The chair has a story. We put six of them out on the roadside as hard rubbish, and our next door neighbours claimed them as round the fire-pit chairs. But the seat cushions split in the sun and a year later they were back out on the roadside. So we claimed one of them back again as a garden giveaways stand. I’d been using various buckets and bins upside down. With a bit of board to replace the seat, the chair works much better.
Another (different) neighbour gets coffee in takeaway cups, and happily collects them for me. “You know,” he tells me, “you can buy a whole stack new for just $6 or $7?”
“Yes, thanks, but I like the idea of using ones that would get thrown out otherwise.” He shakes his head, raises an eyebrow, but brings me cups.
I’ve written before about how I sort seeds to do sequential planting. I like to plant very small quantities of a big variety, sowing a few seeds, potting a few plants on, planting a few out into the garden every week. That way there is a constant supply and no wastage – two lettuces ready to harvest this week, two next week two the week after, rather than all at once. To allow for non-germination or duds, I sow and then pot on a few more than I plan to plant out, and often enough, none of them are duds. They go into coffee cups with holes poked in the bottom, and out on the chair, sometimes as tiny, two-leaf stage seedlings, sometimes as ready to plant out advanced seedlings. We live in a neighbourhood and on a suburban street with regular foot traffic and normally, even in this very suburban street, they are gone within the day.
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 seasons and varieties and what to plant when. It’s part of the little, simple stuff of creating neighbourhood food security, being part of community.
Linda
Did you write a post about building soil in new garden beds in suburbia? I have a feeling I’ve read one but can’t find it. What are your thoughts on soil building where there is no homemade compost or worm casting? Starting from scratch with a no dig method?
I always look forward to your posts. Thank you!
Brenda
Oops I just found your post about Hugel beds when you moved to your new home. Do you water by hand or have you set up an irrigation system! I find it hard to keep the plants moist even though well mulched and soil conditioning, I’m on the fence about irrigation but think it would probably ensure the plants have a constant drip feed of water, and probably save on the water bill over time. Though expensive to set up.
Like most things permaculture, it depends! When we first came here, I was all in favour of building no dig in-ground beds – lay down cardboard (fridge boxes are ideal), alternating layers of stable manure from the racecourse, “browns” – leaves, straw, light wood chip etc, sprinkle of blood and bone, aged manure, compost etc. Top it with a thick layer of mulch, then plant advanced seedlings in their own compost into it. But the first real rains showed us that though the soil is sandy, the site is flat and water sits and slowly drains. So the idea of raised beds gained ground. Then the abundance of wood and the huge volumes of organic matter we’d need to fill the raised beds led to the idea of hugel beds, and the more I researched, the better it looked. And they have been a very good solution to our particular site. But I wrote an article some time back about bare site to dinner party within 12 weeks, and on that site I used a fenced area, chooks and mulch to make the garden. I’ll have repost the article. We mananged a dinner party for 12 entirely from the new garden. The menu:
Nibbles: edamame, boiled in their pods in salted water, wonderful with a cold glass of something.
Entre: green gazpacho made with the yellow cherry tomatoes, green capsicums, and cucumbers, and garnished with lemon basil.
Main: pumpkin gnocchi made with potkin pumpkins, with a sauce of cherry tomatoes, zucchini and basil pesto, with a green salad.
Dessert: melon sorbet
However you start a garden though, the trick to keeping a productive garden going over time is to find bulk sources of organic matter that are so easy to access that you actually do it, and a way to process it all into compost via worms, chooks, compost piles, biodigester …
I water the garden beds by hand. We have a tank and a soaker hose laid out to water the verge food forest, and if it doesn’t rain for a few weeks, I turn the tank on and let the whole tankful go through the soaker hose over a couple of days to deeply water them. I hand water the seedlings and the pots every day, and I give things a good watering in. But the garden beds largely survive on rain. It’s been a good year for rain this year. Some years are so dry, I need to do a lot more hand watering. But the concept is to get the soil water holding capacity up, by adding enough organic matter, so that when it does rain, all that water is held and available. Luckily I don’t mind hand watering. Even if I am very busy, and have to do it at dawn or dusk, it’s nice meditative time.
Thank you. I would enjoy reading the article you mentioned bare space to dinner party.