Planting cavolo nero

There are organic purists out there who only put home made compost on their gardens and nothing else. Something about reducing inputs and outputs. Well I'm not one of them. I think I've laboured on this before but that's not going to stop me doing it again. Linda Woodrow, my permaculture guru, doesn't get prissy about inputs. She is enthusiastic about getting whatever you can that is of grown and not synthetic origin. So yesterday I collected more watercress from the local stream and threw it in the chook run.

I started to make room for my cavolo nero, another brassica experiment. My brassicas have mixed success and I want to give these ones excellent opportunities. So up by the potatoes I started weeding. I spread the peastraw a bit thinly over poorly weeded soil in Autumn and thus have quite a bit of work to do. Mostly I was pulling out grass and spreading buttercup and during this process I really saw how it works when permaculture books say all weeds have a purpose. Spreading buttercup is all over our section and the weed books and websites all observe it is found in wet, poorly drained soils. Linda Woodrow would say don't worry about getting rid of it by chemical means - get the soil health correct and it will reduce its presence or even disappear. Whereas the grass (this area was lawn only 14 months ago) was quite difficult to get out, the roots of the spreading buttercup lifted out quite easily with the aid of my digging fork. I could see how the root structure did actually work to break up wet compacted soil.

I half filled a bucket with sheep poo, added a handful of bood and bone, a handful of lime and topped the bucket up with home made compost. Then I spread it over my newly weeded area and folded it in with the digging fork. I would never use super phosphate or synthetic nitrogen, but as we eat conventionally farmed meat and wear conventionally farmed leather and wool, I consider the sheep poo and blood and bone to be reasonable inputs which link to our lifestyle. I had some lime (New Zealand sourced) in the shed so thought I'd throw that in as well.

Then I planted four cavolo nero plants, mulched them with peastraw and took my crazy toddler apprentice inside with me so she couldn't pull the plants out. It's raining quite hard on them as I write the following morning which is perfect timing.