We ate all the outside leaves of the young pak choi, mostly in won tons but also in soups and stir fries. Then I left them to flower and the tiny, stingless native bees feasted on the flowers, giving us tiny amounts of absolutely delectable light champagney honey. (And we stole some of their flowers for salads too). Then I let them set seed before feeding them, mature seeds and all, to the chooks. Chooks fed canola seed lay eggs that have high levels of omega 3 and I would guess that pak choi seeds are likely to have the same effect.
Chooks in a permaculture garden are wonderful at this capture of yield from down the chain. Crop plants gone to seed, outside leaves, spoiled fruit, grubs and bugs, kitchen scraps, bones and offcuts, fish heads, yabby shells, water weeds that are themselves harvesting nutrient runoff – all rotated back through the system into eggs and manure that feeds the garden. It’s a neat example of one of permaculture’s key concepts: look for flows of energy and water and nutrients leaving a system, and try to design ways to cycle them as resources rather than letting them go as waste.
Every year a few garlic plants manage to escape harvesting in early summer. The leaves die off and I lose them in the garden. Every year in autumn I suddenly find them again, green shoots poking up from forgotten patches.
It’s hardly a proper scientific experiment. I save some of my own garlic to plant every year but I also mix up the genes a bit by buying some locally grown garlic to plant too. It’s only a four year experiment, and lots else changes every year too including soil and weather and shade. But it is an interesting little oddity.
This year, after finding this garlic happily sprouting this week, I’m planting my garlic in February. Crazy early by standard wisdom, but I’m not going to argue with a plant.
Garlic is one of the most worthwhile plants to grow. It doesn’t take a lot of space to grow a year’s supply and it’s pretty hardy with dry or cold or hot weather. Supermarket garlic is mostly imported from China and there’s a reason it’s cheap. It’s treated with methyl bromide at quarantine, and methyl bromide is a nasty chemical. It’s also bleached to make it that shiny white. Chinese regulation of agricultural chemicals isn’t confidence inspiring and the garlic has travelled a long way. The varieties used are mild and the growing practices push it along so hard that you use masses of it and don’t get the flavour.
If you are planting garlic, go to the effort of finding a good local variety. Garlic is highly day length sensitive so a variety grown at a different latitude won’t work for you. If you can’t find local garlic, next best option is to do some good research about a suitable variety for your region – short day or long day, hard neck or soft neck. If you are much north of me in Northern NSW, you are in a marginal area for garlic of any kind. This far north I have to choose short daylength varieties, or they go to seed without developing a bulb at all.
Then just plant individual cloves in good composted soil, pointy end up, as deep as their own diameter, about 8 cm spacing, well away from peas or beans. Give them a nice sunny spot and don’t overwater. And dream of braids of garlic to hang next summer.
I’ve just moved the chooks into a new bed, and they are feasting on broccoli that is well past bearing human food. They like the cabbage white moths and grasshoppers on it the best and have lots of fun hunting them. Moving the chooks just means moving their artificial tree roost you see in the middle, their water bucket, laying box, and the little kids pool you see on the right that they like for some extra protection if there is heavy rain in the daytime. The beds are fully fenced and netted over anyway to keep out wildlife. At night, they fly up to bed, safe from foxes or carpet snakes, and in the morning they just fly down. The little grey hen is top of the pecking order, so she claims the topmost roost high up under the roof.
Over the next month, they will clear out the bed of spent crops, weeds and insects. They will get a bucket of house scraps and some weeds and spoiled fruit from other parts of the garden every day. Over the month they will also get a trailer load of grass clippings and leaves and a few bags of horse or cow manure, maybe some azolla, and if they are lucky a few handfuls of mixed grain to encourage them to scratch through it all thoroughly, mixing it with their own manure and any of the house scraps they have disdained. The deep litter means I can just chuck their food on the ground without it getting covered in their own poo.
At the end of the month, the bed will look like this, the bed they have just come off.
That’s a particularly thick layer of sheet compost, so I’ll rake off the top 15 cm or so and pile it to turn into real compost for my seedling mix. It’s already half way there, so it won’t need any turning and with wetting down, it will be mature in a couple of weeks. Then I’ll plant advanced seedlings straight into the bed, pushing aside the mulch and digging just a little hole for each one, potting mix and all. The bag in there is a chili plant that I wanted to survive the chooking. It is fine and healthy.
On the down-side of each fully fenced bed, I plant perennials to capture the benefit of any mulch that spills through and any water that runs off or oversprays. On the right of the pic (which is the east side of the bed) is galangal. In summer, I let it get tall and lush to shade the bed a bit, then this time of year I cut it back to let in the morning sun. In the middle is a young pigeon pea, on the left (the southern side, out of the pic) is a coffee bush, and a pawpaw tree. They will never shade the bed because in the southern hemisphere, the sun is always to the north. The understory is mint, with some nasturtiums in front.
In that bed, I’m planting beans, cucumbers, and one more tromboncino around the left hand fence, the southern side, where they will climb tall but not shade the bed. Around the right hand fence, I’m planting zucchini, squash, and potkin pumpkins because that is the north side, and they are low. On the eastern and western sides, I’m planting a few more tomatoes, just yellow and red cherry types this late in the season, hoping they will continue to bear well into winter. In my part of the world, northern NSW, the climate is subtropical and my site is nearly frost free, so there should be plenty of time for all of these to bear before the start of winter. It’s too late though for any more capsicums or eggplants – they take 4 or 5 months to start bearing and it will be too cold by then. It’s also a bit too early for peas or snow peas or broad beans here – I can expect another month or so of warm, humid weather, and they’d just get mildew.
The centre of the bed will have advanced seedlings of leafy greens and carrots and beets and spring onions planted into it over the next few weeks. At the same time, I’ll plant a new round of seed so that, in a month’s time, when the chooks move again, they’ll be ready to plant into the next bed. And so the cycle goes on.
My poor garden is soggy. I know rural people talk non stop about the weather, but the weather at the moment is really discussion-worthy. This summer has been the hottest on record, and we are now flooded in again, for the third time in the last month. We do live on the other side of three flood-prone causeways, and it isn’t noteworthy to be flooded in occasionally, but for the last month it just hasn’t stopped raining.
So I haven’t planted anything for this round. The seed would just rot before germinating in this weather. It is part of the whole permaculture approach to gardening to plan and prepare for extremes. A garden that gets knocked out in one go by a few days of the frizzle weather of midsummer, the waterlogging of a floody autumn, the frosts of the dead of winter, is an awful lot of effort for no yield. So I design in shade and water conservation and systems to survive the extremes of midsummer heat. I design stacking of beds to face the north and sheltered microclimates to protect from frost. And I have terracing and drainage and soil structure to survive waterlogging. But there’s a limit.
It’s still yielding well. The Suyo Long cucumbers have joined the favourites list, coping with the wet weather without developing mildew. The tromboncino are throwing lots of male flowers again, but there’s too many of them anyhow. The zucchini and squash are not living to an old age – they’re succumbing to stem rot younger than they would in ideal conditions, but successional planting means I have young ones that are resilient. The tomatoes are tending to split, but again there’s plenty. The beans are bearing well as green beans and I’m not even trying to dry them. The capsicums are tending to split too, and there’s not so many of them, but the milder chilis are filling their spot.
It will be in three months time that the result of this patch of wet shows, when the seed I would be planting now would be bearing.
