Under the mulberry tree

A garden perve

2011-03-08T05:09:00.000+09:30

I don't know about other folk but i love looking at other peoples' gardens and if the owner of the gardens are around so i can pick their brains, then all the better. It really is a way to fast-forward your process of experimentation in your own garden. You often see things you didn't think were possible or just better ways of doing things. That is also why i think community gardens are great - you can learn just by looking.

So this brings me to Kate Herds' book "Kitchen Gardens of Australia"

A mixture of 18 gardens around the country with food growing at their centre. Some of them are very formal and well designed - while others like our Alice Springs garden are thrown together with recycled bits of wire and wood and make no claim to being pretty - at least not in the dead of winter!

Kates' introduction to food gardens is all about the benefits that they can bring to individuals, families, children as well as the biosphere. Growing food is one of the most "real" activities we can engage in. We all need to eat, but increasingly we are finding we need to inoculate ourselves and our families from the pressures of the modern world and media in particular. Time in the garden is a tonic, an education, a slow outward breath when we are in the moment and the other pressures of the day disappear.

But I'm sure i am preaching to the converted about the benefits of gardening.
Another thing Kates' book may help to do is to to expand the area of vegetables and fruit grown in more formal settings. Through her chosen gardens it is obvious that vegetables can be beautiful and a desirable part of any garden (each garden has an overview design page). If we can bring food plants back into the main stream gardening mixture then we are one step closer to a more grounded suburbia, where people preserve, swap produce and share something of substance.

A timely book and another tool in the arsenal to encourage sustainable gardens.

Adios Alice

2010-10-22T16:21:00.001+09:30

The wildflowers are blooming like I've never seen them before. Mulberries are dripping from the tree. The garden and the vegetable crisper is full of produce. The olive trees flowered for the first time.

Despite this we are moving and saying a big brave goodbye to Alice. This is a place where you feel you have to say bye to the land as well as to the many friends we have made here. Those big old bony mountains, scantly clad with Spinifex, tired old Corkwoods and rock garden hills about the town. The sandy rivers the kids have learned to call their own and the watery beaches they have enjoyed this year. We have seen the best years with loads of rain and the worst years with records low rainfall - all within the last 2 years. Ironically the best rainfall can mean the worst results in the vege garden with massive outbreaks of pests.
In Alice we have grown and shared lots of food. It is much easier to do than in a lot of other places but then again it's not the easiest place either. It is a place with its own timetable and idiosyncrasies and the occasional nasty shock. Tune into your garden and environment and you will be rewarded. Vege gardening is an intervention and being attuned to which intervention is required is they key. Make a mistake and the harsh conditions here can mean that is is a big one.

Hopefully the many posts in this blog will serve as a resource to those who come to this town and wonder what and how they will grow food. Who knows? some other gardener might post here occasionally too. However there is a great gardening network in Alice and lots of knowledge and groups like Seedsavers can help you get a foot in the door, providing seeds, knowledge and directions to people who are interested in growing their own food.

For those interested in the adventures of a mad food gardener from Alice who has gone a long way south - Under the Chestnut tree will document this journey. Whoo hooo!
Seya

Pests and predators, nematodes and the VEGE GARDEN COMPANION!!

2010-10-12T20:28:00.003+09:30

Despite a big party the night before, we managed to have a lovely little workshop on pests and predators in the Clarke st backyard on Sunday morning. We lingered a long time on the subject of nematodes - my place being nematode central.

pest and predators workshop in the flowery garden

We also got to see some impressive aphid infestations (grey cabbage aphid) on my Broccoli as well as the many predators at work, which included 2 types of wasp (Chalcid wasps are the tiny ones), Hover flies and lady beetles. There were also Tachnid flies but more brightly coloured than the ones in this link. Pest life cycles in the garden were discussed and ways of manageing them. With the cabbage aphid for example, i try to slow their expansion in the garden by pulling off the first infested leaves that i see- or even whole plants. This way i can have a longer period of picking broccoli without aphids. Eventually they take over but this is usually after I'm sick of picking the million tiny offshoots and have moved onto another vegetable - like Asparagus. Any sprays that i have tried to use make things look worse than they were with just the aphids so i haven't bothered for years.
To minimise the cabbage aphid i also try not to have any brassicas in the garden over summer - a brassica free period. By doing this I reduce the opportunities for this pest to make an early appearance in the garden the following spring. The predators however can parasitise other aphid species (i think) so they still stay around.

So much is in flower in the garden at the moment - especially the plants which are great food for predators like Hover fly and Tachnid flies. We have Thyme, Sage, Marjoram, Evening primrose (seems to flower a lot of the time), Coriander, Rocket, Broccoli, and Parsley.

Of course the whole reason for this workshop, which i have neglected to say was the Gardens for Food workshop series. As part of the gardens for food funding we also decided to do an update of the much loved Alice Springs Vege Garden Companion. This publication is designed to fill the gaping hole which is a lack of easily accessible written material on gardening in the arid zone.

Well done Katrina Button for putting it together - and so beautifully! We hope that this book will allow people to garden with less mishaps and mysteries and more success and wonderful food. Look for it at Arid Lands Environment Centre, Geoff Miers Garden Solutions, Afghan Traders, Bloomin Deserts and an increasing number of other garden centres i imagine.

Now i had to include this photo of the rabbits because it sort of looks a bit like a bunny flower when they all have their heads down. They are powering through their food at the moment and the bowls are always empty when i come back from work or in the morning. BUNNIES FOR SALE - in case you were wondering.

There has been a bit of an undercurrent to my posts of late - the party was our going away party, and there was a lawn sale before that. The house is sold (unlike the bunnies - yet) and we are a-movin. Going to be with my apple trees on our farm down in Vic. My blogging will also migrate over to Under the Chestnut tree as the family starts another gardening adventure on a much bigger patch of land.

Big bountiful spring and Olive flowers

2010-10-03T19:46:00.001+09:30

Our cool spring came to and an end in the last couple of days and we have now had quite a few days above 30 degrees in a row. An early visit to the garden plot was in order this weekend to keep on top of the bounty of maturing winter crops.

Today we picked Beetroot, Carrots, Fennel, Peas, Zucchini (first ones!) and Cabbage at the garden plot while we continue to pick Asparagus, Broccoli, greens and Cape gooseberries at home.
The weeds between the garden beds are really growing well and today i picked a lot of them and used them to mulch between the french beans and beetroot. We should be able to pick some French beans next week.
The snake beans we planted earlier in the month are not doing well - the cold weather must have knocked them back. They do love the heat.
We also picked wildflowers - glorious wildflowers outside the garden, along the roadsides, all over the place. Lots of yellows' and purples'.

Children in Ptilotus

more Ptilotus

Swainsona

Oh yes. Musn't forget about the Olive tree. One of it's branches has burst into flower. I think it's toying with me.

Change of diet

2010-09-26T23:22:00.000+09:30

Tropical fruits and coconuts this week for me, thanks to my visit to the Cocos Islands where i have travelled to advise on food gardens and some revegetation work on a couple of Islands.

I was treated to wonderful poly cultures thanks to the Cocus Malay people on home island. People living among their food plants and all plants in the garden with a purpose.

This Lime tree is shading sheds and vehicles as well as providing fruit.

Experimental Kimchi

2010-09-12T15:04:00.000+09:30

This weeks experimental Kimchi includes Fennel bulbs, Diakon radish, Raddicio, Parsley, Shallot, Garlic, Chinese cabbage, Carrots and Ginger. I am enjoying my first batch of Kimchi quite a lot so i thought I'd make another batch with some Fennel and see how it turned out.

I know i said that bee eaters mean spring but i now think that Orange Blossoms mean spring 2 weeks later.
The next batch of baby rabbits are about ready to make an appearance from out of the burrow.

The cabbages at the garden plots are growing in leaps and bounds as are the Beetroot. The Beetroot are doing quite well with the bit of liquid fertiliser they were given by mistake.

The Sno peas are in full production and are big and juicy. When i saved the seed from them last years i made a separate selection of large pods and it seems to have paid off.

Bee eaters mean spring!

2010-09-04T08:01:00.000+09:30

I'm a bit later in breaking this news but the Bee-eaters have arrived for the summer and so have the Sacred Kingfishers. These birds stay around for the whole of summer and their calls fill the air - especially in the evening when the Bee-eaters are tring to settle down to sleep. Although these are the reliable migrants we also have Trillers, Songlarks, Chats, budgies and cockatiels when the seasons are good - like now. There is also quite a commotion among bird circles as the Princess Parrot is making an appearance in different places.
We have had more rain in the last couple of days and there is more predicted next week, so these birds will just keep on breeding.

We have been enjoying the greenery this year and have been on some lovely short walks with the kids.

there was even a very cheeky Dingo catching fish!

Food overload - preserving notches up a gear

2010-08-29T16:59:00.003+09:30

There is just so much to eat at the moment. Broccoli coming out of our ears, cabbages, cauliflower, peas, Chinese cabbages, fennel, and Asparagus just about to explode out of the ground. Luckily this August has not turned on the heat - apart from the odd day otherwise things would be growing twice as fast. This August has been a couple of degrees below average due to the rain and cloudiness.

Sauerkraut, Fennel and Parsnips

So what preserving have we done this weekend?
Made my first batch of Kimchee (thanks to Mr H for telling me that is was quite ok to leave out chilli)
Made another big jar of sauerkraut
blanched and froze cauliflower
Made pumpkin chutney (the wifey).

Kimchee - ready for the brine solution

We have also been making cabbage salad with our chines cabbages.
You can do this salad with normal cabbage but not too often as raw cabbage has the ability to stop you absorbing iodine - i think.

ingredients
Chinese cabbage
lime or lemon juice
soy sauce
sugar - or make your soy sauce a sweet one
sesame oil
olive oil
sesame seeds - toasted (can do in a saucepan)
spring onion leaves
coriander leaves or thai basil ( i prefer the thai basil)

Now the dressing is not precisely measure but i reckon
juice of one lemon
4 tablespoons of soy
1 tsp of sugar
1-2 tbsp of sesame oil and the same for olive oil

Generally finely shred and combine the rest of the ingredients.

We have also been making a gremolata out of our preserved lemon skin, finely chopped with lots of Parsley.
have on top of stews, baked potatoes, mashed potato
we also use the preserved lemon skin on our pizzas the other day which was very nice.

Tonight for rabbit stew with our parsnips, fennel, greens and potatoes and pumpkin mash with parsley and lemon gremolata.

Sauerkraut a hit!

2010-08-25T20:55:00.002+09:30

There were lots of things to taste on Sunday morning including Kimchee (Korean traditional fermented preserve - thankyou Margi) fermented Diakon radish, cabbage and preserved lemons to marinade our home made olives. Margi also made some pancakes with the Kimchee which were a treat.

I had a lot of questions from the workshop participants including about the safety of eating different fermented foods. One thing i tried to explain is that it is actually much safer to eat food that you have made, have control of and know the history of. You know how the food has been treated and the environment that it has been grown in - which is much more than we can say about the food we buy. I think we have been convinced by the media or health authorities that what we have done for centuries, and what kept us healthy for centuries is now somehow dangerous and that food we buy is somehow mush safer because it has followed regulations in some mass produced factory? It may take a while to get our confidence back after being told for so many years that new is good and old is contemptable.
Another question which i was asked was if the lactic acid had benefits other than not being a burden on the body to digest. To add to that:
Lactic acid promotes growth of healthy flora throughout the intestines
other benefits of fermented foods include:
The bio-available nutrients in fermented food are five times higher following pre-digestion.
This includes vitamins, minerals, amino acids, antioxidants and the numerous medicinal compounds found in food.
Digestive enzymes are a huge benefit as are antibiotic and antcarcinogenic substances found in fermented foods
Lactobacillus produce many of the B group vitamins.

Nourishing Australia has lots of good articles and links if you want to learn more about fermented and other traditional foods. I could spend ages looking at those links. Much of what i have learned about fermented food come from Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon. I had decided to buy it after reading a copy at the local organic shop- and then was given it by a relative. Enthralling reading - the click thing doesn't work by the way.

Now the recipe below isn't fermented but its simple and delicious and a friend asked for it so here it is - for those of you lucky enough to have limes falling on thr ground.

LIME PICKLE

This recipe originally came from Ansty …….. I was never all that fussed about lime pickle before I tried this pickle – and now I am sadly addicted and am probably using it with far too many meals. Of course it is great with curries!

30 limes (we used 60 small ones)

1&1/2 cups salt (we used uncrushed, iodised sea salt)

½ cup Fennel

½ to 1 cup Chilli Powder

½ cupCoriander

½ cupTumeric

1 cup of Mustard seed Black or brown

2-3 cups of Mustard seed oil

Dee- pip and cut up limes thinly. Add salt. Sit for 2 weeks, stirring once a day.

After two weeks add about ½ cup of each the fennel, tumeric, coriander and chilli

(In my recipe I ground all the seeds but some people have left the fennel seeds whole). Stir well and leave for one week, stirring daily (taste after a couple of days to see whether it is the right flavour for you). Heat up mustard seeds in small amount of oil till they go ‘pop’ and release their flavour. Then cover the seeds with about 2 -3 cups of mustard seed oil (you want enough to cover your pickle yet not to much). Let it heat yet not bubble. Pour over pickle and stir well. Leave for a day or two to settle, stirring daily and of course testing for yumminess. Jar up and enjoy!

Even with I cup of chilli – this pickle doesn’t seem to be all that hot. I also made the pickle without any chilli and its still great.

Raddicio - you are a very special vegetable

2010-08-20T22:23:00.001+09:30

Lots of Raddicio has gone into the garden over winter and spring. I love seeing it turn red as the winter colds up and the frosts kick in.
I have a couple more punnets that i will be scratching my head about where to stick, but i haven't tried very hard. Raddicio is one of the few leafy green vegetables that will survive in this climate over summer without daily watering. Over the summer ours get water every 2 - 3 days and the keep on producing and seem to outgrow the pests. I don't think i have ever had any killed by pests. It does have a deep tap root which probably accounts for its drought hardiness, thus it is very different from lettuce which it can be mistaken for.

They are indeed a bitter vegetable and i find they are best mixed with other leafy greens in a salad - but i do find as with Rocket, that the strong flavour is lessened when you add a bit of olive oil and Balsamic. Do not nibble a leaf and decide you don't like them - they are meant t o be dressed and put in salads!

They are also great food for rabbits and chooks and just seem to keep producing after quite savage picking. Our rabbits will always go for the Raddicio first if there is a choice. You can get varieties with long leaves which are more like chicory or fat leaves which are more like Raddicio.

Cabbage aphids arrive, knit one pearl one and processing bunnies

2010-08-16T15:54:00.001+09:30

I knew they would arrive some time soon and as such I discovered a budding colony of blue cabbage aphids – under the cabbages actually. See link for more info - http://www.hortnet.co.nz/publications/hortfacts/hf401048.htm

Usually they start off in these tiny numbers then breed up to a plague and make the broccoli most unappetising. This year they are not stressing me though as I have no great goals of saving seeds from the Brassicas I have – apart from Mizuma, which has just started to flower. I’ll cross my fingers for those. However if you do have a need to get rid of them, one way is just to pull up the plants that the little populations are on – this slows down their population growth for a while and may just give you enough breathing space to get viable seed set on your plants. I have found that sprays that use soaps and oils to make a worse mess than the aphids do as they can burn the plants in warm weather.

Well I have taken up knitting as I just felt I needed to be doing something when my wife was knitting- I’ve already found it to be therapeutic. It makes me slow down a bit. By the way i am not yet pearling.

Processing bunnies. That’s a nice way of saying the half grown rabbits have now transitioned from their homes outside to inside the freezer. They have such soft beautiful fur at this time of the year. I’m wondering if I can scrape it off and use it for felting? I have tanned skins in the past – and I still have them and have done nothing with them. That may have to wait if and when the kids want to learn a new skill.

The kiddies have also transitioned to being present at the processing and are seemingly unscarred.

Down at the plot potatoes and beans are poking out of the soil , and we have planted some more tomatoes hoping that spring has now come. Chinese and other cabbages are looking good and carrots are sweet.

I tried the sauerkraut that I made a couple of weeks ago and it is surprisingly good for a young batch. It already has quite a sour taste. I wonder if it has anything to do with using the whey from goats milk, rather than cows milk?

Sour foods - Learn how to make sauerkraut next Sunday

2010-08-14T12:43:00.000+09:30

Sunday August 22 , 11am - 12
33 Clarke st.

Lactofermented foods are a traditional way of persevering food in many countries. It has been somewhat replaced by preserving using vinegar and sugar which was spawned by industrial processes that were able to produce these 2 ingredients at low cost. However a lot of goodness was also sacrificed by the transition from lactofermentation.

Sauerkraut is most commonly made using finely sliced hearting cabbages that are pounded and naturally fermented with lactobacillus – the lactic acid produced gives the sour flavour and preserves the cabbage. Sauerkraut improves with age and attains the best flavour after more than 6 months of cool storage.

Why bother making sauerkraut? It is yummy , healthy and you can’t buy stuff that is as good for you as the home made. We also can’t grown cabbages during the summer and even leafy greens can be a struggle. By making your cabbages into sauerkraut of the end of winter you are preserving your harvest, making a convenient and healthy condiment that can be enjoyed with lunch and other meals, and provide the family with something healthy to eat in summer of your other crops fail to produce. Growing vegetables in winter also uses less water than in the summer.

On the day we will:

Make a batch of sauerkraut using locally grown cabbages and taste some product that was made recently and some that was made last year.

We will cover the benefits of fermented foods.

Provide recipes and references to take home.

Sauerkraut and socks in the sun

2010-08-08T14:13:00.001+09:30

It was all a very relaxing picture on a Sunday arvo, with wifey knitting her socks and me pounding away at some sauerkraut in our chasseur. She has nearly finished one sock incidentally. We were pondering our differences the other night - the process drive verses the goal driven person. I reasoned that a process driven person would end up knitting longer socks because they are not focused so much on finishing the job as a goal driven person. This also partly explains why when we are doing a very big job like cutting up a fallen tree or doing roadwork, Helen peels off and looks for a job that is more rewarding and gives her a feeling that she is getting somewhere. However, there are many advantages of being goal driven and she is much more likely to complete projects in a timely fashion eg. ask for a baby present for friends, and in a matter of hours craft project is completed!

Sauerkraut did get made. 1 cabbage turned into about 2 large jars.

I also decided to try some preserved and fermented lemons. I have tried preserved lemons before with salt and citrus/ tartaric acid and they worked well. Hmm - must look up that Lemon liqueur.

preserving lemons

preserved lemon with cinnamon sticks

Tomatoes planted last weekend at the plot were hit by frost, so we will have to start again with those. Potatoes and beans are still safely underneath the ground. The carrots are getting big enough to pick but should start putting on some bulk in the next month. The snopeas are also feeling the effects of being nicely frozen and are not setting new pods while the already formed pods look a bit speckled.

Planted lettuce and endive seedlings, planted Tat tsoi seeds, thinned tomatos, basil and greens in punnets. My Iranian lemon balm has come up in the punnets which is good. I was given the seed by a man who obtained the seed through his family and it is an annual rather than perennial. I've never seen this seed advertised anywhere and i may be the only seed network that has this seed. My plan is to grow these plants out and multiply my seed supply because this is one of those special heirlooms that could be easily lost.

The Valencia Orange trees are loaded and looking great. These trees never seem to miss a year, while the navel oranges definitely seem to fruit better in alternate years.

This one is growing in the chook yard but its roots are somewhat protected from scratching by black plastic.
Our old chooks have started laying now that the spring is near, so maybe we are not just feeding them for nothing after all.

Action packed long weekend

2010-08-02T20:48:00.000+09:30

So the mulberry thinks its spring. This black fruited white mulberry was always a little earlier than the white fruited white mulberry near our back fence. Sometimes it suffers the consequences and gets caught by a late frost - which is predicted for this week.

The Asparagus are also showing signs of life especially the ones i have been growing in pots. My neighbour plants which get a bit more sun than mine are up and she is picking. However i'm in no rush to get Asparagus as there is plenty of Broccoli to be had as well as cabbages, sno peas and fennel. We picked some great bulbs of our 2 year old fennel plants from out at the garden plot on the weekend. If you let them grow , the following year that will produce bulbs on the end of long stems.

Another surprising thing about the fennel was that when i dug over the bed next to them fo rthe tomatoes - there were lots of roots up to 1m away from the fennel plants. I 'd never had thought they would travel so far, even in good soil like that. I planted the tomatoes (grosse lisse) just out of reach of these roots just incase there was an effect from the fennel roots releasing nasty anti nutrients.

At the garden plot there was more work to be done than i had thought. We turned over the compost heap for the last time,

planted tomatoes, potatoes, french beans, zucchinis, snake beans. I also mulched the carrots with native Enneapogon grass which is everywhere after the rain this year. I find it very hard to bring myself to buy Hay for mulch when it has travelled so far and when we have perfectly good natural suplies of it growing all around us. I am a scavenger at heart which helps.

camping on Emily creek overnight was great fun and the kids just ran off and made their own fun. We just had to fend off the toottery babies walking around the campfire - and luckily this was successful. The treed were full of budgies and they seemed quite unperterbed by the fact that we had camped there. They still used the same roost trees above our tent. The morning chorus was quite lovely to listen to as we lied in the swags. A small walk through the bush near the river revealed stacks of Litte Button quails, blasting off from unexpected points on the ground and making me jump. The other exciting find was that Brown quails are back after an abscence of about 7 years. They appeared in Central Australia after the big rains in 2000 and 2001 but then disappeared. The fact that they are back again means we have had a pretty good season

planted thai long green eggplants that i received from Mareeba seedsavers. I had been wanting to try these for a while as i think that they are much more heat resistant than the large purple eggplants that we have grown in the past. The large purple one tend to produce great buckets in the Autumn afte rthe hottest weather is over - that is if they are not eaten by grasshoppers. Eggplants are a very favourite of theirs!

Tomatoes are up!

2010-07-31T06:58:00.002+09:30

So after having spent many days looking into the hothouse and frowning, looking a bit closer and wondering wether all the seed was bad - the tomatoes have all popped up. The 3 days of 25 deg plus weather has been responsible for that. Lets hope somebody gets something out of the many pots crammed into the hothouse.
I'm going to have to start evicting plants soon.

In the hot house we can see - curry plants, wormwood, Jujube, shallots, beets, honey locust and shallots

What else is going on? I really need to go out to the garden plots and pick broccoli and snopeas, dig in some compost ready for spring planting and pull some weeds. I think i'll also put in a row of french beans - as August 1 is my usual planting time, but i did wonder this year wether i should get them going in pots a month earlier to ensure a more prolonged crop before the hot weather sets in.

We have been having lovely crusty "no knead" bread for a while now. It's a convenient sort of loaf because it was sit for up to 24 hours and you can then put it in the oven when the oven is on for other purposes. You also don't have to knead it as the name suggests. I'll have to thank my lovely wife for discovering that one through the blogosphere - i just wouldn't have tried it being the pessimist that i am.

Might have a test run or saurkraut this weekend. I have obtained some unpasteurised goats milk from a friend of a friend and that has been sitting on the bench in a bowl for a week making cheese. Last night i began draining off the whey, which i'll put in a bottle in the fridge to innoculate the saurkraut. The whey keeps this way for up to 6 months but you can also freeze it to keep it for longer. I also read that you can innoculate you saurkraut and other fermented vegies by using the juice from your last jar of saurkraut (i don't think this includes commercial stuff as it may have been pasteurised??) I have not quite finished my last jar from August lasy year.

While we are on food, we have been enjoying our sundried figs (made in Dec) in nut mixes, and cut up finely in fruit salads. Although they are somewhat dry when you first put them away to store, the remaining moisture seems to get redistributed and they are now a bit moister and spongy.

My nut mix consists of almonds and pecans (each nut contains a different form of vitamin E), Pumpkin seeds (from our pumpkins) Goji berries (big vit c), dried figs and sometimes sunflower seeds. This is available to the kids at most times of the day for snacking. We beleive we are at a milestone with the kids as they have stopped picking green things out of their food now and are whoofing down green salads in a way that is most non childlike.

Pickles and pottering

2010-07-25T19:16:00.000+09:30

Pottering sort of weekend. Panted abit more coriander so see if we can keep the supply up for a bit longer into spring. Took a few seed punets (gossip cabbage) out of the hot house and into a nice sunny spot for hardening , as well as some thinning of other seedlings. Cleaned out the rabbit pens and dug in some of it where the gossip cabbage has been growing. I have planted a lot of summer greens for the chickens in the form of endive, chicory and gossip cabbage. The rabbits also got a lot of neighborhood greens from our weekend wanderings - and the male rabbit went back with the female. I found out recently that rabbits are "stimulated ovulators"- that is they are stimulated to ovulate after copulation (about 10 hours after). So there is no oestrus cycle that we assocaite with other mammals.

The show radish gets processed!

I decided to have a bit of a test run of my radish pickle (lactofermented) in readiness for a workshop in a couple of weeks time. This involved choosing a couple of large Diakons, peeling and grating, mixing with a tablespoon of salt and 4 tablespoons of whey. This is mixed and then pounded for a while with a wooded mortar/pestle thing. Then it is jarred and sealed. This will now sit in the kitchen for 3 days until it has had a good go at fermentation. The recipe is from "nourishing traditions" by Sally Fallon.

Most of 2 large radishes (1.5kg) fitted into a large pickle jar.

We also pricked out some edibles and medicinal herbs - Malva sp, Euphorbia peplus and Liquorice.

The seed man hands on the batten

2010-07-23T13:55:00.002+09:30

My seedsavers email to our mailing list was sent out today, so i've posted it up here too.

Preparing to save seeds from the winter garden.

.For those who have not saved much seed, we will be working through winter vegetables and talking about how to best save seeds from them. We will cover hybridising, pests and assessing ripeness of seed.

Changing of the guard

As I’m leaving Alice Springs in November I’ll be handing over the running of Alice Springs seedsavers. There are various parts to running a seed network in a low key kind of way. These 4 jobs are listed below. Some of the roles do not require particularly developed skills in gardening or seedsaving but do require a consistent commitment and communication with the group. Consider taking on one of these roles if you would like to ensure the seednetwork in Alice Springs continue to thrive.

If you would like to take part in seedsavers in a more active way but can’t attend the next meeting, reply to this email and something can be arranged.

The seedbank

This consists almost wholly of seeds that have been grown locally by myself and other members of the community. The seedbank managers aim is to get people growing as many of theses as possible and to keep a viable supply of seeds. This may involve enquiring if people can contribute the seeds of certain vegetables or growing out some varieties and saving them every 2-3 years.

The seedbank also contains seeds that have been sent from other seed networks in Australia or from seedsavers. The seeds that perform well are saved from these varieties.

There is a rough division in the seedbank between summer and winter vegetables and this seedbank is shared at meetings where people are welcome to take from seed to grow their own. With the taking of seed there is the obligation to save seeds and to share them with others in the future.

You may also get requests from other seed networks in Australia who are looking for particular seeds, so you may need to package up seeds to send away in the mail.

Receiving seed for the seebank is also an important part of this role. Details should be written down about the vegetable, the date of harvest and who provided it. Questions should be asked as to ascertain the experience of the seedsaver who provided the seed and to ascertain how likely it is that the seed may be hybridised with other vegetable varieties in the garden. The origin of the seed should be taken into account – if it was from the local shops, it may be a hybrid and needs to be grown out for several years to see if it grows “true to type”.

Bulk seed.

Often people save seed in quite large quantities resulting in many thousands of seeds. Often this is more seed than can be used by the seed network and this seed can be shared with the wider community. (*If you receive a large amount of seed from someone with unknown experience that you plan to package, it is wise to grow out this batch in the first year in order to make sure it is what it is supposed to be*). One way of sharing seed with the wider community is packaging seeds with appropriate labels which can be sold to locals though events or through shops. This is also a way of promoting seedsavers in the community.

The website

http://www.seedsavers.net/lsn/alice-springs-seed-savers (scroll down to view)

Seedsavers network hosts a page for each seed network in Australia where various information about each group can be posted. Meeting dates can be posted here as well as links to other websites. There is also a spot for putting seeds you are searching for – and this has proved a very successful way of finding hard to get seeds.

The events

To raise or maintain the profile of seedsavers in the community, we host 2 events each year. Depending on your energy and enthusiasm you may run more events but the events below we have found provide the best bang for your buck.

The Steiner fare is usually a very successful event and many people sign up to be on the mailing list so they can receive notices of the next meeting. It is usually held on the last weekend in May.

The desert smart eco fair is the other event where seedsavers makes an appearance and we usually run a workshop on the day as part of the program. This year it is on September 18.

The mailing list and meetings

The manager of the mailing list simply sends out meeting notices with the appropriate details so that people can attend. These should be sent at least one week in advance. Meetings are usually held four times a year at the changing of the seasons which often are good planting times as well.

March/ April – planting time

August – planting time

November – Seed harvest for winter vegies

Jan/Feb – seedharvest for summer vegies.

Other event notices should also be passed onto people and any relevant correspondence about seedsers network or seed issues.

There may also be other more specific themes explored at meetings such as seed sorting, growing seedlings, etc etc. You can guage what is needed by talking to people in the group or in the community.

New babes and seeds to save

2010-07-22T20:57:00.001+09:30

New baby rabbits have arrived. this time the litter is bigger - probably 7 - 9 but i haven't been able to get a close look yet. She did have them in theburrow again despite the fact that the hutch looked pretty good to me.

The winter rain has brought out lots of grren growth and herbs so there are mounds of milk thistle (and wild lettuce and marshmallow) to be had around the neighbourhood. i've been stopping my bike on the way home to partake of the bounty on the road verges.

On the weekend we harvested carrots, fennel, chines greens, broccoli and planted some beetroot - and made a nice Ministrone. My cucumber seed has finally fermented enough that the seeds are free from the gooey coating. This time i floated the green goo off the seeds while the seeds sank to the bottom of the container. They are layed out on a tea towel until they are dry enough to transfer to a paper bag for further drying.

We also had a big seed sowing of summer vegetables - including tomatoes - although we should have planted these a bit earlier. I'm on the verge of running out of room in the hot house!

Horny cucumbers

2010-07-11T20:09:00.000+09:30

Sorry if your google search has turned up the wrong sort of website. This is a gardening blog, full of wholesome ingredients such as.....

the African horned cucumber

I have grown these things for years - or rather they grew themselves after i planted them for the first time. They are no ordinary cucumber and have a particular timeframe when flowering and fruiting.

They will only fruit after mid summer and in declining daylight hours , so here that means march and april and they go on to ripen into winter. I have had a bucket of them sitting around waiting for seedsaving and decided to do it on this drizzly day.

This involves scraping out all of the pulp and seeds and putting it into a large container (as i had a large number of cucumbers). By the time i finished i had nearly filled this container with green frothy goo, which will now sit and ferment for over a week. This will break down the gelatinous layer around the seed , and when washed after a week of fermenting the seeds will come clean. They are then dried.

This technique can be used for all cucumbers as well as tomatoes. you may have to add a little water to the mix if it is not liquidy enough.

These cucumbers give you a glut of fruit late in the year. I prefer to pick them while still quite green and when the seeds are small or poorly formed and eat them like cucumber - peeled. Today my kids were eating the contents out of the ripened fruits and it was slightly sweet. They are however bullet proof in regards to all hot weather conditions and all sorts of pests, as long as they have water.

Speaking of weather it has rained again over the weekend and in the evening today the coulds seemed to descend to near ground level. I thought you only got fog in the morning and i don't remember even seeing fog here before.

Went to a pruning workshop this afternoon which was very informative. I learned that different types of grape vines need different types of pruning - spur and cane. That was the biggest discovery for me anyway. I look forward to doing a bit of pruning in the near future.

weekend jobs

2010-07-04T20:59:00.001+09:30

The Asparagus has died off well and truly now so i have chopped it off and used it for various things. It will serve as rabbit bedding - the great thing about that is that they nibble it up into tiny pieces and it falls through the wooden slats as mulch.They probably eat quite a bit of it as well.

I have used some for mulch underneath the pigeon pea, which have not yet been frosted off but are not growing particularly fast. The rabbits are not all that keen on pigeon pea at the moment - although they seemd to be keener on it during the summer. This is in contrast to clover (another legume) which they absolutely love - and i have been collecting it from the park over the road. it has now grown back enough after the mowing to begin picking again.

The baby rabbits have now been separated out from the mother rabbit. She promptly sealed up her burrow with anything she could.

During the whole time she has babies she will block up the burrow and unblock it when she goes into feed them once or twice a day.
She might even use the box filled with asparagus’ mulch as a nest for her next babies.

The oranges were also treated to a top dressing of muck and dirt from the chook house. i thought i'd do this because it is forecast to rain a lot over the next week and it would get a good soaking in. Oranges should be given some sort of fertilizer in July as in August they begin to break into flower - and then set fruit. The amount of small fruit they end up dropping will be dependent on how you keep the water up to them and how well you have fertilised.

We also turned the compost heap out at the garden plot, which was just as well as it had some dry patches in it. One person digs and the other hoses to get more moisture into the pile.

We also picked the last of the pumpkins, but some of them are borderline in that they may not have been mature enough before the vines were frosted off.

This pic was just to show the "gossip cabbbage" on the right and more recognisable cabbages on the left. The cabbages are prefect as there are no cabbage moths or butterfly to shot hole the leaves. Some of these cabbages are going to be made into Saurkraut. I made a whole bunch of Saurkraut last year and it was a hit (for me at least). I had it throughout the summer when we can't grow cabbages - and all the nutrients are preserved and some enhanced by the process of fermentation. A couple of people in our street hope to organise a sour foods workshop to pass on some skills in the making naturally fermented foods. Another one of my favourite fermented foods is grated Diakin radish. it develops a lovely smokey flavour and i preferred it to the cabbage in the end.

The Alice show

2010-07-03T21:40:00.000+09:30

The Alice Springs show was on over the weekend and as usual the Brocks had exhibited in various categories – most notably in the agricultural section. Despite the disastrous run of pests over the summer, there was quite a good field of entries to be seen at the show. This was all thanks to Geoff Miers who each year drums up interest and gets people to give up their prize vegetables for the show. Let me tell you the Broccoli doesn’t look very good after a couple of days at the show.

The big news for the Brocks of course was being part of the Clarke street entry which took out the section as well as taking out the prize for the “grand champion” (subdue your visions of a fat red bull being led around by a ring in his nose) of the agricultural section.

of course we couldn't leave out the most memorable part of the summer - the grasshoppers!

i hear we even made the nightly news with our exhibit - muy famoso!

The weather has been wet and we managed to record out lowest daily temp in 22 years on friday. i'm hoping the cloudy overcast weather may help to trigger the germination of some of the seeds we planted recently.

So far the following seeds have come up:

Asclepias tuberosa - L. Pleurisy Root

Fragaria vesca - L. Wild Strawberry

Glycyrrhiza glabra - L. Liquorice

Hippophae rhamnoides - L. Sea Buckthorn

Malva alcea (perennial – eat leaves)

Sanguisorba minor – Salad Burnette

Euphorbia peplus

Acmella oleraceae toothache plant

New comers to the seedbank

2010-06-23T17:59:00.001+09:30

Ulla from Mareeba brough with her an interesting bootie
These included
Bitter gourd - chinese and japanese varieties
Sugar lime passion fruit
Giant cow pea
Thai long green Eggplant
Pigeon pea
Guar gum bean (as mentioned)
long bean (think it is snake bean)
Madagasgar bean.
Poor mans bean (7 year wonder bean)

These will all be available at the next seedsavers meeting in August.
Ulla keeps meticulous records and every batch of seeds has a number which refers to a page in her folder where all the information about the seed is kept - who grew the seed, its origin, which people took seeds to grow. Ulla commented that her seedsavers group had been going a number of years and all of a sudden there a quite a lot of Italian immigrants bringing in their seeds. We weren't sure why but perhaps for safe keeping for the next generation....

Tale of the Guar gum bean

2010-06-21T20:57:00.001+09:30

This story is not so much about the Guar gum bean as it is about how i tracked it down.
A lady from Kinglake contacted me through the seedsavers website. She had lost al her seeds in the fires up there and was keen to begin re-establishing her garden and seed collection. She was paticularly looking for beans (especially those for drying) and was quite a collector of bean varieties. Within a week i had several people send me their lists of seeds from different parts of the country out of the blue. They had also contacted me through seedsavers. Ulla from Mareeba in North Queensland sent me her extensive list and i was pleased to find a few things i'd like to try. In my reply i mentioned the Guar gum bean. She replied she had never heard of it but would ask her members. Little did i know that her emailing network extended to about 500 people! in her region, through permaculture and other groups. A short time later Ulla emailed with the news that she had found the Guar gum bean through a member and would bring it with her to Alice Springs while she was visiting for the beanie festival. Now the Guar gum bean is a pretty obscure member - which makes it all the more amazing that we found it so quickly. Big pat on the back for seedsavers network - Yay!

Loving that Coriander.

2010-06-20T20:39:00.001+09:30

Coriander is a herb that we love to grow, and have done so from seed ever since we arrived in Alice. I saved a large jar of it last year , which we have subsequently packaged up and sold at seed stalls. But we do sometimes find ourselves not using our fresh coriander. i pick a big bunch and it sits in a vase - and i get sort of annoyed and pace around.

But i have a fabulous solution to using coriander and preserving its freshness and flavour.
We make a sort of Laksa come curry paste using:
lots of garlic
and ginger
2 onions
large bunch of coriander
vegetable oil
lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves or lemon rhind
pepper and salt.
chili optional

You can use it as a curry paste, add some shrimp past and fish sauce and make your laska (coconut cream of course) and even as a pizza base for a seafood pizza. You can add sugar and more chilies and make a chili jam - Jamie Oliver has a good recipe.
(this paste freezes well)

Other News afoot is that the Vege garden comapnion is being revised and expanded and should once again be in print. It is planned that this new version will cover fruit trees and maybe even the chooky side of the back yard.

Big planting weekend this weekend as David came around with a suite of perennial edibles and medicinal plants that he had received from a seed company. Many i had never heard of but i was able to look them up on the "plants for a future" database. The website is definately worth a look although i don't think i have mastered the search function yet. I did find out that it was just as well we planted these seeds in winter as some of the plants benefited from cold stratification before the warm growing period. Some of the plants also may take quite a while to emerge - 18 months!!

After cleaning out the hot house last weekend it is once again quite full.

The compost pile

2010-06-14T20:45:00.000+09:30

This week was compost pile week as determined by Tracey who went to fetch the manure.

We had a trailor load and the back of a Ute , so our pile was slightly bigger than usual. Luckily there was a lot of organic matter around at the moment to do the layering of the pile. We spent a fair while clearing up the old pumpkin vines and dragging them into a heap as well as weeding out lots of grasses that had grown over the summer.

I also picked up a few seedling to plant in an area that i dug compost into last week.

We now have Paak choy, coriander, cabbages and chinese cabbage in that row. Hmmm not terribly well planned to avoid a pest outbreak.

We are picking some Fennel bulbs off of the previous years plants which are very flavoursome and we are now getting a few sno-peas. Of course the frosty weather has now reared its head which will reduce or prevent the setting of some fruit. So far we don't have week long periods of frost forecast.

The hoop structures can still be seen. These were used to support shade cloth which was keeping the grasshoppers at bay. The large white structure was last years hothouse.

The home garden is producing Broccoli, greens, shallots, Diakon radish and some celery - as well as Citrus from the trees. The citrus got a trim of their dead branches-I didn't quite get around to spreading chook house muck under them but this should happen soon. Also this weekend and the Mulberries got a major trim. The olive also got a trim to see if i could shock it into flowering this year - its way too big not to be flowering.

I have 3 varieties of Orange plus a grapefruit.

Washington Navel - earliest fruiting in April

Lanes Navel - picking in May , june and hold fruit well over winter.

Valencias - we begin picking in September from memory and try to have them off the tree by the end of November due to fruit fly.

The grapefruit is a Wheeney and we pick from march. It usually holds fruit very well and for many months in the abscence of fruit fly attack as we found out this year.

Did someone say Pumpkin?

2010-06-03T20:38:00.001+09:30

Just a few more photos to further display the abundance of the Pumpkin harvest – just in case you were still in doubt.

We also put in some lovely advanced seedlings of cauliflower on the weekend and (gasp!) removed the grasshopper netting that was protecting our bigger plants. This should all be ok as the temperature has struggled to reach more than 20 degrees during the last week or two.

The rabbits have had babies at long last. This was given away by the telltale sign of patches of fur on the floor of the cage. The female rabbit pulls out the fur from her belly when the birth is imminent and builds a nest. Don’t know how many babies there are as yet as I try to avoid giving them much attention during the first couple of weeks for fear she may desert them. However I did smell something bad this morning which probably means there is a dead one somewhere in the nest chamber, so I may have to intervene after all.

Now Seedsavers Alice Spring holds a stall at the Steiner Fare every year, and because I was super organised and had lots of seed packaged (And because Anna has been so kind as to let us grow lots of vegies in here garden out there at Ilparpa!) we were able to sell seeds to fundraise for the school. Around $700 all up which is better than a smack in the chops. I must also give credit to our trusty band of seedsavers who donated seed to the seed bank or who came along to our mega seed sorting extravaganza in November, where we sorted mountains of seed.

Of course now I’m back to packaging again to get the stocks up…puff…pant..

The day was quite a lot of fun with Tracey and I chatting to loads of people about a subject we quite enjoy – growing things! Still lots of enquiries about the vegie garden companion which is out of print but its good to know there is interest in getting out another revised and expanded edition.

The community garden in Alice is one step closer to becoming a reality with the Alice Springs Town Council approving the lease of the prospective land to the Arid Lands Environment Centre. Next on the list is a business plan and getting funds to build the infrastructure at the site. I think we are having a bit of a presentation at the ALEC office (Warburton street – Haaren house) on Saturday (World Environment Day) to let people who what’s happening with the garden.

A sea of pumpkins

2010-05-24T19:48:00.003+09:30

There must be more than 50 punpkins left in the patch - and we would have already removed 30 so far.
So, many pumpkin dishes will be on the horizon. This year has been the most successful fo far for pumpkins as i have 1) had the space 2) did not need the space for any other things 3) grew a number of varieties so i could have eaters in the summer as well as good storers. I learned last year that Jap's don't store at all.
I also learned this year that pumpkins are more vigorous than rock melons and water melons so don't grow them together as the pumpkins will smother the others. I'm getting a few belated water melons now after the pumpkin leaves have died back.

The pumpkins were planted with composted cow manure mixed in with the top soil. We had some wide spaces between rows but found during the summer that they appreciated some extra water between the rows as they put their roots down into the soil when they crawl around.

The grasshoppers seem to still be active but not eating as much. The situation with these guys is unprecedented so i don't really know if they are going to disappear over the winter or not. i have several netted rows of plants (peas, broccoli, caulis) that are more than ready to be un-nettted but i fear they will still get munched.
My carrots are coming up a treat under one of the netted rows. This is the second sowing after the first failed due to not enough water while i was away. There are a couple of plants left from that first sowing that are growing a treat.

The Broccoli is heading and we are picking plenty of leafy greens so all is good in the world. I planted some Fennel seedlings, Kale and coriander as well as seed of more cabbages, Raddicio, lettuce and Paak Choy.

A trip out to Owen Springs on the weekend revealed the land seething with life and noise. The huge goat moth in our back yard is just adding to the soup of life out there.

goat moth just emerged from the cocoon

weeds a hoy

2010-04-27T21:02:00.002+09:30

So after 5 weeks away i wasn't quite sure what to expect from the gerden - and i often purposely lower my expectations in preparation for disaster. However this time it was not so bad - just a lot of weeds. Such was my fervour to put it all back the right way again i didn't even stop and think to take a photo. Amaranth and love grass featured prominantly and while some things like the brocolli seedlings put up a small fight, other things growing from seed were swamped - like my coriander and fennel. The main reason for such a proliferation of weeds was the rabbit poo top dressing that i use which is not composted and so potentially full of weeds that get fed to them.

my other effort at the garden plot was much less weedy as we had used compost and everything looked quite decent.
At home the snake beans had gone to seed. Cape gooseberry had still not formed any fruit despite the flowers i saw before i left. however i did tast some cape goseberries on the beach near Lakes entrance where they grow wild.

mozambique maize

The weather as you might know continued to stay warm which means we still have grasshoppers and also means that my citrus trees are under the biggest fruit fly attack i have known. I've never seen them this bad and i think it may be due to a higher mean temperature this year and possibly made worse by the the warm autum and mild winter last year. The ground is littered with fruit - quite heartbreaking really. Still not as heartbreaking for those who no longer have citrus trees - because of the grasshoppers they have citrus twigs and branches.

The shame about fruit fly in Alice is that we could easily get rid of them if the government was perpared to put in the resources. This involves releaseing sterile male flies. when these males mate with other females they also make them sterile. the whole process was trialled quite successfullly in eastside a couple of years ago to see if it would work - and it did of course. genetic studies also show that the fruit fly in alice was introduced from a single introduction with no other indication of subsequent reintroductions. What this means is that if they were got rid of - it is very unlikely we would get another reinvasion anytime soon.

the maize had patchy pollination but there are some half decent cobs which are still drying out.
The pigeon pea is up high and flowering, with some struggling to support some huge african horned cucumbers that were hiding in the Asparagus waiting to make their move when in was away.
Chines egreens , shallots and others grew well and probably need a top dressing of bunny poo.

pigeon pea

No baby bunnies are evident yet although i still live in hope that they are hiding out in their burrow waiting to suprise me one day . it wouldn't be the first time. Bunnies are back togeter now so i should expect another litter in a months time.

Bantam has been laying while we were away and no doubt will go broody any minute - then slowly waste away for the next 2 months or more. maybe we should get some fertile eggs this time?? That'll be a job for my clone i think.

Had some of our turkey lasy night marinated in rosemary and lemon and it was tasty but a little tough - maybe some longer stewing required? although the one we roasted whole was quite decent.

Great to be back home with our own food again!

cabbages -( the reason for the little cabbage on the right is gue to a pumpkin germinating and growing over it while i was away. i think you can just nice the pumpkin seedling in the previous blog post.)

So how are the grasshoppers now?

2010-03-14T18:50:00.005+09:30

In the areas that were sprayed they are in much lower numbers than they were last week. I'd say it has reduced them to less than one twentieth of the numbers last week. I can only assume that it has worked and worked well. I even planted the tomatoes under fine netting, such was my confidence.

So no more spraying this week.
A flurry of planting was in order in the home garden.
First we needed to attack a patch of couch grass that had been getting and bigger over the summer - thanks to my dearest for that one

Planted seedlings of Broccoli, paak choi, Gossip cabbage and seeds of Fennel , Coriander, Diakon radish.
All of these seeds have been saved from plants from previous seasons.
I cleared out one clump of snake beans as they have slowed down dramatically since the weather has been below 30 degrees, and the beans have taken on a bit of a purple tinge.

A big harvest of Pumpkins today - about 30. A mixture of Jap, Butternut squash, and one called Red Curi.
There are also some Ironbark pumpkin but they need to stay on the vine until the plant dies back to improve their keeping qualities.

Other things are progressing along well.

The maize is 10 feet tall

The cape gooseberries have decied to flower but i read that they may take 60 or more days

to form edible fruits.

The pigeon pea is growin tall but no sign of flowering.

The New Guinea bean did not thrive here ovet the summer and i suspect it is not nematode resistent. This is in contrast to a bottle gourd that i grew which was absolutely rampant.

Operation grasshopper die! die! die!

2010-03-08T20:47:00.003+09:30

No i'm not that worked up really about grasshoppers. They are annnoying and are preventing me from planting things which would otherwise be in the ground now - and i do like to get a head start mind.
The pumpkins seem to be a bit resisitent to them and that's mainly what i have left in the garden out at the plot. however if i planted tomatoes now they would be devoured in minutes. i don't even think my 20% shadecloth will stop them.

Still, on the weekend i mixed up my fungal spores from the green guard and sprayed mercilessly. if this stuff works i will have have killed thousands of grasshoppers - mostly tiny little wee ones. I had a bit of a depot at my house where i mixed up the solution and had various grasshopper tormented people visit and pick up their solution.

There are so many grasshoppers though in the wider landscape that i'm not sure this spraying will have a very long effect - unless the fungus starts to spread by itself amongst the "grassies" population. but i think that's being over-optomistic.
i have kept a small captive population so i can closely study what happens to them after they have been sprayed. if they do succumb to the fungi i can perhaps blend them up into a new mixture.

So as well as spraying the grasshoppersat 3 locations on the weekend i knocked off the turkeys, ate off(rotten) pate, threw up and sat on the toilet for a while,ate a turkey (with stuffing),made stock, put the male and female rabbits back together (sorry i don't name them but if they did have names they would be sno ball and meat head). The rabbits were "at it" in a matter of seconds and within a minute meat head had thrown himself onto the floor and was groaning in a breif afterglow. everythings' breif with rabbits.

We also did a bit of mucking out of the rabbits cages and re-wired some parts of their cages that rusted through. they rust because they pee in the one spot and because my cages are not state of the art accommodation - but they are roomy.

watching my seedlings go a bit leggy because the hot house is too shady but the hardening off area is busy with other things i wish would move on.

I'm also watching (killing) the remaining grasshoppers around the corn as they have a habit of chewing of the "silks" as they emerge from the female flower. The fungus spray takes 7-12 days to work i think.

My cape Goodeberries have perked up again and have not bceome victims of nematodes after all

Now that the weather has turned cool coriander is on the planting list along with peas and radishes, carrots, pasnip, beetroot, more lettuce and chinese greens too - oh and Fennel and Stocks because i have a sentimental attatchemnt to them and probably other things i have forgotten.

Sopping Sunday Seedsavers

2010-02-28T15:57:00.003+09:30

The worst day posible for sorting seeds - raining and humid. It has been raining for 5 days now and we seem to be picking up about 30 - 50 mls each day. Today is no exception as it has rained non stop for the last 20 hours.
So although the seeds were a bit too moist to do any sorting, a small band with undampened fervour for growing things turned up with raincoats and umbrellas.

There was a small exchange of stories about the likelihood of flooding in Eastside. Luckily we had a historian who had got the story straight thanks to talking to a lot of old timers in town - Warburton street will flood before Giles street by all accounts.

After our lovely morning tea we made our way out the back yard to discuss growing seeds and the like.

rain or shine - serious about seeds!

We covered potting mixes, types of irrigation , sunlight, seed depth, thinning, hardening off areas, humidity as the wind buffeted the trees around. I think we felt quite stoic there out in the rain. This was followed by a small garden tour to see some of the goodies growing .

We also talked out fertliser options, compost, manure, heap as opposed to bins.

Back inside to get a few seeds - and of course more refreshments!

Recent garden successes and problems were discussed and new plants discovered - yes you can eat Luffas!

This was all acheived whie looking after 10 children so well done all.

the growing challenge

2010-02-25T13:34:00.001+09:30

http://1greengeneration.elementsintime.com/?p=1537

I hadn't heard of this until recently but it's a great idea for people who are new to growing plants from seed. It's about growing from seed yourself and getting 3 other people to do the same. click on the link below the pic and investigate!

Next seedsavers meeting -Growing seedlings and preparing soil for the winter garden

2010-02-23T20:52:00.001+09:30

This meeting is well timed for all who want to get serious about their winter garden this year. There is still time to prepare soil if you haven’t already done so.

For me the brassicas are the star performers over winter but there’s so much more as you would know. The Brassicas are good to get in early.

I also encourage people to bring in seed packets they have purchased from Eden seeds etc as I always find I never use all of the seeds in them - then they go out of date.

This meeting will focus on raising seeds/ seedlings and soil preparation for the winter garden, but I’m sure there will be some seed sorting on the side. This will be followed by seed swapping and people are free to take seeds from the seed collection.

When:Sunday 28th of Feb, 10am
Where: 33 clarke st, 10am

Brassica seeds going in

2010-02-15T20:58:00.004+09:30

Feb is the month to begin putting in brassica seeds and this period lasts for a couple of months. the key with brassicas is geting them in while there is still some warm growing weather, but at the same time you are still trying to grapple with the ravages of summer. i try to grow them on into larger pots in the nursery so that when they do go into the ground they are a bit more hardy and able to take a bit of biffo from the pests and the sun.

Broccoli heading while sweet potatoe still prospers - must have been a mild winter

This gives me broccoli in May through to whenever it gets too hot to keep up with it, or i just move onto the Asparagus and let it go. Brassicas do fantastically well in the mild winters in alice and don't mind the frost. They get no attatck from cabbage white butterfly and generally look pristine without much effort. I have tried brussel sprouts a couple of times but have been beaten by aphids so cannot say that they have worked, but aparrently other people have succedded. You do need to plant them in Feb so that they are heading in the coldest part of the year - June - July.

Cauliflower over red cabbage

What i have planted so far...

Cauliflower pale face
This is a big fat cauliflower and the plants are eventually over a metre wide so leave plenty of space (like i never seem to do) The sno ball little cauliflowers are often termed space savers. i call the a waste of space. they produce hardy anything and are only mature marginally faster than paleface. Give them a miss is my tip. You may also be duped into buying these from nurserys where they have not been properly labelled - i was.
Cabbage - vertus
Will give these another go this year
Broccoli - green sprouting calabrese
A long lasting Broccoli that produces lots of side shoots with long thin stems and are delicious. Just keep on picking it while you can keep up with it - or until you can't stand to eat that many aphids. I have been saving the seed from this variety for many years.

Black Tuscan Kale

Kale - Nero di Toscana.
Black Tuscan Kale is a hardy thing that grows for more than a year, but although it is tough it is not quite adapted to suviving the heat and pest onslaught that an alice springs summer brings. Gow it over winter and into the summer until it karks it. i have never managed to get viable seed to save from this one.
Kale - Siberian
I don't remember buying this one but i'll put it in and give it a go.
Kale - Old Women meet and gossip cabbage
This is more like an annual kale than the two others above. closely related to Ethiopian cabbage ora different variety of. I grow it all year round and use it as a great egg conditioner - that is i feed it to the chooks.

Brassicas i plant a bit later
I plant these later because they are direct seeded and are harder to keep he water up to - and i am not too keen on hot radishes. Radishes get milder as the weather cools.

Radish - i really like Diakon and i made a fabulous lacto-fermented preserve of them last year, which as it aged gained a smokey flavour.
Swedes
Kohl rabi

Pumpkin patch powers on

2010-02-07T16:33:00.003+09:30

Iv'e tried to cut back some of the pumpkins to give the rock melons and watermelons a chance.

The garden plot is seething with grasshoppers and the eggplants are no more. A good stage to test our new organic grasshopper killer which is now on order.

The goji berries i planted last week have germinated, so we shall see how they progress in this climate.

The Zucchinis and pumkin are providing produce as are the snake beans and carrots. the snake beans have slowed down with the drier weather

Have just harvested some olives, which after sorting in to green and black have now been put into a brine solution which will now be changed daily for 10 days.

the black olives

And the green olives

Organic control of lawn grubs

2010-02-03T20:49:00.002+09:30

A lawn loveheart ooh - some people know how to be romantic!

Lawn beetles in the lawn.

Some lawns can be decimated by lawn beetles or lawn grubs. our worst experience of it was the first couple of years we after we moved into the house. the lawn was quite badly effected. Now we seem to get some each year but after a dose of an organic treatment they don't persist. I'm not sure if it's just the treatment or wether there are also some predators in the lawn that may control them.

Well you will most likely not see any beetles because it is actually their larvae that do the damage on the lawn. you will notice patches of short grass that seem to have been chewed. if you dig down through the grass there are these green larvae curled up on the surface with a lot of poo around them.
What to do?
there are some organic methods which i use and seem to be successful.
The first is Dipel bacterial culture which you spray on the grass. when the grubs eat it they perish as bacteria multply in their gut. it is only harmful to insects.

The second one i have used is Derris dust or Rotenone. This is made from the crushed and dried roots of a tropical vine. It works on all manner of caterpillars and seems to also work on lawn grubs. it is short lasting and is best applied in the evening as it breaks down in sunlight. It is very toxic to fish so keep away from ponds.

I haven't found any of these work on grasshoppers by the way.

I feel as if i have to justify having a lawn - so here goes
It's my wife's fault - i have tried bargainng away bits for this or that, planting fruit trees in it etc but it seems like a bit of a sacred cow.
So there we have it. It keeps the peace. i have heard other people say that too but something needs to be said about being green and the colour green. When you live in such a harsh place you need to create an enticing and less harsh environment around you. I have known people who rented poor quality housing to have a terrible experience of Alice Springs beacause they could never go outside. Needless to say they never became long term residents.

The first house I lived in in Alice Springs was a house on dirt with no outside living areas. When it rained you had to stay inside rather than sitting under a verandah and enjoying it. When you dropped the washing it got dirty and when you hung the washing meat ants attacked your feet. Some investment in connecting with the outdoor environnment is needed and sometimes that means a lawn - especially if you have kids. Of course there are alternatives. We changed the front lawn into a native garden years ago because we didn't use the area and it wasn't growing well anyway.

The good points to our lawn is that it is well used, we cut it for animal feed in summer. There is a great cooling effect also around the house. The lawn only gets water 2 times a week and this is cut down to once a week in winter and for a much shorter time as the grass is not growing. It gets fertilised with organic fertilisers a couple of times a year and they say a well cared for lawn looks better and uses less water.

Hey laaaa, Hey laaaa, the bees are back!

2010-01-31T14:38:00.003+09:30

They've been gone for such a long time now...hey la, hey la
But now they're back everythin will be fine... hey la .. hey laa
yeah - they'll be a-pollinating
yeah - my efforts much abatin

So after a small appearance last week, there are bees a plenty all over the pumpkin patch.
I'll have barrow loads of jap pumpkins in the months to come aswell as butternuts and ironbark pumpkins for winter eating. The watermelons are sort of getting swamped by the pumpkins although we have got a few. There are a few Israeli rock melons on the go after a stuttering start. This is because rabbits are partial to rockmelon vines but not it seems to other crawling cucurbits.

One strange happening in the garden in our Lanes Navel orange has decided to have another go at flowering and its lovely to have the smell of Orange blosson in the morning. I think it was the heavy rain and total soil saturation that gave it a shock and probably a boost of nutrients. Meanwhile another orange is dropping its fruit because it may not be geting quite enough water.

My stubborn Olive tree has now been in the ground about 5 years and has still not shown any sign of fruiting. Maybe i need to strees it more? It is a Manzallo and we got it as a wedding gift.

Transplanted lots of purple cherokee tomatoes to larger pots.

My jujube seed have germinated and are looking good - below

curry plants are doing well - below

Jambolans have germinated. - no photo - kind of boring ayway

Grasshopper news

I'm in the process of getting hold of an organic grasshopper control. It's called GREENGUARD and it is a fungus developed by the csiro. It was originally discoverd by a farmer wo picked up fungus coverd dead grasshopper. This was many years ago and after a lot of development and testing it is finally available to the average Jo Blogg. I've made some enquiries with Elders who are aparrently one of the distributers. It only effects grasshpper and the fungus burrows into the cuticle of the insect, invading its whole body. Exciting Huh?

Planted some Red Nigeian eggplant seedlings amongst the gourds and other things

The Mozambique maize is growing well. planted at the beginning of January

I saw a Bee!

2010-01-26T20:23:00.001+09:30

Not so unusual because they are coming into the garden to get water but not lingering. However the other day while i was racing around pollinating pumpkins i saw a Bee covered in pumpkin pollen and lingering, looking for the next flowers, which made me think my work at pollinating pumpkins was coming to an end. In previous years we went from getting a few zucchinis to getting several bags full due to the bees doing the work for us.

The Jap pumpkins are doing well compared to other varieties - if only they stored. We have also planted ironbark and butternut squash. We shall wait and see what the bees do and what the cooler weather does later in the year.

Plant your Tomatos now!

2010-01-26T20:11:00.002+09:30

Purple Cherokee Tomatos

We have a long warm season in Alice Springs which allows you to plant a couple of crops of summer vegetables. The touchy tomatoes have two quite specific planting times. The first is in July or August so your tomatoes will flower and set fruit before the consistently hot weather sets in . very hot weather prevents the pollen from tomato flowers from working and they don't set fruit.

The second planting time is January so plants grow all their leafy bits and only start to flower say in march and april - may when it is cooler. We have a tomato that is something like purple cherokee which likes to fruit into the cooler weather. we have much less fruit splitting and rotting - the fruit are particularly thin skinned so this is definately not a variety that will make the supermarkets. The taste of them usually causes the eater to moan. It fruits well into winter if you protect it from frost. Ours wons first prize at the show a couple of years ago which is held in July.

However planting In january is a challenge due to the heat and pests. we plant ours in the hot house and raise them plants in 4 - 6 inch pots until their roots are showing well through the bottom of the pot. Thus when they are planted out they don't need daily watering.

Herbaceous things

2010-01-23T12:47:00.001+09:30

I have tried many herbs in the garden over the years so i thought i'd go through a bit of herb history.

Starting with herbs i have had for years

Sage

The sage bush just gets bigger each year - going on 6 years old now. It grows in a position that gets sun in winter and dappled shade in summer

Thyme.
Slowly spreads along the ground and takes root at the nodes. This is one we've had for 6 years as well.

Rosemary

This one is hard to kill . there was one in the native garden around the front which never got much water and has only recently died through continued neglect.

Marjoram

we have had to plant a new plant a couple of times. they seem to last 2 -3 years.

Echinacea

Not that i know how to use this herb, but we grow it and it has lovely flowers that last in a vase for ages. It has been here for 6 years.

Tarragon

Tarragon went fantastic for quite a few years then seeemd to dissappear. i'm not sure why but possibly it was due to peppermint invading the bed it was in. peppermint may be a very hardy competitor or produce some allelopathic substance that can damage other plants.

Peppermint

Well very easy to grow. it eventually escaped the pot and now it spreadys happily between garden beds. i don't mind it too much becaus ethe rabbits love it, so its extra greenpick for them.

Oregano
never really did well for me but i know other people in alice who have grown it. Maybe it doesn't like a basic soil.

Tansy

i planted tansy originally as a plant that would flower and provide food to garden predators etc. As it turns out it doesn't really flower when it is most needed anyway. i find that vegetables let go to seed are the biggest feast for garden predators. Tansy does grow fine though and rabbits like a bit evry so often.

Garlic Chives

grows excellently and self seeds

Garlic
planted at the right time you can grow top quality garlic in Alice Springs with big healty cloves. you also have to know when to turn the water off so they dry out - therwise your crop could all go rotten.

Annual herbs
Haven't had ant problems with growing annual herbs such as Basil, parsley, coriander, dill etc, as long as they are planted at the right time they do fine.

Annual herbs

And more rain

2010-01-12T19:35:00.004+09:30

After the driest year on record the drought has finally broken - if we call them droughts in places that wander in and out of drought on a constant basis.

Most of the shubs in the surrounding hills had defoliated before the rain. In the raised humidiy before the rain the termites were busy gathering up the last vestiges of dried grass.

Perhaps they needed to stock their larder before the rain?

The rain was slow but constant followed by drissle or waves of heavier rain. over the days the showers gradually got heaver. The swale in our fron yard filled up 3 times over which has never happened before. it's only ever filled up once durng each rain period. Having lived in Darwin, i likened this rain to the monsoon - rain that came in waves - no thunder or lightening. all in all we had about 150mm in 4 days.

The hills around the town are saturated and are slowly leaking water into streams now that the rain has stopped. Already bird calls not heard for over a year are adding to our surrounds. Funghi are everywhere.

On the garden front.... the heavy raindrops demolished the leaves of the leafy greens, slaters decied to become mountaineers and climb the beanpoles - and eat anything that they could. The chickens moped, the rabbits stayed under their shelters and thr ground is still saturated.

The snake beans are going mad and the pigeon pea ditto. Tagasaste however doesn't like dampness as well as heat and many have died due to collar rot. I have one tall one which grew p over the winter and seems to be doing well.

The cape gooseberries i fear are succumbing to nematodes despite fairly ideal preparation

Planted seeds

Jujube

curry plant

Syzigium cumini (Jambolan) we have one around the side of the house fruiting now and the seeds must be planted fresh, which is common for many rainforest trees.

chinese greens.

Jambolan above

Planted bush tobacco in any spare spaces - i have an idea that i might make a nicotine spray out of it and see how it works on grass hoppers - which are the next wave of pests to expect after this rain - oh and the caterpillars in many and varied variety.

i shall keep a close eye on the grape vines as they can easily be defoliated in a matter of days by big caterpillars.

semi dried tomatoes

2010-01-06T19:24:00.002+09:30

It has been great weather for drying tomatoes lately with a majority of days above 35 so we have been drying cherry tomatoes.

We just lay them on trays and usually one day is enough for cheeries. we dry them so there is still a little bit of moisture in them. the key to making them extra yummy is once you bring them inside, soak them in red wine vinegar for one minute then jar them with olive oil. Best kept in the fridge to be on the safe side.We got the idea of soaking in red wine vinegar from Barabara Kingsolvers book "Animal Vegetable Miracle". A fabulous book about being a locavore for a year on a block of land in Kentucky - but dangerous because it will make you want to move to the country!

A garden letter from Yuendemu

2010-01-06T18:53:00.004+09:30

Yuendemu is 500km north west of Alice Springs - deep in the Tanami desert. Its a bit further north than Alice Springs and has its own special gardening challenges so i though it would be good to inclue Trevors email outlining his latest garden trials and tribulations. I've ncluded my response to Trevor, followed by Trevors letter.

Hi Trevor, having you around for a cuppa and a chat was lovely and more than enough payment for our citrus. Look forward to the next one! I have been enjoying the Kefir and have been having it on my morning muesli - so thanks for that. I think it's a great supplement to my diet and immune system.

Frome Jervois - I have just received 3 turkeys (which promptly flew out of the yard and into the neighbours yard) and dispatched one rabbit, a tray of tree lucerne seedlings and Cape gooseberry, old man saltbush seed and Acacia victoriae seed. We have a good little swap thing going - she's good at animal raising and I'm good at growing seedlings and plants. I'm going to get some ducklings and young chooks from her next year.

Good to hear about your garden successes. The carob is a pretty hardy tree - I'm thinking of planting a row of then down at the Steiner school.

We have been getting grapes from various sources - always yummy. We are harvesting snake beans now, tomatoes, carrots and pumpkins (jap)cucumbers and zucchini. Amaranth and pigeon pea growing well and being fed to the rabbits. I have a good crop of asparagus grown from seed coming along (do you have asparagus?) and I've extended the hothouse to have a hardening off area.

The lady i have been getting rabbits from is leaving town but luckily I have another fellow here who is starting off with a pair from Evon, so we shall be able to continue to exchange genetic material.

Love to see some photos of your work in the garden

Cheers for now,

Chris

Hi Chris,

Thanks for forwarding Michel's letter.

I must thank you for the lovely grapefruit and oranges. I enjoyed them
thoroughly. If you want to sell your produce I'm happy to buy.

Its been really hot here lately with the 40+ temperatures making it
tough for the plants. But I still managed to get a decent harvest of
grapes though the birds got about 1/3 of it - in spite of the bird
netting. The little buggers got in between the birdnet and shadecloth
sandwich.

I've been having a good time making compost with horse, cow and chicken
manure together with the kitchen waste from the Old People's Home next
door and straw dust from the chook house. I'll have to get some photos
and put them on facebook. I'm also making 'bokashi' with the excess vege
waste. I'm still working on getting the watering right and also the ph.

The leopard melon vines are flowering and setting fruit. I'm trying my best to go around pollenating the females but the thrill of the season has to be the three carob trees I transplanted from small pots. The new
growth is delightful to watch considering the plants sat in small pots for nearly two years quite neglected.

All my best wishes to you and your family for a lovely season.

cheers

Trevor

Alice Springs - a chickens' paradise?

2009-12-31T10:43:00.001+09:30

Sounds unlikey doesn't it but just reading through magazines like Earth garden and Grass roots made me realise how few problems we have here with our chickens. From what i know we don't get lice or worms or scaley leg. we don't even get fleas on our dogs and cats - the theory being that the climate is too dry.
This dryness most of the year is also probably not a good environment for bacteria to survive and breed.
My chickens have been relatively free of problems and only in their old age do they succcumb to sickness. Funly enough this usually happens when we are away and someone else is looking after them. They also inexplicably slow down their laying to about half their usual when someone else if looking after them. We put this down to probable lack of treats and leafy green which we usually toss in daily.

wattle seed on the menu

2009-12-29T20:25:00.000+09:30

So i've had this wattle seed siiting in the shed for a while now. i harvested it last year in about 30 mins while out on a drive out bush. Acacia victoriae is a widespread wattle . Around here it grows most thickly on river flats and tends to be found with very thick buffel garss. The species grows further north and right down to Adelaide. The seeds are large for an acacia and edible. One of my friends said she hand picked out the seeds of her acacia vic - but with my seed sorting prowess i was sure i could improve on that method.

out comes the kiddies pool

and out come the stomping shoes.

until all of the seeds are ruffled out of their pods.

then theres a bit of shaking and rustling to get the pods to come to the top and the seeds to go to the bottom.

still a bit of shaking to go.

the pods get tossed in th egrden and the seeds into a smaller bowl to continue sorting. most of the sorting of the see was done within 30 mins.

i could have spent more time getting the seed clean but for now it can be stored. i got about 1kg of seed from an hours work.

there are a variety of uses for the seed but mostly it is added to flour mixes (often roasted first). The seed coat is very thick and i have to put it through the grinder a copuple of times before i can get a floury consistency. I put the jar in the freezer to kill any bugs that might be hiding out in the seed.

So far i've mixed it in with my fermented porridge (yum i hear you say?) which is mixed with a bit of yogurt and soaked overnight.

flight of the turkey

2009-12-29T19:54:00.000+09:30

We are now the proud owners of 3 turkeys thanks to Tully. We took the carrier cage into the chook pen and tried to extract the birds. out come number one and two with a lot of racket and kicking, while 3 was still inside. One and two walked across the yard and promptly flew up onto the fence rail , then to the shed next door , then to the neighbours fence.

Oh bother

I grabbed hold of number 3 still in the box and requested some scissors - off with one lot of wing feathers! So at least i had one bird in the hand.

my beloved went next door and scared the turkeys - one of which flew back into our yard and we bagged it. the other remaining turkey proved harder to get and by dusk we had not succeded, despite climbing on neighbouts shed roofs and jumping tall fences in a single bound.

The other turkeys called the rouge turkey back and the next morning i cornered him in the vege patch.

now the turkeys are settling in at the bottom of the pecking order it seems, but they are quick to run in and grab what they want.

The plans are to fatten them up for eating.

Figs are in

2009-12-28T16:17:00.005+09:30

Our friends have gone away leaving their fig tree loaded with fruit. we were only to happy to oblige with the picking job. rain was threatening earlier in the week - so if anything good came from missing the cyclone outfall - it was that the figs didn't all go rotten and the weather is good for drying. We have done a couple of pickings of these dark figs are will probably do another one soon.

So far we have bottled (vacola) and dried figs out the back yard. We are holding off on jam because we seem to have a cupboard full of jams of 7 different kinds - and frankly we only eat in in fits and spurts.

And more buffel grass

2009-12-28T15:38:00.011+09:30

I had a call from the landcare mob before Christmas and was informed that there was a buffel to collect. They had been cutting down buffel grass around young Corkwoods and ironwoods and there was an abundance of grass to be had. i filled the trailer in less that 30 mins (with the kids helping!) and this time it was very pure buffel grass with no bark and twigs. There are still patches of thick buffel grass desptite the lack of recent rainfall. A grass fire out at Simpsons gap today is a testament to the abundance of fuel this grass represents in the landscape. see the North Australian fire information site . Sorry about the clumped photos - due to my new computer blogger aint workinjg in quite the same way and i can't work out how to move the photos around.

After mulchinhg all of the beds that could do with mulch i piled the rest of the grass into the chook house. with a bit of water addded the chooks may help to semi compost the grass and i can use it at a later date on the garden.

On the garden fron the snake beans really appreciated the humid weather over chritmas and i have been picking bunches every day.

The cape gooseberries (sourced from plants that have been grown in Alice Springs since the 1970's) are coming along well although no signs of fruiting yet.

Picking:
carrots (all seasons)
some dwarf french beans (due to the cooler weather)
tomatoes - mostly cherry types
leafy greens - amaranth
zuchinis
shallots - spring onion looking
cucumbers
figs - from friends house

snake beans growing high

Off on a caper

2009-12-19T14:14:00.004+09:30

The native caper or bush passionfruit Capparis nummularia var. spinosa

(photo Steven Pearce)

I have wondered where the word caper comes from - the advernture type caper - that is. When you see where capers grow in their native habitat, you wonder if it is to do with the rugged terrain in which they grow. In italy is was not uncommon to find the capers growing out of vertical walls!

I went on my own little caper to the telegraph station yesterday and collected some capers which are currently flowering and fruiting like mad - this is all despite only having had 70 mm of rain this year (only 10 of that was recent). The plants are always covered in ants which must get some return for guarding the plants - maybe they get to eat the fruit? The fruit once ripe are fairly tasteless and full of seeds - hence the native passionfruit tag.

After fighting with the ants for a while i gathered a pocket -full and put them into a jar layered with salt. i tried this method before and it seemed to work alright as far as i can remember although i don't remember how long it took befire they were edible .

The buffel grass harvest grows legs

2009-12-14T13:01:00.011+09:30

Soon after we began our slashing and mowing , it became apparrent what the effects of buffel grass and fire can be like. This large river red gum ( the largest one within sight) was totally burned out and showing no signs of life. The loss of large red gums like these will eventually lead to a loss of habitat for the many tree hollow dependent animals in the town. These big old trees are also regarded as sacred by traditional owners.

After mucking a round with the brand new whipper snippers, we got to work cutting down the grass. It was suprisingly tough and the nylon line was wearing out quite fast .

There wa salso a lot of sticks and bark from the red gums mixed in which meant that the mixture that was raked up was pretty coarse.very soon after we had begun we were thinking that metal baldes would actually do a better job. the other thing about the whippper snippers is that they spread the grass all over the place - whereas the metal blades cut it and it generally stays where it was cut.

One of our crew had an articulating metal blade - which is better than a static metal blade in the event that you hot a rock or wood during your work.
We ended up with a trailer and a couple of ute laods of muclch but our tips for the next harvest were:

-metal blades

-start in an area with thicker buffel grass (the grass is quicker to gather and it is more likely to be a fire risk)

The bee famine continues

2009-12-14T12:32:00.003+09:30

Heavily flowering Ghost gum Corymbia aparrerinja , early December

The bees are doing fine due to the succession of trees flowering in the Alice Springs local area.

They are just not making an appearance in the garden! except to get water. I have been looking closely at the flowering tree succession this year and it goes like this

River red gum (Oct-Nov) (lemon scented gum also in town)

Coolibah (Nov - Dec)

Ghost gum (dec to Jan?)

there are of course more trees flowering but these are the common ones and produce a lot of nectar.

slashing the sorghum

2009-12-05T20:14:00.009+09:30

My sorghum crop is about ready to dig in and perform its green manure function

I think I planted the sorghum about 8 weeks ago and want to slash it down before it begins to shoot to head. Sorgum is a summer hardy green manure crop that seems to grow fast and furiously.

i first slash down the sorghum starting from the top and cut it into 2 inch pieces, rught down to the base.Once the bed is slashed i decided to add a bit of blood and bone to help hasten breakdown - but i don't usually do this and it also works fine.
And a bit of Sulfur to help reduce the soil ph (caused by our bore water)Now all there is to do it wait a couople of weeks for the breakdown and then plant. I always find that after i dig in green manure crops the worms are incredibly active,

Buffel grass harvest – coming up Dec 13!

2009-12-05T20:11:00.003+09:30

Buffel grass (Cenchrus ciliaris) is one of the worst threats to biodiversity in arid Australia – conversely it is also heralded as the saviour of pastoralists and perhaps both are true. What is true is that it is very common in and around Alice Springs and when left to grow rank, constitutes a major fire risk.

In 2001 fires in the vacant land around alice springs were an almost daily event. Buffel grass grew in the creeks, up the hills and all over the scree slopes to the base of cliffs on the tallest range in the area. After the heavy rains of that year buffel grass grew thickly and the natives filled the gaps between the tussocks. A large part of central Australia burned.

While all this happens gardeners happily drive off to the fodder store and load up their bales of hay (which have come at least 1500km) onto their utes for garden mulch. I have bought very few bales of imported mulch in my time – trying to make to with refuse from mine and other peoples gardens. However I have become increasingly interested in this wasted resource sitting on our doorstep, growing, burning and damaging vegetation as it does. Many an old gnarled river red gum has been burned to theground by fires started in couch and buffel grass along the river.

After many positive responses about the concept I decided to approach the Landcare group about a Buffel harvest where community members come together and solve several problems:
Remove an unwanted plant
Gather a locally available resource to mulch gardens and save water
Reduce their carbon footprint in the process.

One permaculture principles goes something like “the problem is the solution”
We take an unwanted plant and put it into a wanted space – suddenly we look at it a little differently
The process is probably going to consist of a small team of slashers and a larger team of sweepers. The sweepers load the mulch onto trailers and utes and deliver to local residents. Contact landcare or myself if you want to be involved…….

Arid zone fruit tree tour part 2

2009-12-02T13:22:00.008+09:30

From the rows of fig trees we walked back to one of the least seen nut trees in Australia. The Pistaccio tree trials had involved many varieties in the hey day of the farm but were largely unsuccessful due to a lack of chilling in the winter which led to poor bud burst in the spring. To complicate things more for good pollination a male and a female tree is required (or grafts of male material on female trees) and they are wind pollinated. Having said that the trees we looked at had set fruit after not a very cold winter (very few frosts) and very little water. However there was one better performing variety in the trial – so perhaps this was the variety they left in the orchard.

Everyone was holding up very well despite the heat as stepped over the small rabbit proof fence into the bush tomato plantation. This was another trial that was looking at the success of cultivating bush tomatoes. Although the water was now turned off these hardy little plants were still flowering and fruiting and we were able to taste all the different flavoured berries at varying stages of drying. A very acceptable bush tucker – we all agreed. I have eaten too many fresh berries in the past and got a headache - which turns out to be a side effect known by Aborigines from where this plant grows (latz 1995, Bushfires and Bushtucker).
They were also spreading from the original rows through suckers as Solanum centrale, like many bush tomatoes is clonal.

The other plant being protected by the rabbit proof fence was Asparagus. Raghu was very taken with Asparagus as a great plant for central Australia – a man after my own heart. Any plant which likes salty water, ignores hot weather and seems to withstand all pests has got to be a winner.

Our last stop was a brief car ride back down the road to the dates. These date varieties had been gathered from all over the world……

Varieties were trialled based on their horticultural potential which is also affected by such factors as simultaneous ripening.
Although known as a tree of the desert, they are actually from desert oases, and they need up to 400litres of water a day when in full production. The trees at azri were scaping by with less than 100litres but many were still fruiting. Commercial dates usually need to be pollinated to ensure a good crop. There is a beetle which does this job overseas but here it has to be done by harvesting pollen, mixing it with water and spraying it onto the female inflorescence. Quite a labour intensive process!
One unfortunate pest from overseas has been introduced called the date scale insect and it is also widespread throughout alice springs. Unfortunately this limits where the date material can be exported for horticultural purposes but in reality it doesn’t bother the dates most of the time.

Dates don’t like summer rain or humidity and do less well the further north you go.
We managed to snaffle a couple of dry dates from the tree which were very nice, and were bright red when not dried. We were told that they could be picked at this stage and would dry quite well in the sun or shade.

Thanks again to Steven pearce for his fab photos! http://www.stevenpearcephoto.com/

Arid zone fruit tree tour.

2009-11-22T15:51:00.012+09:30

Last weekend a hardy band of garden types headed out to the arid zone research institute to have a look at the orchards and try to capture as many pearls of wisdon as we could from the man taking the tour - Raghu.

Despite Raghu having only arrives at azri less than a year ago - he had mountains of interesting information to offer.

As we waited for Raghu to finish some photocopying for us - i told the group that one of the reasons i had organised this tour was to garner support for an orchrd subgroup that could advise the community garden committee. So after a few moments of people lookin at each other and scratching their heads Raghu came out and we were off!

After negociating a goodly number of locked gates we parked our vehicles in the shade of the Olives and Date palms. The questions started, left right and centre about the olive trees and several indepedent conversations fire up about preserving olives, olive types. Rahgu said that the Olive trees produced well but like most of the trees in this orchard - they were on low water rations designed to keep the trees alive rather than producing a lot.

The orchard was now long past its hey day ( in the 60's and 70's) when Raghu said just about everything and anything was tried. He also relate dthat is was unfortunate that much of the information was not published and only exists in internal reports. The crops were also being tested for horticultural potential in the centre rather than back yard culture which needs to be taken into account when guaging success or not of certian crops.

The hand out Rahgu gave to us documented thefollowing crops:

Roses - yay!

Geraldtone wax - woohoo! - ok i'll stop judging now

olives

figs

Ruby grapefruit

Jujube

Tablegrapes

Stonefruit

Asparagus

Dates

Kangaroo paw

Riceflower

Pistaccios

And in addittion to that there was of course Citrus and apples.

There are publications put out by azri called "agnotes" and they describe how to grow many things. Some of them are on the web and others are filed in the library and can be photocopied.

Rahgu though we were moving until he mentioned the jujube. The group back-tracked to where these couple of old trees stood and srounged around looking for what might be fruit.

Several people had asked me about the jujube in the last couple of months, so i was intreaged to see this tree that was supposed to do so well in Alice Springs. Marg Latz recently obtained one from a business in Darwin called "tropiculture". i have no idea if they are best grown from seed or cuttings or even when they fruit, but there was no sign of fruit and barely any to be seen on the ground.

I got the picture that the tree may well have done quite well in Alice but had no commmercial potential - because people like to buy and eat things like apples and bannanas.

We reluctantly moved ontowards the citrus which despite low levels of water, weeds and relative neglect had reasonable fruit still on them. I asked Raghu why there was never commercial potential for cirtus in the centre and the main reason he sited were labour limitations. He said that securing labour was a limiting factor on many crops and it was a challenge when you had to secure new labour for each crop. Of course Citrus do very well in Alice Springs - just about every second house has one.

Just over yonder were many rows of metal and wire trellises which were where the table grape experimental plantings had been. I lively discussion followed on table grapes - that there were competitors from the gasgoyne in WA to Emerald in QLD. The challenge for grapes was to grow them as far north as you could to get the earliest crops of the year onto the market. the down side to this was of course increasing humidity and rainfall as you go north - and this all has to coincide with good fresh water supplies. The titree grape growing areas was small incomparison the other industry players and had experienced some decline in profits in recent years.

Some nice rows of figs were still standing and had set lovely fruit. There are a range of varieties which fruit at different times. The major challenge to commercial figs was birds.

Some very sorry rows of apples were still in existence which Raghu said did reasonable well but were given hell by the rabbits which loved to ring bark them. There were a few trees which appeared to have keeled over quite recently. The continuing decline of the fruit tree varieties here was a worry - because i dare say it would be very difficult to obtain these varieties again - and importing them from interstate would be difficult and costly.

Thanks to Stephen who took some great photos - and which adorn this blog post.
http://www.stevenpearcephoto.com/

Having just mysteriously lost a page or two of writing I think i'll cut my losses and post the rest of the fruit tour on the next post......
coming up - pistaccios, bush tomatoes and dates.

garden growth update

2009-11-12T16:01:00.010+09:30

The weather is certainly heating up but we are all accustomed to that - 36 and above for the next 4 months. Oh well - we did have such a lovely october!

The mulberry trees have all but finished fruiting. Plenty of citrus fruit still hanging on though. i think my cut off date is late november to have them all picked - due to the fruit fly.

A few things are starting to feel the heat. was disappointed to find that the french beans had nothing much on them - i think due to the heat. will look again this weekend to confirm that. i did have a few set backs with those - rabbits eating them etc. i think if you plant hem at the beginning of august with no set backs you should get a good crop from them.

The pumpkins are growing rampantly as are the other melons and a few setting fruit. Still no bees as the red gums are still flowering. I'll have to keep hand pollinating them!

Gourds and snake beans are growing well while the cabbages look fine but i'm wondering if they will not have tight heads due to the heat??

The sorghum crop is progressing well. the amaranth continues to grow rampantly - almost everywhere.

like a weed it seems to be able to utilise things in the soil that other plants are unable to extract - it might be a good green manure crop because of this trait, making minerals etc more available to the following crop. The rabbits seems to be going for it as much as any of the other greens i'm feeding them at the moment.

I have a large male rabbit seperated in a chook tractor. At the moment he is living of the fat of the land with no supplementary pellets. He gets Ruby saltbush, Mulberry leaves, amaranth, mint, general weeds and the grass on the lawn. He hoes into this stuff much more so than when he had pellets. Certainly the growing rabbits are eating much more and i'm not sure i could keep up with their food demands with the hours i have left in the day after everything else. So they'll have to stay with their beloved pellets for now.

Dispatched 3 rabbits on the weekend. All safe in the freezer now.

2009-11-12T14:33:00.002+09:30

The mega seed sorting meeting took place on the weekend with spectacular results.

The mega seed sorting meeting took place on the weekend with spectacular results. We had many large chook food bags full of seeds. Boxes of assorted seeds, bunches of plants carried in hand. We sorted Coriander ,Sno peas, Ethiopian cabbage, Tat tsoi, Paak Choi, Mizuma, Raddicio, Lettuce, radish, Shallots. It was all systems go! I rushed around from person to person showing them the next stage or sorting out problems with slow progress, but there was lots of help and advice flying all over the place. We quickly labelled all of our jars so that our similar seeds weren’t mixed up.

We all took a well earned break on that 39deg day! We're a tough crew in the centre! We had some scrumptious offerings for morning tea – although it merged into Lunch thanks to some wonderful home made curries and bread from Michael. Thanks Bronnie for hosting such a fun meeting!

Techniques we used to sort seeds included using various sized sieves to remove chaff. Crushing seed pods into fine particles then blowing off the lighter seed, winnowing in metal bowls and removing the chaff off the top, or blowing the lighter stuff away. Most of these techniques rely on the seed being heavier than the chaff, which it usually is. The crushing techniques also rely on the seed being harder than all the other parts of the fruiting body.

In the next few weeks my carrot seed will be ripe. My wife Helen found that with carrots it is much better to carefully remove the seeds from the dried umbel by hand, rather than crushing the whole lot up. This is because carrot seeds come in may sizes – but so does the chaff so they become quite hard to separate.

Earlier in the week I had squeezed out the seeds from 2 types of tomatoes and placed them in a cup to ferment.

After a couple of days mould had formed on top and I then washed all the seeds in a sieve and left them to dry in the sieve . later I scraped them off the sieve and put them in an envelope to dry further. After a week I’ll put them into a storage container.]

back home again

2009-10-31T13:22:00.009+09:30

Returning to the garden after being away is always a bit exciting mixed with a feeling of dread about what might have gone wrong.

This time the irrigation popped and the hot house didn’t get water for a day. Say goodbye to a couple of punnets of seedlings. Mice have also been at work eating seedlings, but I think they’ll sprout back. Sigh of relief – well that wasn’t too bad was it? Now what’s gone right?
The sorghum crop managed to sprout without getting eaten by doves or mice.

The sorghum is a green manure crop which I’ll plow in in a couple of months time.

Out at the ilparpa plot (oops forgot to take the camera with me), we’re harvesting beans, cucumbers, small carrots and tomatoes.

The first female pumpkin flowers have appeared and the rest of the pumpkins and watermelons are going bonkers. However I’ll probably find there are no bees now to pollinate them. My theory about this time of year is that when the river red gums the coolabahs and others flower – all of the bees bugger off from the garden and concentrate on the better nectar source. Hand pollinating zucchinis and pumpkins is the way to go in Oct/November I think.
By the way does anybody know of any bee hives going begging??

My wong bok cabbages went to seed rather than to head – I think because they experienced a period of stress when the watering system was not working properly.

The rabbits. They always seem to get out when we go away. My theory on that is that when they don’t get their usual treats they get all twitchy.

All else is fine

Snake beans getting bigger

The Asparagus has gone to fern and now beginning to compete with the pigeon pea, Amaranth and gossip cabbage

A visit to Michaels house

2009-10-20T21:32:00.009+09:30

Michaels house is a whose who of what you can grow in Alice Springs and most of what he grows has been sourced locally.

Michael and his curry plant

Borage

Cape goosberry - ready to produce. i have just germinated some seeds

Bitter gourd - michael also has a larger variety coming on

Michael calls this one "chilli eggplant" but i'm not familiar with it. Looks like kangaroo apple to me

The amazing thing about Michels garden is how much advanced veg he has growing. he grows egplants under his eaves to protect them from the frost and already has large fruit.

Same with his snake beans. Already big bunches!

Bannana

A great crop of Dill

Salt bush harvest

2009-10-20T21:09:00.006+09:30

I’ve been watching an old man salt bush in my street for a while now. It must be the most prolific producer of seed that I have seen and this weekend just gone it was ripe enough to pick. Obviously I was not the only one who had been watching as I had to scare off a ringneck parrot who was happily tucking in.
Old-man Saltbush Atriplex nummularia is a great permaculture plant for central Australia. It Grows and self seeds easily, is a great source of fodder for animals, can gow big enough to make effective wind breaks, can be harvested for mulching and stabilising areas (especially salty areas) and of course food for ring neck parrots!

One plant established itself on my front verge last summer from what must have been wind blown seed and its now waist high and I clip it regularly for the rabbits.

Harvesting saltbush is pretty straightforward. Just put something underneath the branches then scrunch the dry seeds which will easily fall off. It took me less than 20 minutes to harvest 2 large plastic bags full of seed. I have transferred them to a plastic hessian bag for further drying and I’ll then place them in the freezer to kill all the bugs that I have picked up in the process.I don’t know that I will be able to separate leaves from seeds very well because they are both papery and light.

Given the positive outlook for rain in the next year, direct sowing of the saltbush should be a huge success

Out on the range

2009-10-10T20:14:00.010+09:30

I’m a serial gardener. I have my home garden, a plot at a friends place in the rural area and a couple of rows at the Steiner school full of flowers and easy pickings for the kids. And yes it does tend to dominate the weekends.
The plot out at Anna and Johns house is a cooperative set up. My friend Tracey and I do all of the work and Anna pays for the infrastructure and water. We split the vegies 3 ways depending on who can use the produce. Tracey and I only go out to the plot once a week, and while this is good most of the time it does have its disadvantages when certain vegies need to be picked frequently.

We usually put in a couple of hours every weekend but never seem to get all the jobs done. The cpmost heap days usually require a bit more time.

Dwarf beans with dried peas in the background

At the moment the “all seasons” carrots are nearly at eating stage while our afgan yellow and blue carrots are flowering and seeding.

Afgan carrots, flowering

We have manged to grow realy nice crops of all seasons carrots here during the summer – they don’t bolt to seed.
Tomatoes (Gwens wilt free from Darwin) are fruiting but still green. We just pulled up the sno-pea plants and put them aside for gathering the seed at a later date (away from the mice). Cucumbers are fruiting, dwarf beans are just coming in. The wild rabbits are nibbling a few things otherwise we would have had zucchinis by now. We finally got around to putting some wire around the things we are wanting to grow.

Tomatoes with ethioppian cabbage seeding

The melons are growing well. We have butternet squash, jap punkin and ironbark pumkin as well as watermelons and rock melon. We can save seed from all of these as they will not cross with each other.
The Ethiopian cabbage is seeding and has a huge crop and the diakon radishes also have a big crop of seed.

Wom bok cabbage

watering over summer

2009-10-07T13:39:00.003+09:30

Watering

Watering is a difficult subject in Alice springs- although perhaps not as difficult as places with water restrictions interstate. However we have the distinction of having twice the water use of the average Australian household. The average Australian household lives on the coast and gets rain at most times of the year so its no wonder they are not pouring water on at the rate people do in Alice Springs. So I don’t think alice springs people have any special qualifications to make them the biggest water users in the country – they just need to add a lot more water to get the same results as someone living in a coastal city.
We know that most water goes onto gardens and in swimming pools, so savings in these areas are likely to make the biggest differences to our water use.

Watering in the vege garden
I am not so big on telling people the amount of water they should put on their garden because depending on what type of system you have – there are a lot of variables involved. How fast do you turn the tap on? Sprays? Drippers? dripper line? How clayey or sandy is your soil? What crop are you growing and what’s the weather like?

Generally it is best to observe what’s going on and there are a few things to look out for. Make sure your plants whole root system receives water and a little bit beyond so the roots can continue to grow outwards. Dig down in the soil to see how far the water is penetrating. Water use also changes as your plants grow. As they get bigger and grow more leaves they will need more water, so the 20 minutes you were watering in late spring will not be suitable come late summer. Plants also lose more water in windy and hot weather.
We had our pumpkin patch scorched on a windy 38 degree plus day so we made up a little rule that if it was going to be 38 or above we would manually give the garden another 30 minutes to make up for the extra water that would be lost.

Watch for wilting.
Wilting is a sign of water stress but the most important thing is wether the plant recovers from the wilting by the next day. You plants can experience some wilting in the hottest parts of the day and be no worse for wear. Of course plants which have been watered daily all their life will wilt disastrously in summer if that watering is interrupted, because they have not been encouraged to establish a large, deep root system.

So what do I do?
I generally water 2 times a week in winter and 3 times a week in summer. This covers all crops generally. Some crops are hardy enough to be watered only 2 times a week in summer and some like asparagus can go with one watering a week due to their deep expansive rot systems.
Some parts of your garden may need daily watering – when you have seedlings for example. One way around this is to grow your seedlings in a nursery situation in large pots and plants then when they have quite a large root system.
Some plants just have shallow roots like Chinese greens and lettuce so will need daily watering in the summer if not twice daily.

snake bean seedlings

Strategies to reduce water wastage in the summer
Grow summer hardy vegetables like snake beans, okra, amaranth, melons and tomatoes, eggplants, sweet potato – avoid things like lettuce and leafy greens or restrict them to small areas and only water these small areas frequently.
Amaranth can be used like spinach but it is summer hardy and drought tolerant – nearly un-killable.

Amaranth - pick the young growing leaves and shoots

Source your seed locally
Reason 1. Someone has tried them in your local area and has been successful
Reason 2. it is more likely that the local variety will perform well in your local conditions.
Example: This year I planted 2 cucmbers. An Armenian striped variety which I have grown before and has done very well – and A Lebanese cucumber from eden seeds. The difference in growth rate between them was remarkable – with the Armenian cucumber being about 3 times as large as the Lebanese cucumber.

Avoid trying to establish plants in Jan or Feb – it’s a very stressful period. If you do need to do so in a sheltered nursery situation.

Research and Stick to optimum planting times. If you plant a crop that gives you nothing at the end – you will have wasted a lot of water as a result.

Use windbreaks to slow down wind and evaporation.

spring pics

2009-10-02T11:12:00.007+09:30

Watched river cottage on TV last night. i first heard about it through the web site - which is a great resource for people growing and eating things at home or on small farms. The TV series so far is really great. 610 on wednesday ABC. Not to be missed!

shallots and raddicio

Sweet peas and sweet boy

More on Asparagus

2009-09-29T10:22:00.001+09:30

I have had many asparagus discussions this month and realised one of the things I didn’t cover was growing it from scratch.
I grew my asparagus from seed and it took about 2 years to be big enough to pick although I really didn’t start picking in earnest until the third year. It grows easily from seed and will readily self seed here. Tino on gardening Australia recommended weeding out the female plants but I have found no need to do this and find the size of the spears on both male and female plants quite acceptable.
Plant asparagus seeds in warm weather in pots or direct seeded.
Asparagus crowns can be bought from nurseries and are available in the winter. They are 2-3 year old plants that have been lifted an divided and these will produce a crop for you in a shorter time frame than growing from seed.
Plants can live for 20 years or more so the bed needs good preparation and plants need at least annual feeding and will benefit from mulching. Watering once a week should be sufficient for established asparagus.

Nematode talk

2009-09-22T10:13:00.003+09:30

I was at a community garden workshop run by Janet Millington and Sonia from transition towns - Sunshine coast on the weekend. In our conversations nematodes came up as a major issue in alice Springs. Many people didn't know what they were or how to keep them out so i thought i'd go through it here
Nematodes are microscopic unsegmented worms. There are many types - some are helpful in th egarden and some aren't. The ones we are talking about here are ectoparasites of plants roots. They latch on to the fine roots of plants and start sucking the goodies out. in the process of doing this the roots develop callus or nodules but gradually many of the fine roots are lost. this reults in plants not being able to take up minerals or water. Plants with nematodes will not crop heavily and will wilt easily in the summer. When you pull them out of the ground they will have distorted nodulated roots and very few fine roots. these nodules are almost succulent and when they dry out they are harder to recognide so try to do this with fresh roots.

What do you do about them?

First you need to establish that you have them and the description above should help you to do this. Plants luke tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini are very susceptile so if they are not doing well you may have to investigate further.

NOTE: some people may muse that if you have nematode problems your soil must be badly balanced, have an underlying problem etc - so you can solve those problems and you don't need to worry about nematodes. If there is such a solution i have not found it, but even if there was it would probably be a whole lot more work. and in my experience this is a turn off for people wanting to grow vegies so much better to keep them out and make your life a whole lot easier.

If you don't have them you want to keep them out! you do this by observing some quarantine rules in your garden.
TOOLS: If you or anyone lese brings in garden tools or wheelbarrows into your garden make sure they are washed - preferably not on your property. all dirt should be removed - wire brushes etc.

PLANTS: Don't accept plants from anyone that have been dug up from someones garden. Even plants that haven't been dug up may have been sitting on soil or have contact with soil. Take cuttings and root them yourself or take seeds and grow them yourself.

MANURE: folklore has it that if you pick up horse manure from the racetrack you may end up with nematodes. They way this probably happens is that when the horse owners pick up th emanure in yards, they also pick up some dirt and this ends up in a manure pile. If you have no choice compost the manure you get in an open heap that heats up to high temperatures for a number of days.

cow manure from the stock yards is a good choice. the cows are confined in yards which no vegetation grows, thus there is no opportunity for nematodes to breed. the cows are fed hay and produce manure which is then scraped up. You should always try to compost your manure anyway to get a more balanced product that is better for plants - and it kills nematodes and other pathogens.
My experience and that of others is that we have had no indication of anyone bringing nematodes home in cow poo
having said that - bringing anything into you yard has some risk attached.

If you already have them what do you do?
there are two ways of coping with nematodes. one way is to manage them with lots of organic matter, compost and green manure crops. you can still produce some reasonable crops of most things.
Your other strategy which you also might try is to find vegetables that are resistant to nematodes and grow more of these. Eg instead of trying to grow silverbeet - grow Amaranth in the summer and kale in the winter. Grow snake beans instead of green beans and grow sweet potato instead of normal potatoes. I have found that more often tropical vegatbles will be resistant and vegetables that have not been highly domesticated - although okra is an exception. ( you can obtain lists of more nematode resistant crops)
Asparagus is unaffected by nematodes - so make sur eyou have some of it!
i use both of these strategies and still gave a productive garden. In the summer i can grow sorghum as a green manure crop an dthen plant into it(after its dug in) in Jan or feb.

Rabbit on the menu

2009-09-14T14:06:00.006+09:30

Breeding rabbits for meat in Alice Springs is not a straightforward thing. Rabbits hate the heat and although they live here in the wild, they live in nice cool burrow systems. The meat rabbit breeds are also appreciably larger than your average field rabbit – and because of this extra sized would find it a bit harder to keep cool.
The old Greek man who bought my first rabbits off in Adelaide warned me. “you need to have a new male each year – they die of heart attack in the hot weather”.
He was pretty close to right – I did manage to get one male through two summers but he was touch and go and very crusty at times (ants trying to eat his genetalia). I had to nurse him through several bouts of heat.
The females seem to fair better – maybe due to being smaller and carrying less fat (the fat goes in the breast milk).
Luckily I have located one lady who breed meat rabbits in Alice and we can swap offspring to keep our breeding genetics strong.

Why to I keep rabbits?
They are in my blood I suppose. I grew up trapping shooting and eating rabbits and my grandad would also process them for sale in pubs. We were eating rabbit all the time – especially when we went to granddads. He would even smoke little ones in his home smoker. Once grandad got too old he kept a few wild rabbits which he would breed up in cages in his back yard. As he became less active in the vegie patch he turned the garden over to Lucerne for the rabbits. Grandad’s brother also keeps rabbits now at 80 plus years old.

During our travels in Europe rabbits kept popping up. In Italy they were always on the menu and we once mistakenly stopped by what we thought was a rustic old bakery with all the bread lined up outside. It turned out that the residents of the town would stop by on their way down the hill and throw out their stale bread to feed the rabbits which were stacked up inside in cages.
In Switzerland the brother of our friend in alice bred rabbits because meat was so expensive in that country.

Rabbits are also a good part of a sustainable system. There are a lot of tings rabbits will ravenously devour that chickens tend to ignore. Big lumps of carrots, cabbage, bread. They will eat all of your broccoli plants that are going to seed including the roots. In short they help to use up more household waste and turn it into useful manure.
You can also feed them a range of garden plants. Saltbush is a favourite and they seem to like all types. Eremophila longifolia is also favoured. I am trying to grow some tagasaste for them as well because of its high protein content.
My friend in Naracoorte fed his rabbits almost completely from Tagasaste (tree Lucerne) which was available in his area.
Even if you fed rabbits totally from pellets, it would still be cheaper than buying rabbits – significantly cheaper. It is my aim however to source as much of their food as possible from local sources. Each weekend I return from the garden plot with a garbage bin full of weeds and plant waste, of which they happily demolish.

Breeding
Once you get the animals up to breeding age – which can be 6 months for some breeds – breeding is fairly straightforward. But…there is still management required. This includes having a number of cages. Cages for nesting mothers, lone fathers and babies which need small mesh to contain them. You don’t want 8 young rabbits running around in the same cage as a mother who is about to nest. You also don’t want the father the mate with the mother soon after birth because she can get worn out.
They take about I month to gestate. Close to the time of birth the mother will start moving around material for nesting and she’ll make a down lined nest with the fur pulled from her belly and legs. Once she has the babies she will only feed them a couple of times in a 24hr period and will appear to ignore them the rest of the time. This is so she doesn’t attract predators to the nest – hares also do this.

My last litter had 14 babies and this is about the upper limit. only 13 of these survived and there were a few runts amongst them that didn't get enough milk

spring flush

2009-09-08T13:42:00.004+09:30

I'm happy to be home when the Asparagus is at its peak! I have had this asparagus for about five years and I get more asparagus and bigger spears each year. I got the seeds from seedsavers and they were called “Brocks Imperial” (I’ll try to save some more seed this year). Needless to say I’ll probably keep growing this variety and passing on the seed. Asparagus must be one of the easiest things to grown in Alice. It loves salty water and seems to thrive in an alkaline soil. I simply cut them down in the winter when they yellow off and pile on the compost or manure. They only need watering once a week due to their massive root system and they are nematode resistant. Pick them for 8 – 12 weeks as rule of thumb – or stop picking before this time if the shoots begin getting thinner and weaker. Pets may include grasshoppers (usually not enough around to be damaging) and slaters may try to munch on the new shoots as the come out of the ground. Grasshoppers will also seek shelter in the asparagus ”bushes” every time you try to catch them in the garden, so go out in the morning when they are slower if you intend on catching them.

The Mulberry trees are also fruiting – perhaps the earliest fruiting seasons I’ve known after our record warm August and above average winter months. The black fruited white mulberry is the first in fruit at our place followed by the “white” fruited white Mulberry. The other Mulberry people grow in Alice is the English Mulberry and this one tends to fruit much later and is a much slower grower than the white mulberry.
The white mulberry is one of the fastest fruit trees you can grow, provides great shade, propagates from cuttings easily, and are nematode resistant. The canes are great for using as garden stakes (and apparently for making bows for bow and arrow sets). The fruit of the white fruited mulberry dries to a sugary little sultana – and these can be stored just like sultanas and used in recipes where sultanas are called for.
The leaves of the white mulberry are apparently high in protein and on par with Lucerne. They are very popular with my rabbits.
The fruits of the black mulberry are also high in an antioxidant or two.
Beware seedling mulberries – these are quite common if you have any areas that get watered. These mulberries that grow from seeds dropped by birds are very often sterile or non fruiting. The known fruiting varieties must be self pollinating and thus do not require any other mulberry. It is possible that some of these sterile trees are actually male trees – because I have heard stories of them shedding pollen (which my mulberries don’t do)

Recipe
mix fresh mulberries with marscapone chesse or ricotta and a drizzle of honey. mix up a bit and you will enjoy!