Category Archives: Gardening

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October 25, 2014

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Backyard chickens, Brush turkeys, Damage caused by chickens, Exclusion pest control, Recycling, Vegetables, Weeds

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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.

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October 22, 2014

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Edible flowers, Permaculture, Plants and what I know about them, poisons, Vegetables, Waste, Weeds, Work

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Implausible vegetables

Running bamboo

I don’t know if it’s spring or the big rains we had a while ago, but bamboo shoots from the neighbours’ giant hedge are popping up everywhere.  I say it’s the neighbours’ bamboo hedge but since it’s running bamboo, it’s ours as well.  It makes a frequent guest appearance amongst the native shrubs, pokes through cracks in the concrete driveway, squeezes its way around the foundations of the house. Regularly hacking it back is the only thing stopping our yard slowly transforming into panda paradise (in fact, every time I get out the saw the kids accuse me of species-threatening habitat destruction).

But rampant bamboo is actually fine.  In fact, it’s great, since I consider myself to be an artist whose natural medium is bamboo stakes and zip ties.  So far my oeuvre includes four gates, a 10 metre long enclosure for the vegetable garden, five trellises in a range of styles, a pergola, some windchimes and more bean tripods than you can shake a stick at.  Obviously, if you did shake a stick in my vicinity I’d probably grab it from you, attach zip ties to it and turn it into a trellis.

The wall of bamboo is a magical swaying whispering verdant thing.  Every year it manufactures the living fenceposts that keep our property’s ancient teetering side wall more or less upright.  And now it feeds us!  Okay, it feeds us with grass.  In fact, grass laden potentially fatal amounts of cyanide.  But it’s still food, even if you’re not a panda.

Bamboo shoots, I think, should be included in a new class of produce I’m calling “implausible vegetables”.  I’m not 100% sure how we define this category of foodstuffs.  One possible definition: “a vegetable that, in the process of preparation for human consumption, shrinks to a tiny fraction of its pre-preparation size.  The amount of the implausible vegetable that can actually be eaten is dramatically smaller than the quantity of peelings, husks, stems or leaves destined for the compost bin”.  Another possibility: “a vegetable which even rats refuse to eat”.

But is it simply implausible vegetables, or should it be implausible and dangerous vegetables?

The pics above were taken for our 7 year old’s class presentation: an explanation of a  simple procedure in the kitchen.  In her notes, she did stress that you needed to boyl the sliced shoots for at least 20 minits or you will be poysned.  Even so, if a wave of year twos with histotic hypoxia turn up at the local hospital, we will be keeping a low profile.

After three meals on the trot containing home-grown bamboo shoots, there has been some hypochondriacal consultation of Dr Google.  Hard to distinguish the early symptoms of toxicity, though, since weakness, confusion and headaches are, in my experience, a fairly normal consequence of a day at work.

Globe artichokes, of which I am a passionate admirer, are also clearly implausible, to wit:

All those fallen petals…

But lethal?  Well, for a start, it’s clearly a mistake to allow anyone as unhygenic as I am near any kind of sterile procedure.  The throwaway line in my recipe that inclusion of raw garlic in the jar could induce botulism did not significantly reduce Home Canning Anxiety, either.  And to me, pickled veg and stuff in jars just scream deranged-scientist-in-subterranean-lab-full-of-body-parts-in-formaldehyde.  My own disturbing inaugural effort at artichoke hearts in oil was no exception.

It looks like a body in formaldehyde, but does it contain botulism?

But the more I think about it, the more all plant-based foods seem deeply implausible and highly likely to be dangerous.  You grow grass, pick the seeds, grind them into dust with rocks, add a single-celled micro-organism found on the human body, warm the mixture til it produces carbon dioxide, pummel it until the carbon dioxide diffuses, warm it again, pummel it again, heat it in a fire until you kill the eukaryotic microorganism, cool it and eat it.  What a lot of effort.  No wonder we all used to eat gruel.  And I’m not even factoring in the possibility that along the way the grain might have collected another fungus that causes hallucinations, convulsions, burning of the limbs and gangrene.   

But it’s not just modern, non-paleo foods.  You eat the tiny tiny flower buds? You eat the tiny tiny inverted flower buds?  You eat the stems of a plant traditionally giftwrapped before eating? You eat the extremely sour stems of a plant whose leaves are full of a toxic chemical used as a metal cleaner?  You eat the fruits of a carnivorous plant closely related to deadly nightshade? You grow and then systematically bury a plant closely related to deadly nightshade so you can eat its roots without them going green and prompting delerium, hypothermia and paralysis?

And I’m not even considering the implausibility of cheese – stealing the breast milk of a lactating mammal, mixing it with the stomach lining of a ruminant until it curdles, straining it, pressing it, putting it in a cave until it gets mould on it and then eating it. Hard to imagine the weird circumstances that led to this culinary breakthrough – although I guess cow-keeping cave dwellers with an acute food shortage and limited access to the internet were less thin on the ground in the past.

My conclusion: hungry people will eat anything, even if it takes weeks to prepare it and if, at the end of all that effort, it may well kill them.  We’re just lucky we have so many things that will potentially kill us on our doorstep.

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October 19, 2014

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Backyard chickens, Fruit, Gardening, Plants and what I know about them, Waste

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The year of the dragon?

I know, I know, it’s the year of the horse.  But could 2014 be the year that our dragonfruit plant finally does the business?  Half a decade we’ve had it in a pot in the sunniest part of the garden, and while it did produce this gorgeous flower for my 40th birthday, that’s been it.  Not a single piece of fruit.

Happy birthday!

I figured Sydney was just not hot enough, but gardening pro Juke reckons if I treat them right, I should be in business.  I’ve been guilty of botanical stereotyping: pitaya looks like a cactus but apparently it should be treated like a moisture loving tropical epiphyte.

So, with a tremendous amount of cursing and significant perforations in the gardening gloves, it’s out of the constraining plastic pot and into the ground by the sunny back fence.  I’m not psychologically ready to build a heavy duty trellis (and given that various tipsy bits of paling on the yard’s perimeter are held in place by running bamboo and optimism, if I was quick on the draw with the cement I would have to have other priorities).  So I’m hoping the dragonfruit can cope at least for the moment with jerry rigged temporary supports and the odd bit of string.

In position behind the mandarin tree

There’s not many problems in life that can’t be fixed by chicken manure, spoiled hay and weekly deep watering.  The chooks’ bedding seems to be working well for the stupendously fast growing Eureka lemon and the small but fecund Freemont mandarin, so fingers crossed their new neighbour will respond to the same treatment.  I’m also trying to grow Kipfler potatoes at the feet of the citrus using the same basic recipe.  It will either be a triumph or a multi-species nitrogen-burn-off.

Juke’s dragonfruit expert thinks that a cutback before the flowering season’s not a bad thing.  With the kids’ school fair only three weeks away and the plant stall trestle tables to fill, I’m cloning like the wind. The chunks I had to hack off (literally, with a saw – it was surgeon-barber barbarity) have been unceremoniously dumped in pots, with the price-tag as yet to be determined.

Dragonfruit vines seems to be a bit like tetris pieces.  They don’t seem to have obvious “up” or “down” bits.  In their natural habitat they apparently grow aerial roots from pretty much anywhere so with luck my primitively executed cuttings will take.  I’m hoping the prospect of home-grown dragonfruit will shift units, however implausibly shaped those units might be.

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October 17, 2014

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Australian natives, Garden trees, Gardening, national parks, Natives for shade, Permaculture, Plants and what I know about them

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Black wattle and a pile of rotting logs

We missed the October snowstorm in the Blue Mountains by a week, dammit.  But as we walked the historic (if annoyingly snow flake free) National Pass last weekend I suddenly realised why my callicoma serrata has been struggling in its spot right next to a humungous, thirsty pine tree.

Wentworth Falls, home of many contented callicoma plants
Black wattle dangling its feet in the pool above Wentworth Falls
and another splashed by the spray from the falls
On the moist Undercliff path

Despite the lack of a 200 metre waterfall in our garden, our black wattle is finally enjoying life enough to flower. A rainy August probably helped, but I reckon our extreme torpor also played a role.  A few weeks back, our helpful neighbours stacked the severed remains of a casuarina tree on our side of the fence, right round the base of the callicoma.  It took us a while to move the logs into the woodshed and I suspect the callicoma enjoyed the hyper-mulch experience.

This unexpected flowering made me think again about hugelkultur – growing stuff in raised beds on top of a moisture-absorbing stack of rotting logs.  The idea has some appeal and it’s not just the fact that the word reminds me of delicious German pastries.  I’ve sometimes toyed with ad hoc terracing of the part of the garden into which storm water is unceremoniously decanted after big rain.  Since the yard is full of piles of wood, “hugelswales” (surely the name of a lime green chest of drawers in the IKEA children’s department) may be the way forward.

I admit, there’s a faintly faddish feel about the hugeltalk.  I’ve got a pretty good idea that eventually it will go the way of my superannuated chicken dome, parked up like a rusted out combi van at the bottom of the paddock, only used by weary, equally superannuated chickens.  But what the hell, may as well give this hippie thing a bit of a spin before we put her up on the blocks.

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October 16, 2014

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Gardening, Seed saving and seed raising, Vegetables

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Death toll on the windowsill

Methuselah. Yearning to mingle its genome with an organic celery seedling.

This punnet of celery is 900 years 9 months old.  It’s a heritage variety, lovingly protected from the wicked hybridising ways of multinationals, raised without recourse to superphosphate or pesticides, its seeds collected and harboured by sequence of people of good will, finally given a new home on a windowsill that has scarcely ever seen any form of domestic cleaning product.   And look how it has repaid me and all the hippies before me that sought to give it life.

At some point during the epic period of time it has taken this recalcitrant celery to grow to its current puny dimensions, I  succumbed to a pack of genetically modified and chemically drenched celery seedlings from Bunnings.  The evil celery has been planted out, watered, mulched, fertilised, endured winter, had a spring growth, been mulched again, and seen the inside of at least three soups.  But it’s all too hard for our home-sown hero.

I wish I could claim that this diminutive plant was a radical experiment in developing kitchen-garden bonsai, or the result of a daring hybridisation of celery and genetic material from Methuselah, 4,845-year-old Great Basin bristle-cone pine, which holds the current record for the oldest tree in the world.  Indeed, I’m sure any hypothetical future celery sticks that might be harvested from this uninspiring specimen would have the same flavour and texture as a lump of a four thousand year old pine bark.

Sadly, however, this is no horticultural break-through.  It’s normal service. This is how we raise seeds in our Berowra backyard.  The fact that the celery seedling is still clinging to life at all is, in truth, a triumph.

Here’s a typical sequence of events.

1. I observe a change in the seasons: a warm breeze, the hint of autumn rain.  It’s late winter/ late summer – just the right time to put in some seedlings.  I resolve to grow some.

2. Weeks pass.  Sometimes months.  Eventually in a late-night frenzy of consumer excitement, I order about a hundred packets of seeds from the prompt, informative and ever-reliable Green Harvest: eighteen types of beans, twelve types of rocket, cherry tomatoes shaped like a banana, a rubik’s cube and the Sphinx, vegetables I don’t like/have never heard of/have never successfully grown/wouldn’t know what to do with even if I succeeded in growing them.

3. Seeds arrive in my postbox in a flash.  I file them carefully in an enormous box that previously stored floppy disks, fastidiously organised by season of planting and vegetable family, and filled with a panoply of seed packets, mostly well past their “use by” date. Weeks pass. Sometimes years.

4. One Sunday afternoon, in deep denial about the terminal decline of the weekend, I plant out at least four punnets of each of the hundred varieties.  Space on the kitchen windowsill is now at a premium.

5. Within a week or two, nearly all of the seeds emerge and turn into thriving little plantlets, thrusting up into the light, energised by the stored resources of their subterranean seed.  They grow a second thrilling set of leaves and sometimes a third.

… and then suddenly everything stops. It’s as if we’ve had a sneaky overnight visit from a vegetable hating comic-book super villain with a freezing deathray.

6. Tormented by the failure of my seedlings to grow even a millimetre, I am prompted to do one of the following:

(a) Anxiously over-water them. They rot.  I throw them into the compost heap.

(b) Vengefully serve them up a little tough love (ie, neglect to water them).  They maintain the same utter stasis but look a little bit crispier.  Eventually, I throw them into the compost heap.

(c) Bemusedly supply them with more light and gentle healing rain by putting them outside in the Valley Of The Shadow of Death (aka the zone at the edge of the carport).  From here they will inevitably tumble to their doom, knocked down by a promenading brush turkey, a pair of wrestling brush-tailed possums, a child with a skipping rope and/or RB on a bee line for the first cup of tea at the end of the working day.  I swear a lot, scrape up the seed raising mix and throw it into the compost heap.

(d) Despairingly give up on producing decent sized seedlings and abandon the flimsy weaklings to their fate in the bottom of the garden.  The following day will be the hottest of the year and by six in the evening the underprepared seedlings have been vaporised, leaving, at best, one or two limp greyish leaves draped over the mulch as a cruel reminder of the three months I’ve just wasted.

But it doesn’t have to be like this.  Surely.

I have some ideas for diminishing the windowsill death toll.  This is a non-exhaustive list and I welcome further suggestions.

1. Defrosting my static seedlings with Essence of Death (TM) compost tea.  Treasure the Light Sussex drinks it with gusto and she has grown to an enormous size so surely it must give the seedlings a little vim and vigour.

2. Treating the babies to the occasional little holiday in the veggie garden, to suck up the rays and meet new friends.

3. Experiment with newspaper pots so plant and container can go, holus bolus, into the ground.  The only outstanding issue with this plan, given the volume of newsprint bought by our household, is whether plant pots made of iPads and laptops are biodegradeable.

4. Plant everything out under veggie nets or horticultural fleece.  With lucky, the seedlings, however feeble and under-developed, will transpire a bit less in those tricky first days.  At worst, this will both delay the moment when I realise that it’s all been in vain and provide a fitting burial shroud.

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October 12, 2014

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Backyard chickens, chicken coops, Eco renovations, Insect pests, roosting

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Tonight on Chicken TV: Roost Swap

The chooks have abandoned Palm Beach, my upcycled mid-century vernacular modernist masterpiece of a hen house.  Its retro roof line and evocative beach-shack colour scheme wouldn’t look out of place on the cover of  Vogue Living with Chickens but it seems these days, our girls feel out of place inside it.  I feel the overwhelming sadness of an artist doomed to be underappreciated during their own lifetime.

Of course, the veterans never saw the appeal of the coop: Andy Ninja unswervingly committed to her lonely position on top of the chicken dome; Snowball, after enduring wearying attentions during Andy’s “cock of the roost” phase, shifted to an exposed position on the rim of a half-barrel.

Andy on the chook tractor
Snowball in position

At first I blamed Treasure the uppity Light Sussex, throwing her weight around.  During our recent holiday, she took up a new role as “Her Indoors”. Friends and neighbours, promised eggs as a quid pro quo for keeping the flock fed and watered, went away empty handed. Treasure kept prying eyes away from her crowd-sourced egg stash with fluffed up feathers and force of personality.

Queen Treasure was enjoying plenty of wing room in the nesting box the first night Luna, Shyla and Abbey decided to perch next to a Snowball by the brown turkey fig.  However, by the following evening, she’d followed the crowd, and Palm Beach, with its rakish verandah, striking use of organic forms for perching purposes and innovative aquarium-lid clerestory window, stood empty and unloved.

Treasure hogging the beach shack
The outdoor room

I’d like to console myself that this move is not so much a rejection of my design ideas as an embrace of one of the garden’s many “outdoor rooms”.  But before concluding that the chooks’ change of roost simply expresses a seasonally appropriate relish of al-fresco napping, I thought I should eliminate alternative explanations.  Like an infestation of red mites: the bed bugs of the chicken world.

I can now report that the henhouse is now cleaner than my kitchen, with the deployment of a bottle of bleach and a rarely sighted scrubbing brush.  The organic credentials of my garden may have taken a dent but hopefully the chookhouse has had a detox.  The mantra of “form follows function” does come in handy when you need to hose chickenshit out your modernist masterwork – though this is not a feature frequently noted in Australian Architecture magazine.  In the process I believe I may have made a breakthrough in the quest for an eco-friendly alternative to concrete: a mixture of sugar cane straw, wood ash and a small quantity of egg yolk, carefully cured under a sequence of chicken bottoms, makes a substance that could not be moved by a jack-hammer.

I hope the chooks were keeping a close eye on my efforts to pest-proof their home, since the tomorrow’s weather forecast, predicted with 95% confidence, is for rain. If there’s anything more humiliating than spending your Sunday on your hands and knees scrubbing a nestbox, it’s standing in a puddle during a downpour trying to persuade a group of saturated chickens of the merits of functionalist architecture.

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October 10, 2014

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anthropocene, Anthropomorphism, Backyard birds, Seasons

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Going cuckoo

You’re suddenly awake.  It’s very very early in the morning.  There’s an loud, insistent two-note call right outside your bedroom window.  It goes on and on and on, each time inching up in pitch, getting more and more desperate until it’s pretty much a hysterical squeak.  Just when you think the bird’s going to start outright screaming or explode, abruptly it stops.  You settle down in bed.  And then it starts again.

Or it’s the middle of the night.  Somewhere in the darkness, there seems to be a huge, angry and deeply confused seagull, belligerently squawking in disgruntlement and disgust: “Where the hell’s the beach??! And where are my chips!!!?”

It’s spring and they’re back.  Koels with their plaintively annoying round-the-clock cries, and channel billed cuckoos, raging at midnight (and during the day as well).

I heard my first koel, bang on time, the day after the vernal equinox; a raucous channel billed cuckoo interrupted one of my classes a few days before.  They’ve flown in from the north in time for the breeding season.  Sydney: it’s officially spring.

Whining teenaged koel begging for attention and grub

Despite their loud voices I have only ever eyeballed koels a couple of times.  On both occasions it was a whining juvenile that got my attention.  Down the bottom of the garden a year or two, I watched a great galumphing teenager begging for takeaway from a  motherly if diminutive wattlebird. We’re still working on installing LBB (little brown bird) habitat around here.  In the meantime wattlebirds rule the roost, along with magpies, kookaburras, rainbow lorikeets, cockies, brush turkeys – the usual self-confident generalists and anthropophiles (is that even a word?).  Which suits the koels fine, since red wattlebirds seem to make great parents.

Channel billed cuckoos prefer currawongs and occasionally magpies as babysitters, and since a mob of maggies has been hanging out at our place over the winter, I wonder if we might get an in-situ “fig hawks” or two as well.  My dad spotted a mega-cuckoo at the top of the drive last weekend, so it just might happen. Surprisingly, considering its deafening cries and outlandish hornbird-esque appearance,  no-one knows much about what the channel billed cuckoos get up to in their spare time.   So, go, backyard birdwatchers, go! Do that citizen science thing!

My one and only picture of a channel billed cuckoo

For all the mystery, it seems these guys, like the brown cuckoo doves, cooing outside the kitchen window in a more decorous and paradigmatically cuckooish way, are some of the winners of the anthropocene.  They like us and our tasty fruit-bearing trees.  And they favour the parenting style of the other birds that enjoy the buffet. Currawongs have come down from the mountains in the last forty years to snack on Sydney’s privet and lantana, and the visiting cuckoos are pretty happy about it.

Brown cuckoo dove
Brown cuckoo dove wondering “What’s the annoying clicking noise?”

Reflecting on how much these birds seem to enjoy our company, I’m tempted by a “humans-as-brood-parasites” line of thinking.  Begging for food from our animal compatriots, all the while chucking their babies out of the nest. Terminating the blood lines of the things that came before us in a flash and replacing them with more and more of our own offspring.  Bigger, noisier and more devious than the critters that feed us and house us.

But let’s not go there.  It’s a nasty thought, and whatever we might say about humans, cuckoos just aren’t that bad.

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October 3, 2014

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Bees, Fruit, Plants and what I know about them, Pollination

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Sweets from my Sweetie

Big news from the solar pergola: Sweetie-boy, our blokey kiwifruit, is in bloom.  Still nada from the Hayward pair and Mt Tomah kiwiberry down at the bottom of the garden, but there are buds all over the low-chill Sweetie vines, lad and lass, after only two years in the ground.  Well done, boyo!

I’m really really really hoping we get fruit, but I’m not wildly optimistic, given how tricksy pollination can be for kiwis. According to the ever-authoritative North West Berry and Grape Information Network “kiwifruit flowers do not produce nectar and are relatively unattractive to bees”.  Potential pollinators won’t look twice at your unappealing chinese gooseberry flower if there’s anything else going.  I’m mystified – they look lovely to me.  But I’m starting to regret that lavender hedge.

New Zealand’s boffins are developing a RoboBee to help solve this problem (seriously!).  In the meantime, if your fella really isn’t up to the job, there’s always PollenPlus (TM), “from the world’s largest male kiwifruit pollen producer and supplier”.  Surely that’s a niche market.  And to get your big jar of pollen where it needs to go, why not purchase a PollenPlus motorised air blower with an electronic pollen dispenser?  Live the life of a giant mechanical insect!  You know, I really fancy that, though I think a bee costume would be mandatory to get the full effect.

Let’s be sensible.  Robotic pollinators are a bit rich for our blood.  I reckon I can stretch to assisting with a bit of  flower-on-flower frottage, though.  So come on, Sweetie-pie, show us those girlish blossoms and let’s get twirling!