Summer crops

After crying last year at how dry the garden was, and losing all my seedlings, in late 2010, I decided to take a more pro-active stance and finally put in some irrigation piping. This was "2nd hand" piping, just pulled out another section of garden where it had lain unused for years. This limited my ability to decide where the drippers/sprayers are located (as in, they were already in the pipe from the other garden), so I just snaked it through the garden as best was possible. I then bought a $20 battery operated timer from Bunnings, and connected it to the town water tap. The plan is to connect it to the tanks eventually, but we need to put a whole new connection on for that.  This has worked pretty well- nearly all the summer seedlings survived (and thrived), and we can now go away for weeks without having to think about how to ensure the garden survives. It's currently set up to just give 'adequate' water, that is, most plants still need a good rain to have a decent growth spurt (corn shot up after a week of night rains) but at least plants aren't dying of thirst in the summer heat.

We are still mulching with leaves, and cardboarding, and I've started to build little palm leaf barriers (poking palm sticks into the soil and threading the longer palms leaves through as type of lattice) along the edges of the mounds. I found that many leaves/cardboard/seaweed was quickly breaking down and leaving exposed sandy edges that lost alot of water along the mound edges. With the palm leaf (and cardboard) barriers, the edges are more protected and the water retention excellent.

We've got butternut and golden nugget pumpkin coming on, corn soon ready for harvesting, capscuim (3 year old) producing crisp tasty fruit, passionfruit doing ok but not fantastic, a self sown tomato producing orange sized tomatoes, silverbeet, parsley, basil, and so much rocket that I am sick of eating it!. There are also in blue lake beans, soy beans, lentils, cowpea, zuchini, cucumber, eggplant & okra - though these are all a month or three away from producing fruit.

End of an era- goodbye Cocos Palms

It's the end of an era...goodbye to the 10 cocos palms that were spotted around the place- the possums and bats will miss you, but we will not! Now that the Cocos palms are down, the real clean up begins as we drag cocos palms pieces into the back yard (couldn't be mulched and would cost an extra few thousands to get tree guys to remove). Looks like several weeks of dragging cocos palms into garden borders etc...

Fig tree was trimmed at the same time and we now have a fantastic huge pile of mulch blocking the driveway

Sweet Potato

back in the garden after a long break and lots of pleasant surprises. Several big sweet potato (this one in the photo I discovered under the black plastic under the passionfruit vine), the perennial rocket is thriving, parsley is pulling through and the silverbeet has survived the extremely dry conditions.  The miniature peach has two little peaches on it, the mango is in flower and amaranth is everywhere. Must say I think the amaranth looks like a weed, but there you go.

Worked for several hours today for before having a break and taking my hat off- found this spider hitching a lift! can't say that I was very impressed and quickly shooed it away. There is a brown snake hanging out between us and the neighbour, so I did alot of clearing and mowing there today.

Seeds

 

Its been dry and again the garden is only just managing to survive- we managed to collect about a dozen passionfruit (which seems a pitiful number given the lushness of the vine), the remaining citrus tree looks yellow (though has a few baby fruit) and all the capscuim , Basil and rocket were wilted. The butternut pumpkin are/were doing well- I had to pull them out of the grass and move back into the garden, and so shifted the orientation of the leaves, which means now they look wilted and unhappy.  The basil and bok choy I seeds I scattered in the planter box look fantastic, and really have the only things that don't look heat stressed. I've decided to fill in the ditches with cardboard, lawn clippings and horse manure...I just don't see that the ditches have captured any water as the black sandy soil just lets it run away too quickly. I think building up the organic matter in the ditches and around the mounds might help with water retention.  Its been so dry that the japanese millet seed pods all dried out, as did the okra and we just crumpled them and got a fantastic amount of seed for next planting. 

Short, half-set corn

Tears, rain and recovery

Its been a month or more since I came up to garden and after a long hot November and no rain, I came home to dead seedlings, withered and dying tomato vines, a herb garden full of black sand (dumped there) and two dead citrus trees. All I could do was cry..... have since spent a week piling up the horse manure as much as possible, spraying the stink bug on the remainig citrus (sorry, but admit I cracked out the  insecticide 'confidor' as I have no idea how to deal with this bug organically), removing the heavy rocks from the base of the citrus and giving it a daily water, and generally planting, pruning, fertilising and watering.

On a positive note, there is plenty of corn and capscuim to harvest and the passionfruit has begun to fruit.  The planter box was doing well, and I dug out the parsley and corinadar and replanted into the mound. The okra seedlings survived, as did two eggplant seedlings and they all got planted into the mound. We've been harvesting corn, though only half the cob set this year. I must say, that I think the organic corn seed produced bigger and more tasty corn cobs that the commercial ones.

Last night it rained lightly for about 8 hours, so I hope that garden survives the next absense better...

NewsFlash: Garden sprouts prawns!

Last week I put out some beer traps (old beer in a deep bowl) to catch the slugs and snails in the Mound- and to my surprise the next morning, along with a few drowned slugs, were at least half a dozen dead prawns-cooked by the beer!

Admitably the prawns were little, finger nail clipping size....

In order to prove I'm not crazy, the next night I put out a bowl of sea water, and sure enough, the next morning I had collected three live prawns (now swimming in the fish tank)

I think that the seaweed I've been using has prawn eggs or hatchlings, and during the night they've jumped into the bowl...

I am certainly the first person in the world to sprout prawns in a permaculturemound