dilly dalley doolittle gardening

Before the 12 months is over

As anyone who read this blog knows, I stopped blogging and gardening in April 2008. It is now March 2009 and I'm trying to get started, turning over the engine again, just before the 12 months clicks over. I took a long break from the community garden last winter. I really didn't want to go down there. It's always a bit of a challenge to put in early mornings in the garden during the winter, but added to that were my motivational issues. My husband, who wouldn't know a spinach from a silverbeet, who on a number of occasions has dutifully watered the weeds leaving the lettuces to wilt, held the line for me during that long winter. He would go down to the garden and water, he stayed involved in all the working bees, he gave me updates on the vegetables and let me know when things were ready for harvest. Then once a month or so I'd go down on a Sunday afternoon and harvest the winter vegies. We sort of muddled through and I let the dust settle and tried to work out how important this was to me - community gardening. We discussed building some garden beds in our home garden. It would be nowhere near the 144sq metres I have at the garden but still it would be something. We progressed quite far down that track but by the end of Winter the pull back to my patch was strong enough and I decided to resume a regular routine at the garden. Here's the pumpkin harvest and some of the tomato harvest bottled up ready for pasta sauces (circa May 2008).

As part of starting back I purchased an expensive tool I had been admiring for years - a tool to make soil blocks. We made up a bunch of soil blocks, cranked up the propogator and I started a new spring garden. Then while the tomato plants and lettuces and melons were germinating I took a look at the community garden plot and felt almost satisfied. It hadn't fallen completely into disrepair. I was timing it just right, before the warmth really started to get weeds moving, I returned to active gardening. In typical fashion this self satisfied situation lasted only a few weeks. I slid back to my winter ways of not getting down there every morning and Spring really started to kick in. Homer Simpson doh moment. By the time my little baby seedlings, in their cute little soil pots, were craving a nice warm earthen bed, the weeds had taken hold of my plots and I had to do penance for weeks down there to pull it together. Ohh that was painful. Head down, just do it. You'll get on top of it and it will be fun again....blah blah blah. A monsterous compost heap of weeds grew day by day. Every time I crossed paths with a fellow community gardener I had to mea culpa  - yeah, yeah let it get a bit out of hand, snicker, snicker. Ah timing is such a sweet issue in a garden. Anyway, I managed it and planted out the spring garden - beans, pumpkins, melons, cucumbers, tomatoes, capsicums, eggplants, lettuce, corn - the works.

For some reason though I found it harder to get back to blogging. Recently, I had to check my blog for a report on a bushwalk we did with the kids a few years ago and I thought - wow - its almost a year! How about I set myself the goal of restarting the blog just before the year is out. So I find myself here - at the start again. And just like the fields of weeds I encountered last spring - I had all sorts of technical issues to get through - typepad wouldn't talk to flock, I couldn't remember all sorts of photo uploading details, my passwords were out of date blah blah. With a final push I overcame those and I'm back. Here's hoping.

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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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Winter bed ready

This is a bit of an "update post". I actually did this work last weekend but am only now posting. We have had a long and intense and sad week with the death of the family pet. My cat of 18 years who predates my life in Canberra, my marriage and my children reached the point in her life where we as a family had to make some hard decisions. My 10 year old son and I have found the last week to be particularly hard. However, the vegetables wait for no one. As the earth relentlessly continues its passage around the sun, so too do the seasons change and we must answer the cycles or its Woolies for you girl! Heed my warning.

So after a very sad cat funeral where we buried our cat, said a few kind words about her, read her Cynthia Rylant's "Cat Heavan" poem, and planted a She-Oak over the top of her, we all went down to the community garden for some life affirming garden bed preparation. Normally, working in the garden cures all sorts of ills. I'll go down with a headache, feeling stressed from work (paid work that is) and find that after a short time of gardening my muscles are relaxed, my tensions are gone, the headache has subsided, my thoughts are turning to sweet things. But even the magic properties of gardening cant take away an aching heart. At least not straight away.

You can just see the baby she-oak (casuarina) in between the children.

Still here it is. The bed that had contained the mis-timed melons now is dug over ready for winter crops. I have seedlings of cabbages, cauliflower, broccoli (italian style), broccoli (hong kong style), kale, silverbeet, spinach, and cos lettuce ready to go in. Saturday, the day I did the bed preparation, was not my watering day and so I decided to plant the seedlings on Sunday afternoon at about 5-7pm so that soon after they were planted I could water them in. Anyway, here's the bed early Saturday evening. I've managed to retain the cucumber trellis.

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Potato bed - update late summer (last one of this series)

Last update that is...I've finally worked my way around my garden beds with update photos. After  I've done this, I'll let you know how I'm going getting my brassicas in for winter. There was that small issue about killing off the melons. Anyway, here's the potato bed.

There appears to be a gap half way down the bed and that would be because there IS a gap half way down the bed. But its more complicated than that. The first half of the bed was planted before the garden open day (but still very late for me) - late October maybe. I usually try and get potatoes under straw in late August, early September. Anyway, after the garden open day - so I'm talking early December (!) I put in the other half the potato bed. Really, when I did that I was just experimenting. I don't even know if all is well under that growth at the back, and whether or not they'll finish growing in time for harvest. It seemed like it was worth a try because I had this half a bed allocated to potatoes - I just hadn't got around planting. So, we'll see. Certainly the potatoes at the front of the bed - just after the stawberry plants - look normal. Bulky, lush, green growth on top that covers the bed whereas the ones at the back are smaller and haven't all managed to grow.

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Bean bed - update - end summer

Strawberry plants at the end of the bed. Beans blue lake on the trellis.

The green beans are cropping well. I pick a handfull most days at the moment. This is just about right. Steamed for dinner the children each eat one green bean and we eat the rest. And yes, the one green bean is eating on sufferance. One day they will realise what a joy fresh home grown (community grown) vegies really are. In the meantime, my husband and I sigh at our philistines and enjoy the bounty.

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Pumpkin bed - update late summer

These photos were taken a few days ago - anyone living in Canberra would know that because the sky isn't overcast in the photos! We have had days and days of overcast weather but only moderate rain. Still, any rain is good rain. So here's the pumpkin bed update.

And from the other end.

The poles / sticks that you see cluttering up many of my photos are used to help guide/ drag the watering hose around. I don't have a watering system set up in the garden bed and do all my watering by hand. I have two long hoses joined together, which makes for a bulky and sometimes recalcitrant heavy rubberized snake. I don't want it to damage the plants and so have set up poles on the corners of each bed. So every garden bed (all 8 of them) have 4 poles - one on each corner. From this angle you can see one pole on the corner of the pumpkin bed and one pole on the corner of bean bed (which I'm standing next to to take the photo).

One of the babies on its way... not sure what type.

And standing side on to the pumpkin bed and looking back across the 4 beds is this view of ...what..a wave of pumpkin vines about to swamp those who linger on the edge of the sea of plenty.

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Melon bed - late summer

Look now before it vanishes! In my confusion and drought induced nervousness, I ran late putting in my Summer beds. Then all of a sudden the pressure was on. We were scheduled to be part of the Open Gardens scheme in December. So, without looking at my crop rotation plan, and without really believing the drought was over, I planted out this melon bed.

It has a trellis with cucumbers growing on it, and watermelon vines, heirloom rockmelons and store bought seedlings of (I think) Hales rockmelons. Unfortunately, it all has to go in about a week. I need this bed for winter brassicas: cabbages, cauliflowers, broccoli, kale etc. I feel most annoyed with myself.  Given my complicated crop rotation, I was never meant to have a melon bed this year but because I didn't check my plans I didn't know this. Anyway, I can't plant the brassicas anywhere else so these babies will have to be sacrificed, as given the current cold weather, I really don't think they'll ripen in time.

And these...

And these....

I'm just going to have to stiffen my resolve. Ignore the perfume of an organically grown rockmelon (hopefully it will be a cold day with no heady aromas wafting around). And repeat after me - never plant without checking your plan!

These at least will not need to be killed off. I think I can maintain the cucumber trellis and still have enough room for the winter brassicas. The cucumbers will probably continue on through to end March - early April. By then we'll be sick of them, frost will get them or downy mildew. As my incredibly fussy eater daughter does actually like cucumbers I am glad I can maintain the vines until the end of their natural life.

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Half a bed ready for winter root crops

I started off with the digging board and slowly, over a few mornings, dug my way through the bed. (Thursday morning view)

(Friday morning view) Then I levelled it and smoothed it and now I'm just waiting for some rain, or a day when I'm allowed to water and then when its moist enough I'll put in the carrot, turnip, beetroot, parsnip and radish seeds. The far end of the bed I'll dedicate to onions, which I wont need to plant until June.

(Saturday morning view) On the pole is my jacket. It looks a bit reminiscent of Peter Rabbit. It was chilly this morning. Strange cold weather for February. This is very Canberra though. The weather always seems to be doing what you least expect. We were told it would rain every day last week. It rained one day, and we had 10mls in the garden. Good. Then it stayed overcast and chilly all week. Hard for those heat loving vegetables to ripen and hard for us heat loving humans. My husband is a winter chap and he's enjoyed the break from summer but not me. I love the summer. The winter has always seemed long and dominant in our climate. Having said that, of course we aren't really talking about a very serious winter. Frosty and cold but no snow. I grow vegetables right through the winter, after all. So its not that cold. Still the trick is to get your winter vegetables in early enough. Late February for cauliflowers and cabbages has been, from my experience, the very latest you want to push it. After that, they really don't get established enough before the days get short and the cold and frosts set in.

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