Rain gardens and bio filters

Rain gardens, bio filters and figs. My spy at the festival of plumbing in Victoria recently sent me lots of goodies. It's all about stopping precious rainwater going straight into stormwater and people, councils and companies are innovating in backyards and in urban catchments.

First of all building a rain garden is something we can all do to stop rainwater flowing directly into the stormwater if you don't have a tank. We need to slow the water down before it hits our stormwater systems. A big slug of water hits the natural waterways with high speed which is damaging. Slowing the water down reduces the damage to the natural water ways. Here is a link to how to build a rain garden. It's easy. Native plants are best and a gravel mulch works well.

Water garden at the Australian National Gallery

In Melbourne councils are trialling bio filters to reduce stormwater impact. An intelligent network of rain gardens to mitigate stormwater flowing into marine systems. The units are modular and use plants to clean the water and slow the flow. Biofilta is the name of the company which builds next generation bioretention systems. Their vision is cities which can adapt to climate change through an intelligent network of these plant-based systems which treat and cleanse the stormwater for re-use in urban areas.

Now for the figs. I love fig trees. Have you heard of the term 'capfrication'? NSW Agriculture does terrific fact sheets where you can find out lots of technical horticultural stuff like methods for pollinating figs. I was planning to plant some along our back fence. Until. Jody Rigby told the festival of plumbing that a fig tree will search over 20 metres looking for water. Wow! I don't want one of those babies searching for my stormwater pipes. So, I will admire fig trees in other people's backyards for the moment.

Chickens are really smart

I looked at the PETA website the other day and in a bid to persuade me to go vego they mentioned how chickens are smarter than cats or dogs in some respects. I was dubious. Until this evening. Every night we have been chasing our chickens to put them to bed. There is always one nicknamed 'speedy' who refuses to be caught and I have been habitually late after spending half an hour or so trying to herd and outsmart this one chicken. We were about to put up fencing wire so we can herd them up into their house.

My husband went outside to put the chickens in their coop this evening but couldn't see them anywhere. To his surprise they had walked up their little ladder and put themselves to bed!!!!! That's smart.

Peter Cundall...sigh!!!

Everyone goes gooey over Peter Cundall don't they? One of our great Australians and he was a migrant of course with a fascinating life story which includes running from the Nazis in World War II on some mountain in Austria. I've posted previously that I have harlequin bugs in the garden. They are nesting in the compost heap. I also have leaf sucking insects that attract the ants. I wasn't quite sure what to do and I have sprayed with a soap spray available from Yates. I'm hoping the chickens might eat the harlequin bugs. I dusted off Peter Cundall's the Practical Australian Gardener and sighed with delight. I don't need the internet! It's a seasonal version with a weekly list of tasks and covers absolutely everything I need to know even though it's about 10 years old. Peter hates the harlequin bugs and says it's imperative to destroy their nests with Clensall or winter oil. White oil will also help with the sap sucking bugs. The harlequin bugs are nesting in my wooden upraised vegetable gardens.  Phase One of our ornamental vegetable garden is complete and I note from reading Peter Cundall that most vegetables need lime in the soil. I'm not going to plant too much straight away as many crops really need establishing in Spring.

I was impressed by the simplicity of Peter's potato garden - find an area you want to rehabilitate and throw good seed potatoes over it then cover with a few nutrients and lots of straw. Just keep piling up the straw and the potatoes and earth worms will transform your soil and you will have a good crop by autumn. Lift up the layers of straw and your crop will reveal itself underneath in abundance.

I'm going to photograph the Chinese garden around the corner and also Anne and Kim's new garden at Dickson which is a showcase for the front yard vegie garden. By the way someone or something has completely stripped my Asian salad green seedlings. They are nought but little stubs. Who or what is it?
I know it's not a possum. It's thrown me the gauntlet  - I wanted that mizuna.

Poultry fanciers

We have five fancy new pets. Five Light Sussex baby girls. Vanilla, Cloud, Ice cream, Flour (plain)...these were originally the names dreamt up by the new pet owners for this white heritage breed which is quite ancient. Astrid asked if she could put a little blue bow on her chook which would be called Vanilla. Those names have changed already but one is definitely called Tallulah and has become my husband's office mascot. Why Tallulah? Just because... but also because of Maisy and Tallulah fame.

I first saw a pretty Light Sussex last year amid a flock of heritage breeds at Boree Creek, NSW and set my heart on the white chook with silvery black markings. I can't quite believe I was able to obtain the seven-week-old chicks from a Goulburn breeder whom I met at the crack of dawn at a building site in Canberra where the birds were produced from a huge truck. We are all pinching ourselves as we have wanted chooks for quite a while now, convinced of their utility in the garden.

Chickens really do make fantastic pets. The sustainable chook house designed, built and installed by Sonya Kershaw of www.canberrachooks.com.au is amazing, attractive and ideal for kids. Built of recycled timber, it is fox proof, insulated against Canberra winters and ergonomic. On stumps, the little house is easy to reach. Imogen has already trained the chicks to roost on their perch and they are starting to walk up and down their little ladder which ramps up to the chook house.

They have become accustomed to the large area in our backyard that is now their free range and wander around together chirping joyfully and pecking the dirt for bugs. I instantly relax just watching them peck away so happily. We have already started to put out our vegetable scraps for them and I've been told they'll eat anything although there's a few things they definitely shouldn't have such as chocolate.

Jacqui French's chook book is apparently the bible for chook nurturing. I must get a copy but I have found some great sites on the internet including a Youtube video showing how to clip their wings. You only clip one wing so they can fly a bit to escape predators. A friend told me her chicks the same age were taken by crows in Ainslie so we hope the little family survives into adulthood. They should start laying in 20 weeks or spring time.

I look forward to after-school suppers of egg and toast. I'm told once you have your own eggs it's very hard to go back to shop eggs.

Compost and mulch accelerant

Too early for eggs but they have been producing heaps of poo which is already going into my compost system. I'm extremely pleased to discover that our new compost product - leaf mulch - is accelerated by chicken poo which is hot in the nitrogen scale. My sheep poo is 'cold' and won't burn my plants but chicken poo is definitely 'hot'. As hygiene is really important in preventing chicken diseases we change their bedding straw regularly and place it straight into the compost near the chook house - so convenient. We also have a large receptacle made from chicken wire and star pickets. Our street is lined with the controversial plane tree - incredibly hardy as a street tree but highly allergenic and with leaves that don't break down well and nasty seed pods.

We discovered last year, however, that leaf litter makes another form of 'gold' and now know that the plane tree leaves can break down after years of sending them off site in tidy bags to landfill. I read with glee that its moisture retaining properties, once mouldy, are the equivalent of non-sustainable peat and spaghnum moss products. It has to sit undisturbed for two years to form the precious dark leaf mould which can then be used as mulch and soil additive. However, the addition of CHICKEN POO accelerates its breakdown by half that. Yippee! After trucking in loads of pine bark mulch and discovering later that it strips too much goodness from the soil in its chemical exchange, I'm really keen to create mulches as part of a natural cycle from our garden clippings and leaves. Many of the leaves started to crumble while we were off-site when the house was being renovated and I noticed they turned a lovely dark colour helped along by all the rain.

Bellchambers produce

The chickens arrived in a hurry as their breeder happened to be working in Canberra last week and my vague inquiry pending a gate in our backyard morphed into...'meet me tomorrow at the crack of dawn'. So keen was I to snap these babies I said 'yes of course' and my long suffering but equally super keen husband had to whip up a makeshift gate that night to protect our chicks from escape and the dog. After collecting the box of chicks I tried to find some chick feed which has special additives that protect against coccidiosis.

Our chickens were a bit muddy! They love their perch.

That was how I discovered the magical world of Bellchambers Produce (established 1948). The man on the phone was soothing with his encyclopedic knowledge of seven-week old chicks and their needs and just as impressive in person as he reeled off exactly how much the little darlings will eat while growing and calculated what they would need. When I arrived it was like stepping into the wizard shop from Harry Potter but for gardeners. Beautiful wooden feed bins filled with various forms of stock for bunnies, chooks, horses et al; advertisements for horses and miniature pigs stuck to the long old-fashioned wooden counter and gardeners' goodies tucked in everywhere. They do gardening supplies and stock feeds and home deliver. So different to your big pet barn or big feed supply place - I was completely charmed by this little patch of old-worlde commerce and rural expertise tucked away in Yallourn Street, Fyshwick.

Here are the photos of our new arrivals - some of the photos are a bit dark as it really was dawn.

Sonya Kershaw designed, built and installed the Free Ranger.

Proud new pet owners.

Maybe this is Tallulah...

Ornamental vegetable gardens

Great climbing branches near the hedge

I am looking forward to creating an ornamental vegetable garden in my front yard. I declare that vegies in the front yard are terribly fashionable. We heard (from our neighbours whom we love!!) that a Chinese lady up the road had a vegetable garden in her front yard. We went for a wander and saw the most beautiful garden packed with rows of produce all beautifully positioned and profuse. The garden was offset by the festive lanterns she had hung in the front windows of the house.

Rosemary hedge outside the Albert Hall, Canberra

Clive Blazey emphasises the importance of the vegetable garden looking neat and shows some of the French gardens and at Dromana with box hedging enclosing impossibly beautiful vegetable gardens. This is going to be challenging for me because I am not neat. I have decided that rosemary hedging is the go for my border. Tough, ornamental and edible. Recently my friend W. and I were over at Albert Hall listening to baroque music as you do. We soaked up the romance of this classical-style building and W. mentioned that most older couples in Canberra met at Albert Hall dances in the 1940s or thereabouts. We explored the building in the moonlight and once we got outside to gaze at the secret turret, stumbled upon the most handsome clipped rosemary hedge planted in a little parterre around a sundial. I was so taken with it that I had to go back and take photos. It happens to be located next to a heavenly Atlas Cedar which looks like it is compulsory for climbing. In the daylight I noticed the rosemary plants were double planted. Perfect for the formal vegetable garden. We also discovered a secret underground art gallery - I will show you images in another post.

What I love about the formal front vegetable garden is that not only does it pay respect to our multiculturalism - think olive trees, grapevines and tomato plants in the front garden - but it carries on a tradition started by those whose forebears arrived in convict days on these harsh and strange shores. The early settlers slashed all the angophora around the harbour and built slab huts (with picket fences for posh people). On each side of a central path vegetables were planted so that every possible inch of space could produce food. This was of course necessary given the trials and tribulations the early settlers faced. They could have asked the local people for help with identifying bush foods but didn't and nearly starved but eventually were able to grow their own food.

Nowadays in our era of abundance the front vegetable garden is symbolic and a little bit cheeky for other reasons - growing food in the era of mass production takes on a new significance. It is water hungry but practical and useful. My last post about Paul Tranter mentioned oil crises and possible threats to global food production and the need to work cooperatively and share produce in our neighbourhoods. It makes a lot of sense and we made lots of connections in our community establishing that Dr Tranter lives locally and is a generous and well-regarded speaker and thinker. His words are responsible for why I now have a large hole up the backyard created by my enthusiastic little team of diggers. I think I need to buy a Pawlonia Sacred Dragon tree just for my little diggers to plant and watch it grow like crazy over the next few years. They are very keen to plant a tree and this one should reward small children with impressive growth.

This week our other beautiful neighbour Bob handed fresh cut beans over the fence. He cut them on the diagonal and we were able to steam them right away with some other vegies. Delicious. I intend to grow beans up large tripods in our front yard ornamental vegetable garden. I'm thinking of cabbages in rows for aesthetics and then swathes of artichokes to make a silvery statement and punctuate the neat rows.
We are going to wheelbarrow in compost soil from the backyard, add in the sheep manure and cover each mound with weed mat. Clive Blazey recommends this technique with cutting through the weed mat to place the seedlings. Can't wait to get started.

Crookwell potato festival

We couldn't miss the Crookwell Potato Festival. It was a beautiful drive and a great afternoon outing. The whole town seemed to have got behind the festival which took place on the local sportsground with all the fun of the fair including spudlympics and old fashioned sack and egg and spoon races for the kiddies. We gorged ourselves on massive baked potatoes with bacon and sour cream, potato pancakes and bangers and mash with fried onion and real gravy in polysterene tubs.

Astrid and I met some real potato farmers who were running the potato seed stall showing all the different varieties of potato which come out of the ideal growing conditions of Crookwell. An unexpected highlight as we were leaving was the discovery of a sock company in Crookwell which sells locally made socks from Australian wool dipped in colourful dyes for a rainbow effect. Lindner quality socks at www.lindnersocks.com.au or visit the shop and factory at 6 Goulburn Street Crookwell on a Saturday. What a charming town and a fabulous festival! The gentleman farmer of Crookwell was there with the lady farmer of Crookwell and their charming grandchildren.

Sebagos

The gentleman farmer of Crookwell with newest loved one.

Potato fever!

Our children need skills to save their world

I just read a compelling piece by Paul Tranter about the need to prepare our children for an uncertain world by teaching them how to grow their own food and generally be resilient. It is part of a piece on child-friendly cities and how we must develop child-friendly spaces and cities for our children who he describes as 'indicators' of healthy environments. He predicts and plans for an uncertain future where our children will need to know how to grow local food in the event of a range of crises including oil shortages, climate change and population stress as the world absorbs the inevitable impacts of climate change.

Let our kids dig in the dirt.

I must confess I don't let my children dig in dirt as much as I should and they love it - only a few days ago they asked me for a shovel and started digging holes just for fun. I started to get uptight about it because of the mess but I will resolve to encourage them to dig anything they want as long as they are touching the earth!

He said our children need to learn practical skills such as how to grow their own food at home, at school and ultimately in the community. Currently we educate our children in schools to fit into our complex, corporatist and consumerist world based on economic growth and oil resources but this model is already outdated. They will need to be resilient and to adapt to change and learn some basics as the world we know starts to fall apart at the seams. That's why the kitchen garden program is vital for our children's future.

It's all good however, as no matter how bad things get...and they will get bad....change is an agent for good and will force us all to develop alternative technologies and survive and regenerate our battered planet.

Schools should become a place where children learn to be creative and part of a cooperative community that can grow food, tackle solutions to alternative energies and innovate. Currently our children depend on us to drive them to activities in their highly scheduled lives - we need to change and our cities and spaces need to change to enable children to explore and play. Even our front yards should be places where children can interact within their community, play, explore, dig in the dirt and grow stuff.

Being part of a robust connected community is good for our health and will help us respond better to future crises such as global food shortages if we have the networks to act cooperatively and share food.

Create a garden in an old car

There has been an alternative movement in urban communities to grow gardens in old cars. What a great idea. Have a look at this car garden 'how to' website in the Netherlands. Very cool!

http://www.autotuin.nl/cargarden.html

Peru's International Potato Centre

After the Crookwell Potato Festival you may want to visit the International Potato Centre in Peru. A well-travelled friend sent me this link saying this was on her list of places she'd like to visit. Our taxpayer dollars help fund this through AusAID and they are doing great things like developing iron-enriched super potatoes. Iron is the most common nutritional deficiency in the world and potatoes are a good alternative to meat. Thanks for this link W and I'm sure their souvenir shop is exciting!

International Potato Centre

The Crookwell Potato Festival

The gentleman farmer of Crookwell asked me to mention the Crookwell Potato Festival which is on this weekend. It is inaugural no less and celebrates a century of spud cultivation in Crookwell.

http://www.crookwellpotatofestival.com.au

I've been thinking about the potato lately as I've watched some self seeding plants in our compost heap - I can't bear to eat those bland varieties from the shops anymore but love a nutty flavoured Kipfler with that yellow creamy flesh.  I recall you have to keep piling up the soil around the potato as it grows which is why people recycle car tyres as a perfect growing vessel. There are pros and cons for using old car tyres due to oily nasties but if you were worried - you could grow potatoes in one of those new fangled vegie bags and keep piling up the soil around it as it grows deeper.

Our neighbour, an original resident of the area, grows potatoes in a large vegetable bed down the back yard and I recall seeing my daughter chat to him as he dug his spade into the soil one day. She was enthralled watching him dig his potato patch and for a moment I absorbed the scene and felt very fortunate to live where I do. One year he gave us about four different varieties of spuds which we were able to roast.

I noticed loads of the little red rather geometrically shaped bugs on my compost potato plants and heard on the ABC radio gardening show that if you want to get of them you need to find their nest and spray them with something nasty ish.

Possum harmony with sacrificial chillis

Dr Doug the seasoned wildlife observer says it may not be possible to live in harmony with the possums especially if they are in your roof. They are of course strongly territorial and wander through the suburbs feasting on vegies that may be quite far from their tree houses. Sacrificial chilli plants is his suggestion. Plant them around the veggie bed and they may sample the chillis and be deterred.

Pawlonia Dragon Tree

I've been reading about the Pawlonia Dragon Tree and I'm sorely tempted to plant one just to see what happens. Sounds like Jack and the Beanstalk although I can't imagine it would grow terribly well in Canberra as our climate is not really like Asia.  They're on sale though. Apparently there are problems with wood borers and you have to fertilise it and treat for bugs to get it going but then it grows to an enormous height in three years.  It looks very beautiful and I note it's being used for reforestation and even whizz bang surfboards.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulownia