Notes From Ground Level

An incredible diversity of 'weeds' covers the disturbed sand.

Here is a journal entry from 2012.


Today is Friday the 13th of April 2012.

One of the most significant changes over the last few months has been my natural leaning towards 'raw foods and wild edibles'. In retrospect it is something that has been coming for some time and for a multitude of reasons. It seems that now it is appropriate to give it a go. It is early days yet, but I feel like it is the most natural thing.

How it has affected things is interesting and I do hope to record them as I notice them because otherwise they will pass quickly and become second nature and I won't properly recall the transition that was made.

As I was watering the garden this afternoon I noticed to my delight all the weeds popping up with the autumn showers and the ample sun we have been having. I say with delight because I have been using many of them for green smoothies and in salads. Nasturtiums have been coming out everywhere after I left them to roam over summer and drop their seeds. Many of the new seedlings have been attractive to the cabbage moths and have the green caterpillars on them which I usually lift from the garden whole and throw in to the chook pen. The fresh, new autumn nasturtium leaves I have also been using in salads.

I don't use any chemical sprays in the garden so I know that the weeds and plants that come up are fair game. Now it is a race between me and the guinea pigs as to who gets to them first. I've had my eyes on a lovely little dandelion seedling forming under the choko and noticed instantly the other morning that something had eaten half of the leaves off it. The little pigs had beaten me to it. It seems absurd in our society to be gleefully watching a weed evolve so you can eat it, let alone being in competition with a couple of free range guinea pigs over it. With that said, can you even consider the paradigm shift that would have to occur for your average person to make that leap?

This new dietary shift will have it's implications on the garden for sure. For a start weeds will be allowed and encouraged to grow where they appear. If the situation is good they may be encouraged by picking leaves only, otherwise the whole plant will come out.


It makes for an interesting retrospection for me. My current practice has been to sieve garden soil from the chook pen to replenish the containers used to grow salad greens. I usually sow my vegetable seeds straight in and before they come up there is a diverse range of 'weed' seedlings growing. These get thinned out and either used for our salad with dinner or given to any number of animals for feed from guinea pigs to quail to rabbits or fish.

We have been harvesting abundant quantities of purslane from the other block. Following the initial earthworks, thistles and purslane popped up all over the sand which we harvested in late summer and chopped up for salads.

Why Free-Range Guinea Pigs? Part I

This is Jazz. One of our original Petit Paradis guinea pigs, sunning herself happily in our garden. People are often surprised and curious that we have guinea pigs running free in our edible garden so I thought I should do a post about it. I've kept guinea pigs free in the yard for over 5 years now and it now strikes me as odd to keep them in cages.

I originally began to keep free-range guinea pigs over ten years ago when I had a small group that I kept in a large chicken cage. Central to the garden was a wooden slat shade house and I had some GP's get out and set up house in there. I soon realised that this was an ideal home for them because they could shelter in the shade house and come out through the slats to feed on the slopes of buffalo lawn that I had growing, as well as other bits and pieces close to the shade house.

Stray dogs, cats and hawks were frequent 'visitors' to the garden and at the slightest presence of these the GP's would run quickly to the shelter of the shade house and through the slats to the inside. A couple of things happened almost straight away. I realised that they would be able to forage their own food this way and that I could still supplement with scraps I bought home from working at a cafe. Their health also improved considerably or should I say their level of fitness, and then their health. The level of care required dropped quickly as there was plenty of feed from the lawn and garden and only the odd sweeping out of the shade house to collect droppings for the garden. 

The rest of the guinea pigs were released. A notable observation was the fact that the GP's seldom ventured any further than a few metres radius of the shade house - with one exception being a younger one that took to fancying the neighbours lawn better than my own and would venture through the wire fence and feed there, much to the delight and amusement of the neighbours.

I have noticed this with our current GP's also. We originally received two females and housed them in a hutch on our deck. It wasn't long before they too were released into the garden, but with different intentions as I will mention later. I gave them the same necessities as the previous family I had kept. They had a 'base' that they could run to and shelter in, quite central to the garden and other little spots were set up around the garden such as half concrete slabs leaning against pots or propped up with bricks. Many of these were camouflaged within the garden themselves making a convenient escape from stray cats and hawks passing over-head.

We were not altogether aware of the impact that this would have on our new pair of female guinea pigs. Both Maiki and Jazz looked like they were much older females when we received them from their previous owners. After a short while it was clear that they had a bad case of mange. We tried various treatments and got it under control. It was then that we released them into the garden. And they changed. They started to look younger and more youthful. Their over-grown claws which we had to trim regularly began to take care of themselves with all the work of running and moving about on limestone rubble and earth. They ate a wider variety of foods and their coats started to shine and look younger and finer. They began moving quicker and faster and were more alert and appeared to be more appreciative when we caught them to give them the odd combing and cuddle.

Initially it was a small challenge to keep green feed readily available in the quantity that they were consuming. It didn't take too long and I now have a small forest of sugar cane as a stand-by. In the meantime they set to work which is the intention I had for them from the beginning. As the garden grew and I had 'green waste' to deal with this became a staple for the GP's. We still supplemented with pellets and the odd amount of straw and have since cut this down to pellets only. The rest of their diet they get from the garden and our kitchen scraps. The majority of it being sourced by themselves directly from the garden. In the picture above you can see a gathering of females feeding on grape vine cuttings. When I prune areas of the garden I generally lay the cuttings out on the ground for the GP's to feast on. Any left overs are either composted or added to the chook pen.

Since my initial family of GP's I have tried to keep only females. Late last year we brought in a new couple and one soon proved to be a male. As it turned out we lost him during a particularly hot day this summer - he was the only guinea pig in a hutch as we were keeping him segregated from the females. During hot days such as we experience in summer we have noticed that the GP's take shelter either under our house or in areas of the garden where they can find a shady, cool spot. Our little male did not have this luxury. Previous times in summer it would be a trip home by my wife to make sure the GP's had an ice block and plenty of water in their hutch. Another advantage of having free-range guinea pigs. They will find places during summer and winter that are adequate shelters. They are smart animals I think and perfectly capable of managing themselves.

The New Transition to Paradise

The image above was taken just after moving into our house. I always knew the grass was going to go, and in time it did. Rather quickly in fact.  With the increased bio-diversity I noticed that birds didn't just move through our garden, they moved into our garden.

This is the garden around 2013/14. A magical playground for our two small boys who didn't miss the grass one bit. It was sometimes frustrating having unripe fruit picked, but it was a unique learning experience each and every time they ventured into the backyard.

This image above was from an early post titled Grass is for Parks. It is one of my favourite pictures of our garden taken in summer 2012 when our first son was only weeks young. It was a humid summer and the garden was just an oasis. Water chestnuts, bananas, squash, beans tomatoes, corn, berries, sweet potatoes.... fresh eggs....

This is the kind of little paradise I am hoping to transfer to the block in the image below. It is much larger in comparison, but still a modest size to manage the elements I wish to include, so as to provide for a growing family and continue my efforts at natural seed saving practices.

The underlying process that we initially used to set up the first garden will be adopted to set up  the next garden. The scale will be different, but there are more of us in the house now (increased food scraps) and we also have the addition of extra assistance in the form of chooks, rabbits, guinea pigs and quail. We only had guinea pigs early on when we set up the first garden. The chickens came much later. We will have the advantage of having them right from the start to get things going. My goal is to build soil rapidly and to document the process in more detail. As you may be able to see the basic structure is coastal sand.

Red October - A Community Minded, Free-Range Chicken

The little red hen pictured in the banner photo was only with us for a week or so. She eventually took off over the fence before I could clip her wing. She took shelter a couple of houses up in a building site over the winter. We crept in one afternoon to find a pile of chicken shit on a stack of bricks and figured she'd been roosting there during the night.

We came back that evening with a torch and a towel and quietly crept down the back of the house to find her there perched on the top of the bricks somewhat bemused by our presence on such a cool night. I gave her a good eye-full of torch light before turning it off, hoping that it would give her some temporary blindness. I moved up next to her and prepared the towel for capture. With samurai sense she took off blindly into the night and over the neighbour's fence. We approached our neighbour's house in hot pursuit.

Our neighbour's at the time were a newly immigrated English couple who were quite well accustomed to our regularly adventurous pets. We tracked down the little red hen and she took off into a tree  at the edge of our garden. With the neighbour's permission I scaled the fence and found the hen in the top of the tree. I prepared for capture. Like a bat out of hell she took off again into the dark night and flew about 20 metres into the next street over a house roof, navigated around a street light in a sweeping curve and carried on another 10 or so metres to a group of trees situated in the next block.

This, to me, was all at once:

1. Impressive: for such a small hen to have flown that distance at night and with some accuracy.
2. Annoying: for now we had to widen our search and risk disrupting other neighbouring folk.
3. Perplexing: that such a new hen could not have settled in our lovely yard like all the other chooks we've bought in.

We immediately aborted the mission and went inside. Thanking the neighbours for their assistance.

Some time passed and we could both hear our hen and had sightings of her in our street a couple of houses down. We have been identified as the people responsible for releasing this savvy, worldly-wise hen onto the neighbourhood where she now struts her stuff and supplies eggs to a lady down the road whenever she is able to locate the current nesting area.

Clearly, Red October, as she came to be known has out-witted both cats and dogs, kids and cars, and has been adopted as a feral pet by numerous neighbours who sometimes courteously share with us some of the antics of this hen that could not be tamed, nor hunted down.

9 Aussie Gardening & Landscaping Blogs to Inspire You

This website page was discovered recently and much to my surprise and amusement Petit Paradis scrapes in at No. 9. I'm very honored to be in the company of the other blogs listed, they inspire me too. There are some great landscaping pics. Thank you Armstone.

While the posts on this gardening blog have been a little sparse of late, this blog is still an awesome source of information on permaculture. Based in WA, this anonymous blogger provides informative posts about how to set up a permaculture garden in suburbia. Petit Paradis has information on growing permaculture produce as well as gorgeous Western Australian blooms.

Armstone's Website links of 9 Aussie Gardening & Landscaping Blogs to Inspire You.

I did a post a couple of years back of other backyard gardening blogs that I thought were worthy of checking out. Sadly some of these are either retired, have sporadic postings or have completely disappeared altogether. I can relate to this. Having had kids and being involved in various community ventures, plus working and being a Dad - it is not surprising that sitting at a computer falls at the bottom end of life's priorities.