her way through that neck of the woods, grubbing for remnants of trad, but she hasn’t managed to loosen the Warrigal greens from their moorings, and we’ve had it in everything from lasagne to dal to quiche without any visible dent appearing in the supply.  Rumour has it that they self-seed prodigiously, so there’s promise of more next year.

During a couple of La Nina years we had watercress soup on the menu for about 18 months on the trot thanks to a semi-shaded spot near the chook run: boggy in torrential downpours but otherwise ordinary garden soil.  A soft spot for umbrelliferous flowers and the aphid eating critters they attract, and a lazy habit of chucking decrepit parsley plants under my fruit trees as mulch has meant that Italian parsley pretty much dominates the seed bed in the herb garden and food forest around the back door.  Whenever the moisture level and the temperature is right, a new generation surges forward underneath the potted makrit lime and the Cavendish banana and even between the paving stones.

I had rocket doing the same in the veggie patch a couple of years ago, until I put the kibosh on it by over-zealously collecting the contents of the papery pods.  I must have been indulging in some herbal fantasy of seed saving, and so I have feral rocket no more.  At least for the moment.  Because of the tedious necessity to earn a living, I’m never on top of the weeding, and as the years pass I’ve started to recognise the seedlings of my favourite plants wherever they appear so I can “edit” the garden rather than, in that hateful bit of business-ese, attempting to “grow it”.

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However, a particular favourite has proven to a more difficult proposition.  I love bok choi and all its cousins, but especially the look and taste of red bok choi, an F1 hybrid that’s really a luscious purple, a perfect match for the “house” beans, Purple King; the salad enriching Giant Mustard and the beautiful but apparently impossible to grow purple brussel sprouts.

I have spent far too much time, money and mental energy over the last three years trying to produce an anemia-busting harvest of bok choi.  In year 1, following the gospel of Jackie French, I tried to shelter my precious cruciferous greens in a guild of fellow travellers, with limited success.  In year two, I went for a guerilla strategy – my choi germinated under the cover of the great hairy leaves of my zucchini.  I was optimistic but the cabbage whites were not so easy to fool.  But I have made a break-through, thanks to a “chuck all the seeds in the bottom of the packets together and hope for the best” approach.  Coriander!  So impossible to grow in Sydney, always starting so well and then going to seed before you’ve even got a garnish out of it.  But apparently, you can keep the barn door closed (to moths? where is this metaphor going?) even if your coriander has bolted.  The bok choi that grew in amongst my incorrigible coriander was completely untouched.  So under the shelter of brush turkey-thwarting hoops of wire and the modest veil of a rather tattered veggie net, in goes bok choi and sacrificial coriander along with the aragula and the mizuna, the watercress and the daikon.  If I can crack this one, the purple brussel sprouts are next!