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Category: Design

Permaculture garden design principles and ideas

A glass breakfast bowl with slices of banana, cubes of paw paw (papaya) and passionfruit pulp, sitting on a bed of white yoghurt. A spoon sits on the back edge of the bowl.

Beating fungal disease

First of the season’s pawpaw (papaya) for breakfast this morning, with Cavendish banana, black passionfruit and homemade yoghurt. The pawpaw in last year’s winter fruit bowl had more black spot but this year I think I’ve beaten it.

A green tarpaulin covered in fragments of black charcoal with a shiny surface.

Bamboo Biochar

We made bamboo biochar on the weekend. There’s some impressive science behind the idea that biochar, and especially bamboo biochar, might be a cheap, fast, effective way to remove huge amounts of carbon from the atmosphere and add it to the soil. And biochar does such good things for soil quality.

In the centre of the image is a large wooden carved fruit bowl filled with ripe Ladyfinger and Cavendish bananas, orange-red tamarillos, lime green guavas and yellow passionfruit. In the foreground and background are more tamarillos.

Autumn Fruit Bowl

I continue to be astonished at the quantity of food we can produce on our little suburban block. We harvested over 20kg of tamarillos today, and this is the third pick of the season, with another to go. here’s a huge bunch of Cavendish bananas ripening on the back deck, and a smaller bunch of Ladyfingers. The lemon tree in the verge planting has its first real crop just starting…

Water in a light cream coloured container with dozens of little black tadpoles in it, and some water chestnut reeds.

Mosquito Control

Striped Marsh Frogs moved in of their own accord. They don’t mind urban environments except that, like all frogs, they are highly sensitive to RoundUp ®. Use RoundUp to get rid of your bindii-eyes or lantana, and you end up having to use insecticide on your skin to ward off mosquitoes. And then snail bait. And then whatever it is they use against malaria plasmodiums and rat lung worm.

Autumn Equinox

I’m not a fan of winter. I like light and warm. I like being barefoot and outside. Winter always comes on me unprepared. So the equinox is a good warning. It’s like when the kids are playing hard and having fun and the games are getting a bit manic, and you give them first warning – half an hour more and it’s time to come in and get cleaned up.…

Vinyl chair with a plank on the seat, with disposible coffee cups full of seedlings in dark compost. We can see lemon basil, Thai basil, Tomato and coriander written on the cups.

Zombocalypse resilience Part 2: roadside seedling giveaways

I love the chair. It saves me the angst of murdering perfectly healthy seedlings, or worse, being tempted to plant them and use up all my precious garden space on more basil or zucchinis than any household can stand. The chair brings me into lovely conversations with passers by who garden, even just pots on highrise balconies. Because I am sharing what I am myself planting, it creates conversations about…