Gardening moments

It's done.  My new vegetable patch has been dug over, had compost and cow manure added, seedlings planted and mulched with lovely pea straw.  In the garden are cauliflower, bunching broccoli, red onions, leek, pak choy, spinach, carrots and beetroot.  The onions and leeks were planted amongst the cauliflower and broccoli to hopefully trick the white butterflies.  I also potted up a blueberry, cape gooseberry and a perennial basil.

Perennial basil

Today I removed the contents of the potting shed back into the potting shed.  They had temporarily been housed in the unoccupied chook shed while the potting shed was dismantled and rebuilt elsewhere to make way for the studio.  Looking forward to getting some more chooks in the near future.

Hubby made a temporary enclosure for my compost heap which will do until he has time to build more permanent construction.  I mowed the grass this morning so the contents of the grass catcher was added to the compost pile together with prunings from the herb patch and other overgrown foliage.

On a mission

So I'm on a bit of a mission, a voyage of discovery and experimentation and it's all to do with gardening.   See that garden bed below, it has been cleared.  I've hacked, pruned, grubbed out shrub roots with a spade and mattock. 

This was a beast.

So what am I doing taking out quite a nice garden bed, well I want to make a big vegetable patch and grow food.  I've been reading up on permaculture, composting, making a difference in our own backyard and so I'm starting on a very small scale to see what happens.  We do have a vege patch in the back yard but it is not doing too well.  Tomatoes are not happening this year.  :(

We get rid of an amazing amount of foliage including leaves, branches and weeds from our property all year and I'd like to try and put as much of that back into the ground as I can.  So the contents of the wheelbarrow is the start of my compost heap.  The grapevine has started to drop it's leaves and I've also pruned to let more light into the family room.  I stripped the leaves off what I pruned, put them in a pile and ran the lawn mower over them.  I raked up some other leaves and they got the same treatment.  Together with some grass clippings, I've got a nice little pile of goodies ready to do its thing.  I'm throwing in my kitchen scraps too and to my absolute delight when I went and checked my pile this afternoon, it's all hot inside which is what it is supposed to be doing.  I'm collecting paper and cardboard to add as well and the coffee grounds can be added too.

 Now I don't know how this whole permaculture thing is going to work because we are surrounded by trees and very little light enters our property.  We are also on the south side of a hill, not so good if you live in the southern hemisphere.  Vegetables and fruit need sunshine to grow but I'm sure there must be a way to get things happening starting with getting the soil healthy.  So my newly cleared ground is going to be bombed with cow manure, compost and mulch.  We have heavy clay soil so there is a bit to do to make it a happier place for veges to grow.  I've been spending up to 3 hours in the garden nearly every day and loving it.  It rained today so I cleaned the house instead.

If anyone has any success stories, tips, knowledge about composting, permaculture, growing veges in shade etc, I'd love to hear them.  I'm thinking of getting some more chooks too.  All those eggs and fertiliser. 

Well I've a busy weekend ahead.  Charlotte will be home from her Queensland holiday, my sister-in-law and nephew are coming over for dinner Saturday night before he goes off to study in Italy and travel for a few months and then Sunday/Monday will be spent with my gorgeous niece who loves to craft.

A big catch up

I've been home from Western Australia just over a week and have spent a huge amount of that time out in the garden pruning, digging and planning.  Before I get into regular blogging again, here is a little of what I did while I was away in both Adelaide visiting my sister-in-law and brother-in-law and visiting Mum and my brother at the farm in Western Australia.

To say I had a wonderful time in Adelaide would be a understatement.  Here are a few snippets of my time there.

Visiting Christies Beach.

One day we took a drive out to the McLaren Vale winery region.  The scenery was beautiful and we enjoyed a lunch platter of delicious produce local to the area.

Some of the gardens at the winery.

Out walking one day we were fortunate to see these two dolphins frolicking.

Lunching with this view of the ocean was a wonderful treat.

 The three days spent in Adelaide went by very quickly and then it was off to Western Australia to visit my Mum.  One of the first things I did was help out my brother with some sheep work.  Here is Jessie rounding up a mob of 8 month old lambs that needed to be drenched and vaccinated.

Farm work is not a glamorous business so its old trousers and one of Dad's old shirts to keep me covered from the sun.  Eric's doing the drenching and I'm vaccinating.

After the sheep work was done, I went to see my nephews little kitten he rescued when it was only just over a week old.  Here is "Scramble" still with blue eyes.  Isn't he sweet?!

 Driving back to Mum's house we came across this Sand Monitor in the middle of the road.  Eric was quite close to it and was able to very gently touch its tail but after the second touch, he/she took off rather speedily over to a tree.

Beautiful Bonnie, Eric's other sheepdog of sorts.

A farmer's got to have his hobbies, right?!  This is one of Eric's, flying model aeroplanes.

My lovely Mummy and me having a girls day out in one of the local towns.

 The farmer was having a birthday within days of me leaving to come back to Victoria so he got his present in early.  Brown paper from packaging, string and rusty bolts and a washer found around the farm shed made for excellent masculine gift wrapping.  Everything recycled or to be recycled.  Love it.

 The farmer doesn't only grow grain and raise sheep, he grows grapes as well.  These Crimson grapes are the best I've every tasted.  They're organic, they were sweet and crunchy just how grapes should be.

Galahs on a silo, silly things kept sliding off.

Galahs and a lonesome crow.  They were very noisy.

 

One of the things I enjoy doing for Mum is gardening and she asked me to prop up this old bike and pop a few plants into the basket which incidentally is an old freezer basket I found lying around.  It's always a challenge gardening on the farm with extreme heat in summer and frosts in winter.  There is always an abundance of dry grass in summer and hoses nearby for the never ending watering.

So it's back into gardening at home in Victoria, trying to make the most of the cooler weather and more stable temperatures.  Time for pruning, digging out and dividing or discarding plants.  Also time for trying out some new recipes and maybe I'll find some time to get up into the studio.