Thinking Ahead

As I look at my back yard now I have to have a bit of a chuckle at my crop planning, or complete lack thereof. Before I knew better and developed a mild sense of gardening logic - three months or so ago - I started planting things in my veggie garden that were "in season" now. Well that's pretty dumb I hear you say under your breath, but somehow it made sense to me at the time. It didn't occur to me that the plants would need weeks and even months to produce a 'crop' and by that time the veggie would totally be out of season.

Why should the season matter if it grows anyway? Well, yes, I suppose this is a logical question. And the honest answer is: because they don't grow anything worth eating. I currently have a couple stunted cabbage 'bushes' with some inviting looking leaves, but no sign of an actual cabbage. Same goes for my cauliflower. They were just planted at the exact opposite time of year than they should have been planted.

The point here, of course, is that timing is vital when planning your veggie garden. With this 'new' knowledge I go forth into the spring when I will be planting all the things I dream of eating at through the Summer. So, get planning and get outside in the garden!

Location:Glebe,Australia

Could Have Had Three Large Steaming Piles of Compost by Now

Okay, so it has been yonks since my last post, and that is an understatement, but a lot has been happening this year. I know, excuses, excuses, there isn't one, I just haven't gotten to my blog because I rathered being outside in the garden in my limited free time. But now that it is pouring rain and the middle of winter, I have some time to get back into it and start to form a habit of writing about my every success and failure in the yard.

Much has changed in my garden since last year, including the addition of a big compost bin (still need another one!) and some vigourous lettuces and a few herb. And lets not discount the importance of all the weeds I have nurtured through pure negligence for the last several weeks - I like to give myself something to do that gives me instant satisfaction. I will be the first to admit that not as much has changed as I would like, but at least I have some veggies and a few things in the ground and the soil is starting to finally resemble something I could grow stuff in. That's more than some people can say!

I have planted the beginnings of a native bush hedge along the western side of the garden to catch a little bit of the morning sun and one day provide some nice habitat for birds and lizards. It is a work in progress, for about the next 25 years, but I think once it is nice and bushy it will look great. All the Natives I have chosen flower, but at different times of year, so the idea is that there will always be some colour in the garden. It is one of those things that I am really excited about, but won't really know how it works out in the end because I don't think we will be in this house when it comes to fruition. But it is still worthwhile for the practice of it right?

My compost bin is full and happy and I am going to have a bonanza of beautiful compost in the Spring to add to my garden, the soil will love it and I think the plants are all in need of a little nutrient love. I discovered the Compost Companion, which is like a cork screw thing with a really long handle that you screw into the compost and pull up the more broken down stuff from the bottom to the top - essentially turning the compost without moving it at all or touching it with a shovel. For someone like me whose back has seen better days (not sure when that was, but in my early life I'd imagine), this is fantastic. Air is such an important component of a compost, and that is what turning the pile provides to the system, so my CC allows me to aerate the compost without the back-breaking work. I only have to do it about once a week and it has sped up the process so much! I reckon I could used much of what is in the bin now and it has only been 8 weeks cold composting!

Another really important component of a healthy and efficient compost pile that people often neglect is water, it is so vital to the process and the number of times I have seen dry, sad compost heaps has driven me to write this post. Moisture is vital, you don't want it to be waterlogged and soggy, but the pile should always be moist to help the microbes and lovely living things in the compost function more effectively. Just think how you would perform in a football match, tennis game or on a jog if you hadn't had any water for two or three days, that is how your little bacteria and microbes in the compost heap feel. Further, a dry compost will not attract worms, which lose up to half their moisture every day, so need to be in a moist environment. So, encourage everything that will help your compost work better for you by giving your compost a little tipple every time you are out in the garden watering or when you make a 'deposit' of kitchen scraps or yard waste. Just don't let it dry out, please!

Fire!

Well, last night my husband and I woke up to the shock of finding a blaze alight on our patio, roasting our dining room table to a charcoal mess. Why was our dining room table out on the patio you ask? Well, we are getting hardwood floors put in at the moment, so we had to move all of our furniture in the main room of the house out and it wouldn't all fit indoors.

We had carefully and laboriously covered our beautiful 8-seater timber table to protect it from the sun over the next week. How ironic then to find that the bag of saw dust the workers had left outside had spontaneously combusted and destroyed the table. It all turned out okay in the end, all that was damaged was the table, all of my plants on the patio survived (the oregano and thyme have seen better days, but will recover) and the fire didn't damage the house or anything else on the patio.

It could have been so much worse, thank god we were home and woke up! We had put dust covers over the smoke alarms yesterday so the dust from the floor sanding wouldn't ruin the alarms. Again, the irony is screaming out so loud, I almost have to laugh. Lesson from this? Spontaneous combustion is real, I don't know what causes it in every case, but it is a serious thing and should be looked out for. It is actually a real danger in a very active compost pile, so if you are adding lots of manure and rich stuff to your compost pile, make sure you turn it occasionally.

Tonight I really do feel lucky to be alive.  That may be dramatic when I am only really talking about a small fire we put out with a garden hose, but it all could have been so much worse that I have to appreciate how lucky we are that it didn't get out of control.

Thanks for reading!
Cheers

Moving to a New Garden

Looking back at our house from the end of the garden

We are moving. Again. But at least this time we are moving to a place with lots of potential in the back yard...well, there is a back yard, which is more than I can say for the two places we have lived since moving to Australia in 2007. This being my first blog ever and the jumping off point to a what will hopefully be a long career of informative, witty, sometimes hugely biased entries, I thought I would start with a short(ish) history of how I got interested in all things soil and garden related. I am sometimes disturbingly passionate about decomposing food matter and yard waste, but if you think about it, where would we be without healthy soils...well, let me put that another way, look where we are now as we deplete all the nutrients out of what used to be healthy soils!

It has been over three years since my husband and I moved to Australia and since we arrived in Sydney we have lived in apartments. Actually, I have lived in apartments since I left home at 18, but that's a whole other story. Our first one was interesting, my husband likes to refer to it as 'the insane asylum' and it did sort-of have that feeling about it, though the padded walls were missing. I think what really made it feel that way though wasn't the white walls or the fact that no one could be bothered to make the 10 km trek out there to see us (it really did seem further than that). I have  come to the conclusion that it was actually the fact that there was no outdoor area to enjoy, no garden or even balcony where you could have a few plants. There was no greenery at all in that place and for some reason we didn't think to get a few indoor plants to cheer things up a bit.

Needless to say, we only stayed there for about 10 months and practically threw the keys through the real estate office door as we zoomed out of Ashfield at record speed toward bigger and better things. We have never looked back.  Onward to Glebe we went, moving in with a mate of ours to help with the rent, we began to enjoy the feeling of having a little outdoor space to make our own. I didn't really stretch my imagination about how to use the space, I put a few pots around the place and my brother gave us a Happy Plant as a housewarming gift, which immediately brightened the place up. Then our mate moved out and my brother moved in with us and that is really where my enjoyment of plants and gardening started. I mean, I had always loved getting my hands dirty and helping my mother in the garden as a kid, but as an adult, living in apartments for so many years, I just never got really into having plants and didn't realise what a difference they can make in your life.

On a visit from the States, where we grew up, my mother helped me put in a "U"-shaped raised bed just below the kitchen window that I proceeded to fill with bags and bags of potting soil and compost from the garden shop. Needless to say, it wasn't the highest quality of soil and didn't really retain much water, so the summer was a bit rough with watering every single day. First lesson learned: use lots and lots of different organic materials in the soil when first filling a raised bed, just potting soil or soil that has been sifted and/or sterilised at some factory just will not cut it and will dry out and get really compressed. Ironically, plants won't really survive well in that kind of soil, at least not without feeding them a lot of fertiliser and other chemicals.

Another lesson that came out of the small raised bed occurred when I pulled up my very first carrot and beetroot. They had been going great guns, had huge leaves, beautiful greens, but when I pulled them up the carrot was about an two centimetres long (compared to its 20 cm leaves) and the beetroot looked more like a pathetic radish with insanely bushy, dark green and red leaves. The lesson you ask? Okay, you didn't ask, but I'll tell you anyway: too much Nitrogen in the soil. You see, I did realise that just potting soil wouldn't be good enough, so I added all sorts of natural fertilisers like cow manure, blood and bone, seaweed emulsion, charlie carp...sort of overdid it on the nitrogen love and then planted a whole bunch of peas and beans as well. So, I discovered that Nitrogen is great for green, leafy veggies that put all their energy into the leaves, but that it isn't so good for the Winter root veggies. What I didn't discover until I had tossed them all over the back fence thinking they were useless, is that beetroot leave are actually really lovely to eat and full of vitamins and minerals, another lesson learned.

We had been happy in that spot for more than two years, then about five weeks ago we were asked to leave there. We have now found a great place with a nice yard that is like a blank slate to work with. The people living here before us were obviously not into the garden, what a shame! But it gives me the opportunity of a lifetime to start from scratch! I am so excited, but being relatively new to all things gardening, I am going to be doing a lot of trial and error learning. That is really what this blog is for, to talk about all the mishaps (and successes and many other totally unrelated things) that occur as I turn this blank slate into my Permaculture Paradise.

My future Permaculture paradise

I am not going to act like I know all there is to know about anything, but I am going to try and find out all I can about gardening, composting, bokashi, soil and all the things beautiful nature has to offer us and try to share what I learn with other people like me who are interested in such things. 

Why Peas and Manure?

Hi there! This is the going to be interesting considering I have almost no tech saavy and have previously tried to avoid computers as much as possible, preferring the great outdoors and spending my time in the garden.

I grew up in California in a smallish town on the coast. My parents both lived in the mountains, just outside of town, so I was blessed to have lots of fresh air and outdoor space to play in, which I can't say for most of the kids these days. No, I am not really old enough to say 'the kids these days' but sometimes I do wonder about them and how they are raised. I absolutely love the outdoors and that definitely has to do with the way I was brought up.

My mother always encouraged us to be outside, getting dirty and having a great time doing it. I remember spending many hours in the garden helping my mum weed her huge garden. I would often get distracted by a lovely wet puddle of mud that was ever so tempting to dig into or by a pretty butterfly fluttering past. I didn't realise it then, but that is where I really fell in love with spending time in the garden, then I forgot all about it for many years when I moved away from home and never had a space for a garden. My love was reignited when I moved to Sydney, which I will talk about in my next post.

I called this blog Peas and Manure for a couple reasons, one being that these are two things that are really great for developing healthy soil, which is what I am mainly going to be discussing.  I also like the alternate interpretation that it is also a space for me to take the piss at some of the ironies of life and talk some crap about things that drive me crazy, not just about gardening, but life in general.

I hope you enjoy it. I am sure I will enjoy writing it and I would love any and all comments.