Open Garden (2012)

September just flew past and it took October with it. November had come and our Open Garden was fast approaching. Before I knew it the day had arrived and the garden had actually conspired to make a little show of itself.

After only two years in the garden the banana has produced an inflorescence and is now gradually revealing its small fruit. The Goji Berry has fruit, the ever-productive Babaco had forming fruit to show off and a multitude of plants were in various stages of flowering or setting seed. The weather has been kind with a light afternoon sprinkle on Friday and over-cast to sunny the rest of the time. After Friday afternoons visitors, Saturday was a steady stream of folks coming down into the garden for a peak.

I was not sure exactly how the garden would be received but everyone showed either surprise, delight or amazement on various levels which are reactions I will cherish.

The main reaction from people seemed to be something along the lines of:

• There is so much stuff growing in such a small area!
• Look at how packed it is and why aren't I doing this too?
• I never thought of growing that here!
• I never thought of growing it that way!
• What an amazing little garden.

In the conversations with people there was also a general consensus that it is probably better to do something with the space you have rather than thinking more land is better. I too had a dream in my teens to one day have a large area of land to grow fruit and veges and plant areas of native vegetation for wildlife. I still think the latter reason is a good one, but as far as land size I've looked at different sizes and I keep settling on less might be more appropriate - at least for the near future and for household means. The main reason - and others I spoke to agreed completely - is that more land can be a lot of work and a whole lot more intimidating and overwhelming when it comes to maintaining a garden, especially of edibles.

I can count the number of gardeners on one hand that I know personally that have reasonably sized land areas and keep them maintained and producing quite well.

September Update Part I

Today I spent nearly a full day in the garden and yet it does not look like it. This is somewhat disappointing, however its the end vision that keeps me inspired. If I can get the place as lush and productive as last year - or better - I'll be happy.

Though having not been able to spend much time out there over the last few weeks means I feel rushed now to get things going while there is a real energy spurt occurring

The priority job was getting the guinea pigs into the chicken's 'straw yard" and making it secure. This was easier than I thought it would be as much of the place was closed in already and the addition of some garden trellis made smaller holes pig proof. I have now moved two of the large compost bins into the straw yard as I value the growing space in the garden too much this year! The advantage is also that the chooks enjoy the presence of the extra insect life that is attracted to the bins as well as compost worms and slater bugs. It also is a convenient spot to put some of the scraps that the chooks don't eat. They are simply raked up and put into the bin to keep the yard somewhat tidy - especially now that it is home to an extended family of guinea pigs.

I removed the old hutch that was in the chook yard as the chooks were no longer using it to lay in and it was getting weathered and took up good scratching space. I trimmed the mallee tree and bottlebrush a little and mulched the remaining twigs that had been laying around for a while.

More tripods were made for growing plants up and I even made a bamboo frame for training and supporting a choko on that was well under way with new growth and was located in the corer of the new garden bed. I also found what looked like self-seeded basella which I planted in a large pot with a bamboo teepee to train the plants up.

My wife helped early in the day with the task of ripping up some fluted cardboard which I have been storing under the house and using in the worm farms as I find the worms really love to get in amongst the layers and sometimes will lay their cocoons there. The picture below is under the house where I am using the plastic tubs to start worm farms. The tubs are filled with shredded paper or newspaper, kitchen scraps, weeds and greens from the garden that are weeded out or pruned and sand (which really is just sand and is quite fine, but after this treatment it makes wonderful soil). I have begun to do this because as we are eating volumes more fruit and vegetables than ever before we are creating a lot more kitchen waste. It is a regular thing for us to fill a 9 litre bucket of kitchen waste each day, or more. Our garden areas are limited in size so I really only buried scraps in the first few months of us moving in. Most everything is planted out with stuff now so I have taken to using compost bins and these tubs to solve the problem. It is also intended to assist my wife with having somewhere to put the scraps instead of having to ask me where they are to go next. : )

What actually happens is that I will leave these tubs to sit once full for up to twelve months while the worms do their thing and transform the contents into wonderful, dark, water retentive soil. In this way I am using the area under the house in a more productive way and there is no shortage of areas to put the scrap bucket! I even have an aero bin set up which will function in a similar way over an extended period of time. In my experience I have found newsprint and straw to be a much more rich soil than simply horse manure which breaks down very quickly - and then disappears. Newsprint on the otherhand - and hay or straw - make a very dark compost or vermi-compost that has increased microbial activity. Ideally, I will have enough compost and castings to add a top dressing to the large vegetable garden bed each year - if not twice a year!

I realise that the garden has evolved from the early plans I had for it and I should do a more recent plan of what is where and what is being used. These tubs are a good example.

Here is the simple bamboo trellis I constructed today to give the choko some climbing space. I am utilising vertical spaces more this year as I can grow more and it adds to the layers in the garden and will also hopefully break up some of the easterlies when they come in summer.  In the garden bed is some of the sludge from the kitchen sink pit where the worms hang around some of the run-off water and food bits and are present in crazy numbers. The soil is literally crawling with them. I also planted our Japanese Taro and water spinach in the vicinity of the pit as the soil is constantly moist and should be ideal for them. They did poorly in the pot and I am hoping with fend for themselves better here.

In the image below are the two crops of broad beans I have in at the moment. One is aquadulce - on the left - and the other is more a typical fava bean. I have already marked some with red ribbon so that we know which ones we will be saving seed from. In the foreground is a broccoli that we are also letting go to seed which is currently in flower.

Ambition

The Container Garden at the beginning of Spring getting ready for an overhaul

There are two main 'events' occuring this year in the garden.

The Main Event is an ambitious planting of seeds that I have collected over the years in order to get fresh new seeds for storing and putting into the seed bank for the local savers network I have set up. Alongside this I am also wanting to reap a fairly decent harvest for the growing family to feed on  - and to maintain this indefinately once the new back garden space comes 'on-line' after sitting in a semi-fallow kind of state for the last few months.

The other event is a planned open garden in conjunction with one of our neighbours to take place in late November. This has meant acting NOW to get seeds and plants in rather than leaving it a week, or two ..... or three as would normally happen with the distractions of family, work and other projects.

Having upped the stakes, it has - as any gardener would know - created some challenges that are having to be overcome fairly quickly, whilst still working with the same constraints as before. ie. limited surface area for growing plants, limited areas of direct sunlight, working in with the other components of the system such as the chickens, guinea pigs and our own inputs such as kitchen waste and recycling.

Also, more than previously, TIME has a new value and appreciation. Mainly because it is 'maxed out' with the priorities of our new little family member and his changing requirements. This is a post all of its own that I may or may not get to, but probably SHOULD!

So, given all these new restraints, goals, objectives and challenges I am dealing with it the one way I see fit - ADAPT.

This has meant remaining ever so flexible and looking at things from other perspectives. Dropping some ideas and creating new ones. Looking for ways of having things work and making the advantages sing above the disadvantages. A good example of this is the post below of the consolidation and integration of the chooks and guinea pigs.

As I work on the garden I will document some of these things for future reference.

Chickens VS Guinea Pigs

Grazing guinea pigs in the orchard/chook yard out of town.

Last Friday afternoon we packed up our three remaining boar guinea pigs and took them for a drive in the countryside to a lovely property where the folks there keep guinea pigs and chickens in a netted orchard. I had read of keeping guinea pigs and chickens together before and in this example they really worked well together and did their own thing. With past problems of in-breeding our three lads were welcomed as they would introduce some 'new blood' into the population.

It was great to see our males find a new home and it now means our own guinea pigs numbers are finally back to a manageable level again. After the losses of the last few months due to stray cats in the garden and the birth of six new babies we are starting again and I have some new ideas after making this visit out to the farm.

At present our guinea pigs are housed in a large hutch to keep them safe from the cats. Although I have not seen a cat in the yard for some weeks now, our last two free-range guinea pigs suddenly vanished overnight. That was around last Wednesday. Seeing firsthand how the chickens and guinea pigs interacted with each other I am looking at housing our guinea pigs with the chooks. Already I can see the benefits.

• More space to roam again. I really dislike keeping them caged up. I much prefer having them roam on their own and keeping them in the chook yard will give them a bit more freedom once again.
• They will still be in a semi-secure area and have access to convenient shelters from curious chooks, stray cats and whatever else may come their way such as storms or hail.
• When they were free-range before they snuck into the chook yard to nibble on scraps and now they can share the feast freely. This means that we won't have to discern between what we feed the chooks and the guinea pigs. All the kitchen scraps for them can go in the one spot and they can deal with them at their leisure.
• Being in the one spot - as with the chooks - means that their droppings will be concentrated in the one area and this will make it easier to clean. I actually don't see it as cleaning anymore because now that I am using the woodchips in the yard I just need to keep it turned over until I use it on the garden - and then it will have chicken and guinea pig manures in it!
• The greatest advantage is that with the six remaining guinea pigs being in the chook yard I can remove the hutch and use the garden space to plant more vegetables. It also means that although they are not free-range in the garden, I can concentrate on planting vegetables wherever I wish and not having to protect certain plants from hungry guinea pigs. Given that I am really playing all out in the garden this year for a big harvest this is going to be very helpful.

I will need to make some slight modifications to the chook yard perimeter to make sure the guinea pigs stay where they are required, but still give the chooks a bit of access to places.

Oh, I must mention too that we have had Jennifer Aniston go clucky again and have been given some fertilised eggs from a friend so I also need to give her a bit of room to have her own space.

End of August Update

I have had a busy winter so have not posted very much at all and the garden was left largely to its own during that time. This can only go on for so long and last Friday I managed to get out into it once again and start planning for Spring.

Space is becoming a real premium and this year I plan to push the garden a lot more than previous years as there are many seeds I wish to plant out in order to either:

• see what they actually are, as they have no records
• produce fresh new seed for future years
• build up more seed from a small existing stock

I have also been inundated with a lot more kitchen scraps since we started to eat a lot more raw fruit and veges. This has meant that the compost bins are filling extra fast and I usually stand these in the garden to keep the worm traffic happening. Wanting to use every bit of garden this year that I can I have decided to use the tubs that I have access to which you can see in the picture above. These are washed of their detergent contents, the tip cut off and if possible left in the sun for a time. I then have begun to fill them with green matter from the garden prunings and weeding, cardboard and newspaper and the kitchen scraps. Sometimes shredded paper from the guinea pig cages is added along with old straw and a good half bucket of vermicompost which is wriggling with worms from the patch down the back.

These tubs will sit under the house as worm farms until they are either mature enough to use to plant herbs into or I have enough to tip the eventual compost and worms into the back garden bed for the next lot of vegetables.

In the picture above I have raised the mesh from the winter spinach garden that didn't have any success growing peas up it (bad or old batch I suspect) in anticipation of another successful harvest of cucumbers like last years crop. I did have plans to make this a bigger support but have opted to erect more teepees for growing beans as I really wish to focus on getting some good tomato and bean crops this year.

The picture below shows the teepees which are either waiting for seedling to be planted or have seeds directly sown at the base already. Other black tubs have been harvested and topped with dirt from the back bed and sown out with lettuce seedlings.

I've had quite a reasonable crop of carrots this year which still came out well despite actually getting transplanted into the tubs.

I have planted some kale seedlings that came up through winter into the ground beds and will plant out parsley seedlings that have come up in the white tubs during winter into the ground also as their long, tapered roots penetrate quite a way into the ground where they can tap the nutrients and in turn convey it to us and the guinea pigs!

After the recent cat attacks on the guinea pigs I have been thinking of what to do next with our new little generation of pigs. Given that the last remaining female that was free-range did well under the cover of the corner jungle I think I will look at making an enclosure there for them all where they can still roam in a large area and not interfere with the rest of the garden whilst still having shelter from any cats that do come in. There is still plenty of room there and it is closer to their liking than the cage we kept them in over winter while they had their young.

The young ones are all dark eyed which is what we are looking for now after having a few pink eyed guinea pigs. We feel the dark-eyed, short haired pigs will do better in the garden environment through all seasons and will endeavor to breed this form from time to time.

The chooks are coming back on the lay now and I straightened the tamarillo the other day after it gradually went on a lean during winter. It already has some small flowers on it but I think it is in it's last year. It's had a very productive and rough road.

Some projects in the garden have not worked out recently. A couple of seedlings have either not come up or have been picked off by either caterpillars or snails/slugs. Disappointing, but better management will be required. 

The deck has been cleared of it's clutter of planting projects also and given a new coat of water-based sealer which has come up much nicer and friendlier on the nostrils than the oil-based sealer I have used previously. This year the deck will be kept clear as our little son begins to crawl and move about. I am moving the choko vine so that it does not get hammered by the summer easterlies and this will give the wandering grapevine a bit more room to move as I train it further along the deck.

I am expecting a big year for the garden. The same late summer jungle as last year, but a little more formal and manageable, simply because with my new time constraints, I have to be.