The blog is closing
8 months ago
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
How far are we living on moral capital?
This post is particularly for Rachael. The title is taken from this article which was reproduced recently in the Guardian Weekly. I have taken the title of my post from the article as that question, that paragraph, is one I have wondered about myself. Still wondering, no 'answers' though.
Thursday, January 3, 2008
chooks
Have I mentioned I want chooks? Oh only five times this week.
Well I still want chooks and I am fairly determined to get them. Still planning the chook coop and organising Favourite Handyman to make it.
Apparently some breeds are quieter than others and thus particularly suited to suburban life. If I could get fairly quiet birds and no roosters, then I think my neighbours would be fine about the project, especially with a little egg gift bribing, oops egg gifting. Can't see they'll be any noisier than my children and the neighbours seem to like them.
Need to do more research and find which breeds are quiet ones.
Well I still want chooks and I am fairly determined to get them. Still planning the chook coop and organising Favourite Handyman to make it.
Apparently some breeds are quieter than others and thus particularly suited to suburban life. If I could get fairly quiet birds and no roosters, then I think my neighbours would be fine about the project, especially with a little egg gift bribing, oops egg gifting. Can't see they'll be any noisier than my children and the neighbours seem to like them.
Need to do more research and find which breeds are quiet ones.
mulch, Bokashi
Slowly, slowly I am getting the point that gardening is about mulch because mulch is about good soil and gardening is all about soil quality. I've read it many times but as with so many things in life, doing is my way to learn and eventually accept that others are correct in their advice. The vege garden area which I mulched yesterday is looking better already. I'd mulched around one parsley plant a week or two ago and lifting the peastraw today, the difference between the muched soil and the outlying bare soil was significant. So I added pea straw to my newly composted area that recently held non-performing brassicas tonight and then watered over it with Bokashi liquid (waterd down to some appropriate looking ratio) in the watering can.
That was after I'd buried the latest Bokashi mix in an area of lawn until now untouched by my gardening fingers. Ha ha ha, nothing is safe forever. It is by a boundary fence where the neighbours have lots of large trees so I'd expect the soil nutrients to be all taken up by the tree roots. Since we culled the large bush/tree ruining that area, the lone plant which looks like a zantedeschia of some kind has started to look more healthy and one day it might even get healthy enough to flower for me. So I dug up the soil beside the zantedeschia (canna lilly I think) and found:
1. a few worms. good.
2. dry soil. Par for the course this week, though drier than I'd expected.
3. plastic rubbish. Previous inhabitants of our house have left plastic legacies all over the section.
4. Lots of roots. Expected.
5. Some vertebrae with spiky bits on them. Sharp and not expected. I suspect it is groper bones buried after a fishing outing. I know inhabitants in the past have been keen hunters as one day I met a man who'd once lived here and had arrived to take possession from another town and found the remnants of a recently slaughtered deer in the lounge. I'm pleased to report that much had improved inside our home by the time we bought it 20 years later.
I'm disinclined to plant edibles there at this stage, but flowers could be good. Also thinking of things chickens like, as I may well start the chickens there. When I get them. If I end up having to do a permanent night shelter house rather than a portable one, then that is where it would go.
That was after I'd buried the latest Bokashi mix in an area of lawn until now untouched by my gardening fingers. Ha ha ha, nothing is safe forever. It is by a boundary fence where the neighbours have lots of large trees so I'd expect the soil nutrients to be all taken up by the tree roots. Since we culled the large bush/tree ruining that area, the lone plant which looks like a zantedeschia of some kind has started to look more healthy and one day it might even get healthy enough to flower for me. So I dug up the soil beside the zantedeschia (canna lilly I think) and found:
1. a few worms. good.
2. dry soil. Par for the course this week, though drier than I'd expected.
3. plastic rubbish. Previous inhabitants of our house have left plastic legacies all over the section.
4. Lots of roots. Expected.
5. Some vertebrae with spiky bits on them. Sharp and not expected. I suspect it is groper bones buried after a fishing outing. I know inhabitants in the past have been keen hunters as one day I met a man who'd once lived here and had arrived to take possession from another town and found the remnants of a recently slaughtered deer in the lounge. I'm pleased to report that much had improved inside our home by the time we bought it 20 years later.
I'm disinclined to plant edibles there at this stage, but flowers could be good. Also thinking of things chickens like, as I may well start the chickens there. When I get them. If I end up having to do a permanent night shelter house rather than a portable one, then that is where it would go.
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
New bed #2
Fionn, Brighid and I made the new raised bed today. Prompted by Patrick's recent comment, I did go for the no dig style. Favourite Handyman and I had great success with the no dig raised bed at the beginning of 2007 when we layered cardboard very thickly to cover tree roots which we had found impossible to remove (hiring a digger wasn't an option for us) and then added 30cm worth of compost, straw and soil.
This time we only had lawn and weeds to squash out and the 'walls' of the raised bed are perhaps 10cm high - they are are the old beams from the fence which Favourite Handyman repaired last month. I layered the newspaper thickly. I've had relatives collecting newspaper for me over the last year precisely for these raised bed projects. Fionn watered the newspaper down with the hose. Brighid pressed it down further by crawling all over it. Why use the paddling pool when you can climb in the garden project? Then I emptied the three bags of sawdust/chook manure mix over it which I had from our last visit to Rayleen our wonderful chook keeping friend. Looks pretty good so far and not time intensive to create at all.
Did some culling in the mixed vege garden after that. Pulled the tree spinach as it had gone to seed and didn't taste much good. Also pulled the bok choy that had begun to bolt and the last of the purple sprouting brocolli. I was browsing the Koanga site recently and noticed a comment about purple sprouting brocolli not moving beyond leaf stage in Northland due to the warm weather. Decided that if I'm not going to get any actual brocolli off it until it gets colder, then I may as well get rid of the white butterfly attracting, hole riddled plants and put something else there. I've got tiny wee seedlings of various winter brassicas coming through in pots now which should be more timely.
Things aren't generally growing in the mixed vege garden as quickly as the warm weather and water supplies suggest to me that they could. So I figure that comes down to low soil fertility and thus threw some of our own compost on as mulch and dug in some bought stuff where the brocolli had been. Once we've got our own chooks, I doubt this will as much of an issue.
Rinsed the salt off yesterday's kelp find this afternoon but then realised that my seaweed brew-making bucket is currently housing the Christmas tree. Once I've got a suitable vessel again, I'm planning on cutting up the seaweed into small pieces before I make the brew. Once the brew is poured off twice, then I'll bury the pieces into the area which currently has the garlic once I've lifted the bulbs.
This time we only had lawn and weeds to squash out and the 'walls' of the raised bed are perhaps 10cm high - they are are the old beams from the fence which Favourite Handyman repaired last month. I layered the newspaper thickly. I've had relatives collecting newspaper for me over the last year precisely for these raised bed projects. Fionn watered the newspaper down with the hose. Brighid pressed it down further by crawling all over it. Why use the paddling pool when you can climb in the garden project? Then I emptied the three bags of sawdust/chook manure mix over it which I had from our last visit to Rayleen our wonderful chook keeping friend. Looks pretty good so far and not time intensive to create at all.
Did some culling in the mixed vege garden after that. Pulled the tree spinach as it had gone to seed and didn't taste much good. Also pulled the bok choy that had begun to bolt and the last of the purple sprouting brocolli. I was browsing the Koanga site recently and noticed a comment about purple sprouting brocolli not moving beyond leaf stage in Northland due to the warm weather. Decided that if I'm not going to get any actual brocolli off it until it gets colder, then I may as well get rid of the white butterfly attracting, hole riddled plants and put something else there. I've got tiny wee seedlings of various winter brassicas coming through in pots now which should be more timely.
Things aren't generally growing in the mixed vege garden as quickly as the warm weather and water supplies suggest to me that they could. So I figure that comes down to low soil fertility and thus threw some of our own compost on as mulch and dug in some bought stuff where the brocolli had been. Once we've got our own chooks, I doubt this will as much of an issue.
Rinsed the salt off yesterday's kelp find this afternoon but then realised that my seaweed brew-making bucket is currently housing the Christmas tree. Once I've got a suitable vessel again, I'm planning on cutting up the seaweed into small pieces before I make the brew. Once the brew is poured off twice, then I'll bury the pieces into the area which currently has the garlic once I've lifted the bulbs.
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
chooks
I need some slave labour to help me achieve my (many) goals in the garden. And chooks seem the cheapest and most effective. There is wood against the shed which can be used to make a chicken coop once I work out the best plan. I want to be able to move it around the garden. Currently I'm thinking that I want to be able to vary the size of the run rather than have to standardise my raised beds so the chook tractor fits neatly on each one. Everything in my body resists standardisation, of anything, anywhere, anytime. So some metal stakes (we recently inherited some) and chicken wire (not hard to acquire) which could be used to make the required shape depending on where in the garden the chook tractor is. I need to read a bit more and decide whether I have issues with clipping their wings. If I don't, then I won't have to bother about creating a lid for the run.
new bed
garden bed of course. Started to make another raised bed this morning. I removed all the tyres from my potato tyre experiment and the yield was dismal. Compared to the beautiful and bounteous yield from my raised punga bed, the potatoes in the tyres were pathetic. The straw was full of worms though, so that is a useful product of the experiment.
I've got Bokashi to bury and nowhere near enough compost for all the places I need to put it to make a no-dig raised bed. So I need to work with the soil already there and raise it gradually. Tomorrow I hope to dig it up and bury the Bokashi and remove at least some of the major weeds and then cover with peastraw. It is currently lawn, with strong grass and a significant presence of docks, dandelions and daisies, narrow leafed plantain and some funny dense feathery stuff which is really hard to weed out but which I haven't learnt the name of. Will get a photo on here sometime. Actually I neeed to weed everything out of the soil for good long term results but it's not a sexy job.
Had been thinking of another bed beside it for asparagus and rhubarb but my latest thought on that is to give the asparagus the best drained position on the section, which would be to build a bed around where I plonked a zucchini in the middle of the lawn in our most recent Spring.
I've got Bokashi to bury and nowhere near enough compost for all the places I need to put it to make a no-dig raised bed. So I need to work with the soil already there and raise it gradually. Tomorrow I hope to dig it up and bury the Bokashi and remove at least some of the major weeds and then cover with peastraw. It is currently lawn, with strong grass and a significant presence of docks, dandelions and daisies, narrow leafed plantain and some funny dense feathery stuff which is really hard to weed out but which I haven't learnt the name of. Will get a photo on here sometime. Actually I neeed to weed everything out of the soil for good long term results but it's not a sexy job.
Had been thinking of another bed beside it for asparagus and rhubarb but my latest thought on that is to give the asparagus the best drained position on the section, which would be to build a bed around where I plonked a zucchini in the middle of the lawn in our most recent Spring.
Tomatoes
Back in July when I was permanently attached to the Kings Seeds catalogue for days and probably weeks, I chose two packets of tomato seed. I nurtured Tomato Rainbow Blend Mixture and Tomato Sungold F1 and eventually got to the point today where I have ten plants producing fruit in my garden. More of the cherry tomatoes (Sungold F1) survived to today than of the mixed packet. As they are a fast producer, I've been able to eat some already. They look gorgeous and taste okay. Oops, what was that about? I went back to the seed packet and to the catalogue (my Kings Seed catalogue gets the attention many devout religious people give to their Bible) adnm found I'd purchased a hybrid. Well I'm a bit snobby about such things these days and it will be heirloom seeds all the way next year.
As for the Rainbow Blend, there are some interesting shapes of fruit thus far, but none of them are ready for eating yet. I'm a little frustrated by having to guess the varieties and next year I'll splash out and buy packets of individual varieties.
We may even have a glasshouse next year, but for the meantime I'm assuming that I'll have the same growing conditions in 2008 as 2007 - raising seedlings on the windowsills and planting in pots and against the brick house. I'm thinking about "Sub Arctic Plenty", "Oregon Spring" and "Russian Red" as apparently they cope with low temperatures.
I found one leaf roller caterpillar last week - a fat healthy confident one too. Some of the plants look very healthy and others mostly so. I removed one which wasn't pollinating at all a few days ago. Laterals spring out and up when I'm not looking and I am hoping for some fabulous fruit withing the next two months. Tomatoes have taken up more of my gardening time than anything else I've planted this season.
As for the Rainbow Blend, there are some interesting shapes of fruit thus far, but none of them are ready for eating yet. I'm a little frustrated by having to guess the varieties and next year I'll splash out and buy packets of individual varieties.
We may even have a glasshouse next year, but for the meantime I'm assuming that I'll have the same growing conditions in 2008 as 2007 - raising seedlings on the windowsills and planting in pots and against the brick house. I'm thinking about "Sub Arctic Plenty", "Oregon Spring" and "Russian Red" as apparently they cope with low temperatures.
I found one leaf roller caterpillar last week - a fat healthy confident one too. Some of the plants look very healthy and others mostly so. I removed one which wasn't pollinating at all a few days ago. Laterals spring out and up when I'm not looking and I am hoping for some fabulous fruit withing the next two months. Tomatoes have taken up more of my gardening time than anything else I've planted this season.
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