I like mowing. One of the few “things” I really love is my mower. I had a horrible beast of a Briggs and Stratton for years and I have no affectionate memories at all of it. It was demanding, unreliable and very needy. But then I met a 5.5 horsepower Honda self propelled walk-behind, and we’ve been getting on really well for years now.
It’s just hard enough work for me to feel entirely justified ignoring the gym. A few kilometres of power walking, a bit of aerobic exercise pushing it uphill, a bit of weight training emptying the bag, a bit of stretching and flexing. The perfect workout.
I call it my “mowing meditation” and I come up with all my best ideas after about half an hour of walking round in circles behind a mower with earmuffs on. The first half hour gets rid of all the little buzzing worries and vexations that clog up a brain. The second half hour is full of “I wonder if” thinking.
And last, and I guess least though it’s still pretty good, I end up with mulch for the garden, and with enough mulch every other bit of gardening just works.
I’ve been doing an hour of mowing most mornings lately, first thing in the morning before work. It yields me a uteload of mulch each time. Sometimes I work in public but at the moment it’s just me in a little office, which is just as well since I must look a sight in my mowing gear.
The chooks get a barrowload a day which they are scratching over for seeds, pooing in, and turning into sheet compost for the next bed. The fruit trees are getting a bit of horse manure and some mulch. The current garden beds are all getting mulched up, protecting the soil, reducing the need to water, and encouraging worms. I have a new compost pile on the go which will give me compost for potting mix for my seedlings, so I can grow them on in the shadehouse and plant them out as quite advanced seedlings. And the mulch mountain is giving me a nice sense of garden security as we head into what could be a hot dry summer.
I thought I might share this little trick with you, because it took me a ridiculously long time to think of it!
I’m a strong believer in succession planting. For most annuals in my garden, I plant a very small quantity of each thing every month through it’s season. So, for example, this month I have planted the first of the cauliflowers for the year. But we will eat only two or three caulis a month, given all the peas and snow peas and broad beans and broccoli and spinach and everything else we’ve got to choose dinner from. So I only want to plant about 8 seeds, of which 6 are likely to germinate, and I’ll choose the strongest four to pot on, and the strongest three of those to plant out. We’re likely to eat a couple and give at least one away.
Then I’ll do the same next month, and the one after, all the way through till early July, by which time my caulis would be running into Spring weather and cabbage moths before they mature.
The problem is that, planting just 8 seeds each time, a packet lasts an awfully long time. Too long. If I take the whole packet out to the shadehouse, I’m likely to be dipping into it with damp or dirty fingers, or putting it down in the sun, or an errant spray from the hose wets it. Which means that, too often I am missing a planting because of old seed that fails to germinate.
So these days, I sort my seed indoors, in the cool dry shade. I put the number of seed I intend planting in a little pots and make up the label for the seed raising box to put with it. I label carefully, including the variety and the date that I expect it to germinate by. I also note in my garden diary what I am planting.
Then I take just this tray out to the shadehouse. The packets of seed stay in the seed box indoors. Anything that fails to germinate by its due date is culled from the seed box. I might chuck all the rest of the packet in to see if something comes up, but I won’t rely on it again.
It’s such a simple little trick, but it saves so many failures!
Isn’t sex an amazing thing? That chromosomes split and crossover to create a totally new and unique being? Not once, but every single time, so that every single life is totally unique. Every single life on this whole planet not just now but that has ever existed. That is just so breathtakingly ambitious! And that, at the same time, out of all those googols of pilots, evolution has such a nuanced and sophisticated mechanism for selecting not just the ones worth repeating the split and crossover, trying more combinations based on them, but also the ones worth a long shot.
When I stop waxing lyrical though, the practical result of all this is that every single seedling is different, as different as brothers and sisters (or more likely second cousins once removed). As different as two puppies from the same litter, even though humans have been selectively breeding dogs about as long as most crops.
Which means that, when I find a good variety, that works well in my microclimate and is resilient in the context of the little ecosystem that is my garden, I try very hard to remember to save seed. Not always successfully. Remember this post? It’s nearly pea planting time again, and I still haven’t found the climbing, powdery mildew resistant variety of snow pea I lost year before last. I’m still kicking myself.
These capsicums have done so well. They are thick walled and sweet like the familiar California Wonder capsicums in the supermarket, but they are much squatter in shape. The bush is slow to grow and it doesn’t bear huge quantities, but it bears over a long period, and the capsicums are resistant to the fruit fly that bugs us in summer.
Capsicums are “perfect flowers” – which just means the flowers have both male and the female parts, so it is most likely that it has fertilised itself. Bees will cross pollinate them though, and I have several varieties of Capsicum annuum species in the garden including chilis and banana peppers, so there is a bit of potential for surprises in the next generation. I’ve tried to minimise it a little by saving seed from several individual fruits from several plants, and by keeping only this variety in this bed, and several of them, but you really need to keep hundreds of metres distance between varieties to ensure purity. But since I’m not selling these, just saving them for myself and to give away (as insurance against losing the variety), and since I’m not too averse to surprises (sometimes they are nice ones), I’m happy to take the risk.
I’ve just simply washed the seed to remove any flesh and dried it in the shade on my verandah till the seed is crisp-dry, then put it in a recycled paper envelope in my seed tin, labelled with the variety and the date.
The reduced cost of buying seed is a minor benefit. The major benefit is that I have a better chance of getting some of those really nice chromosomes again next year.
This has been practically the longest period in my adult life without chooks! Back in September, our very large resident carpet snake got the last one. She had taken to roosting in the bay tree. I actually saw the snake heading up the tree in the mid-morning, and made a mental note to catch my one remaining chook and give her a compulsory warning not to roost there. And then, in the middle of the night, I woke with a start – I’d forgotten all about warning her. I felt so guilty.
Back in the days when I gardened using chook domes, I very rarely lost one to a predator. But the bandicoot-enforced change to fortress fencing meant I could no longer use chook domes, and the free ranging chooks became vulnerable to goannas, carpet snakes, and wedge-tailed eagles.
Carpet snakes have been the hardest predator to foil. I’ve never managed to build a cage large enough for chooks and strong enough to keep snakes out, not permanently. They seem to spend all night going over and over my cage trying to find the weak link. A friend has succeeded with electric fencing, but it means keeping the chooks in a “chook yard” and that limits their multiple uses.
This is the new roost design. I am hoping that while I can’t win in persistence against a hungry snake, I can win in intelligence (and having opposable thumbs helps a lot).
This one is the pilot “proof of concept” version. It is made from a recycled market umbrella, painted with some old paint to improve its outdoor lifespan, and with roosts nailed up in the canopy of the artificial “tree”. The umbrella sits in a galvanised pipe holder donged into the ground, and the leg of the umbrella is wrapped in extra sharp barbed wire, designed to stop a carpet snake from climbing it. I can move the roost around my fenced garden beds, allowing the chooks to refresh them and keeping them safe from goannas and eagles at the same time. That’s the theory anyway.
I have chosen bantam Australorp crosses as the chook breed, because they are a bit flighty and can fly up to roost, hopefully higher than a carpet snake can rear. This snake was very eager to test the theory on Day One. So far so good. Fingers crossed.
One morning in 2000, I came out and every single seedling I’d planted the day before had been dug up. It was the beginning of the end for a style of gardening that had served me very well for over a decade.
I swore, replanted every morning, erected little barricades around newly planted beds, tried all sorts of deterrents, but the problem just got worse. The obvious answer would be a dog to guard the garden overnight, but what makes permaculture important for me are the core values: care for the earth, care for people and fair share. I wanted to nurture the bandicoots, just not on my vegetables!
When we moved here in 1983, this was very degraded farmland – logged, cleared, regularly burned, and grazing just a few head of cattle. There was hardly a breeding population of most species of wildlife. Along with building and gardening, we started planting native trees especially along the creek riparian zone. We avoided cats and dogs, poisons and fires. We carefully managed our water use to leave environmental flows.
It took a very long time to have any effect at all, but then all of a sudden, the wildlife came back. That’s what happens with exponential growth. One day there only a few bandicoots, timid bush creatures rarely sighted. Next day there were dozens of them digging over my garden every night.
(This is off the track, but this lesson in how exponential growth works has had a profound effect on my thinking about peak everything: it won’t be a nice slow, time-to-get-used-to-it process. Doubling means you go from just over half full, to overflowing, in one step.)
For about a year I persevered, swearing, replanting, erecting little barricades. For about another year I despaired. Then finally I gave in and accepted that I would have to redesign my system. It involved a digger and took me weeks to get over!
Thankfully (in retrospect) I had enough foresight to consider that the same path of growth might be followed by other wildlife species. Back then the bush turkeys were still timid bush creatures rarely seen, we were very excited if ever we saw evidence of a possum, bower birds were rare and wonderful. But the redesign took into account their potential too. So the solution was very intensively fenced annual garden beds, with bird wire buried 20 cm deep to foil the bandicoots, chicken wire sides to foil the wallabies and padimelons (with holes large enough to admit the little insect eating birds), and netting over the top to exclude bush turkeys, possums and bower birds.
About the same time, I was questioning the whole concept of organic farming, as opposed to gardening. So the redesign also took that into account. The beds are circular and about 4 metre diameter. I have 7 of them scattered through a larger, more lightly fenced area filled with perennial fruit trees, herbs, and bushes that are less vulnerable to being dug up.
Of course, that meant I could no longer move my chook domes over the beds. I had to devise a new way to use chook-labour. With the garden beds fenced, the chooks could be allowed to free-range. I set them to work making compost by scratching mulch, manure, waterweeds, and any other ingredients I brought in downhill to rest against a series of V-shaped barriers. Each week I’d lift the top barrier to allow them to scratch the compost makings down to the next barrier, then down to the third barrier, where I collected it to use in the garden beds.
The new system lost much of the elegance of chooks self-feeding, clearing, fertilising and de-bugging garden beds. It did, however, allow me to play a great deal more with stacking and using vertical space. I no longer use dwarf varieties of peas or beans, for instance. The southern side fencing of each bed is always a wall of green, with peas, beans, cucumbers, and tomatoes.
That system too served me well for a decade, and moved my thinking about urban and small space gardening systems forward in some really useful ways. But this year, the evolution of the system has reached another milestone.
I very rarely lost any chooks to predators in the domes. The design served quite well to keep out foxes, goannas and carpet snakes. However free ranging chooks were much more vulnerable, particularly to goannas. And over the last few years, the range of predators has increased to include wedge-tailed eagles and quolls, along with some very large carpet snakes. Six months ago the last of my free ranging chooks was eaten, and the last six months have been the longest period in my adult life, I think, without chooks.
Today, finally, I have chooks again. And I’m so happy about it! The new roost is a “proof of concept” at this stage, so it’s a bit bodgie, but I have high hopes it will work and I will have a system that works for another decade, before the next stage in the evolution.
