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.

perfect Pears

My pear was pruned originally by removing the central leader and hanging small pots weighted with rocks to keep the branches low and horizontal. Now my fruit is very easy to reach . I keep all my fruit trees short as I am only short too and I don't need a ladder to pick any fruit . This pear shown is a  3 year old Williams.

The Bunny House

This is about the "Taj Mahal" of Bunny Houses. It is made from recycled materials, like the rest of my garden. It is a 3x3m shed with North facing windows for winter warmth and sunshine. it has a 400mm wide verandah for summer shade on the north. 

The southern side (in the photo below) has a large mesh window area to let the cooling summer breezes in. The bunny house inside is split level as the garden is also split level. 1) the upper vegetable area ; 2) the lower fruit area and chook/bunny run. 

Two feeding chutes made from old plumbing poly pipe can be seen just above Bella, my dog. The larger one is for food and the smaller one on the right is for water. The food goes down the chute easily, saving me from going through the gate and down into the lower part of the garden and opening the large bunny house door, where the bunnies love to rush out for their exercise.

The bunnies come out to play once a week usually and run around the fruit garden, eating the rosemary, and harassing the chooks. To get them to go back into the house, I put some food down their chute and they run back in, except Brownie, who I have had the longest, he's a bit more relaxed about going back in.

In the Taj Mahal, the bunny's have a large old cupboard on its side, that they go into or can sit on, to look out either window. This gives them a chance to exercise and jump inside the house as well.  They also have an old microwave oven with its door and cord removed, which is buried into the bank like a burrow with a brick tunnel leading to it.

Brownie (proud dad) and two babies in the entrance to the "microwave" burrow.

Thunder and Tubs- two bunnies that I adopted from friends.

   

Sunny (RIP) hiding in the cupboard above the "burrow".

A baby bunny.