Green manure

Ages since we've written. Most weekends we have been out scavenging bits of steel, iron and wire to make up a new section for the garden. We've rapidly outgrown the shadehouse and need much more space for our vegetable dreaming.

This weekend just past we completed the bed with good fencing around it to stop the dogs getting in and digging into the sweet smelling manure. It is hard to stop the feeling that you want to plant as much as you can straight away but we've decided to grow a green manure crop. The soils here are so poor that you need to be able to get as much organic material into it as you can.

So we've sown barrel medic as well as an assortment of beans and pulses that have been sitting around in big sacks for the last 12 months.

In about 6 to 7 weeks time we should be able to dig it all into the soil and then plant all those seeds I have been accumulating and dreaming about. Beetroot, peas, broccoli .....

Susan
22 May 2007

Pests and pesto

The basil has taken off in the last two weeks with the rain and milder temperatures. It is almost at the end of the season for basil so I picked most of it this morning, leaving behind just a few plants to go to seed for next season.

Pesto is a great use for basil. I used Stephanie Alexander's recipe for it. For each two cups of well packed basil, add:

• 1 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 4 cloves garlic
• 60gms pine nuts
• salt to taste

Blend together until smooth and stir in 120gms freshly grated parmesan cheese. Put into a jar and pour over enough olive oil to cover lightly (stops it going black).

Trevor had fun licking the bowl afterwards. Just as well that I had picked the leaves off individually before putting them in the blender. A large hawkmoth caterpillar was camouflaged amongst the leaves giving me quite a shock. They are almost exactly the same colour as the basil leaves and try to look like a fat fleshy stalk.

The pesto is delicious and caterpillar free. There is always added pleasure in eating such food when it comes from something you have grown.

In the cleared spaces we will be planting cucumber and carrots. The cucumber is going into the tub with the dwarf beans as they are good companion plants. The carrots will go into a tub by themselves so we can progressively sow seeds for a continuous crop. The rocket I planted last weekend has already germinated. In fact it has rocketed up!

Birds, lizards and centipedes

Our garden is starting to become a small ecosystem that attracts birds to hang around for a while. There is water as well as a couple of trees to park your babies on while you check out what insect goodies are in amongst the vegetables.

I was looking out the window a few days ago admiring the growth on the kang kong since we moved it to a water trough and started hand picking off the caterpillars. A honeyeater flew onto a waving stalk, picked amongst the leaves and flew off to a nearby tree branch with a green squirming caterpillar into its beak. Waiting for a nice feed was a fat baby that made quick work of downing the caterpillar. Next the parent bird flew into the vegie shadehouse and started walking around the beds checking out the underside of leaves. Yes - another one - up to the baby and another caterpillar contributes to the growth spurt of the baby bird. I think the birds are yellow tinted honeyeaters, but I need to do more careful bird watching before I can be sure. But no matter they are very beautiful little birds with great garden clean up skills.

I am also starting to see more of the common lizards that are all around here. Military dragons they are called. They are about 6 inches long and a tasty meal for the dogs so they keep a low profile while they also hunt out goodies amongst the vegetables.

We have been pulling out buffel grass again and no doubt will need to do it again and again. Pulling out a huge batch of it a large centipede came tearing out looking for a safe haven. Beautiful it was. A bright red head, green stripes over the creamy coloured segments of its body and a green, but maybe it was a red, forked tail. It looked a bit like this.

On the vegie front the dwarf beans are starting to flower, the lettuce is providing us with lots of leafy salad, the mint is taking off, the basil is taking over everything. We planted out a crown of asparagus this weekend.

I'm waiting for a delivery of organic seeds so we can start up rocket, pumpkin, tomatoes, parsley and more. We are going to need another shade house. Its amazing how vegie gardens spread themselves.

Grey water, google ads and Twilight Zone music

I've been experimenting with putting Google ads on this blog just to see how it works and what the benefits are versus the annoyance of seeing an ad on the blog.

The Google ads are usually pretty spot on in terms of matching blog content to the ad. Some of the ads I would even want to click on, but I have sworn in the sign up for Google ads that I won't click on any ads.

Sometimes the ads are strange. Take today for example. An ad came up for bathroom renovations. Beyond the laughable concept of this, based as we are at Yuendumu far far away from the renovation madness of the east coast, it made me wonder why it had turned up. Have I been writing subliminally about my secret dream for a tiled bathroom floor? I checked the posts. No I don't seem to have been doing so.

Then it struck me. I attached a waste run off hose to the washing machine yesterday to see if I could reuse the water used for our weekly 3 load washing. Grey water capture. I had also wondered at the time about how to capture the water run off from our shower and handbasin. See the connection? OK, tenuous but it is a connection.

The google ad today somehow knew about this. Spoooookkkkkeeeee. Twilight Zone music started to play in my head. And a funny little video that I had seen recently came to mind. One called EPIC - a video of the reshaping of the world by Google. And another thing came to mind - a woman on the radio yesterday talking about the Internet and how we were all now connected to an external brain - a transhuman mind - which we could access at any time giving us an enormous brain capacity beyond anything previously. I think her comments might be on the same degree of tenuousness as my laundry/bathroom grey water linkage but there you go.

But maybe it is all part of an emerging transhuman body/mind scape. Google seems to have got into my thoughts; maybe I am connected into a non human brain grid after all ....

Definitely time to get into the garden and do something with that grey water.

It does seem to be a water weekend this weekend. The Kang Kong tub is attracting gorgeous blue dragonflies flitting around each other and no doubt checking the potential of the tub as a hatchery; cloud is building up from the cyclone to the north west of us and it looks like rain, and Trevor has finished putting in the main part of the vegie garden watering system.

I just think I have to get out more.

Happy watering
Susan

Mixing it up

We are having another go at growing trees in the front yard. About 6 months ago I bought 6 tube trees on an impulse. The tubes sat around for about 3 months. It was just too hot to plant out. We kept them shaded and watered but one turned up its toes and died. I think it was the one that didn't take too well to be dragged off the table from time to time by the puppy and being stuffed back in the tube.

Finally we got around to digging the holes for them. But in this heat it is easy to give up quickly. So we dug as big a hole as we could before the water in our bodies was evaporated. Put some potting mix in with the clay/sand soil that makes up our soil here and put the trees in. A local builder gave us shade cloth to put around the trees and we shrouded them up.

But it was HOT!!!! The ground burned out. We watered and watered and one day we didn't water. Two trees died that day. Three left. We watered and watered and one day they weren't watered and another tree died. Two left.

I kept on watering the dead ones for a while in the hope that new shoots would come up from what might be still alive roots. After a while though, the embarrassment of watering dead sticks in full view of everyone walking or driving by got to me and I gave up the hope of resurrection.

We unshrouded the wire mesh off the remaining two trees - one was and is still doing great - it is an umbrella bush - Acacia ligulata. The other tree is a bloodwood -Eucalyptus opaca. This tree is suffering. Its tender leaves are obviously the meal of choice of caterpillas that come out for a midnight feast. I've now put down some loose mulch around it as a way of making it harder for the caterpillas to crawl across from their buffel grass hideouts and up to the stem of the tree. It has worked a bit and the tree is holding on somehow.

So now we are giving it another go with somewhat more advanced trees - a couple of Eucalyptus Woodwardii (drought tolerant) and a Eucalyptus Citriodora. And a grapefruit tree that Trevor intends to use as a grafting base to make a mixed up citrus tree - grapefruit, lemon and orange.

This time we have learned to dig after dark. And this time we have actually managed to plan for digging. When you come up from the East Coast like us digging a hole for a tree is pretty easy. The ground is usually pretty good, there is a nursery around the corner and the conditions are relatively mild. Here you need to consider what you are doing well in advance. So going down to Alice Springs means making sure that you get supplies of rotted manure, pea straw, good compost, humus mix, water holding crystals and coir/peat blocks. Anything to help with keeping moisture in the ground.

So far we have three holes dug, two have a great mix of humus mix, local soil, water holding crystals, coir/peat mix, and some local sand courtesy of the local workshop. The third one will get mixed in this weekend.

We will plant the trees out (they are currently in the shade house with the vegies getting used to the heat), and then we will start watering every day and see if our second more considered approach to tree planting has more success.

May your trees bloom
Susan

The grass is as high as an elephant's eye

It does rain at Yuendumu. And when it does, usually sometime between December to March, the buffel grass takes off.

Last year I spent a long time pulling out buffel grass in an area I had visions of becoming a garden bed. It is pretty easy to pull out, but there is just so darn much of it. It takes over everything in its path killing off little native plants in its relentlessness to create a mono-grass environment. It is the sort of grass equivalent of cane toads.

In January we were down south, and it rained buckets and buckets while we were away. We got back to find the buffel grass waist high in our yard and my little patch of cleared ground filled with buffel grass all over again.

It is at these points that permaculture principles really pay dividends. Just like the no dig philosophy of Esther Dean, the permaculture approach of layering over the top of weeds makes for effective weed control.

The old carpet we put as the flooring of our shade house stopped the buffel grass in its tracks. And lucky for our dogs who had been left behind under the care of neighbours the overflow of the carpet into an area in front of the shade house gave them a nice clear area on which to lie. Otherwise the grass being what it is it is not hard to imagine the buffel grass growing around and over the dogs as they slept.

Trevor got stuck into the grass in the other parts of the yard with another Tip Shop find. Well finds that is. He cobbled together the parts of old whipper snippers and managed to create one in working order. Add to that the recycled head gear and his old walking leggings to ward off brown dog ticks, he made quite an impact on the vision of what the gardening man is wearing this season.

Happy gardening
Susan

Framing the Garden

There were two steel gates from cattle yards that had been lying around the outskirts of Yuendumu ever since we arrived. We resisted the temptation for nearly a year and finally succumbed just before Christmas 2006. What with my shiny new inverter welder and recycled welding shield from the Tip Shop in Alice Springs, in no time I had a demountable "A" frame sitting on a solid base frame to keep the dogs out.
With some old carpet from a friend's house we laid the floor before erecting the shade house and spot welding it to keep it together. Its strong enough to withstand a force 5 cyclone.

An angle grinder and a welder are the basic tools in making use of the vast supplies of steel available at the rubbish tip here. I'm waiting for someone to hand me down an oxy-acetylene set. That would complete the outfit.

The plants are coming along well and the next task is to install an automatic watering system.