cricketk's Journal

We’ve needed to redo the retaining wall since we moved in. The palm trees were in the process of pushing the wall over, plus the iron fencing stood at more than 2.4 metres high on the down side, which made a fairly nice enclosure for the pool, but rendered was incredibly imposing on the rest of the garden. Today was the day where we made the changes to the yard that we’ve been thinking about and getting organised towards since we pulled the palm trees out in August.

Over the course of thinking about where and how to do our vegetable garden, the most sensible place for us to use is the garden around the pool. To work with the type of pool fence juffy wants to build out of pickets, I need more room to account for the amount of full shade various parts of the garden will be getting in winter. So we’ve decided to hugely expand the pool garden to make it be a useful vegie garden.

This morning, juffy pulled as many of the rest of the sleepers out of the existing pool fence as he could prior to J and CW turning up with the Kanga to knock things over and dig holes. We had a lot of rock walls concreted against the old retaining walls and concreted garden edging that would have been extremely difficult to dig up with a spade. The old retaining wall had also been seriously invaded by the palm tree roots and splintered apart when pulled up by the Kanga. We think that the stones and concrete were probably added to try and hold that wall up against the date palm, which was endeavouring to push it over. There’s more concreted rocks defining a garden bed on the west side of the pool fence.

We also needed to pull out a Bird of Paradise – this is one of two left in the garden. They’ve all been planted in corners where they have gotten to work expanding and pushing walls over. We found roots from this one 8 metres away. I keep telling myself that all the left over palm and Bird of Paradise roots will make nice highways for the worms once they are rotted down a bit more.

You might be able to tell that all of our pathway between the retaining wall area and the mandarin tree is also gone. Some of it was dug up by the Kanga’s treads, but most of it is just covered in dirt. Digging out the paving is something that will happen on another day, as the change in shape of the pool garden necessitates a change in shape for the pathways – and I’d like something different to straight lines.

We had a lot of sleepers – 20 x A grade and 10 x C Grade delivered from Mountain Movers, around 10 scavenged from a rubbish pile and another 10 salvaged from the old retaining wall:
A and C grade sleepers on the driveway scavenged sleepers previous retaining wall sleepers

Sadly I have no pics of J hoisting sleepers over his shoulder and carrying them around by himself. This is because I was gazing upon him with dumbstruck awe at the time. And worrying about his back.

J used the Kanga’s augur attachment to drill metre deep holes for the uprights. We have really interesting dirt – it varied wildly from hole to hole – and the holes were only 2.5 metres apart. Overall, our soil is a heavy clay. Not as heavy as zebra’s and in some parts of the garden (particularly in the orchard area) it is a lovely clay loam. It was much drier than I was expecting, so I should probably get onto gowing some daikon solely to make nice watering holes in the dirt.

We do still need another 12 sleepers, as unfortunately, the sleepers salvaged from the original retaining wall are 15cm shorter than the bought sleepers – and we used the bought sleepers to measure our distances between the uprights. In a way that’s OK though, as I now have a LOT of sleepers with which to make garden edging.

We also need about 6 cubic metres of fill. If I’m very lucky, I may be able to get it for free. J helped someone dig out the space for a pool last weekend, and they still have all their dirt to get rid of. :)

This one haybale has produced several meals-worth of green leafy vegie. The tatsoi has now bolted with the warmer weather and is attracting loads of bees to the garden, who are also busy in the plum tree.

The cos lettuce is producing like crazy – we are harvesting leaves twice a week for salad at the moment. It also seems to be completely slug and snail proof (knock on wood).

A successful experiment that has now expanded to a total of 9 bales.

Awesome.

Loads and loads and loads of flowers.

Actually, the tree was in full blossom in the middle of August. Right now it is full of what are very obviously stone-fruit and equally obviously not cherries.

Our best guess is that it is an apricot tree.

The flowers were spectacular though. I’m feeling very pleased that it is looking so well and so full of fruit. I’m pretty sure that it will go through a couple of fruit drops, but right now it looks like we’ll be hip deep in apricots come December.

Given the success of the haybale experiment and the fact that it is extremely unlikely that we will have the vegie garden infrastructure ready any time soon, I have decided to go ahead and expand the hay bale experiment into a hay bale vegie garden.

I have purchased another 8 bales (of straw this time) and started the watering/fertilising process.

Conveniently, my bamboo appears to shed canes when finished with them, so providing a framework for the vining/climbing plants has been very easy.

Planting should get underway on Saturday of this week.

I’m planning to grow beans up stakes on the north-west edge of the set of bales to provide some protection from the sun to the leafy-green vegies that will grow below. The south-west edge will have a couple of cucumber plants growing up it. The eastern most bales will have tomatoes (one cherry tomato variety and one heirloom black tomato variety) on the south edge, so they can be tied to stakes without shading the capsicum that will be growing in front of them. The middle bales will be growing a pumpkin and a melon on the south side, and a zucchini and a squash on the north side.

I’m only aiming to supplement our food with home-grown vegies this season. I figure that we’ll use the bales twice, for an early summer and a late summer crop. Then they can form a layer in the sheet mulching intended for real vegie garden once all the fencing is complete.

Swoit!

Whee!

Mulched the rose garden yesterday. Got my mulch from “Green Life Soils” who are all about Permaculture and organic growing. The mulch smells like garden heaven. It’s got plenty of poo and compost in it.

The mulch is nice and black and very clearly shows the rows of onions and leeks. I had already thinned them, but it looks like I will need to thin them even further. Damnit.

We’ve pruned this back to something more tree shaped. It had turned into a giant weed reaching for the sky. Lost a bunch of the second crop, but it fruits really well, so I’m not overly worried about that.

I weeded in the rose garden on Sunday – no bugs. On Tuesday, when I cut the garlic scapes, the roses were a seething mess of aphids. The stems were entirely armoured with aphids and ants had moved in to start farming them.

I freaked right out and sprayed with pyrethrum (I know, what a bad gardener I am) and now the entire mass of aphids are gone. It’s like I had an over wrought hallucination of aphids, they appeared and disappeared so suddenly.

Cut the leaves off the garlic shoots and ate them in risotto.

According to what I’ve read, this should give them the will power to grow nice big garlic bulbs. I certainly hope so. The scapes were Yummy.

I was very pleased on Monday morning to see that these are well and truly growing with nice thick stalks. There’s been so much rain and I’ve been home so infrequently during daylight hours that they’ve made it to nearly 10cm tall without me noticing.

I’ve never grown garlic before, so I have no idea what else they are likely to do, nor how big they are going to get.

How exciting!

Spent the weekend pruning the fruit trees, spraying with lime sulphur, spreading dolomite lime and then feeding.

These trees are going to take off like a rocket in the next couple of weeks, once spring gets underway.

Sweet.