Gathering my thoughts

March 08

It has been almost a year since I last blogged, so you must be thinking I have oodles of news. And in a way I do. But in another way I don’t.

The garden has been a roaring success, and a perpetual disaster, depending on how you want to look at it.

The winter season in 2007 turned out to be very generous despite the relatively dry weather, virgin unimproved soil and record frost. There was a constant ample supply of collards and kale, snow peas, and turnips and parsnips just to the point of saturation (~15kg each per 4 square meter standard bed, which is also conveniently 1/1000 of an acre), though they are all sorely missed now and their imminent return eagerly anticipated. Weeds were seldom a pressing problem in the winter veggie garden. As August passed the potatoes were put in and ended up yielding a similar amount of roots despite a wave of caterpillars in late spring (just as they were dying down anyway). My Dad pestered me to put in some of his childhood favourite spuds but I insisted it was too late. By the time I relented and let him try them it was way too late, and they were starting to grow just in time to catch the caterpillar plague. When we harvested them there was barely more than we planted, and they were shrivelled and evil looking. Dad wouldn’t let me throw them out at the time (I just tossed them in the compost last week!). Lesson learnt- timing is everything, and there is no shame in overwhelming the munchers with a wave of superabundance (not a cursed “monocrop”, more like the synchronised hatching of baby turtles to beat the seagulls).

Over winter I continued to push along initiating the summer veggie beds, always running behind schedule as the change of season loomed. Unlike the winter veggies I merely green manured these with oats and lupins, slashing repeatedly with my indispensable kama from Green Harvest, then adding a layer of our own horse manure as a coarse mulch. The winter beds by comparison had spottier green manure crops (timing was rushed), but had a few inches of composted commercial horse manure brought in (well worth the money, $150 for 5 cubic meters did the garden wonders as a start, but it shall not be a permanent input). I also prepared four field row squares by literally thrashing the kikuya to death with my bare hands to prepare pumpkin mounds. Kikuya is dormant in winter so solarising or spraying it is a waste of time, hence the heavy-handed approach. In each 4 x 4 m square four wheel barrows of fresh horse manure were piled up, with a few handfuls of either compost or copra (cool fuel) and a handful of lime, then the loose soil hoed and raked up over it. These grew slowly during the dry beginning of spring and got a couple of hand waterings. When the rain finally came they took off, eventually yielding a wheelbarrow of cucumbers, 20 or so rockmelons, and ~300 kg of queensland blue, blue hubbard and crown prince pumpkins (seven heavy wheel barrows full for scale). The watermelons planted alongside the more vigorous pumpkins were buried to start, only yielding three decent fruits.

The summer veggie garden was on reflection adequate but not spectacular. The constant rain made weeding and maintenance difficult, and a previously low priority well behaved Lobelia weed went berserk and spread runners everywhere. I adopted a pattern of always starting at the uphill area of the garden and working downhill, removing every scrap of weeds by hoe or butter knife. When I ran out of time or got sick of weeding I would get out my kama and slash everything with flowers in the rest of the garden to stop any seed ending up back in the soil. Be sure to collect it in a bucket and put it on a separate compost pile (or better yet future bonfire). Starting tomatos and capsicums was a pain- slugs took up residence in the coarse manure mulch and levelled everything as it germinated. In the end one bed of cherry and roma tomatos limped along and gave a meagre harvest(<5 kg per bed)- but this bed had a trickle running past it during the rain. Another drier bed of romas started later gave about 30kg of good fruit from just two plants. Varieties roma and san marzano were good, palmwoods failed twice to produce much. String beans yielded very heavily, but quality was dropping by late November. Snake beans filled the gap nicely (except they need to be cooked), and winged beans were meant to follow but the cool summer slowed them down enormously. They are flowering now but the pods are dropping…next year I guess. The stand-out success was the okra, though the variety star of david was spiny and unpleasant. The best way to cook them is to roll them in polenta and salt, (with optional moisture), then fry in a little oil until the polenta is golden. Delicious. They also went brilliantly with our tomatos, herbs, and homegrown black eyed peas to make a local version of gumbo. Quantifying yields on these regular fresh crops is tricky since they come on gradually over months. I was getting a large basket full of these crops twice a week, meeting our family’s needs. Jicama grew massively but roots are yet to fill out. It is flowering now so I will bide my time while I gather seed. Sweet corn went in late but was planted on top of fish heads and skins (after the chooks had a pick). They grew like rockets and yielded so much corn we were sick of it. In the perennial end of the veggie garden a massive patch of purple kumera (~15 square meters) has given about 20kg of roots so far, with a bit more to come. The Yacon has also done ok, but lost major roots to the rots. The blueberries have done well on a mound of mulch and pinebark dug in downhill from an overflow sump nearby, and will probably be expanded into this patch to fill it out as all berries, along with the rambunctious brambles (will have to wait until spring to see which ones chill enough to fruit).

Out in the field I managed to prepare around one row of 15 field squares for summer (4x4m between trees) to trial staple crops. By staple crops I mean grains, pseudograins, pulses and roots that can be grown with little extra fertility, little weeding, and no irrigation during an average season. From three squares of buckwheat I harvested, threshed and winnowed 15kg of grains. All in all less than three days of work gave 30 days worth of calories- not a bad return. Sorghum grew and set well but was a magnet to the hoards of parrots in our area. Think carefully about where you plant as it is a pain to remove by hand due to its deep roots. Black eyed peas and black kidney beans gave about half a kilo each from half a field square. Millet (mixed proso and foxtail) gave about a kilo from a similar area. The buckwheat has been carefully ground in my hand grinder to feed the starter culture for my fermented oat porridges in the mornings. I cheated a bit in the winter veggie garden and put in more field crop trials instead of a full green manure rotation. More sorghums, buckwheat and beans behaved similarly. Three strains of Amaranth gave good yields of 0.5-1kg per 4m2 bed. This is where the scale to the acre comes in handy- we could grow 1000kg (a tonne) of amaranth if we planted our entire 1 acre/4000sq m field, a consistent behaviour with typical subsistence systems. This is the amount Fukuoka refers to in his Natural Farming book, and I suspect that the energy (chaff and roots) returned to the soil each year, and the green manure rest, allows the soil to draw up any basic mineral nutrients from deep in the soil at a limited rate. Of course you can boost this if the basic geology is deficient, or help out by returning as many wastes as possible (humanure is the next experiment to get right). Next season has just been planted in the field, with the area now doubled. Moving around a big roll of thick black plastic ($160 for 4m x 50m) has made bed preparation a breeze but it only works during the warmer months. The basic balance is between parsnips/carrots, quinoa, spelt/chickpeas/lentils, and field peas/broad beans from May until August. After the frost it should change over to potatos, buckwheat, kidney beans, maize and pumpkins from September until December. Then January to April will be kumera, amaranth, black-eyed peas/cowpeas and millets/sorghum. Only two of the four field rows at any one time will carry a crop, each one starting in spring then cycling back into a deep mixed green manure thicket after a year. These will be slashed by hand (keep it fleshy enough for a short scythe to glide through) with the row about to be recropped mulched with its own growth and with that of the other row, hopefully providing enough density to smother the growth and do without the plastic in the long run. The field green manure rotation will include the veggie garden species but add on other controllable species like Nasturtium, Parsley, Coriander, Daikon, Mustard greens, and some trial ornamentals like shrimp plant (Justicia), African snapdragon (Brilliantasia), some gingers (slow to dig out?), etc etc as trials figure out what works.

Green manures did finally get into most of the beds in the winter veggie garden by January, leaving time for a few slashes before the next cycle. The soil in the winter veggie garden ended up very rich in some places, and stubbornly hard in others. The two worst spots are side-by-side near the drive way, so may be spilled fill, one of them near a water stream, so a little top soil may have been lost. They also got less manure last cycle since they were supporting peas and parsnips. I’ll keep working on them and see how they change with time. The odd thing is even apparently hard soil in some places is finely honeycombed with roots and channels when you look closely. I think you have to get out of the mindset that a root and a finger have the same experience penetrating soil.

The winter veggie bed was slashed and pulled bare in mid February, and just recently I got a final load of manure (now $180!) that will cover both ends of the veggie garden this time. I layered a few inches on top of the green manure wastes, then broke up the top 10cm of the paths in between the beds, and dug them up and on top of the bed uphill from them to work against the direction of erosion. This approach is supposed to do a few things. It makes a deeper bed for the crop roots to spread down into. It also raises them so they are less prone to rotting during heavy rains. The contours in the soil profile mean than run off will get trapped and given more time to soak into the ground. And finally all the weed seeds in the top few centimetres of the compacted paths are moved onto the softer beds, making it easier to remove the weeds and leaving a clean path (recently seeded with milk thistle, my chicken’s favourite). I have been spreading our own horse manure in the hollowed out paths in run off places to act as another water sponge, and to allow me to compost this down and reduce the number of weed seeds in another spongy substrate to make weeding easier. All this was a lot of hard work (now ¾ done in the smaller winter garden, summer to come next before its green manure rotation), hence my reluctance to do anything more than pry deep cracks into the original beds to give the roots and worms a fast lane to the subsoil. Mixing it all up by hand seemed like it may be unnecessary, and some sources say it speeds the loss of organic carbon in the soil. Instead I just used a hand trowel to mix the manure and dirt layers where I am planting seeds, saving a lot of labour. Ill let you know how the experiment turns out. Looking back over summer the green manure crop could have been more effective, not just in terms of being in place for longer. When it was cut down it took quite some time to recover and grow again (2-3 weeks). Next season I am planning on planting the paths with the low species (cowpea, marigold, Japanese millet) and scraping the top off the bed to cover the seeds on the paths, then the beds can be sown with taller species (malu-khia, pidgeon pea, sunflower etc) that can be slashed just to half height, giving them more biomass for growing back quickly, and deeper roots to bring up leached nutrients. The winter green manures are a bit trickier- oats and lupins are excellent low plants but tall plants are less obvious. Ill run a few trials and sort it out. This combo did amazing things to the soil though- oat roots turned it dark and crumbly. The main criteria, apart from nitrogen fixing legumes, and a wide diversity of plant families, is to have fast controllable growth that is easy to slash, easy to remove entirely, and has controllable reproduction (large seeds, or distinct flowering spikes, or propagated from human driven cuttings).

Livestock wise the chickens have recently started laying at 6 months age. I got them as a box of day old hatchlings in September and had them peeping at the bottom of my bed for a couple of months. They are all grown up now and no longer love their mother (unless I have a grasshopper to share). I got an unsexed dozen plus one that died the day it got home, from which I got five roosters and seven hens. One rooster died suddenly during a rainy period (probably gut infection from eating mud), one rooster went to breed on a friend’s farm, and two went into the pot. Killing them was easy (one person holds them down, the other chops) then they were strung up by their feet and skinned. Plucking feathers takes forever, skinning takes mere minutes. They were filleted and ended up giving many meals, including lots of invaluable stock. We are now getting two eggs a day, still small pullet eggs, but of excellent quality. One hen was eaten by an adventurous python, with the enclosure since covered in finer wire. The chooks eat lots of weeds that when pooped on makes a valuable enriched mulch for the veggies. The Australorps have been good natured and quite thrifty with food inputs so far, and their gorgeous glossy black plumage never ceases to impress me.

The other livestock are our muscovy ducks. These were moved into the field in a low enclosure with a secure night box. One of the females got bloated in the chicken pen earlier and was quickly despatched (fantastic low fat dark meat- think kangaroo without the hazards of toughness). The other two were joined by a drake and have botched a few attempts at raising a batch of ducklings. We suspect the eggs were infertile and the drake not doing his job, so he is due to be replaced soon. A batch of fertile eggs is currently being incubated. The ducks are consuming a lot of time and giving little in return compared to the chickens, though we could have done a better job in setting them up properly. They are now roaming the orchard and neighbours forest and seem very happy collecting seeds, leaves and bugs, but may become a problem when my field crop seedlings are germinating, so they may be locked up a few weeks to let them get a go on. The orchard is due to be enclosed in a hedge of giant NZ flax as a barrier to them wandering too far and dogs getting in. An electric fence to hold back our moldy old horse is probably needed before I do that. We double fenced a windbreak planting to shield the veggie garden and he has turned it into spaghetti leaning in to nibble on the lablab bean and scratch his neck. Bees might be the next experiment, maybe this spring.

So that is a long, highly detailed, but probably frustratingly vague account of my first real year in the garden. Production is scaling up rapidly and I am learning all the tricks to make things go as quickly and as smoothly as possible, and also learning not to bite off more than I can chew. A lot of people have lost control during the rainy summer- my only advice is to start in one place and work outwards, and get a good sharp hoe and kama to stop longer lasting damage being done.