Codling Moth

Blech - the thought of these burrowing around inside my apples gives me the heebie jeebies.

Every year since we've been in this house (5yrs) our apples (and pears to a lesser degree) have been inundated with codling moth. I've never been too bothered about it and we've just let the fruit fall off and rot (sounds terrible doesn't it!). Remember, when we embarked on this permaculture garden thing back in March when I was planning it all, we had a large line of very tall trees cutting our lower section off from our sights. It was so overgrown with grass that it wasn't usable land unless we upkept it - which we never did!

I hadn't really thought too much about the fruit trees this year with getting everything else up and running, but it's been bugging me (hehe) about how to manage this problem.

In tonight's organics course class I asked the tutor on the best course of action. It's too late in the year to wrap the trunk to stop the caterpillars crawling up the tree (the best time to wrap is in winter and remove it in spring). So, I think I will go on the hunt for some moth traps. They are hung from the trees and baited with pheromones to attract and trap the moths.

Garden Envy

I know I don't need to be suffering from it! *sigh* I knew I shouldn't have looked at online pictures of some beautifully groomed raised garden beds full of veges all ready for harvesting. Then to compare them to my au naturale permaculture garden without borders to allow for the chicken tractor to be easily moved on and off, full of weeds and long grass since I'm saving my energy rather than picking them out when I am not ready for needing the space at this stage...*sigh*

I have my supplies!

I've been procrastinating - but today I put my bum into gear and went and sourced myself some supplies for ginger beer making. I needed to get a food grade bucket with lid, some bottles (we don't buy anything in plastic bottles anymore), ginger powder and tartaric acid (one of the recipes required it, so at least I have it on hand now). I'm sure I could have found cheaper than going to the local brewing supplies shop, but I really wasn't up for driving around to find what I might be after for the best price, so took what I could find which happened to be enroute elsewhere.

Just a bit of chit-chat

Nothing too much going on in the garden really - we're kind of in between with plants growing, seedlings doing their thing and not a lot else going on. But at least we have sunshine and no blowing gales - I've been feeling on edge at not being able to get out into the garden even if to just to hang with the chickens!

SO...

~ We collected 3 eggs today. I am relieved to finally know that I do have 3 girls in there, I was starting to wonder. One of the eggs was really big and the size of a full size egg - I'm wondering if it came from the black chicken since she is a bit larger than the other two.

~ Two of the chickens now let me pat them and pick them up, I love stroking their silky feathers. Nathan's dying to have a pat of them too.

~ I found a starling (bird) inside their coop this morning when I went down to feed them! Bizarre! It flew out easily when I went over the opposite side of the coop and it found it's way out - was like it was never in there. The chickens weren't phased.

~ A pair of ducks were in my driveway this afternoon - maybe I'm turning into the Bird Lady??!!

~ Planted out another lot of seedlings - beetroot, brocolli, lettuces, leeks, cucumber, cabbages

~ Have put stakes in the ground for my tomatoes and sunflowers for when they need it

~ My strawberry plants have flowers

~ Bought myself some yoga DVDs - have really missed going to classes, but my post-baby pelvic floor muscles shame me everytime - so need to do it in the safety of my own home!

Found me a ginger beer recipe...

I've been on the hunt, and there are so many out there and I've already found a few I want to trial. So while I've got the Living The Good Life book in my hands, I thought I'd take note of it here for later reference since the book will be returned to the library in a few days. Will do my comparisons with other recipes later on to figure which one to go with first. This recipe appears to be a quicker method than some which feed the plant over a week or so prior to adding the water.

Step one
2 teaspoons dried yeast
4 teaspoons sugar
1 cup warm water

Step two
4 cups sugar
2 teaspoons grated lemon zest
2 tablespoons ground ginger or 4 tablespoons fres grated
2 teaspoons tartaric acid
4 litres hot water
4 litres cold water

Stir the step one ingredients together in a glass and leave them in a warm place.
Put the first four ingredients from step two into a large clean bucket, add the hot water and stir until the sugar has dissolved. Then add the cold water. When the liquid has cooled to only just warm add the yeast mixture from step one. Cover the bucket and leave for 1-2 days then strain into bottles. Fill each to within 3 cm of the top. Add 1 teaspoon of sugar to each bottle, cap and shake well to dissolve the sugar. Place in a warm spot for 1-5 days. The liquid will expand in the bottles over that time. Refrigerate for several hours before drinking. Makes about 10 litres.

Don't know about the kids...

...but today is the kind of day that I love to think back on. I sometimes wonder what things the kids will have memories of when they are adults and hope that these sorts of days make it into them.

Today was a family day and full of...

- Blue sky, sun and just a gentle breeze

- Me digging up the next vege patch while Simon cut up more of the firewood for next winter and the kids pottered around keeping the chickens out of the vege patches and playing in a pile of sand

- Taking a break and deciding on an impromptu picnic lunch in our garden which we haven't done before (well not down in amongst the vege's anyway); so out came the picnic mat, plates of fresh food, mugs of water and sitting under the pear tree in the shade watching the chickens and hoping we'd see them laying their eggs (no such luck, think they knew they were being watched even from a bit of a distance)

- Collecting the eggs later on with Danielle and just sitting down on the grass and chatting about them for a good 10 minutes while picking buttercups and putting them in our hair

- A bike ride down to the beach

Roll on more sunny days...

Is it straw or is it hay?

My last post jogged a memory back to when we got the chickens. We went out to get the girls from a breeder. There were geese, hens, roosters just all wandering around everywhere. Nathan got out of the car and proceeded to talk to the owner's father who was visiting her and he said to him "those chickens have hay in there!". The father corrected him by saying "no, that is straw". I'm standing there going "hmmm, yeah" and it got me wondering just what hay was and what straw was?! So upon arriving home, off I went a googling and now know...

Straw is dried stems of cereal grains (like wheat, barley and oats) (sidenote: wonder how this will affect Nathan and his gluten intolerance if he comes in contact with it??)

Hay is mowed grass, dried and used as fodder

So, I knew about hay, but not about straw - now I do!

Straw Everywhere!

So, I was checking out the weather forecast yesterday evening and noticed that we were going to have a fairly cold overnight temperature and was a bit concerned that there would be a frost (it's been freaky cold enough!). After having lost my last lot of beans a month ago and now that the new beans have sprouted and the old ones have new growth I didn't really want to risk it again - not to mention my huge potato plants and corn all coming along nicely (the other greenery seems to be pretty hardy against the cold and survived before...). I decided to bring down the straw bale that I have for the chickens nesting box and started to spread it all around. What a peaceful, still night it was. WELL - of course today it's all windy and blowing it all around! What a mess. So this morning I went down (no frost afterall) and pulled away the straw and tucked it around the plants as a mulch. I suppose it follows that I have an organic-looking no-work yard with things all over the place. I'm now claiming to follow the Fukuoka method LOL (I was doing my homework last night for my course and we were covering the history of organic horticulture) who advocates "no tillage, no fertilizer, no pesticides, no weeding, and no pruning"

A budding photographer - or maybe not...

I was downloading my pics this evening and found masses of photo's that Nathan had taken yesterday. Here's one that is kind of appropriate really that he took yesterday while I was talking to Simon. Not that I spend ALL of my day at the computer! Afterall, someone's been down in the garden planting it out and growing little seedlings... Now, THAT'S what I need a pic of, me doing some gardening.

Oh, and me, being asked to do this pose today??!!

Nathan's living the good life

Nathan enjoys looking at the pictures of "Caleb" in my Living the Good Life Book - guess he sees the fun photos of things that he's up to. So today he wanted to have his photo taken holding *our* chicky eggs just like Caleb!

We're up to 2 a day now, so I feel the girls are getting the right amount of protein needed.

The BBQ's have begun!

Yep, it's that time of year. The clocks have changed, we're onto daylight savings time and things are finally warming up.

It's been a bit of a social weekend. We've had a couple of bbq's, plenty of laughs and fun and wine and beer with friends, the children entertaining themselves and late nights into bed.

Not a lot of gardening going on, and I swear those potato plants keep growing significantly higher everytime I go down to the garden and require more soil to be piled up around them!

I went to a local Sustainability Expo this afternoon with Nathan and ran into many people we knew - what a community, love it!

An abundance of this too...

I have fumitory in many places too - the chickens seem to really love it and if I throw a handful in they will just stand there and peck away for ages till it's all gone. At least on days when there are minimal green scraps from the kitchen to give them if I've composted it instead I can throw a large handful of this stuff to them. The patch their tractor is currently residing on doesn't seem to have much in the way of interesting weeds in it it seems, so I've been hand picking interesting looking things to toss in and see what they do with it.

The "Real" Dandelion

I have a friend who is right into "weeds for medicinal purposes" (and I'm talking about the legal type here!) and it's great when she comes over to point out what's what. It's not something I've ever really been interested in, but I find the more I hang out in my garden, the more I am interested in what is naturally growing in my garden environment. Weeds are such a telling sign for what type of soil you have and I now see them as a beneficial addition to a garden (for the most part!). I was reading a book which was very much into a natural organic garden where the author would leave all self seeded plants exactly where they were because they were there for a reason - and rightly so. She also had a section on weeds and talked a bit of dandelion plants. That was a bit of a learning experience. What I had always thought were dandelions are in fact not - and are actually known as "false dandelions" LOL. BUT, today while down in the garden as the kids played in the mud that had accumulated around the base of the bath/trough I spotted a Real Dandelion.

The differences...

The Real Deal
The leaves are smooth and soft and not shiny
The leaves stand upright off the ground
The flowers are borne on a single pale green stem

The Imposter
The leaves are hairy and glossy
The leaves are dark green and lie flat on the ground in a rosette
The flower stems are borne on tall, branching stalks with many flowers in a candalabra

Dandelions are a useful addition to salads and contain iron, silicon, magnesium, sodium and calcium, high in vitamin A, B1, B2, C and small traces of a few others. So, off to munch on my dandelion plant and soak up the goodness...

The many uses of wood ash

A few months back I cleared out the fire box of the wood ash and kept it down in the garage *sure* that I could reuse it for something!

I've occasionally come across uses in my readings on gardens and chickens so thought I'd put a bit more (small amount!) reading into it.

It is alkaline in nature and acts as a good liming agent useful in soil - it will raise the pH. Only half as much is required though and is best avoided for plants that like acidic conditions. The type of wood burned (soft or hard) will affect the alkalinity.

So I have added some as a fertilizer to my soil that will have the tomatoes planted in a few weeks time and a light layer has been added to my compost.

Good as a snail and slug deterrent if sprinkled around your at-risk plants as the fine dust will clog up their ability to move and with the snails will stop them from retreating back into their shell.

It is also good for chickens to dust bath in. So this afternoon I filled a low tub and placed it in the chickens coop for them to bath at leisure if they choose since things are still a bit mucky out there.

A good dusting!

Today when the chickens were out for a romp while we tended to the garden for a while they headed straight for a bare patch of ground with a dip and proceeded to have a dust bath. It was certainly interesting to watch and the first time I've seen them do it. They all squished in together and rolled around and preened each other. I'm hoping they are just doing it as a normal preventative thing and not coz they've actually got mites/lice...???

Rain, rain, go away...

Well, we've had weeks of fairly persistent rain. We've had the odd half day's respite, but it's been pretty relentless. I have hope though. This afternoon the clouds parted and the sun came out and it was warm. Not much of a breeze though to shift that humidity and moisture that seems to have permeated into the house and everything within it.

At least I managed to get one load of washing dry that's been on the drying rack for a few days, switched clothes off the nappy drying rack so I could put out my nappies which were getting down to the last one. I used up the last tonight and fortunately there will be dry ones for the morning.

It's the spring weather that makes me long for a clothes dryer.

I don't have problems in winter trying to dry clothes with having the woodburner to toast them all off in front of overnight (not to mention that over winter we didn't have nearly as much rain as what we have in the last few weeks!). But with it not being cold enough in the evenings to light a fire now, yet having wet days for days on end it really does make for a bit of juggling of things.

All this rain has also escalated a Roof Problem that I kept hoping would go away. We have a leak in one of our lounge skylights that leaks periodically (depending on the wind direction I think). So we've also bit the bullet and decided to have the entire roof replaced since it's starting to get rust holes all over the show and it won't be long before there are leaks elsewhere. Since we have fully committed to staying in this home for the long term it will definitely be a worthwhile investment. No more waking in the middle of the night to a downpour sending Simon out to put a bucket under the drips when I should be snuggling down and enjoying the sound of the rain on the roof.

Living the Good Life - the book

I borrowed this book from the library a couple of days ago (well actually, rather than me making a special trip down there, I had Simon pick it up for me on his way elsewhere) and I can't put it down. I'm 1/4 of the way through it and really enjoying it! I briefly heard of this book about 6mths ago, but kept forgetting about it until a few weeks back. Their journey is really inspiring. I love the recipes interspersed throughout, the funny stories, the successes and the failures. I'm also wanting to read Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life at some stage but have a pile of books to make my way first and hoping that my local bookshops will have it back in stock.

All that rain...

...has been great for my plants! I was pleasantly surprised. I really did wonder how the garden would hack it. We had torrential downpours for days. The soil has drained off quite nicely though and I noticed that a lot of the older seedlings have really grown quite a lot (or maybe it's just coz I never really looked at them closely over the past week instead of twice a day as I had been!). None got knocked over with the rain, although I am wondering if any of my seeds will germinate that I happened to sow the day the rain started. The ground has turned quite hard on those beds and compacted down, so not sure how the seedlings will even be able to pop through the surface! I will wait a few weeks before deciding what to do with them.

An egg a day...

Since we reassessed the chooks diet and increased their daily intake of pellets we have been rewarded with one egg a day. I'm still hoping for more, but I'm just happy that there's been an improvement. Today was the first day in a week that we've been able to let them out for a run around since the weather has been so terrible (and I only have them out when I'm down there too). One of them even slipped through the fence into the neighbours, so a quick shimmy over the fence by me sent her back through and the hole blocked up. She was being quite frisky today and flying up onto the coop and off again and making a right racket - I reckon she is our late layer (around 2pm) since she was racing around weirdly and in our out of the layer box the entire hour I was down there and once I put them back inside and then checked 1/2 hr later there was an egg there waiting for me.

I'm finally harvesting...

Well, if you can count three spinach leaves! It's strange, because I've been growing all my seedlings from seed, it seems almost *not real* having grown some plants from store bought seedlings. That's silly, coz they are still homegrown by me and have survived! These were my replacement plants since I kept breaking the stems of my own seedlings before I figured out my transplanting technique was a bit nervous and holding on too tightly lol.

So, the kids and myself enjoyed spinach chopped into our scrambled eggs with our own parsley and one of the eggs was our own. Then the remaining leaf which wasn't needed in the scrambled eggs went into our fried rice for dinner.

A bit of education

Quite timely really, but I was emailed information on an Organics course that is being run at the local polytech - the tutor will be the woman who did the permaculture discussion that I went to a few weeks back. So starting tomorrow night, once a week I'll go along and soak it all up for 6mths.

My potato experiment

I had some seed potatoes left over today after planting out another bed. So I decided to see how easy these things really are to grow and what sort of conditions they do ok in. I hear often that potatoes will grow in any sort of soil.

So, some ended up in my mulch/kinda compost pile - very loose type arrangement with compost at the bottom. There were about 7 put in there. Then I plonked another half a dozen or so up on my front lawn area in the designated herb spiral which only has a few herbs in it so far, that's fairly sandy once through the top thin layer where the grass is.

There's nothing like learning through experience.

Grrrr to all this rain

I'm really hoping all the rain we've had over this week is not going to wipe out all my seedlings and wash away all the seeds. Some of the older more robust plants seem to be doing fine and I don't think they have too wet feet. Ah well, we'll see what happens.

I've been sewing!

OK, so no pictures just yet, but my evenings this week have been spent at my machine.

I made a couple of cushion covers for my mum using a couple of long linen dresses (they actually belonged to my mum and she wanted a gift made out of them). Just need to find some buttons or domes to do them up.

I've made my rice bags and just need to get the rice to fill them - made from the linen napkins I got from the op-shop.

Nathan now has a pair of pirate pants which is to be a part of his Christmas gift - they were refashioned from an old skirt of mine. I was able to use all the darts, side seams and waistband - so was only about 5mins of sewing! Just need to figure out how to make the shirt now.

The garden as of today!

The lower garden where most of the action is going on!

You can see the edge of the bathtub at the bottom of the picture, it's sitting in it's frame and waiting for the piping to be attached with a bullcock valve (why can I not find much on the net for those who don't know what one is - perhaps there is a more "official" name for them??).

My vege plots are all rather square and straight-lined looking, but there is nothing about straight lines with the plantings inside them (aside from my carrots, onions and potatoes). They have been planted closely only allowing space for what each full grown plant requires. So rarely are there two same plants alongside each other either. Can't wait till it all grows up random and natural looking.


Here is the garden up by the front of the house (the herb/kitchen garden is to the right of this picture). I harvested the rest of my brocolli's a few weeks back and now we've got some lettuces, leeks, strawberries, pumpkins all placed up here somewhere.


And this is my front porch (front door just to the right of the picture) with all my seedlings growing. Gets great sun, good shelter and being up there I remember to tend to them!

A dilemma

Feeding the dog
Feeding the chickens
Feeding the compost

That is the dilemma.

It's finding the balance between $$ spent, return to the garden and feeding the animals.

Prior to the chickens moving in we were feeding the dog all the household food leftovers from the day - a lot! He was actually getting too much and put on weight.

Prior to the chickens moving in the compost was a lovely, nutrient rich growing heap of organic matter.

Now...

The chickens now get a good portion of the left over scraps, all the vegetable scraps (except citrus and onions since they don't seem to care for them) and the odd topping up of pellets when there doesn't seem to be much "cereal" based scraps (as in the kids rice porride, Simon's left over weetbix crumbs from the end of the box or bread crusts).

The dog has lost weight and we are once against supplementing his diet with dog food.

The compost only receives pumpkin skin, onion skin, citrus skin and grass clippings/vacuum cleaner dust.

The only thing really benefiting are the chickens (and the dog's health). However, I suspect they could be laying more eggs than they are (only 1 or (very occasionally!) 2 eggs in 2 days from three chickens).

So! (Gee, what a long winded lot of waffle this is...)

I will give the chickens a full diet of laying pellets/wheat, they free range most days and get fresh grass under their tractor once a week - so a nice rounded diet I think. We hopefully will see an increase in egg production. The extra $$ spent on buying in what they need will hopefully pay off in a few ways and actually lasts quite a while - being bantams, they require less calories than full size chickens).

The dog will go back to getting the majority of the cooked food scraps, but only as much as he needs and the surplus goes to the chickens. Saving on $$ here again.

The compost receives all vege scraps from the kitchen again. Savings on $$ so I don't have to buy any in and the benefit of it being organic.