Back in the garden - Bus life on hold

After over 12 months on the road, living and working from our motorhome (#forkthebus - that's a whole story in itself that you can find on our facebook Finchys Australia page if interested,) we find ourselves living in the driveway at my parents house.

Not far from where we lived at our permaculture property, they have good soil, good rainfall and a temperate climate, although going into Winter now after chasing the sun for the last year feels like the South Pole.
However, mid to late Covid-19 Autumn is a perfect time to get in the garden and plant winter crops.
My dad, (Johnno) and I refurbished and extended his vegie patch.

In southern Australia it's time to plant winter greens and root vegetables. We are planting by the moon and running with a 4 bed rotation system. So we planted vegetables that grow above the ground in the New Moon Phase (1).

Bed 2 is our Brassica's bed which includes leafy greens, silverbeet and spinach etc.

We planted Broccoli, Silverbeet, Perpetual Spinach, Rocket, Mesclun Salad Mix and Baby Spinach.
This bed needs manure and blood and bone turned into before planting. Chicken manure is ideal but needs to be old, anything fresh will burn the new plants. Our new load of soil we had delivered had poultry manure in it already, mostly duck shit, so is ideal for these crops.

In the First Quarter Moon Phase (2) plant above the ground again. We planted into Bed 1.
Bed 1 is our Legumes Bed or peas and beans. We planted Dwarf Peas, Climbing Peas, Climbing Snap Peas and Broad Beans.

The tags I use are old venetian blinds cut up. Write on them with pencil and then rub it off and re-use.
I write the date planted P, the date to harvest H, and any other details that will jolt my memory about their care as they grow. The legume bed only likes organic matter, potash but no nitrogen.

Let it be

After 18 months of not doing anything in my garden, it is flourishing.
Due to many factors affecting my ability to put the regular time into my garden, I have done virtually nothing to it for the past 18 months.

Yet it has still provided fruit, herbs, minimal veg and plenty of habitat for the insects birds and occasional blue tongue lizard.

All the self seeding greens, herbs and even parsnips have provided wonderful habitat for the hoverflies and other small pollinators.

ADD:
A month after this post we sold our property. We had a massive garage sale and sold, gave away or donated all our belongings and began life living in a bus full time on the road travelling Australia.
Our nomad lifestyle website is:  www.finchysaustralia.com

I do miss my beautiful abundant permaculture garden  but still have the opportunity to garden when house-sitting around the country. Our new life on the road is a big adventure and just another chapter.
I am forever grateful for the knowledge I gained from doing a PDC with the Food Forest in Adelaide in 2005 before we built our property. Hands on learning and being creative are two of my all time favourite things to do.

The Garden Gate

I'd left quite a gap when the fence was put up for a decent gate.  A new farm gate costs around a hundred bucks here in South Australia and I thought thats a bit much for a vegie patch.

I have an area in my garden for  "inherited" items that can be repurposed or "upcycled" ! Really, its just a pile of junk but it always comes in handy. I'm sure I inherited this trait from from grandad who in later years "tied it up with wire" or surrounded it with shadecloth.

You may not recognise it but my garden gate was a trampoline in a past life. Made to measure, and with a wheel to take the weight, my garden gate serves several purposes.

1. Its a gate. It keeps things out and keeps things in.  It keeps the roos and rabbits out and keeps the dog in when the chooks are out.

2. It allows me great access with a wheelbarrow or cart. I can pull my car right up to it and unload chook food or a trailer load of sheep manure.

3. With the timber slats it stops the strong southerly winds from over the hill into the garden while still allowing a good breeze through for air flow.

4. I sometimes use it as a dying rack and hook or hang herbs etc over it.

Good bugs I have in the garden

The Hover fly is a good insect to have in my garden.
Adults “hover” to find a place to lay their eggs like around aphid colonies. This is so when the eggs hatch they have an immediate food source.

They are very predacious and love soft bodied insects, such as aphids.
To attract Hover Flies to my garden, I have flowers in the garden all year round, as well as native vegetation in the surrounding gardens.
I don’t use any sprays at all in my garden as I don’t want to harm the “good guys”.

Another good guy we have is the Ladybird. We are very lucky as there is an annual hatchery close by and they hatch in the millions.
Both the adult and larva are predators.
Ladybird larva is quite a ferocious grub and has relatively large legs.
They are greyish black in colour with orange or yellow markings that go across the body and may also be covered in spines or white fluffy material.
They love anything soft bodied including moth eggs, mites, aphids and leaf hoppers. I watched this little fellow on a garden stake enjoying the afternoon sun.

Blue Banded Bees visit

The blue-banded bee is an Australian native bee that has recently begun visiting my garden.

They use a process called "buzz pollination " that involves clinging onto flowers by clamping their legs onto the anther of the flower and contracting their flight muscles so vigorously that the pollen is released. This type of pollination is really useful on crops such as tomatoes, blueberries, cranberries, kiwi fruit, eggplants and chillies. I took this photo of this bee about to buzz one of my hollyhocks.

Blue-banded bees can sting, but are not as aggressive as other bees and are solitary creatures.  Female Blue-banded bees tend to nest in burrows in dried-up river banks, old clay homes, and mortar between bricks, but may also burrow in soft sandstone. We have lots of this type of rock and it can become riddled with bee tunnels. Males don’t build nests, they cling to plant stems to roost for the night.

In Australia the majority of these bees collect their nectar from blue flowers, but they also feed on some non-blue flowers such as the white salvia, tomato and eggplant flowers. They also like my fuschia flowers.

Adult blue banded bees fly only in warm months of the year (October to April) and die before the winter. Immature bees remain sealed in their cells inside the nests during the winter. They develop into adults and emerge when the warm weather returns. Cells at the end contain an egg and food (pollen and nectar) for the larvae when it emerges.

cherry slugs for the first time

I noticed cherry slugs on my cherry and pear tree for the first time last week. As i don't use any chemicals (or even homemade organic mixtures much) i decided to try something else - i sprinkled wood ash over my small trees.  I keep some wood ash in a bucket in my garden shed which i put a cup full into a small empty pot and then used it like a sifter to shake the ash over my trees.

The cherry slugs sit on top of the leaves, unlike other bugs and caterpillars that hang underneath.  It worked, the next morning the slugs had died and most of the ash had blown off. I shook the rest off and today it rained so i know the little that remained won't burn the leaves

Don't ringbark my trees

In my garden I have a small orchard. It is an enclosed area with a corrigated iron fence that also is my chook run and my bunny exercise yard. Unfortunately the bunnies like the apple trees and nibble on them. I have tried many things to deter them, mostly small fences and netting or shade cloth surrounds to deter them.

Over winter I have not done much weeding and many stinging nettles have grown up inside the wire cages at the bottom of my trees. This has also kept the rabbits from touching the trees. Now all my fruit trees have stinging nettles growing at their base.

A trial of a bed of lettuce with nettles around it also proved successful. Just before the nettles flower I put them in my compost. Some compost bays  and bins I let the chook's scratch in and some I like to keep them out awhile, so throwing nettles on top of the bays, stops the chook's as well. I recently made soup with stinging nettles in it. They don't sting when cooked and have good nutritional value.