Queensland After Oil (Australia)

Transition Town Initiatives in SEQ

Sonya — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 15:23:37 -0800

Start: 2008-12-13 08:30

End: 2008-12-13 17:00

Transition Town Eudlo - A Relocalisation Group

Low Carbon Diet

shine_on — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 23:30:56 -0800

The Low Carbon Diet is a Queensland Government program, consisting of a 30-day challenge for households to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The goal for each participating household is a 2-tonne carbon emission reduction over 1 year.

Participants form EcoTeams, calculate their current carbon footprint and select and commit to actions to reduce their footprint. Go to the website www.climatesmart.qld.gov.au for more information.

Let's have an initial meeting for all those interested in doing the Low Carbon Diet and then we can break up into EcoTeams of 5-10. Call 4196 0043 or email jacqui@sustainabundy.org to register your interest in taking the Low Carbon Diet 30-day Challenge.

SustainaBundy can also participate as a community group in rolling out the program in the Bundaberg region. If you have any ideas or thoughts on this, call 4196 0043.

A lot of SustainaBundy members will already have a small carbon footprint and are taking substantial action to reduce their household's environmental impact. If that sounds like you, use the carbon calculator and write your story here to inspire and educate those households starting the Low Carbon Diet. Here's my story:

I evaluated my household's carbon footprint using the carbon calculator: The yearly result was just over 5.5 tonnes of carbon emissions. I don't know how good this is, but I noticed my electricity use is well below the average, at a total of 710kWh vs. 2730! I also realised that I have cut down my personal car travel by about 80% since I moved to Barolin St., by thinking about where, when and how I travel, by carpooling, walking and taking the bus. The carbon calculator said that saves over 1.3 tonnes of carbon emissions over a year.
Actions I can take to further reduce my household's emissions are: installing solar hot water and solar electricity and buying green power.
I'd like to see a question in the carbon calculator about composting, because that further reduces a household's carbon emissions by reducing methane emissions in landfill.

Transition Town Eudlo - A Relocalisation Group

Transition Town Maleny - a short report

pekadillo — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 05:04:17 -0700

The Transition Town workshop was a wonderfully inspiring afternoon. Thanks to the 40 or so participants who came and joined in on the somewhat chaotic, yet strangely exhilarating meeting of minds. With Morag and Evan's guidance, we have begun to sketch out the path ahead of us, from here to sustainability.

We started with introductions around the circle. Many of us have been moved by the opportunity presented by the crises unfolding on the world stage: climate change, peak oil, and financial breakdown.

We then had a quick brainstorm to list all the things Maleny has already achieved; our community has already built some wonderful institutions, systems and relationships which put us in great position to start this project. Co-operatives, community organisations, a wealth of volunteers, a long history of successful collaborative action.

Next we passed around slips of paper of different colours. We were asked to visualise walking down the main street of Maleny in 2030, and imagine what it might be like if we continued down this road towards sustainability. On the green paper, we wrote about where Maleny 2030 gets its food. On the blue, we wrote about how we get around. On the yellow, we wrote about where our energy comes from. And on the orange ones, we wrote other 'wild card' ideas.

We then broke into small groups and discussed what we'd wrote. I found this a lot of fun, as people had come up with a remarkable variety of visions, which I enjoyed hearing about. Of course, there were several strong threads of commonality too -- an encouraging sign that there are some strong paths forward.

The results of this brainstorm have been typed up (thanks Franklin!) and you can download them here (257KB Word Doc). The highlighted text was unclear; feel free to send through corrections. Have a look through there and see if it produces more sparks; if it does, then please bring your ideas to the next workshop!

After a break for tea and snacks, we moved into a discussion about how to move the Transition Town project forward. We tried to list the major elements of the project (eg food, water, energy, waste, economy, etc, etc) but this turned out to be quite difficult because there are so many important areas to cover! If we can break things down in some way, we should be able to organise ourselves into sub-groups of 3 or more to focus on a particular topic or project.

Morag and Evan may only be available to help us for these first two workshops, so we need to find a way to organise ourselves to operate without them!

A short video of the day can be viewed on YouTube here:
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=IR53p5-hy2M

There are also a few pictures here:
http://tinyurl.com/5jv9fe

If you are interested in coming to the next workshop on November 8th (2-5pm), please contact us to reserve your place.

Thanks everyone who turned up to the first one for a hugely enjoyable and inspiring day!

SustainaBundy

Junior Landcare Challenge

shine_on — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 18:25:01 -0700

Start: 2008-10-21 18:17

End: 2009-03-06 18:17

Sustaining Gold

One day, forever

androphage — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 02:39:39 -0700

Gardening is a funny thing. In some ways it feels like everything we do is so insignificant, so transient and instantly erased by the forces of nature as soon as we relax and look away. But in more subtle ways the consequences of our choices and actions propagate through time forever.

I have been contemplating this matter when considering the best way to help beginner gardeners start growing their own food for the first time. Beginning a garden is hard work. The soil is usually hard and poor. The weeds are well established and abundant. Dozens of new skills need to be acquired rapidly in order to prevent problems from escalating and all that hard work and expense (not to mention the tiring job of wishing and hoping) coming to little or nothing. In contrast managing a well set up garden is staggeringly simple.

Beginners also are most likely to demand instant results and gratification, not yet coming into tune with the long slow rhythms of the garden. Solutions to this problem include growing radishes for children- a hair brained idea if ever there was one. The garden instructor aims so low that even success is unsatisfying should it come. The opposite tendency is to attempt to do too much and master too many skills all at once, leading to a complex and overwhelming mess. The important point is that both approaches usually yield something of a result, only that the effort involved in getting things up and running is totally out of proportion with the meagre returns. When this fact gradually dawns on the gardener they are well justified in finding other ways to spend their time and energy.

No garden in its first year can ever be regarded as a success. No matter how perfectly skilled the gardener is. No matter how much fertiliser and labor is poured into the soil. No matter how abundant and perfect the crops. The investment of labor, inputs and money can never be repaid in a single year. In subsequent years the absence of the enormous effort of claiming the space, of fighting the worst of the weeds and as the soil gradually improves: only then will the garden more than pay for itself in money, energy or time.

All gardens begin and end with the soil. So my solution to the dilemma faced in guiding people through their first garden is to strongly advise that the first six to twelve months be predominantly spent on improving their soil. From their larger space a small subsection can be put aside to receive a small amount of fast tracking soil amendments like animal manure and compost. This small area serves mainly as a teaching laboratory to allow them to learn the soil boosting, weeding, germination, irrigation and harvest techniques of a small range of crops. This small test space will not produce enough to make the household self sufficient in vegetables in the first year, merely provide encouraging hints at what is possible. The rest of the space is cycled through solarising or other sod killing techniques, deep cultivation, weeding, green manuring and accumulation of plant and animal wastes to boost the soil condition and prepare a sufficiently weed free bed.

Success in gardening comes from continuously following one action with the next in order to extract rewards from earlier efforts again and again. Nature uses the same techniques. The nutrients hard won through the weathering of rocks by microbes or the mining of subsoils by deep roots are recycled again and again in the top soil and biomass, magnifying the value of that initial hard work.

Patience, gentle persistence and follow through are essential for successful gardening that provides real benefits.

Honor the soil above all things, place its health first, and everything else will follow.

Sunshine Coast Relocalisation- Noosa Eumundi and Districts (SCReNE)

Last drinks

androphage — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 17:04:33 -0700

Next week I will have a week off work to complete the last big push of planting in my gardens.

I have a large area under mulch mat and mulch for hardy ornamental plants- shrubs, groundcovers, bulbs and succulents, that once established only require pruning, weeding and propagation (and appreciation of course). These old fashioned plants are becoming rather hard to source these days as our subtropical climate places particular demands upon them. At the extremes we can have long hot dry summers, but many drought tolerant plants will fall to pieces when the summer is humid and soggy. Often a plant will perform beautifully for a year or two before collapsing in a pile of black slush. Some of these can be kept going with regular propagation to prevent old age from crowding their growth, but you have to seriously wonder if it is worth the bother. At the other extreme we have a little frost here and there, but the summer is by far the most limiting season.

The right plants for your garden will grow vigorously during the good times, persist solidly through the tough times, and increase steadily so they don't need attention too often, while adding some element of pleasure to the garden.

Right about now is the last chance to establish ornamental plants in the garden in order to give them a reasonable chance of surviving our difficult summers. The trick as always lies in allowing the transplant to form a functional connection to the soil before the top growth dries out severely enough to die. For most plants the root ball needs to be sufficiently disturbed to force the plant to grow new root hairs into the underlying soil. This process takes about half a week for most plants, making these first few days the most critical. In order to help the top growth survive this period it is useful to prune back the top part of the plant as much as possible, while leaving plenty of strong new shooting positions to initiate growth later on. Removing immature leaves is particularly important since these have an unformed waxy skin on them and lose much more water than older mature leaves. They also demand energy to grow, and since that will also be lacking for a few weeks it is essential they are removed as much as possible.

Another trick to reduce water loss by the top growth lies in burying the plant in order to shelter it from drying winds and the sun. Sticks, mulch, straw, short branches off a nearby tree- all of these can be built up around the transplant. Only the smallest amount of light needs to filter through. As long as the basic functional unit of the plant gets a start, ie the root system connected to the soil, and the capacity to grow new leaves, then success will come along sooner or later.

How you dig the hole will also require some consideration. Personally I prefer to spend as little time as possible putting in a plant as necessary in order to give a reasonable chance of survival. So if I have just bought a pricey plant that I only have one of, I will spend a little more time to dig a larger hole, and carefully crumble the soil back around the root ball and pack it down gently. If I am dividing a clump of something and have dozens to put in I will often trim the roots to a convenient length then simply open up a slit in the soil and cram each division in. Using this slap dash technique I may only achieve a 70% success rate, but I will take only a third as much time to do the job. By leaving a spare clump of the same plant to break up next year I can easily go back to fill in the gaps. This strategy of never putting all your eggs in one basket is invaluable. If you lift and divide the entire stock of one kind of plant then the weather can turns completely against you and wipe out everything. Always hold something back in reserve.

Watering by hand at this time can be a useful investment of time. These new plants only need small sploshes of water every few days to keep them hydrated. Doing so at the end of the day is the most efficient and will encourage the growth of new root hairs into the soil overnight. If this is not possible then early morning is acceptable, even at midday is better than not at all. Once most plants have enough of a connection to the soil to stave off wilting then it can be better to let them sit and suffer over summer. They will appear to barely grow, while actually their root system is going deeper and deeper as the summer heats up. Once the pressure eases off in autumn the top growth will make a massive jump to catch up.

By far the most ideal time to transplant whole plants is in the autumn and winter. This gives the plants a much longer time to get established, allowing them to coast through their first summer. Transplanting now is still possible but you cannot expect much more than for the small plants to survive their first summer, ready to take off next year.

At this same time I will be transplanting new varieties of capsicum and eggplant into the vegetable garden, using the same basic principles but being more generous with them in order to encourage rapid growth and production. For me the only vegetables that I will grow from transplants are these two types. For a start these are often slow growing in their early stages, so there is some time saving advantage in getting them to a decent size before giving them bed space. For the same reason they can be difficult to establish from direct sowing using commercial seed, which is often weak and supplied in small quantities. Once you have grown the first generation you should be able to save handfuls of strong fresh seed for direct sowing. All other vegetables are much better grown from direct seeding and I don't think anyone can truly call themselves a gardener until they have mastered this relatively straightforward technique. I'll write more about direct seeding in the next blog entry.....

Queensland After Oil (Australia)

Australia Pumping Empty - Film night & discussion panel

pekadillo — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 06:59:59 -0700

Start: 2008-10-17 19:00

End: 2008-10-17 22:00

Creating a Sustainable Sunshine Coast - Nambour to Mooloolah

Humus and hubris

androphage — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 20:18:11 -0700

Things are unusually peaceful in my garden at the moment.

A light spring rain is falling, settling in some recent transplants and helping them make that crucial first connection to their new patch of soil. Most of my summer veggie seeds have been planted and are up, and the spring field crops are all in, barring a touch of resowing to fill in a couple of gaps. The weeds are here and there but basically under my thumb. A lazy morning wandering about with the hoe, picking here and there, but mostly just looking at things, will put them in their place again. I will probably get out and replant the many gaps in my new zealand flax windbreak- now the grass on the other side of them is gone our old horse should stop grazing through the fence and pulling them out. A hen sits in a trance on her first batch of eggs, drawing on the deepest of histories to guide her. Fruit are ripening steadily on the small trees. Flowers are all about and unidentified sweet scents swing about on the gentle breezes. Does she ponder the fate of her children? Life in spring seems almost unreal. Serene. Unborn, undying and unvanquishable.

But I have been through many springs and I know what treacherous creatures they are. Summer will come before we can snap ourselves out of our swoon. Fruit will rot and spoil. Flowers will wither in the sun. And the weeds will rise up like a hydra. The sun will sting our eyes, and our sleep will be shallow and fitful. Just as the beauty and bounty of autumn inspires a vague fear of the depths of winter for temperate gardeners, the sweetness and generosity of spring should inspire unease in the warm climate gardener. Summer is our season of the testing of strengths and limits.

For now I will enjoy the calm before the storm and use it as best I can to replenish my reserves. Spring is the last opportunity to fill your senses and replenish the well of hope. If we can drink of spring fully its image can linger upon our eyes as we look upon the savagery of summer.

There is no rest in the garden. No permanence. No certainty. The only permanent culture is the ever changing one. One crop follows another, one generation another, concepts and ideologies swing back and forth. Any perception of progress is merely evidence of the incompleteness of our lives. We only ever get to see half of the story.

But life does have one trick. Life slows down the eternal ebb and flow of the universe and spins it around. The pace is softened, the edges roughened and elaborated, and the whole dance becomes all the more wonderous.

Sunshine Coast Relocalisation- Noosa Eumundi and Districts (SCReNE)

Walk to Work Day

shine_on — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 15:47:10 -0700

Start: 2008-10-03 06:00

End: 2008-10-03 18:00

Sustaining Gold

A bet each way

androphage — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 17:33:03 -0700

Making predictions is hard, especially about the future.

All of us in this peak oil/climate change/relocalisation/down shifting movement have decided to think carefully about the future based on what we can learn today and to make adjustments to our outlooks and attitudes and to our practical living arrangements.

But more and more commentators in the area are helping us to keep our heads and not rush to extremes. Sharon Astyk stands out as a champion for common sense. Even if we are all heading to some kind of apocalypse there is a real downside to making (or trying to make) all the possible preparations too far ahead of the ideal time. For example if someone had known in 1920 that the depression was coming in 1929, then they would get no particular benefit selling all their shares in 1921 and sitting on the sidelines for nearly a decade. Apart from that it is easy to totally exhaust and depress yourself by doing too much at once.

Everything goes through phases and changes, and we need to respond not too soon and not too late to reap the benefits. Trends can also veer off in very different directions. At the moment the world financial system is teetering and lurching between deflation and inflation. Both problems require different personal approaches to minimise the damage inflicted. The direction things go at any particular time basically results from the politically motivated decisions of a small number of people who are far beyond our influence. In such uncertain times we can do well by choosing to protect ourselves partially against both extremes and place a bet each way, rather than assuming we have perfect knowledge of the future. The results may be less spectacular than choosing a winner, but they are certainly more pleasing than picking a loser.

In the spirit of this I have recently started persuing a career in the electricity industry. Given electricity can be produced and consumed in so many ways I believe it will be the eventual winner in the struggle to power our civilisation. This bet for a "techno utopia" will be balanced by the remainder of my time going into my partially self sufficient farm that represents my bet for the "stone age". Real life will continue to shift and lurch between the two, but I will win at least partially either way. Investing in such a divergent way means I have a foot in the door to respond to either eventuality. If "techno-utopia" prevails then I have a chance to define myself as an expert in the field. If it all goes to hell I can quickly scale up from feeding ~1 person year round to feeding the 5-10 people in my entire family. In the immediate time my life is more diverse and I can enjoy both sides. Each type of toil is a holiday from the other. Realistically I may have to keep holding down an increasingly stressful and poorly paid job, so that the family can keep the farm, while coordinating the family themselves to grow their own food. Other alternative job targets are in the water system and agriculture public service. Doing a major career shift like this is always a chancy affair, so I have to cast a fairly wide net until someone gives me a chance.

A similar tactic pays when gardening in a changeable and changing climate when you are using little inputs. Water is the main variable in eastern Australia, so having the ability to rapidly shift between water loving/tolerant crops and dry tolerant ones is very useful. Even understanding that you shouldnt expect to grow perfect lettuce every year is a major step in allowing you to adapt as things develop without falling into despair.

Sunshine Coast Relocalisation- Noosa Eumundi and Districts (SCReNE)

State Govt Peak Oil discussion paper

Sonya — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 15:53:44 -0700

SustainaBundy

Sustainable House Day

shine_on — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 20:16:00 -0700

Start: 2008-09-12 01:55

End: 2008-09-12 23:55

Sustaining Gold

We, two, form a multitude

androphage — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 23:03:16 -0700

It looks like my weekly blogging habit is starting to settle in. If I keep this up for a month then it should be set in concrete.

This weeks post has no grand theme, just an update on progress.

The second community group meeting went well, with an even mix of new and familiar faces. I encouraged people to pick out one project they would most like to focus on, to help us identify focus points for groups of 2-4 people to persue. The blackboard idea was well recieved, so I will source some materials for it this weekend. A couple of interested souls came to visit my place afterwards. I am starting to pick up a strange sense of disbelief in people that I can manage so much cultivated space with just a decent hoe and a roll of black plastic.

The 28 spot ladybugs have arrived to pester my potatoes. I have been getting up early in the morning to crush them by hand, while the air is still cool and their reactions are slow. I deliberately squash them on the leaf surface and leave the carcass behind. This isnt to emotionally traumatise the survivors, rather the idea is that the decaying corpses give some encouragement to any diseases or predators that the ladybugs may harbor. A similar approach with cabbage white butterflies from last year seems to still be working- I spotted several rotten caterpillars on my broccoli despite no interventions this year so far. Timing is also important for managing these kinds of pests. If I had planted my potatoes any earlier then they would have been vulnerable to frost damage. Any later and they would have been defoliated by the ladybugs despite my best effort since they eat and breed much faster at higher temperatures. If I had planted my broccoli at a warmer time of the year it would have favoured the caterpillars as well. Another part of the ladybug problem comes from the prevalence of reservoir plants for this pest. My Dad is fond of Cape Gooseberry, that grows and fruits through the winter, and is a favourite food for 28 spots. Black nightshade and eggplants will do the job as well. Keeping these plants over winter gives the ladybugs a head start in spring on the potatoes. The upside is that you also can maintain ladybug predator populations by having reservoir plants around, though the dynamics of the system is more complex and unpredictable. There are a couple of other potato leaf eating beetles in the mix, but at much lower population levels. I am currently holding back on squashing these to test the theory that a diverse beetle population is a more stable one since they compete with each other, and more importantly can spread parasites and diseases between themselves. Ill keep a close eye on the other species and start crushing them if the balance shifts again and their numbers start to explode.

Another job finished last week was the planting of a large Roma tomato variety trial. I think I collected about 15 kinds from all over the place, with a view to finding the best 2-3 for my area and my tastes. I am opting to specialise in Roma types so I can grow a big crop simultaneously, harvest it in one big squashy orgy to bottle and dry for the years supply. Synchronising a crop like this is another strategy to manage disease problems. The pests that love tomato plants only get one short chance to do their thing, and for the rest of the year there is nothing for them to eat. The crop is started as early as possible to give the plants a head start on the heat loving insects. This approach is not the equivalent of a "monoculture" we hear so heavily criticised in the progressive media. It only works when carefully timed and included in a crop rotation process. It is much more closely comparable to the "safety in numbers" approach that nature itself uses all the time to protect the vulnerable, such as when baby sea turtles coordinate their breeding and hatching times so that opportunistic predators are overwhelmed.

The tomato planting this year was changed a bit from last year. For one thing the beds were raised about 6 inches above the original soil level by digging out about 12 inches of the narrow paths between the beds. The soil was moved uphill to counter the natural flow of erosion. These deepened paths serve a couple of functions. Mostly they are to assist drainage during extended wet periods- last year was so wet a lot of my tomatos struggled to grow and fruit. It also helps with extended dry periods since the end of the hollowed paths stops abruptly, interrupting water flow downhill and capturing run off. The subsoil exposed in the paths will be aerated by fork through the season as well to enhance this effect. Finally these hollow paths are being gradually filled with horse and cow manure as it becomes available. Walking on this regularly helps break down the lumps, and concentrating the weed seed prone horse manure in one place makes it much easier to clear the weeds out of it as they come through. For each tomato place space I dug down a hole ~18 inches in the middle of the bed, each hole about a meter apart, filled it with a couple of shovel fulls of well rotted horse manure, a couple of handfuls of coconut meal (copra or cool fuel) with a dash of aglime and dolomite, a couple of inches of soil, a few inches of horse manure again and one handful of copra/lime, then finally an inch or two of topsoil.

Into this a generous pinch of tomato seeds (~10-20) were scattered into a ~4 inch wide, 1/2 inch deep hole and covered over. I didnt bother watering as the soil was quite damp, and the seeds needed all the warmth they can get this early in spring. I sowed generously as experience has taught me that those remaining seed in the packet are of limited usefulness. The time spent waiting for germination of a smaller number seed to come is much more valuable than the "wasted" extra tomato seeds, and if a variety should prove to be worthwhile the seed I save myself will be far stronger and far more numerous than what was left in the original packet. In our hot climate stored seed doesnt last especially well, so old seed packages are really only good for three years at most. Sow generously once (10-30% of a packet). If germination is good then you have another year or two on hand. If germination is poor you have at most one more year's worth. If germination is nill check your season was right and then resow the entire remainder of the packet, if only to be rid of it so it doesnt clog up your seed store. Once the seedlings are at ~2 inches high I will thin them down to the two or three strongest ones that arent side by side. At this size they can still be leveled by a bird or slug. Then by ~10 inches high I will pick the one strongest, put in my trellis, and stand back. A few doses of liquid fertiliser (weeds and food scraps rotted in airtight plastic garbage bins for a month or two) and wood ash from the winter (rich in potassium essential for expanding fruit) will keep them powering along. By Christmas time I should be picking about 20kg or more per plant, so my 20 or so plants may be giving me ~400kg of fruit. This may seem like a lot but it is only about 1kg per day across the remainder of the year, so between the tomato sauce and dried tomatos it should nicely cover our years requirements.

The economics of the venture are worth considering. The space used is five 2 x 4m beds (40m2) and all up the crop will probably require about three solid days of establishment and maintenance, and processing, divided over the growing season. Crushed bottled tomato sells at ~$2 per 500 mL, so if I crushed the entire (presumed) 400kg crop it would be worth ~$800. Inputs of fertiliser, water and wear on tools would be worth less than $40, so labor is the most critical input. Three days worth of work (my main paying job, after tax) is worth ~$300, so even allowing for additional costs for the bottling etc I am turning a substantial profit of around $400, or a weeks after tax wage. All from 40 square meters. This doesnt take into account the savings in not driving to the grocery store, reusing bottling equipment, or the hedonic advantage in having better quality organic tomatos (priced typically at double conventional for industrial produce).

So three days worth of actual work save me from having to do eight days of wage work. This rough ratio of one day in, two days out seems to be typical for vegetable growing. Staple crops give even bette returns of about ten to one in terms of days worth of food energy produced versus days spent tending the crop.

When done properly growing your own food is far more than an indulgent elitist hobby.

It is a way of reclaiming a degree of financial and energetic independence.

Sunshine Coast Relocalisation- Noosa Eumundi and Districts (SCReNE)

Relocalisation Cooran

androphage — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 21:46:27 -0700

Just last week something quite wonderful and unexpected happened.

In response to a small and unassuming ad in the back of our local permaculture group newsletter, and through word of mouth, twenty or so community members came together to sit in our local park and talk about ways of energising and coordinating our little community of Cooran to prepare for rising energy prices and a spluttering financial system. People brought along a wide range of concerns and ideas, but the general feeling seemed to be that having a mechanism for people in the community to reach each other was the foundation that was needed to bring us all together.

Another meeting will be held this coming Sunday, with extra advertising to go up at the small Saturday markets to spread the word further.

Our community needs a nervous system of its own if it is going to wake up from its long slumber. If we can give people a reliable and simple way to communicate with each other then they can spontaneously form the relationships they need to strengthen the community. My personal model is to have a community blackboard set up in parallel with the Saturday markets for people to use as a kind of low tech internet or local newspaper- but with no electric or printing costs. This way people can buy and sell, hire or share labor, organise skill sharing and social events. It will be interesting to see what the response is from others at the meeting....Ill keep you posted.

I took along some parsnips from my field to share with a couple of friends. They had gone from ~3cm diameter to ~10cm in diameter in just a month, despite getting zero rain and zero irrigation. Im not sure my friends really believed that I dont water them. From a 4x2m patch I weighed 16kg of parsnips, equivalent to ~8 tonnes per acre. At this rate the crop will sustain ten people per acre (not accounting for the additional 2-3 other crops that could be raised in the rest of the year).

In the field crops (so peaceful and simple compared to politics) my experiments continue. I am madly planting a large patch of buckwheat (~1/8 acre) and thought to try an experiment to see if I could save a lot of work. Normally I prepare hoed rows for sowing seeds, and scrape the soil back over the seeds to make sure they are well planted. With the buckwheat row the solarised kikuyu was still quite thick in the soil (though mostly dead up one end, the other end will need a touch of glyphosate to finish it off and stop me missing the planting season). This dead kikuyu made hoeing rows for sowing seed very hard work. I had been using my broadfork to start breaking up the soil, and as it had been quite dry these left quite deep channels in their wake. So instead of lots of fiddly sowing I just trickled my buckwheat seed down these cracks in a small section. I suspected they might be too deep, or too dry, so I sowed quite thickly. Two weeks on and the seed is germinating well, so I will continue the approach for the entire bed. Take away lesson- it never hurts to do a small experiment to see if you can get away with cutting corners. If I had planted the whole thing this way only to find it didnt work I would have wasted lots of seed and a fair bit of time. In another row pumpkins (on mounds of horse manure lightly covered with soil), maize and beans have germinated well despite being in apparently dust dry soil and getting no water, plus things still being quite chilly.

In the vegetable garden the crops are continuing to yield well. I finally relented and watered the garden after two months with no rain. Up until then things kept powering along, and by the end the lettuce was just starting to taste a little bitter. This is a consequence of doing deep decompaction and cultivation of the soil by gently cracking it open so it absorbs as much rain when it comes, and plant roots go as deep as possible. So I got a length of pvc pipe the same dimensions as my vegetable beds, sealed one end, glued a hose fitting on the other, and drilled holes along its length. This was attached to my large rainwater tank (still full from months earlier) allowing me to give each bed a long soaking for 20-30 minutes. It was propped up at one end with a brick to keep it level and stop one end of the bed getting all the water. The beds simply drank up the water- in fact with the deep cultivation you can pour a bucket on the slightly raised bed all in one go and it just drinks it up with no run off. The rains have finally come, but at least the tank has had a chance to fill up again, and the entire garden given a chance to have a drink. The timing of the rain is perfect for my large potato trial since they should be initiating tubers at the moment, so any stress at this stage can greatly reduce yields.

Spring is fast approaching and everything seems to be running early again, despite the light chill still in the air. Ill be rushing to get my tomatos in this weekend (several roma types to trial and pick out the best 2-3). The weeds have been doing their best to seem subtle and innocuous but they are due for another round up. Job hunting continues to be a puzzle as I allow myself to face the realisation that I dont really want to end up stuck in a cubicle farm, but the reality also is that I don't want to be unable to support my aging parents and struggling sisters, nieces and nephews during tough times. It is about time to break free of the job ads, really think about what I want, and start cold calling businesses.

It is really wonderful to see more comments on the post- I should be posting weekly. Keep responding and I should become more reliable for a look in!

Sunshine Coast Relocalisation- Noosa Eumundi and Districts (SCReNE)

Pause to boast

androphage — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:27:39 -0700

I recently made the enormous mistake of boasting that after two years of work I was finally ahead of the planting season, having gotten my potato variety trial in the ground a month ahead of time (something makes me think "potato variety hour" when ever I say that). I managed to source 26 different varieties for a side by side comparison of how they grow and yield (and taste) under our local conditions. It should be an interesting process to dig them up and tally the scores. From previous similar trials on sweet potato and now peas it is an emerging pattern that you get a ten fold variation in yields between strains, from pitiful to plentiful. The potatos went in after a pea/broadbean/chickpea rotation, with deep forking with a new broad fork (from gundaroo....an absolute dream to use) then application of ~4kg of coconut seed meal per 16 square meters. Anyway to get me back for my gloating the universe seems to have both sent spring down the tubes a month or two early, and also possibly given my now sprouting potatos a light touch of frost to slow them down (Ill have a look when I get home at the farm tomorrow).

Also, unsurprisingly, now that the farm seems to be settling in well, the vegetable garden is powering and performing, the orchard trees are leaping away, and the staple field crop trials are yielding real results, I find myself seriously caught up thinking about what I should do with my "career", caught between my excess qualifications, unremarkable "experience", and reluctance to work anywhere for more than four days a week. I had a minor lightbulb moment considering applying for some kind of community development grant to manage a community garden or two in the area. Three hours later of wading through endless government red tape and forms I realised that may not be as easy as I had hoped, despite the palpable zeitgeist around at the moment for better nutrition/lower food miles/better food security. Ill keep fishing around but I am not as confident as I was to begin. I'm contemplating the probability that I will never own my own property, perhaps I don't really need to. Living with your parents until they die, then being cast adrift at 50 should be a terrifying prospect. But part of me relishes the process of letting go of things and just moving on. It seems to be the longing itself that causes the most heart ache.

Shane

Sunshine Coast Relocalisation- Noosa Eumundi and Districts (SCReNE)

Hold a mirror

androphage — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 22:05:15 -0700

This is just a quick update. I am seeing a lot of people are reading my blog, but so far I have had very little actual feedback. My curiosity about who you are is burning a hole in my brain. I would love to see more comments- how about just telling me where you are and your general situation, so I can learn more about all of you.

Thanks

Shane

Sunshine Coast Relocalisation- Noosa Eumundi and Districts (SCReNE)

Beyond 'An Inconvenient Truth'

pekadillo — Tue, 27 May 2008 18:22:24 -0700

Start: 2008-06-04 17:30

End: 2008-06-04 20:00

Queensland After Oil (Australia)

Building Sustainable Communities Ecovillages and Bioregions

pekadillo — Tue, 27 May 2008 06:32:44 -0700

Start: 2008-06-13 18:30

End: 2008-06-15 16:30

Sustainable Maleny Project

Building Sustainable Communities Ecovillages and Bioregions

pekadillo — Tue, 27 May 2008 06:29:26 -0700

Start: 2008-06-13 18:30

End: 2008-06-15 16:30

Creating a Sustainable Sunshine Coast - Nambour to Mooloolah

Wet day, dry day

androphage — Tue, 13 May 2008 22:13:37 -0700

The main focus of this entry is dealing with the drying weather. It has been a couple of months since we had substantial rain, though summer this year was particularly wet. The grass is still green. But looking around the cultivated areas the bare soil is looking rather dead and lifeless, dusty even. To a casual observer it seems hard to believe that I have only just watered my lettuces once last weekend, and my brassicas a week before that. As in they got no water, even when I sowed the seed. Recently I put some valuable imported Quinoa seed strains into my summer vegetable garden green manure rotation to make sure I successfully bulked up my seed supply for next year. They germinated in a week, in recently disturbed dry looking soil, with no rain falling. The green manures around them are coming up as well. The deadness and dustiness of the soil is actually part of the system. By minimising the amount of leaves drawing on the soil moisture you extend the useful lifespan of your ground water reserves. This means you need to weed meticulously (a topic for an upcoming post). When irrigation isnt an option a last gasp trick to save a struggling crop in drying soil is to thin out every second plant. Those remaining will usually quickly perk up, giving you half an edible crop rather than all of an inedible one.

So why do people anxiously water their newly planted seeds? Unless you are well into a substantial drought there is no point in doing so- it is mostly to feel like you are contributing to the growth. Seeds germinate by absorbing humidity within the air spaces in the soil. Being trapped in water logged soil is often detrimental as the availability of oxygen for growth declines, and also because it usually lowers the temperature of the soil and slows germination. This is especially critical for sowing warmth loving crops early in spring when the soil is already cooler than the air.

Normally people water far too shallowly to have much effect anyway. They rely on cues such as the amount of moisture sitting on leaves or flying through the air to feel like they are doing a good job. In reality the moisture that matters is invisible, deep in the soil. By deeply cracking open that soil (without necessarily turning it) you help the soil to drink deeply when the heavy rains come, and give your plants a fast track to growing deep roots down to the stored water.

Watering newly planted seeds also carries some dangers. You are effectively making a promise to those seeds that you will supply them with all the water they need, regardless of how the season progresses. If you manage to keep your seedlings perfectly and generously moist during a dry season for a few weeks, or a month, but then forget to look at them for a week or two you can expect them to suffer severe moisture stress or death. In contrast if you put your seeds in and let the natural store of ground water do the job there is much less chance of things going wrong. The seedlings will develop deeper root systems and may appear to grow more slowly at first, but the reduced fluctuations in growth are of great benefit to the quality of the final crop. Planting seeds at the end of a dry season in anticipation of coming seasonal rains is the corollary of this process, and once again it is better to put the seed into dry soil and allow it to decide when it is time to grow. Strong healthy seeds are quite capable of waiting six months in dry soil to grow (though what comes out of commercial packets often lacks freshness and vigor).

When you do need to water, and it is quite reasonable to expect to water fast growing tender vegetable crops, you will want to do it properly and as infrequently as possible. The trick is to never exceed the soils capacity to take up the moisture, which for most of the heavier soils on the sunshine coast means a long slow dribble into the ground. I had a large concrete water tank installed uphill from my vegetable garden for this express purpose, partly as an insurance against future water restrictions. At current usage rates its generous 8000L capacity would keep my water demanding vegetable crops going for at least six months with no rain. The slow gravity feed relies on no external power, and matches my dark soils slow deep thirst. My raised beds come in handy too as they seep from the sides once they are filled up.

Out in the field crops the chickpeas are flowering and setting pods vigorously despite being at the higher, drier end of the row. At the lower, wetter end the shelling peas are are doing well after weathering pidgeon attacks, but would probably like some more moisture. These two crops together form a perfect pair to hedge against the changing moisture levels. Chickpeas will grow well in even our driest years, while the shelling peas will grow through moderate water logging. Plant some of each, varying the balance in response to the season that year, and you have a dependable source of legume protein for winter. It should be pointed out my field crops are never watered. In a region where "record breaking drought" means 700 mm a year you have to reflect on how unirrigated crops like wheat would find such an arrangement perfectly comfortable. The trick is learning to change our crops as the rain levels fluctuate, and to not throw up our hands in despair when the occasional season yields next to nothing.

So in summary try and take simple steps to improve your soils moisture holding capacity to make the most use of our ample but unpredictable rains. Cultivate deeply without completely disrupting the soil structure. Soil organic matter helps but deep decompaction is far quicker, cheaper and more effective (also opening up subsoil mineral stores). Time your sowings and plantings to make maximum use of rain when it comes, and liberate yourself whenever possible from the hose!

I have uploaded some photos of the farm. From left to right, top to bottom we have:
1- Winter vegetable crops coming along
2- Summer vegetable area with trash pile and green manures
3- My beloved rooster Clarence
4- Field row showing the first plantings of carrots and parsnips
5- Field row with shelling peas on cowcane
6- Same row as 5 showing chickpeas at drier end
7- Recently solarised row (being prepared for maize, kidney beans and pumpkins in spring)
8- Unsolarised row oversown with random green manures and crops (to be solarised for spring buckwheat soon)

Sunshine Coast Relocalisation- Noosa Eumundi and Districts (SCReNE)

Beneath my feet

androphage — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 01:39:03 -0700

In the spirit of making more regular contributions I am determined to keep progress on the property more up to date to avoid data-dumps like the last post.

The weather has well and truly turned the corner into the cooler end of the year. This is my absolute favourite time of year. Spring may be heavy with blossoms and perfume, but there is something flimsy about them, a tinge of unearned riches. Autumn is the best time of the year for preparation, hard work, long term planning. The air is cooler, the sunsets glorious, and the rain light and reliable most years.

Firstly the vegetable garden. The old summer crops on the lower end are gradually finishing up. I am still getting a fair amount of okra, snake beans, and the winged beans have finally come through (quite neutral but tasty). Rosellas are prolific and jam is piling up for winter. The capsicums and eggplants that finally made it past the slugs at seedling stage are fruiting. Eggplant "redskin" from eden was prolific with tiny fruits full off seeds and quite evil tasting. Result- root pruning and binned the seeds. The italian varieties like rosa bianca by comparison are big and meaty and heavenly when grilled to perfection. Conclusion- varieties matter, so don't beat yourself up when something doesnt perform the way you would like. The jicama did the same thing. I compared two seed sources- one made tiny inedible tubers, the other large crisp ones. If you really want to grow a particular kind of crop buy several varieties of seed from a few different sources and compare the results. It can be truly eye opening.

I have changed the summer veggie rotation to reflect moving a lot of the staple type crops out into the field. So now the most soil pathogen sensitive tomatos get a full six beds in a coordinated assault through spring to give one massive harvest of roma types for bottling and drying. These are followed up by heat loving and more disease tolerant capsicums and eggplants, grown in pots through spring to a decent size, giving them enough time to crop lightly going into winter. They are then over-wintered, allowing them to give early crops the following spring. After that a mix of beans, greens, okra and soft roots (like perennial leeks and spring onions) will follow on in the other half of the rotation. The summer bed is now gradually disappearing under rows of green manures. The bulk oats and barley I got through demeter are alternating with lupins from green harvest and commercial faba beans and lupulini beans (from a commercial wholesale food place in West End-much cheaper). One bed has been left as a trash pile to compost everything down in situ. And sweet peas have been dotted here and there on trellises to spice up the garden over winter/spring. The lobelia weed that went mad in summer is being eradicated, always starting from uphill and working down.

On the upper winter side the unturned raised beds with the manure sandwiched between soil layers have worked quite well. Apart from a little local subsidence as the manure decomposes there were no obvious penalties for not mixing the beds up like dirt smoothie. Lesson learned- endless turning and crumbling of already decent soil can be a waste of energy. Brassicas have been a magnet for pigeons again, meaning having to resow and improve the protective bird netting several times. The broccoli bed received the entire 6 months of food scrap compost to test how much nutrient they could use. As a result the bed shoots out a stream of massive worms any time you stick a trowel in it. The ducks figured this out and started jumping up and down on my broccoli seedlings, meaning I had to build a small fence to slow them down. To take up the space from the potato crop leaving the veggie garden I have added a strawberry rotation, hopefully avoiding the problem of choked permanent strawberry beds that people put in and never get around to thinning out, and giving us a massive crop to bottle. The root crops have been scaled back to onions (a trial, tricky to grow fast enough to bulb well, and daylight sensitive so you need dedicated subtropical varieties while most in circulation are temperate), leeks (a bit fussy) and a smaller amount of turnips and kohl rabi than last year (they tasted pretty ordinary to us). Lettuces have been planted alongside single trellises of snow peas to improve air circulation around the peas and minimise powdery mildew. These combo beds have been staggered (two started in March, one in April, one in May) to spread the harvest of lettuce and peas. The scraped out paths have definitely had less weeds, but the soil moved to the top of the beds needs a fair bit of time to weed by hand and butter knife, though as planned everything comes out very easily, and it is hard to ignore when it is right beside your prized seedlings.

The chickens in the middle of the veggie patch peaked at 5-6 eggs a day from six hens a month ago and have reduced down to 2-3 a day as their moult approaches. One has an injured eye and was always flighty and fearful, and another has a classic spinsters build (while the others are as boxy as tissue box covers) so these two will be culled shortly to make room for a batch of chicks in spring. This way we can replace half our laying birds each year. The gorgeous glossy rooster has turned out dumb and sweet natured, though he does crow when the moon is full, but it is a pleasant enough note since he isn’t a screechy tiny bantam.

In the field the fruit trees have made surprising growth after being waterlogged all summer. The odd precocious fig has been offered up and savoured, and our elderly neighbour let me collect about 20kg of persimmons that were ripened, pulped, and frozen for gradual use. Rough pineapple with persimmon pulp over the top is one of my favourite desserts now- the intensity and mellowness contrast beautifully. The two squares (4x4m each) of trial sweet potato varieties were harvested last week, giving around 50kg despite the lack of weeding, watering (well it was pouring this year) and minimal fertiliser. The interesting thing was that some varieties gave 10kg easily, and others gave zero usable roots. This again emphasises the importance of variety choice, and of not beating yourself up if things go poorly. Imagine if I had only planted the worst variety (“Im a failure”) or the best (“I’m a genius”). The parsnip crop is in and away, with seven squares planned, another one of carrots, probably giving 200kg of roots to get through. I am currently savouring a dish of mashed spiced sweet potato, now making about 30% of my total diet:

Ingredients
4kg sweet potato (or potato or parsnip). Peel, boil and mash. Set aside.

2 Onions (or equivalent with shallots, leeks, garlic, etc)- chopped and fried lightly in olive oil
Spices and herbs (combine to taste: oregano, thyme, basil, rosemary, sage, sesame, black sesame, chilli, pepper, coriander/cumin/fennel seed, cardamom, etc) and fry to release the flavor. Consider timing of adding these ingredients. My failsafe method is to divide all these into 2-3 lots and add them at intervals to the frying onions. This gives a much deeper and more complex flavour as the volatile components are released by the heat in waves.
Put mashed roots into the pan and stir vigorously until a light browning is observed at the base of the pan (scrape it off as it forms to stop it burning). This will add that delicious baked vegetable flavor to the dish, without needing hours in the oven.
Optional- Add peanut butter, tahini or good quality butter (1-2 teaspoons max) to add an element of fat and enhance the mouth feel. Take off the heat immediately and stir it in to avoid oxidising the unstable vegetable fats.
This meal freezes and reheats beautifully, much to the envy of all my work colleagues who must sniff it on a daily basis.
A side helping of braised mushrooms and beans, or tomato sauce and chickpeas adds variety and protein. I also eat it with a boiled egg from my hens or ducks.

The rest of the parsnip field row has newly sourced varieties of quinoa. Local quinoa is hard to source (only from Eden seeds after needling them) and appears to be a food grade dead seed. These just went in after resolarising the bed to remove a fuzz of grassy weeds, so fingers crossed. The next row over has a mass of staggered shelling pea and broad bean plantings. I am trialling about eight varieties of each to compare performance and taste. They have been given old sorghum and cowcane stalks to climb up, saving money on stakes. At the top of this row there are chickpeas (from edible sources mostly, good germination), a few lentils, massed beds of garlic (oriental purple and Italian from NewGippsland seeds bulbed well for me last year growing from April to November- they must have their own space to dry off at the end of the season). The spelt sourced from Eden seeds have ~1% germination. The few plants that made it through will have to serve as a very bottle necked starter population for a better crop next year. Of the remaining two field rows one is being solarised in sections in preparation for a spring sowing of maize, dry beans and pumpkins/melons. The other is still pasture but has been oversown with wheat/barley/oats, lupin/field peas/vetch/fenugreek, sunflower/cosmos/marigold, mustard greens, coriander/parsley etc etc. It is fun to crawl around the grass looking for new species emerging. It will be cut low in late winter, solarised and then planted with a big spring buckwheat crop. I had better get busy on making a hand thresher to process the crop. It is basically a rotating drum covered in a gripping surface that turns against an adjustable board. Once it is spinning the reaped crop is fed into it and the lumpy seeds are stripped off. This mass of seeds and leaves is then spread out to dry and threshed again before winnowing to remove the chaff. Based on last years trial the 15 square row should yield 75kg of unhulled buckwheat.

The best news is that the muscovy ducks, which I was ready to give up on, are now sitting on two large batches of eggs. After blaming the poor sitting duck after several tries at breeding I finally caught the thief (a swamp hen) with an egg in its beak. So a bit more netting and security later and we should be weeks away from having a plague of little baby ducks. Two months of chaos later and we should have a freezer full of succulent dark duck meat.

The scale up continues, but the end is in sight of this phase. By the end of this year we should be producing most of our own calories for the immediate family (meaning plenty to share with the extended family). Up until now I have dealt with a measure of derision from my siblings, and bewilderment from my parents, without feeling massively unappreciated for the endless days of digging and hoeing. By the end of this year they will hopefully be able to see what one person with one set of hands can contribute. Growth in everything is exponential, painfully slow to begin, terrifying by the end.

Sunshine Coast Relocalisation- Noosa Eumundi and Districts (SCReNE)

Future Ready Expo - Building Better Soil

dino — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 23:34:59 -0700

The Future Ready Expo at Kawana was quite an eye opener. There was a lot to see and hear. Listening to Roberto Perez (from the Power of Community DVD) was a real treat. We all remember his quote about riding bicycles ;-) Then there was Geoff Lawton. Who hasn't been inspired by the "Greening the Desert" flash animation on the web?

But one of the most intriguing discussions I attended was regarding building soil in a sub tropical climate. As organic gardeners we're always trying to build soil using compost. It helps, but in a tropical and sub-tropical climate we can easily lose our nutrients to torrential downpours leaching it away. So much we read about compost is for more temperate climates in Europe and North America that hearing a new take on it for the tropics was fascinating. Due to the differences in climate in temperate gardens 80 percent of the nutrients are held in the soil. But in a sub-tropical garden this is only 20 percent. The rest is held in the plants themselves..

Having a layer of organic matter, mulch, continually shielding the soil from blasting sun and torrential rain is a natural way of protecting the nutrient levels in the soil. Frances Michaels from Green Harvest gave a great lecture on what we need to do in a sub-tropical environment to build great soil. Remember that soil is alive. Dirt is dead. So having an active layer of mulch, leaves and other vegetable matter, covering the soil promotes this in a sub-tropical garden. Grow plenty of plants that are good to "cut and drop" to provide this nutrient rich mulch layer. Remember, we're trying to create a rain forest in your backyard.

We don't necessarily want to have too many nutrients in the soil. We want a continuous slow decomposition of organic matter into nutrients. With the weather being warm enough for this to happen with out having to pile it high in mounds we don't need to work so hard at composting as those living in more temperate climates. Obviously if we have a no dig garden or raised bed these rules will change but the natural food forest concept at this latitude and rain fall really doesn't need us to work so hard at building compost.

One of the great additions to a backyard permaculture forest are chickens. Originally forest fowl, they have been bred for maximum plumpness and egg producing capacity but are still right at home in a well shaded food forest garden. They turn the mulch while looking for bugs and can reduce bugs and leafy greens to nitrogen rich manure.

So if you are thinking of having a food forest in your backyard, you won't need to think about where your kitchen vege scraps go. Feed them to your chooks under your fruit trees, no compost turn and you have the bonus of fresh free range eggs for breakfast.

Dean

SustainaBundy

Sustainable Maleny needs YOU

pekadillo — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 05:15:54 -0700

Start: 2008-03-29 14:00

End: 2008-03-29 16:00

Sustainable Maleny Project

Gathering my thoughts

androphage — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 01:29:51 -0700

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.