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May 25, 2014

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Animal pests, Backyard chickens, chicken diet, Gardening, Greens, Plants and what I know about them, Possums, Rats, Vegetables

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Critters with kidneystones

It was all going so well. The warrigal greens were flourishing, even without being regularly urinated on. Deep-rooted sorrel was a stalwart when pretty much nothing else was happening in the garden at all. Both were in high rotation in the kitchen. I’ve always been a bit cautious about using them raw, since, along with other garden staples like rainbow chard and rhubarb, both of them have a fair bit of oxalic acid, which if you overindulge and/or are unlucky can cause kidney stones (although the idea that the latest “miracle foods” might have the potential to be dangerous causes outrage in some) . Given that rainbow chard, which is also quite high in oxalates, always has escaped animal attention, it seemed too much of a coincidence that the beasties seemed to leave these plants alone: those smarty pants critters were sensibly avoiding intestinal distress .

But look at my poor greens now:

Something is clearly tucking in.

There are a number of possible suspects. Judging from the robotic squeaks and buzzes in the undergrowth, there are satin bowerbirds still around. Rumour has it they are fond of fresh shoots – I blame them for the tatty foliage of my now past-it Purple King beans. It could be the chickens of course, but though the four new girls spend a lot of time in the area where the warrigal greens are (or were… *sniff*) only tricksy skinny Shyla regularly scoots through the gap in the bamboo gate into the veggie patch where I’ve planted the sorrel and, more recently, rhubarb (the leaves of which *are* toxic to humans, and have also been chewed in the last few days). So, in the absence of an extensive literature review on comparative rodent, marsupial and human tolerances of oxalic acid (I have tried!), I’m blaming rats or possums. I guess definitive evidence would consist of creatures with particular glossy pelts. Or creatures rolling around with excruciating abdominal pain. Or both.

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mccnmatt

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May 10, 2014

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Companion planting, Edible flowers, Gardening, Ornamental gardens, Seasons, Vegetables, Weeds

Autumn on Hawkesbury sandstone

Pepino flowers

“Frenchette”from my lavender hedge, in front of the garden gate

Hazelnut catkins

Globe artichokes, sweet potato and Freemont mandarins (not quite ripe)

Bleeding heart leaf on a treefern Cyathea Cooperii

Mixed leaves: mizuna, giant mustard, rocket, bok choi and weeds

Artichoke leaves

Persimmons

Bougainvillea on the fence

Greek basil and muscadine grapes (“Achilles” I think!)

Persimmon

Naughty Marietta marigolds and kale

Custard apples… hopefully this one will be ready to eat soon

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mccnmatt

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April 27, 2014

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Animal pests, Animal senses, Backyard chickens, Chickens as cultivators, Companion planting, Edible flowers, Exclusion pest control, Plants and what I know about them, Rats, Vegetables

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.

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mccnmatt

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April 15, 2014

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Animal pests, Backyard chickens, Brush turkeys, Diamond python, Exclusion pest control, Gardening, Insect pests, Native animals, Plants and what I know about them, Rats, Recycling, Vegetables

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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mccnmatt

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February 25, 2014

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Animal pests, Backyard chickens, Brassicas, Brush turkeys, Companion planting, Exclusion pest control, Gardening, Greens, Insect pests, Iron deficiency, Native animals, Natives for shade, Possums, Rats, Vegetables

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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.

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”.

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!

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mccnmatt

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February 5, 2014

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Edible flowers, Gardening, Vegetables

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Thistles

Things are looking a bit Miss Havisham in the garden at the moment. A fallow season – my attempt at growing green manure an abject failure – hasn’t yet been chased away by the autumn seedlings. There are scraps of sweet potato vine, regrown from last year’s tubers, heading towards the (rather peaky) citrus, and disorderly “Fat Bastard” asparagus and frazzled raspberry canes toppled over the pathways. The artichokes are proving their thistle heritage: seeds bursting out in a most non-food-like manner, though a couple of weeks ago they made really quite impressive display in a vase. They make me think of other edible flowers and buds: nasturtiums, violets and borage; the spicy flowers of daikon radishes and bok choi; as well as the weirder ones – broccoli, capers, figs.

Better get out there and cut those giant thistles down to size.