weekend jobs

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

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

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

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.

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

 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?

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.