dilly dalley doolittle gardening

Thanks for your comments - your sympathy

Thanks everyone for your comments on my last post that described the harm that happened to the ducks. It has been supportive to hear your commiserations and shock and suggestions for how life might be and should be. I have been down to the garden a few times since last Friday and I do find it a bit lonely without my clucking, gaggling girls. I had got used to my feathered friends having a bit of a chat to me, early in the morning, when I came with their bucket of leftover vegie peels. They would rush up to me and gather around while I tossed out the compost box. Sometimes I had to shoo them away because they were making such a nuisance of themselves, under my feet. I always attended to them first and then turned my attention to growing, harvesting, weeding, watering, planning the vegetable garden.

As far as my emotional progress on this issue, last Saturday I felt reassured to move the chickens back here to our home garden. It's been nice to see their little feathered skirts as they wander about, bossing the ducks around. Its curious that chickens seem to have the upper hand over ducks - or at least mine do. Nonetheless, I do feel the loss of their presence at the community garden. Like all things though, I'm sure I'll settle into the new situation at some stage. Hopefully, sooner rather than later.

Its funny when you take a blow against something you love. Not funny ha ha, funny strange. I'm trying to keep it in balance and not despair at the world. Throughout the long months of vandalism, I've talked often with my husband about what kind of life these young people have led that brings them to do these things. We've moved from thinking of them as young people harmed from life, in exchange harming other life, to young people, irresponsible - just out for a lark, a bit of fun, and somehow that fun tied up with transgression (cutting through the fence, stealing eggs and smashing them). Then after my experience with the ducks and the harm that was done to them, I moved back to thinking of them as wronged individuals who in turn do wrong. The pain that they have experienced is transferred into the world and experienced by others in society. Their life pain became my pain. But now I'm sick of them and want my compassion to be over. I don't really want to care about them any more. I just want to move on. Keep my animals safe and grow my vegetables. We'll take our turn repairing the holes in the fences. However, if the scale of things increases and more damage is done to my plot, to the efforts of my labour, so finely balanced in my life, I'll have to consider my commitment to this endeavour. I've already started considering grey water systems and building some vegetable beds here at home. My backyard here would never be able to manage the scale of what I have at the community garden but maybe that's my compromise for not dealing with the distress and turmoil of other peoples lives. Who knows. I hope to settle and calm my perspective.

On Monday of this week, my husband rang the police and they were surprised we hadn't rung on Friday when we discovered the harmed duck. I guess we thought the police could do nothing. They said they would send more patrols around the area and acknowledged that in reality they probably can do nothing but they wanted us to know they take these things seriously. They said they'd put us in contact with the police community liasion officer who will follow up with us about strategies and such. Then they put a value on the duck =$20. I had a bit of a giggle at that one. I could just see the earnest police officer filling in the paperwork - value of property - duck - $20.

By the way - camera is in the repair shop. I realise my photos are so out of date. The pumpkin vine is dying from frost burning off it's leaves. The tomatoes are ready to be ripped out. I have evidence of the labours over summer of bottling up my tomato crop. My winter vegies are going great guns. Not so hot  - the root vegetables. Still can't seem to get those right! Anyway, bear with me. My camera has been off at the hospital for two weeks and is due home soon.

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Distressing experiences at the community garden

I went down to my plot at the community garden yesterday afternoon after work and had the children with me. It was about 4pm in the afternoon and I noticed my two ducks were missing from my chicken house. I had moved two of my ducks down to the garden a few months ago when they had gotten very loud in my backyard and I was worried about offending the neighbours. There was no sign of damage to my shed and the three chickens were sitting quietly inside. A fox or a dog had not managed to dig underneath or break through a hole as there was no damage I could find. The ducks were just out - not in the shed. Who would have done that?

One of my children found one duck, injured and desperate in the corner of the garden. I hadn't told the children the ducks were missing but as soon as I heard my son call out I raced over to see her. She was very badly hurt. Her neck looked broken and she couldn't stand properly and she was desperate. She had been there for some time and ants hand started attacking her. I quickly took the children away and asked them to stay up in my plot while I rang my husband to tell him our distressing news. He had a list of the community garden members with him at work and rang one kind fellow who lives nearbye and doesn't work in the afternoons. Thankfully, this kind man came down and put my poor duck out of its misery.

We have never found the other duck. Who knows what her fate was? I am sick with saddness about such cruelty to animals. We have been experiencing vandalism in our garden for months. Patiently we patch the breaches in our garden fence (there would be over 10-15 entry points). These vandals have smashed up my watering poles and left them on my garden paths (we patiently replaced them with new poles). They have taken peoples' pumpkins (not mine I think) and smashed them in the next door netball courts. They have taken the apples off the trees in the orchard and left them lying around the netball courts. They regularly take our chicken and duck eggs from all four of us with chicken sheds and smash the eggs on a rock outside the garden. We have spent quite a bit of energy us chicken gardeners (who are copping the worst of the vandalism) narrowing down times when they enter - and who might be doing this.

My husband is now down at the garden collecting our three chickens and bringing them home. We'll have to set up some kind of temporary structure for them here and then wait and see what happens. I could not bear for my animals to be harmed like this again. I don't know what happened. Why anyone would do such a thing. The poor duck was either harmed by the vandals or was left out all day and an animal attacked her.

I will keep them here forever, if necessary. I certainly wont put them down at the garden while vandals regularly enter our garden. And I am feeling so sad about the whole thing, i may reconsider this whole community garden experience completley. I'll take each day as it comes. I have had such joy and peace and satisfaction from growing vegetables and keeping ducks and chickens. But it isn't without it's stresses and costs. There is often issues to deal with in the community of gardeners, and now there is vandalism and cruelty to animals, and there's always the balancing of my life as mum, wife, housewifely responsibilities with the intensity and workload of my gardening.

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Planting the winter vegetables - update

It is now over 3 weeks since I planted the winter seedlings and my apologies for being so tardy in updating my blog. Particularly if you were following my progress. My gardening blog is like the canary in the coal mine. If the blog falls off it's perch something isn't well underground. Only kidding. Well sort of. I do find that with all my responsibilities as mother of young children, part-time public servant, keeper of the home and hearth, that it only takes one or two slightly disruptive things to knock me off the platform that has space for little stolen moments of photographing vegies, uploading to the internet, composing a piece and posting to the blog. I usually grab moments here and there and do one or two of the stages. And slowly a little rhythm of growing, recording and writing takes place. I have enjoyed the creativity and reflection of writing to the blog. But it must take a back seat sometimes when life gets wonky. My husband's accident last spring and more recently the death of the family pet were unsettling times and resulted in time out from posting. Anyway, I'm back - at least to  update you with the past. So here it is.

On Sunday 24th February I planted seedlings for my winter crop:

Cabbages: Red Dutch, Cuor di Bue, Savoy Vertus

Broccoli: Hong Kong, Chinese Broccoli 'Gai Lan', Broccoli Raab 'Spring Rapini', Green sprouting Calabrese

Cauliflower: Phenomenal Early

Kale: Dwarf Green

Spinach: winter giant,

Silverbeet: Vulcan Red

Lettuce: Red Cos

I bet you can't even see them. If you look closely you can see some tiny green leaves. They had been started in my propagator at home and I used jiffy pots for all of them. If you are a regular reader you'd know that when I first started doing this I wanted to grow everything from seed, but after valiantly doing just that for a few  years I succumbed to time pressures and spent most of last year buying seedlings. For these 2008 winter vegies I wanted more variety than was possible from the chain stores (bunnings, and other chain nursery stores) and so tried a labour saving method of growing my seedlings. It isn't particularly economic to use jiffy pots for everything but it did mean I didn't have to transplant anything before planting out into the garden.

I have scattered - very lightly - some lime on the surface of the bed. I really should have done the lime before planting and probably with a slightly more generous application but because I was applying it at time of planting I went a bit easy on it. Brassicas love lime or dolomite (I'm out of dolomite and have a huge bag of lime so lime it is for the time being).

I plant by sitting on my digging board and I use a triangle method for spacing my plants.

My children and husband helped me make these triangles. They are cut from wood. I think this one was part of an old children's easel that we no longer needed. My husband cut them to size and the children painted them with glitter paint. I planned to stencil on the size and from memory I think this is a 32 or 38cm?? I'd need to check. There are different size triangles for different size plants. Brassicas grow into large plants and so have a relatively generous spacing. The Kale, Silverbeet, Spinach and Lettuce can all be planted on a 20cm triangle. The principle of the spacings are that instead of planting in rows, you plant on a triangle grid and then the plants should grow up to completely shield the soil from sight. That is, they should form a "living mulch" that prevents weed growth and evaporation. If you have particularly well developed soil, full of nutrients and compost, and the soil is aerated (dug over or at least lifted with a fork) then the plants can sustain close plantings. That's the theory and I've been on the whole happy enough with the results to stick with the method.

I've placed some straw on the edge of the bed to stop the water from rushing off the sides. And on the other side of the bed is the climbing frame for the cucumbers. Funny though - this is me speaking on the 18th March - we're kind of over the cucumbers. I kept the lattice and vines in instead of ripping them out and having more space for brasscias but as the seasons turn I find my thoughts turning away from summer vegies. And we have eaten an awful lot of cucumbers - they are eaten by all 4 members of the family. Minor vegetable miracle.

I have other photos to post of the progress on the root crop and the progress on bottling the tomato crop. I'll update these in the next few days (fingers crossed). Sing canary sing.

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Pumpkin harvest

I have been meaning to show you my pumpkin harvest for ages. I finished cropping about a month ago, which is fairly normal in my growing season. It's getting around to writing it up that's the hard part! There are six types of pumpkins & squashes on the table. Five I planted purposefully and one volunteered. I planted the orange skinned Australian butter pumpkin (my favourite). It has a really beautiful taste and is a deep orange colour inside as well. I only harvested 4 of those (one already devoured). The other pale organey brown ones in front are a fairly common butternut pumpkin in Australia. The seeds are all stored in the bulby end and they roast really nicely - you can even keep the skin on when you roast it (cut up of course). These don't store as well as the others so we tend to eat them first. Then the yellow and green stripy ones are a squash (Delicata). In previous years they were much more yellowy-orangy between the green stripes. These seeds came from a different supplier this year so perhaps it's just natural variation. Then the greeny grey ones are Baby Blue, Crown Prince and not sure what the volunteer is (I'm assuming a Crown Prince as I did plant those last year as well and it grew up from where we had the chicken shed/compost heap).

Here's the same crop from another view...

From this angle you can see the unripened butternuts and some of the late harvest rockmelons. It was such a warm autumn and the melons kept growing. I must admit once I feel a season is over I don't much feel like eating the last season's crops (except for the storage type crops). I felt the same about the few tomatoes that carried on well into the end of May. It just seemed odd - and then by the time you get to the end of the season, you've kind of eaten your fill - tomatoes every day - melons not quite so frequently but still- a lot!

Anyway, I'm rather thrilled with my pumpkin harvest. For the past few years, my goal has been 12 pumpkins - one for each month until the next season's harvest. However, for the past two years I've done better than that. I have already given away a few and will continue to find homes for the grey ones.

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Green thumb Sunday #6 The Tree with no leaves

Well, the colour is finally over. It's been a beauty but now the Manchurian Pear in the driveway is a reminder that autumn is coming to an end and winter is just around the corner. Speaking of winter, our skiing trip is booked and seven weeks away, but...it's still fairly warm...last week we were having days of 21 degrees. We've all been wearing short sleeves and the children are so overdressed in their winter school uniforms that at the end of the day their little bodies are hot and bothered. This week the forecast is for some 18s, maybe some 16s. It's going to need to get mighty cold and mighty wet to make it a good ski season. Last year there was no snow - trust me - no snow. We had to walk in and out of the lodge instead of skiing in and out. Overnight the resorts made snow by shooting fine water vapour up into the sky. So, it was technically cold enough to make snow. It's just that last year we were in the grips of the severe drought so there was nothing falling from the sky.

As mentioned here, the El Nino is over but there still hasn't been much rain and in Canberra we are now facing stage 4 water restrictions (no outside watering at all). Generally, Australian cities use only a 5 stage water restriction system. For all of the spring and summer 2006-07 Canberra has been on stage 3 water restrictions. These new harder restrictions are due in June if the rains don't come. So far we've had below average rainfall for April and only one day of rain in May. Hopefully, it will get so cold we wont feel like watering anything and then the restrictions wont matter. At least wont matter for those of us trying to grow things in the city. Life in the bush has not had the luxury of the tap and I'm sure they feel we can't even begin to understand water restrictions.

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Seed saving - Beans Blue Lake

I have been gardening. Honestly. I haven't been writing about it, but I have been gardening. I haven't been taking many pictures - not sure why. What I have done though is picked the bean seeds and hulled them, and now I'll put them in a paper bag, label it "Beans Blue Lake, 2006 crop" and save them for late Spring planting (probably October). One early morning, instead of visiting the community garden, I sat at the kitchen table and shelled the dried beans. You may remember back in April that I wondered when I'd get around to doing it?

Here's the final product.

I still have more beans on the vine down the garden. I'll need to pull the trellis down that the beans grew on, so I may as well pick and hull the remaining dried beans. Again, when will I get to that though?

One of the community gardeners actually cooks with his end of season dried green beans. I have never bothered trying but I do like saving them for next season's food crop. I haven't bought bean seeds since 2004. I just save some from last year's crop and they've always grown really well. I also save the peas, snow peas, sweet peas, lettuce and onions. But am fairly sure I can't save the melons and pumpkins and brassicas because I interplant too many varieties and as they cross-pollinate I can never be sure I'll get "true" plants. Or so the books say. I do just let them grow up in my vegie patch when they self-seed and so far, despite the book's warnings about cross pollination, all the self seeded varieties (zucchinis and pumpkins) have grown true - or at least they grew completely healthy plants with lots of pumpkins and zucchinis on them. That's true enough for me. It seems so wasteful to not save the pumpkin and melon seeds but I sort of can't be bothered risking it because our season between frosts is so short that there isn't time to experiment with sowing my seeds indoors during the winter, hardening them off, then planting them in my beds only to find they don't fruit properly. So, instead I buy pumpkin and melon and brassica seeds as I need to. Often they last for a few years.

Having been so virtuous with the beans, now when will I get to this?

Way back in February, the onions were living on my outdoor table. I did manage to move them off - but only into some old laundry baskets. I really must sort them, and store them downstairs in my "root cellar" aka garage. If you look closely you'll notice some have started sprouting. As I plant the onion crop in June, I'll just pop those babies right back into the soil.

There are lots of chores to do in the garden this month. Move the chook house, sow the green manure for the winter (3 beds of the 8), prepare the onion bed, finish weeding, order the BD500 for June (seeing how I missed April and May - most unfortunately because May was actually wet enough to put out he 500 - let's hope June is wet), prune and mulch the strawberries....all good work. I just have to get to it.

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Broccoli & friends

I promised to show the update on the broccoli and the other vegetables intended for winter eating. During the autumn I settle on two or three productive beds, out of my 8 garden beds. Remember, two are always taken by the chooks leaving me with 6 beds to grow plants. In the summer I have a bed for pumpkins and corn, one for root vegetables (carrots, parnsips etc), one for potatoes, one for melons and cucumbers, one for tomatoes & capsciums, one for green vegetables. In autumn I begin the transition to winter and as I harvest and rotate a bed, I decide if it will overwinter with green manure or produce vegies. At present I'm using one bed for silverbeet, kale, brussel sprouts, broccoli, leeks. I have another bed planted with some leafy greens: asian leafy, a mixture of lettuce, a few more leeks, some silverbeet, and then the snow peas, sweet peas, and broad beans. Once the chooks are moved onto the old pumpkin bed, I'll use one of their beds for onions and root crops and the other one will be sown with green manure. I'm expecting to move the chooks (with the help of my friends of course!) sometime in May. Just enough time to get the garlic in and get the green manure established before the winter starts.

 

Here's the chinese cabbages and the broccoli and the kale all nestled up together. I do have a tendency to plant everything very close. Mostly it is purposeful and I have planting distances researched from John Jeavons book. However, I do sometimes find myself down the garden without my planting measures and so just guess. I'm generally happy with the results, occasionally I can tell a plant is having a hard time as it is too crowded. You can see that some organic creatures have been sampling my cabbage leaves. I don't fuss about this kind of thing. Perhaps I will sometime in the future, when I've mastered some of the more important aspects of kitchen gardening. For now, as long as the food part of the plant is edible and intact, I don't worry about damage to outer leaves.

Here is the Ruby Brussel sprouts plant. I grew it from seed supplied by the Diggers club (there's a link in my sidebar). There is a another brussel sprout round the other side of the Kale. This one is my gem though. I think it is just beautiful as a plant and of course understand those who grow vegetables and flowers together to create onamental gardens. I am too novice and too conscientiously growing food to feed my family to experiment yet. I feel I will some day make one of those beautiful vegie/flower gardens.

That tree - more leaves

Here is another view of the Manchurian pear in the front driveway. I raked up these leaves yesterday and put them on the front garden. I also spread some lucerne mulch, watered in some biodynamic seaweed solution, pruned off some straggly branches of the wattles that overhang the footpath, and assisted Tessy in her "plantings". She was accompanying me in the front garden and wanted to plant some seeds. I didn't have much that was relevant to plant in the autumn, and the dry continues and we're trying not to water the front garden too much. I have to water the vegies, and we have ducks, and gasp a swimming pool. In my mind, I have no allocation for watering the front garden. So, I was a bit at a loss and ended up giving her some sunflower seeds I'd saved from the summer crop. There is news on the drought that if rains don't come, irrigators on the Murray-Darling river system will not be allowed to draw water from the river for outside watering. We've reached a very serious point indeed if we are talking about letting all the farms, orchards and crops along the Murray-Darling dry out. It could spell the end of the orchards. It did sprinkle here in Canberra a little bit yesterday - not enough to really call it rain.

Seed saving beans

The beans have now dried on the vine. They are the Beans Blue Lake variety and were very prolific that first year in 2003. We ate and ate and ate green beans. I've saved them every year since then and I think these are ready to be harvested as seeds for next year's crop. It is one of those tasks, a bit like sorting and storing the onions, kind of hard to get around to. I've checked them out quite a few mornings when I go down to the garden. So far, I've always responded with "I'll do that tomorrow". Well this time I most certainly wont be doing it tomorrow. Instead, I'll be sitting in the car with the rest of the family as we head down the coast to do our inaugural overnight camping bushwalk with the young ones. So beans, you'll just have to wait. I'm sure you can handle drying on the vine for a few more days.

I hope it is warmer down the coast - which it should be. Up here in the Great Dividing Range we really are a bit colder than down at sea level. Friends of ours took their children down last weekend and the kids swam in the ocean - not the parents though. I think they just sat and watched. Not sure about me. Am I a kid or a parent? Anyway, we've settled on a walk from Congo along the Bingeri Dreaming track. It sounds like a fairly flat track that follows the coast with lots of access to the beach, headlands and lookouts. We've decided to keep it really simple, with just one overnight camp and really only a walk of 3-6 kilometres in length. We need to keep it manageable so that everyone wants to do it again. See you in a couple of days.

Sorrel

This is my sorrel plant. It has become quite rounded and bushy over the years from constant picking. I like to pick just 3 or 4 leaves to add to a salad. I chop them up pretty small because they are quite tangy in large doses. It is quite popular in the community garden with the south-east asian gardeners and I've swapped cuttings of this for some coriander seeds and rocket seedlings. It survives our relatively mild Canberra winter (no snow) quite nicely and adds greens through the lean months.

I was looking up a recipe to share of sorrel and came across this one in The Greens Cookbook (Deborah Madison). She says of: Sorrel-Onion Tart: the almost lemony, tart taste of sorrel is very pleasing with the sweet stewed onions. Even a small amount of sorrel will transform the character of what would otherwise be a more predicatable onion pie. Though expensive to buy, sorrel is very easy to grow. Plants can be bought in nurseries, put in the ground, and harvested leaf-by-leaf for several years. It would be worth having a few plants to be able to make this tart on a regular basis.

Recipe: Sorrel-Onion Tart

make a tart dough (she gives instructions but any good cookbook will tell you how to make a tart dough)

4 tablespoons of butter in all, 1 large red onion, thinly sliced; 1/2 teaspoon of salt; 4 to 8 ounces of sorrel leaves, 2 large eggs, 1 cup heavy cream, 2 ounces Gruyere cheese, grated, pepper.

Prepare tart dough, partially prebake it, and set aside. Melt 3 tablespoons of the butter in a wide pan, add the onion, and the salt. Cover the pan, and stew slowly until the onion is completely soft, about 10 minutes. Check it occasionally and give it a stir.

While the onion is cooking, cut off the stems of the sorrel leaves and roughly slice the leaves. Melt the remaining tablespoon of butter in a pan, and add the sorrel by large handfuls. Although the amount of leaves will seem voluminous, they will quickly cook down to almost nothing. Cook over a low heat until they have wilted and turned a grayish-green colour, 3 to 4 minutes.

Whisk the eggs with the cream; then stir in the onion, sorrel, and half of the cheese. Taste for salt, and season with freshly ground black pepper.

Preheat the onion to 375 degreesF. Distribute the remaining cheese over the crust; then pour the filling on top. Bake in the centre of the oven until the custard is set and well coloured, about 35 to 40 minutes. Serve the tart while hot. For wine, consider serving a chardonnay or French white Burgundy. This tart is based on a recipe from Richard Olney's Simple French Food.

This Greens cookbook also has a recipe for a sorrel sauce and sorrel and potato soup.