Garden Update

OK, so I know it's been a while. Between work and the garden, it's been a little busy, so I've not been able to post for while!

Our chickens have matured, but with maturity came the realisation that one wasn't so much a chicken, but rather a rooster! Given the issues with our city about keeping chickens in the first place, having a rooster was a no-go. Thankfully we found another couple who's existing rooster was getting on a bit, so they've taken him to a big farming property they run. Here's a shot of the two Rhode Island Red girls that we reared:
My wife also had a friend who's in the middle of rearranging their garden and henhouse, so needed to get rid of two chickens. We've adopted these, and while I'm not 100% sure, I'm thinking that they're Australorps. The new chooks are a fair bit older so I don't know if we'll end up with huge numbers of eggs, but at the moment we're getting our fair share of manure!
I'm also using the slower growth now we are in winter to be able to establish some garden beds to have ready for summer. This new bed I'm using no dig principles with, starting with mulch on the bottom, green plants (old pumpkin vines and green grass clippings) then autumn leaves off our deciduous trees. Between each layer is a layer of manure. The bed's almost complete (another layer of manure and old grass clippings) and then it will sit for a few months waiting for summer.

I'm not growing too much at the moment, but have got a few broccoli and pea plants. These peas are growing on an old no dig bed that I used to grow potatoes in last summer, and seem to be doing very well despite the cold setting in early this year. The peas will also provide nitrogen to the soil, which is essentially now a compost having decomposed while the potatoes grew.


So, while the plant growth drops off in winter, the work continues! The next big projects until the spring planting season starts is really around preparing the soft fruits - clearing some space for our strawberries and dividing our raspberries to make sure that we've got way too many this summer!

Rhubarb and Apple Crumble - without the crumble!

The Rhubarb's getting a bit overgrown at the moment, so I thought that it would be a great time to get some Crumble going. Only thing is that we're out of butter, so it's just straight Rhubarb for now!

I plan in some of my writings to include recipes for cooking, along with preservation techniques. The idea is that this isn't simply about the garden itself, it's suggestions of how to deal with the produce.

So tonight the Rhubarb.

This is a really easy recipe. You start with around 10-15 stalks of rhubarb, add a half cup of sugar, and two apples. I did it over a reasonably moderate heat as the rhubarb was almost cooked by the time I'd finished slicing the apple.


In this shot you can kind of see the rhubarb's cooked already. To make sure that the apple wasn't raw, I left it on the low heat, with the lid on, for the apple to continue cooking and soak up some of the juices. It worked pretty well, about 10-15 minutes all up.

You could then take this mix and put a mixture of sugar, oats, flour and butter on top to make the crumble. Ice cream worked just as well though. I did use brown sugar for this tonight, and I think that it's made it a bit browner overall - this photo kind of looks like a chocolate pudding!

Still, I think that the kids would be able to tell that it's a little bit more tart than chocolate.

The Garden is Growing!

Well, I've been a bit quiet logging onto the computer and putting an update in. Virtually all my free time is spent in the garden trying to make sure that I've got everything up and running for the summer growing season, and I think I'm almost there!

The weather's been perfect for planting out - lots of rain mixed with a fair bit of sunshine. We've only harvested minimal amounts so far - a few bunches of rhubarb, a broccoli, some strawberries and one raspberry. Just one, not one cup or one bucket. The chickens are growing well and are now outside. My wife is celebrating that the laundry has been reclaimed for the humans!

I've gone for a semi-no dig garden. I've not been to get the copious amounts of straw and manure to do a fully fledged no dig, but the rough principles are there. This first shot is my potato bed and it's a bit of an experiment itself. We were too late getting seed potatoes from the nursery, but we did have some sprouting potatoes in the pantry. Unable to eat them, they've gone into the patch to see what happens. If it doesn't work, we haven't lost much - next season I'll be prepared for the real thing!

There's two rows of tomatoes next to the potatoes (in the 'old' vegetable garden bed). One of Gross Lisse (for salads etc) and one of Roma (for sauces).

The next bed is roughly Brassica's - at the moment the last of some cabbages and the broccoli. I've planted in some climbing beans in between, and the wood shavings at the bottom are some carrots. Peter Cundall of Gardening Australia talks about how carrots don't always germinate if they dry out too much once you sow the seeds. I'd lost quite a few (out of about 2 metres/yards of seeds I'd had around 3 carrots germinate), so figured this was worth a shot. The seeds are at the bottom of a 'trench' about an inch deep, and then covered in wood shavings. So far so good!

At the back of this photo is the rhubarb, and a row of newer (Gross Lisse) tomatoes.

The next bed along is the corn and I'm growing Baby Corn along with Sweet Corn. I've grown the Baby Corn successfully a year or two ago and ended up getting close to 8 ears off each plant. Apparently if you let the cobs grow to full size you can use the corn as popcorn, so I might try that to see how the kids like that. The beans on the left are Borlotti and are great for drying out and using in soups, stews and possibly baked beans. On the right is a Cherry Tomato - this plant is extremely prolific already and we should have a few tomatoes to pick very soon.

The final bed in this section is for melons or cucurbits. We've got a couple of varieties of Pumpkin, some Cucumbers and some Zucchini (Squash). Hopefully with lots of eggs from the chickens and we'll have endless amounts of quiche over summer!

There's a bit more to the vege garden, but this is the main portion of it. Effectively this part is simply the original dirt garden, with some extensions of the no-dig portions of it. During next winter I'll grow green manure through most of it, and then I'll be able to properly divide the beds and have a proper rotation system happening.

For now the goal is simply to get as much in before the heat of summer kicks in, and then we can have a bumper harvest!

New Additions to the Farm

Since settlement went through a few weeks ago, we've been getting right into the garden and improving the vegetable garden and putting in fruit trees. Today though was the exciting addition of three new chicks to the farm.

We have been wanting to have some chickens, but I thought that with two young children under 4, buying week old chicks would give us a few extra benefits. Although they were a similar cost to point of lay chickens (and so we've got to feed them for around 3 months until we start getting a return in terms of eggs), the chicks will grow while the kids are able to be around them.

This afternoon as soon as we got home the chicks were out running around on a rug with the kids watching. Once I put them away, our daughter ran to the table and started drawing pictures to show them! She can't get enough!

Tonight we went a step further too. Our daughter loves a PBS TV show "Sid The Science Kid" where the character learns about growth, charts, observations and heaps of other aspects of science. So, these chicks are now providing a science to our daughter. We weighed the chicks tonight (and will do so weekly) so that we can chart their growth, plus she sat down after and drew pictures of the chicks.
The picture needs a bit of an explanation. The head is on the left. The black mark on the top is a mark that this particular chick has (we're hoping it doesn't grow out as it helps identify it!). The red and purple bit on the left of the legs (in blue) is the container the chick is eating out of. The brown spot at the right at the opposite end of the head is... Well, I guess you will be able to work out what comes out of week old chicks from that end of their body.

It's Ours!

After months of planning and talking, the house is ours! Settlement went through yesterday, so now it's all official.

I've got my parents visiting this weekend, so there probably won't be much packing, moving or gardening this weekend. The removalist is booked for next weekend though, so we'll be heading into a very busy week or two.

Two weeks to go!

Two weeks to go and things are definitely getting ready to go! One of my big goals out of the whole move is that this will help set us up well financial, especially through reducing our grocery bills as we become more self-sufficient.

To help with that, the last few weeks have been preparing for the move and getting some more plants organised. I've written before about the strawberries and grapes, but we've given them a push along by purchasing some more fruit trees.

This will be our front lawn - 600m2 of lawn. It will be the kids play area, with deciduous fruit trees around the edge (apples, pears, peaches, apricots etc). We live in a cooler high rainfall area, so the grass doesn't need watering very much at all (around half a dozen times a year), puls the grass clippings will help with compost for the vege garden. I will work on a greywater system for a portion of the lawn, I'm leaning towards not watering at all for the most part of it, and then greywater for where we want the kids to play (and green lawn!).
Part of the backyard vegetable garden. On the left of the shed I'll be putting in a henhouse for some chickens. Free eggs and manure!!! Leading up to the shed & henhouse will be some plants that will be outside of the rotation system used for gardening in the main plot. Strawberries and potatoes at this stage, but likely to include peanuts and sweet potatoes as experiments later. Where the hedge is on the right will make way for raspberries and/or grapes. They'll then provide a productive border to the rest of the garden.

Finally, the top garden - where I'll grow the vegetables. This is from behind the garden shed, looking back towards where the other picture was taken (slightly to the left of this shot). The chickens will be near the hedges on the left, but I've still got around 100m2 within this area that will be our vegetable garden. Eventually I'll have six beds and employ a rotational system, but to start will I'll be dumping a stack of seedlings and seeds into this small garden bed which the current owners have used. It's not massive, but the soil under the grass is a heavy clay, so it's going to take a little while to build up.

I'll also put in a few citrus trees towards the back fence (left of the large trees at the back of this photo), so in a few years we should be (mostly) self-sufficient in fruit, vegetables and eggs. We'll need to buy in some groceries (we need a permit for the chickens from our shire council, so I don't imagine they'd look favourably on getting a milking goat or sheep!), but this will provide more than enough produce and we should be able to barter with some other residents around for additional produce that we can't grow ourselves.

So, we've notified our current landlord that we're ready to vacate, and will have removalists coming to shift our furniture in less than two weeks. Some of the plants have already started to make their way to the new place (we know the current owners quite well now!), and the orchards should be ready for the (Southern Hemisphere) summer growing season that's about to start.

Settlement Moving Forward!

Wow, what a couple of weeks it has been. Finance was approved, and then the building inspection came up OK (a few things to fix, but no surprises at least), so settlement was formally set for November.

I went to visit the couple we are buying the house from last week, and the place they wanted to move into was still on the market. I gave them a couple of tips to get their offer accepted (another guy had an offer on subject to finance which had been dragging on, I suggested that we could move our settlement forward to then let them put an unconditional offer on the place they wanted). As a result, we could potentially buy our new place in as little as 4 weeks!

I'd planted out some seedlings in our current home a few weeks ago (cauliflower, broccoli and spinach) but now it looks like we won't be around long enough for them to properly grow out!
My wife's also been renovating a kitchen! Well, one for the kids anyway... She's taken two old small chest of drawers (about 40 years old, they were my parents originally) and converted to an oven and fridge, then a piece of MDF board to be the bench in the middle. Four black coasters for the stove, and a stainless steel mixing bowl for the sink, and viola! A new kitchen!