So shine on, harvest moon
Cast your might on the ripening corn
RUNRIG – Harvest Moon
My gamble to plant corn late this year has paid off with gold! Golden corn that is! This week of warm weather in April was exactly what it needed and look at these tasty kernels!!! I’ve never grown corn before, hence my excitement!
I’m planting some tasty greens for autumn/winter soups – a few Asian greens I’ve never tasted individually- tatsoi, yukina, and mizuna red and kale because it’s an incredible superfood.
Also one of my old favourite Dragon’s Tongue Beans. I love the name as much as their beauty.
I’m quite excited as I like growing things that aren’t easily available in the shops and it should be a great learning experience in the garden and kitchen!
Tatsoi
Yukina
Mizuna Red
Kale
Dragons Tongue Beans
Two weeks to go until the baby emerges into the big wide world and I’m reading a lot about gardening, permaculture and dreaming lots about backyard farming — primarily because even walking is a physical challenge at the moment. Even tending the tomatoes is getting a little tricky but luckily our 3.5 year old eats so many, they don’t stay ripe on the vine for long anyway. : ) There is so much I want to do in the garden, but I’m trying to be happy with planning, reading and dreaming about it.
I found this beautiful site called Adventures in Urban Sustainability which is a very inspiring record of one couple and their attempt to create a food forest in a normal backyard in the suburbs near Wollongong, NSW.
Seeing what you can achieve in a normal block made me really happy and excited. Leaving our 20 acre farm felt like a step backwards in my ideal of living sustainability – but I’m really beginning to see that our ‘normal’ house, the timing of moving here, my time off work with our second baby imminent has really created this massive opportunity that I’m not likely to get again. It’s an opportunity to do some really proper planning and design around creating a garden that’s about living and playing space and growing food.
Our house already has solar panels, rainwater, solar hot water and a blank canvas back garden with lots of food growing potential. Already we have dramatically reduced our energy use and reliance on cars compared to the costs of maintaining our farm on the hill.
So, we’re actually ‘greener’ for having moved nearer to town without much effort on our part. It fascinates me to think of what we can achieve when we ramp things up with proper effort.
I definitely miss being surrounded by trees and wildlife- and the ‘feeling’ of living an alternative lifestyle on the farm on the hill – but in terms of living life in a way that is better for the planet – it should be less about the aesthetics and image of where you live – and more about the practical and efficient use of the space in our immediate environment.
Back to the dreaming and planning for now….
Here are some photos of the temporary backyard veggie patch at our new place. Huge effort trying to tend this with a massively pregnant belly so I’m feeling actually really proud and fulfilled about this.
The new place came with veggie beds, but they are neglected and need to be moved, so until then, this teeny tiny patch is my passion.
On Christmas Day we harvested the first of our heirloom potatoes and were bombarded by lovely potatoey flavours. The first batch were grown in straw and we need to harvest and store (in hessian or calico bags) the rest of these this weekend, shortly followed by the other ones grown in soil. Planting in straw has been successful but it’s noticeable that the potatoes planted in soil grew with more vigour and overtook those planted in straw. Whether or not this makes a difference in the actual potato flavour remains to be seen when we unearth those in the next few weeks.
Richard has spent his entire week of annual leave lovingly building a greenhouse. Made almost entirely for free – the framework came from a friends small shadehouse which Richard extended with metal framework from my parents dismantled bird aviaries. The pieces magically slotted together to form this beautiful mega-framework. We had to spend a small amount on a piece of wood, some fixings, compost, gravel and plastic – but all up I think it was less than $100. Pretty impressive. It even has a tap within and a raised bed and will have benches/tables for potting!
The result – an impressively sized greenhouse ready to hopefully supply us with greens over winter and a head start on tomatoes in the spring.
A friend of ours helped Richard dig the flat foundation last weekend (a hell job with pick axe into what is basically rock) and this jump-started the week long project to the point where Richard almost finished completely. Richard didn’t get much rest during this holiday. As you can see from the photograph, Gandalf was the ever helpful cat.
I had my hands full with 2 week old baby Fionna so was only involved as a sounding board for design issues. I think I held a bit of plastic aloft at some stage but that was it. Fionna was fairly happy to sit next to the building site for feeds, but got a little grumpy during the drilling – so all credit goes to Richard for this beautiful structure that I just watched appear before my very tired eyes. I’m hoping Fionna will be happy to spend time out there watching me get my hands dirty. As soon as she can hold her own head up we’ll have a spade in her hand. 
Richard only has a few small bits left to finish, so I’ll add some final images once it is finished, but for us this is a very exciting addition to our small dreams of becoming more and more self sufficient.
Finally managed to plant some vegetable seeds in punnets today which was on my list to do before the baby is born – phew, made it.
- Dragons tongue beans (heirloom) [photo]
- 5 colour silverbeet (heirloom)
- chocolate capsicum (heirloom)
- tomato five colour mix (heirloom)
- okra
- aubergine (eggplant)
- courgette (zucchini)
- big juicy italian tomatoes
April 2007 – a friendly dragon licks my hand with its beany tongue …
Hmmm…well the vegie patch is looking a little bit wild and untamed … it’s sort of a wilderness of edibles amongst a forest of weeds. Heirloom potato seeds will be arriving soon so work will be done soon and the patch will be rescued.
I can’t believe that I haven’t written since Christmas. Although things have moved on around the farm a little, the harsh, dry summer nearly sapped all my enthusiasm. The cost of feeding our cows over the summer stung our average finances and you really start to wonder what it’s all about. I’ve also not been myself at all because for the last three months I’ve been preoccupied with the scary wait of getting through the early stages of my first pregnancy. Having passed that milestone safely, with lots of sleeping and eating I can finally feel my passion, enthusiasm and imagination for the property coming back with the rains and green grass. I’m not sure where I’ve been, but I’m glad to be back.
Vegetables
One important job over the forthcoming weeks are to revamp the vegetable patch for winter. I really haven’t been near it for a few weeks except to pick a few pumpkins and I’m a little scared of the neglect. I have been just too tired to nurture anything else but myself these last few months. I wake up, go to work, come home from work, eat and sleep and repeat the process. On weekends I just eat and sleep. 
I think I’m getting to the better part now although my body is still finding ways to stop me from manual labour. I’ll fight it though – I want big cauliflowers and cabbages on my plate from the garden.
Richard helped a friend dismantle a tiny metal framed shadehouse in his backgarden, and had the excellent vision of extending the frame with some metal from some aviaries dismantled at my parents place. The pieces slot together like a jigsaw puzzle destined to be built. We now have the framework of roughly a six metre by two and half metre greenhouse in our barn, waiting to be fixed and then moved into place. All we need to do is find a suitable fabric to cover it and then we are another step closer to self-sufficiency for vegetables out of season. With a baby on the way the ability to support yourself with home grown organic vegetables becomes even more attractive, there is an increased motivation.
Orchard
Yesterday, we bought and planted Kalamata olive tree for the orchard, and plan to establish the orchard over the next few months. I’m quite interested in using heirloom varieties from Diggers, but we’ll see how we go.
Chickens
We also have a new Sussex hen called Rose and a guest chicken called Bess who is having a return stay at the chicken b & b. Bess is an Isa Brown like our others. We also have five baby chicks, all extremely cute. I missed out on their growing up this time as while I crashed and burned and Richard took on the role of chicken Grandpa. This property is a two person job *at least* so I need to get with it again.
Cows
We sold our last four Hereford cows a few weeks ago. The cost of feeding them was so difficult over the summer and we’ve now had to sell them just to give the land a chance to rest. We are thinking that our next season may be the opportunity to try a small breed, like Dexters, but this time with the intention of growing our our meat. It is the only way to not lose bags and bags and bags of money – something we can no longer do with a extra mouth to feed. I think it’s finally time to grow up and face the truth about rearing our own meat. If we can’t handle it, we don’t deserve to be meat eaters.
Anyway, enough dark tales, now the Autumn is here I can literally feel the life flooding back into me. It’s so strange as my time in the Northern hemisphere taught me to feel autumn as the start of the end, the step towards dormancy, but here in the South, autumn and the promise of winter feels alive.
The new location seems to be working. We have our first yield of young lettuces, there’s a chocolate capsicum on its way, some budding tomatoes, silverbeet, the climbing peas and bush pumpkins are chasing the sun up their trellises. The okra is … where is the okra? I’ve misplaced it. I need to find my original patch plan.
The vegetable patch is alive with the promise of a beautiful summer bounty …(excuse the dead lawn in the photos before but we can’t justify watering it when we rely on rainwater for all our water).
