Blooms for my Birthday

The snow peas have started flowering - what a lovely birthday present!

Hawthorn Garden Update - Week 6

I was very spoilt on the weekend, and splurged on two citrus plants for the garden!  Well, truth be told, its my birthday on Tuesday and had been sent some money to spend on something I would love, so this is it!  We will be making two smaller containers for the citrus, probably 600x600 that can be moved back and forth around the garden as well.  I'm so excited!

We also finished building the second main planter that Dan had started during the week!  It took two of us to transfer the snow peas from their containers, whilst making sure they were still attached to their climbing frame, but all was good and they are happily planted in their own larger planter box which is great.  The roots had already started circling the bottom of the pot so hopefully they will be happier in their new home.  I was a bit worried about moving them about with them being as established as they are, but they seem pretty happy where they are now so all good.  I also moved the spinach seedlings into the pot - I'm sure they'll be happier in the larger pot too!  So all of the small pots are gone now, with the spring onions to be transpanted at the plot next weekend :)

Double grafted Eureka Lemon / Tahitian Lime and an Emperor Mandarin 

Another planter constructed and plants relocated! 

(Notice the two little nasturtium plants next to the catnip as well!  I moved them earlier in the week)

Another wonderful purchase on the weekend was a potting / storage table for our little garden shed!  Such a bargain - they're on sale at Bunnings Hawthorn at the moment for about $80!  I also bought a mushroom kit that will live in the shed over winter! 

So organised! 

So much storage area!

Luscombe Street - Week 4 Update

Prior to heading out to CERES on Saturday, I popped past the Luscombe Street plot to see how thing are going.  All of the beds are going well, things are going a bit slow but all the plants are very healthy which is a great sign!  More of the radish seeds have sprouted and will need to be thinned next week to make sure there is enough room for them all to grow.  I planted one of the nasturtium seedlings in this bed as well as a few chrysthaninum seeds in the Allium bed - go the companion planting!

The broad beans have sprouted but not popped to the surface yet so hopefully next week they will be up and growing well!  I'm debating as to whether I should pop a few seedlings from CERES in as well to have two staggered plantings of the beans.  I might just wait to see how the seeds go next week!

I planted out the kale seedlings into the Brassica plot so this bed is chock-a-block and will be yielding heaps of yummy goodies in the months to come!  With the amount of work we had on this weekend I have left the spring onions to be planted out next weekend when there is more time!  We have a working bee on Sunday so will be out there again to help out :)

 Root / Fruit bed

Allium Bed 

Brassica Bed

Legume Bed

Worm Farm Update

The wormies are going very, very well in their new home and munching away on all sorts of goodies that we have put in there.  Lots of raw veggie scraps, old bananas, lint from the clothes dryer and the egg carton that had the catnip seeds that didn't sprout.  The worms are less active in winter so I'm going to leave the amount of food in there (about 2cm worth) and wait until they have eaten it all up before I add any more.

Happy wormies!

Aphids Going Wild!

I went outside yesterday to have a look at the garden, and my goodness, we have been invaded by all species of aphids suckering on the Pittosporum hedge.  The new growth has been inundated by green and black aphids both with and without wings, they're all getting into it!  So, I decided to take some action, as they had started eating the sprouts on the iris bulbs in the ground as well, and doused them with EcoOil and squished as many I can.  Take a look at the photo below - its crazy! 

So many aphids!  This was taken after I had sprayed...

I'll be following up the treatment in 5 days and will see how effective it has been.  I have also planted two of the nasturtium seedlings into the first planter to attract the aphids away from the vegetables we have planted.  Apparently nasturtium is really easy to grow and aphids just love the leaves so they can be utilised as sacrificial plants in the garden to keep the aphids away from your precious veggies.

Relocatable Timber Planter

We had the best day today making the first timber planter on wheels for the courtyard - gone are the black plastic pots for us!  I'm so proud that we designed and constructed this all ourselves with fence pailings, treated pine 7x3.5cm sections, a few wheels, nails and screws all from the local hardware store!  It only took us 4 hours or so to cut and build the one today so we'll be building another two for the yard, along with a 60x60cm version for a double grafted lemon / lime tree from CERES!

The photos below show the process we undertook to make our fantastic timber planter!

All the pieces cut - fence pailings for sides and base, and treated pine section cut for the base and uprights in the corners

Dan screwing the uprights to the base sections ...

Side pailings nailed in place - starting to look good!

Dan screwing in another base section...

Nailing in the bottom pailings...

 Measuring up for predrilling holes for the castor wheels

 

Wheels screwed in!

 

Last minute trimming...

Nailing in the black plastic liner...

Plastic liner in!

Soil in!

Planter in elevation - look at the wheels!  They also have brakes on them to stop the planter from rolling about...

And the finished product!  We planted the Broccoli and Spring Onions into this one.  And of course some Catnip for kitty just near her cat door!

So proud!  Looking forward to making the next three!

It's going to be so great being able to move the planters around the garden, not only for the plants following the path of the sun during the year but for when we're entertaining.  We can just move them out of the way if need be!  A great solution for a courtyard garden :)  I'm so proud we made such a beautiful thing!

Hawthorn Garden Update - Week 5

The propagating hot house is alive with activity at the moment.  The Kale seeds continue to grow very well, and the Nasturtium seeds have also sprouted!  It looks like three out of the four seeds have germinated which is fantastic.  I haven't had as much luck with the Catnip seeds that for some reason got completely waterlogged and were subsequently chucked in the worm farm!  I think it must have been the huge amount of rain that we have had that was dripping through the holes in the roof of the hot house onto the seeds.  Oh well, lesson learned!  I bought an established plant for kitty at CERES yesteday instead!

It will be interesting to see whether the Warrigal Greens and Radishes sprout.  The Radishes in the Luscombe Street patch have already sprouted so maybe these ones have been given a little bit too much water!

 The Hot House - Parsley seeds are almost germinated, Kale doing well, and Catnip seeds have been given to the worms!

 Kale seedlings are going really well

Nasturtium seeds have germinated

Luscombe Street Update - Week 3

After a morning spent at CERES shopping for our fruit and veg, and helping a lovely friend of mine plant out her own little potted garden for her balcony, we headed up to the plot to have a look at how things were going and plant some seeds!

Everything is doing great.  The lettuce is going well in the Legume bed - the broadbeans haven't come up yet but I'm sure they will do in the next couple of weeks.  Radishes are sprouting in the Root / Fruit bed, and the bok choy seeds are also beginning to sprout in the Brassica bed.  We spread some parsley seeds across the plot along with coriander seeds in a few of the beds.  Apparently they are a great companion plant for peas and beans so I made sure we put plenty into that bed!

Our neighbour Jill kindly gave us some horse manure that she had picked up from a farm closeby so I spread a fair amount of that around the beds as well.  I'm sure the plants will appreciate that!  The spring onions are still to be planted but that will be a job for next week :)  Everything got a good water with Seasol as well.

The other cute thing that I put up were my homemade mobiles that made use of the offcuts from the plastic cup coloshes on the plants - you can see them dangling in the photos below.  Hopefully they will keep the birds and things away!

 Lettuce doing well in the Legume bed

 Radish seeds sprouting in the Root / Fruit bed

Planting some Coriander seeds in the Legume bed

 Bok Choy sprouts in the Brassica bed

The Plot - Looking North East

Attack of the Little Black Flies!

So, under my nose, it seems like a hoard of little black flies have decided my snow peas at home are a nice place to live!  I had left the plants alone for a couple of days during the week, knowing that they were receiving enough rain to keep them going, and came back to them yesterday morning to see that there were heaps of little black flies on the snow pea shoots!

After a bit of google investigating, it seems that these little guys are a type of aphid with wings that love to suck the nutrients out of new buds on all types of plants.  They do, however, love new shoots on soft vegetable plants and will get at them at any opportunity.  After a bit of observation, it looks like they're actually all over the hedge plants that we have in the backyard, so they have naturally migrated across to the vegetable plants located nearby.

The Little Black Flies (Aphids)

Hungry for a way to organically manage the issue, I went on the hunt for a home made spray that might do the trick.  The best way to deal with them is to actually squeeze them off yourself everyday, but the infestation was such that I thought it needed more drastic action.  I actually heard about a product called 'Eco-oil' that had been discussed in a few gardening threads on the internet.  Some people had used it before and recommended not using it on anything you intend to eat, but I thought I would head down to Bunnings to see if they had any, or anything similar that would be organic and suitable for use on vegetables.  To my delight, they sell EcoOil, and low and behold the one that they sell can very safely be used on your veggies.  Its a natural plant oil based concentrate that smells a lot like a cross between eucalyptus and tea tree oil.  You just need to dilute it and spray on your plants. 

 Organic Eco-Oil

They recommend you reapply 3-5 days after the first application, then again another 3-5 days after that.  I sprayed last night, and went out to check on the plants tonight and the vast majority of the little insects have left the plant - very nice!  I just squished the remaining couple, and will repeat the spray in a couple of days time.  I think  there is a warning that you shouldn't undertake more than 2 regimes over a 6-8 week period, but from what I have seen today hopefully I will be able to keep them under control myself by doing a bit of squishing now and then, and giving the surrounding bushes a bit of a spray as well :)

Luscombe Street Update - Week 2

Who would have thought the weather was going to be as wild as it was on Sunday!  I couldn't help myself though.  I waited until we had an hour or so that was relatively rain free and headed out to Luscombe Street to plant out the seedlings and seeds I had bought from CERES on Saturday!

As mentioned in the previous post, I have spent a fair amount of time planning out the plot and had a chat to Digga about what I planned to do.  It was great talking with him and I made a few changes based on his recommendations.

The basic plan for the garden is to follow a crop rotation plan to help reduce the incidence of soil-borne pests and diseases, as well as catering for different vegetable's nutrient requirements in your garden.  There is a great explanation of the concept here if you would like to learn more about it.

There are four types of plants that I have planted in separate beds - Alliums, Root/Fruit, Legumes and Brassicas.  Alliums are onion type vegetables, Root/Fruit are carrots, tomatoes etc, Legumes are beans and peas and Brassicas are green leafy vegetables like spinach and broccoli.  The idea is that from season to season you move each vegetable type one step across - i.e. Alliums to Root/Fruit, Root/Fruit to Legumes, Legumes to Brassicas and Brassicas to Alliums.  Fairly easy right!

So for the late Autumn / Winter patch I have planted;

Alliums

Garlic in the plot for most of the year

Spring Onion - multiple crops over the season

With a quick crop of Silverbeet interspersed

Root / Fruit

Carrots - multiple crops over the season

With radish interspersed - multiple crops over the season with lettuce

Legumes

Broad Beans for the whole season

With lettuce interspersed - multiple crops over the season

Brassicas

Bok Choi - multiple crops over the season

Sprouting Broccoli in the plot for the whole season

Silverbeet - multiple crops over the season

With Rhubarb in the plot all year long

The Winter Plot

The next step was to look at each bed type and apply additional permaculture principles to the garden.  The best thing to do when planning out your garden beds is to assess the location of your plants to best suit the prevailing wind conditions and sun requirements of the patch.  The broad beans are located on the south eastern corner of the patch to ensure that during winter they will not block out much sun for the rest of the vegetables to grow.  By the time the rotation makes its way through two seasons to summer, the bean or pea crop will be on the northern side of the plot and will provide leafy vegetables with dappled shade against the hot weather.  In summer the northern wind is fierce and the legumes will help with this and therefore reduce water loss across the beds.  Its these simple considerations that really have an impact on the garden and it really means spending a few minutes planning your garden to implement them!

Another principle that is really important is to plant out your garden as densely as possible, providing you with an economical crop and reducing the amount of water loss through evaporation on exposed soil.  Its also worth assessing the profile of the soil and cropping times for your various vegetables to get the most out of your garden bed.  For example, sowing radish with your carrots.  Radishes have a much shorter growing period than carrots, so you can be cropping your radishes when your carrots are beginning to grow underground, allowing the room that they need to mature and gaining a second crop of vegetables in the meantime!

The Planted Plot

I love the bamboo teepee I bought from Bunnings on the weekend for the legume crops.  So architectural!  I would really love to make one myself one day :)

The Garden Beds

Legumes

I have planted seedlings of butter lettuce as the first crop and planted broad beans around the external edge.

Brassicas

The rhubarb has been planted centrally on the southern wall and will stay there all year round.  Sprouting broccoli and silverbeet seedlings have been planted.  I scattered some bok choi seeds across the patch as well as a later crop.  Its going to be a well planted out bed this one!

Alliums

The spring onion seedlings that I have sprouted at home are almost ready to be planted into this patch.  A few more weeks of hardening off and they will be ready to go.  I have planted some leftover silverbeet seedlings that will be an early crop.  I have planted a heap of garlic cloves in this bed too!

Root / Fruit

And finally the root and fruit crop.  It doesn't look like much is happening here at the moment!  I have spread a heap of carrot and radish seeds so we will see a lot of little seedlings coming up over the next couple of weeks!  Once the radishes have grown and been harvested I will probably spread some more lettuce seeds!


So its all happening now - very exciting!  It will be great to see how they all go.  With the huge amount of rain we have had this week they are hopefully off to a great start!



Week 5 Veggie Garden Update

Things are going great guns in the potted garden.  The spring onions are growing up, almost ready for replanting into the Luscombe Street patch.  The baby spinach is growing its mature leaves and will be ready for picking the next week or so.  The snow peas are growing and growing - I'm hoping they will flower soon and we'll be able to start harvesting some sweet young pea pods!

The seeds in the hot house are going well.  The kale seeds sprouted within only a few days of planting which was incredible.  I think I'll just sow them directly into the Luscombe Street patch next time - they are a breeze to grow!  We have had bucketloads of rain this week so the plants have been thriving :)

The Worm Cafe

I had a very busy weekend this weekend - I'm still trying to recover from it!  An early night tonight for me I think :)

I spent an exciting day all day Saturday at CERES undertaking the second part of the Permaculture workshop.  Having set up the Luscombe Street plot last weekend, I had spent some time during the week thinking about crop rotation and what I was going to plant in the garden for the late Autumn / Winter crop.  I had a few sketches to show Digga (our workshop guru) and we had a really great chat about how I can incorporate permaculture principles into the garden.  Its amazing how transferrable some of the concepts are from large scale properties down to a small one square metre plot.  I really encourage people to have a read up about permaculture as before this course I really had no idea what it was all about.  A lot of the principles are so common sense but are things that we would normally overlook!  I'm going to try and incorporate as much as I can, and will hopefully share with you a bit as I go :)

After the workshop I headed up to the CERES nursery to buy some seeds and seedlings for the plot, along with a ready made worm farm for home!  I was very excited about this because we are currently throwing away so much green waste from the kitchen that could be used as compost or fed to worms to produce wonderful worm tea or worm castings for both the garden at home and the Luscombe Street plot.

I bought a ready made kit, known as the 'Worm Cafe' made by Tumbleweed that comes with its own stand, bedding material, additional trays and a tap on the side to collect your worm juice.  Its quite an expensive option - you can build your own with polystyrene boxes as well - but with the concern of smelliness and rodents potentially getting in I thought it best to have a well constructed container for our wormies!  There's a great review with a video here.  For those of you who watch Gardening Australia, Costa met a worm expert in Sydney last week on the program (12 May 2012) who explained the process of setting up a worm farm really well!  Check it out here.

The process began with the reconstitution of the dried bedding material.  This meant submerging the 'brick' into a container of water for about 15 to 20 minutes prior to transferring into the first tray of the worm farm.  The bottom tray, connected to the tap, should be left empty for any juice to flow through down to the tap on the bottom.  Then it was time to add the worms!  I purchased a starter pack from CERES containing 1000-1200 worms.  These worms are wonderful feeders (they apparently eat up to twice their body weight each day!) and multiply very readily!  It will be interesting to see how they go!