reading in a beautiful place

was just thinking this morning that one of my greatest pleasures in life is reading something intellectually stimulating and personally grounded, while enjoying a beautiful physical location , like a park on a sunny day, or somewhere indoors with a view on a stormy rainy day, or Coburg square when its humming with activity, or anywhere with jessie sleeping up against my body.

acacias are hardy and molasses kills cabbage moth

so my newest garden lessons are that acacias are hardy - one of the chooks had severely damaged one of my new acacias (acacia myrtifolia), but CERES nursery staff assure me they are hardy and will recover. which is just as well cos they were out of stock and i wanted to grow one!

the other lesson i learnt on-site at the CERES market garden. Meg took me there this week, which at first seemed like a rather boring stuff-around kind of way to spend time, but once we got there was really awesome! Meg was giving a group of Muslim schoolgirls a lesson in organic market gardening - it was great to see these girls in hijab and long skirts shovel and rake compost and then scatter seeds. the most amusing point was when one of the girls said to her teacher "miss, can we take off our skirts" - of course, they were all wearing pants underneath, but i was ignorant of this fact and wondered about the extreme contrast of total covering one minute, stripping the next. under their school outer clothes, many of them were wearing fashionable clothes and they were comparing labels, prices and the availability of "cool" clothes in their local shopping centres. i enjoyed the experience.

anyway, back to the gardening lesson. i wondered how they controlled cabbage moth (which is wreaking havoc with my brassicas at the moment). they spray the leaves with a teaspoon of molasses and a teaspoon of detergent mixed in a litre of water. the molasses kills the caterpillars (which eat the leaves) and the detergent keeps the molasses on. So i came home and sprayed my brassicas. fingers crossed :>

bye bye betty bigbottom?

it seems that betty bigbottom has gone on an adventure. she's not been seen in her coop for over a day now. it's even possible she's been gone since friday (it's monday as i write) - on Saturday I was out all day, and when i went to hang with the chooks on sunday, betty was not there. just alice palace, looking very lonely, but not particularly aware that anything was going on, you know, just pecking around like a chicken. last night, though, she looked so lonely, perched on her bed all alone. betty and alice usually cuddle up together. i suspect alice was chilly without her hotty.

over the last month or so, betty had been getting onto the roof of their coop. i wasn't sure how she got up there - there was a chair in the coop, and i thought maybe she used that, so i removed it. i also clipped their wings (well looked up my chook book and cut feathers according to what it said). and i fenced all the vegie areas of the garden so that i could let them out more often (hoping that would curb her needing-to-get-out-and-about tendencies). but all to no avail. she still kept adventuring. what about alice? well she followed betty.

so, when i discovered that betty was missing (sunday morning), i checked over the fence in the neighbours' yards (no luck), and called to her, and listened. i could hear a chook in the distance, and alice was definitely communicating with a chook. but alas, i discovered that the people who have just moved in two doors down have four chooks and i'm sure that's what i could hear.

a chook has got loose before (i think it was betty that time too!) and jan and i went door knocking to all our neighbours, so i'm assuming that if any of them had found a chook (or an extra chook), they would've said something.

i dreamt last night that betty came home. i'm still hoping. that's what happened last time - one morning (ok, well the very next morning), she was there, she was just back.

she's a plucky one, betty. she has a big bottom, a big fluffy, white bottom. she doesn't like being held and she doesn't communicate much, she just wants to peck on the ground and explore new things. but if you see her, send her home. alice and i miss her.

Nativising the garden at last

So, yesterday i spent a few hours scouring my native gardening books trying to learn more about plants that would work in my garden. by "work", i mean i don't want the to need much water to thrive, i want them to grow quickly, i want them to be native to this area, and of course, i want them to look pretty!

i've been getting into permaculture. now, this possibly sounds wanky, but is actually just about a way of being with the garden, learning by doing and working with the garden, minimising the amount of effort that me or the garden needs to make to produce abundance (e.g. planting things that need to be watered heaps closest to the house). It suits me cos i'm a big nerd, and it is a lot about understanding stuff like soil structure, root depth and ecosystems (e.g. what encourages what, what eats what), rather than just buying heaps of shit and nuking the pests. Well, actually i have been buying a lot - this is definitely my most expensive habit - but i'm learning what needs what.

the garden is a beautiful, lush haven of serenity. there are so many butterflies at the moment, mainly enjoying the calendula that grows on the edges of everything, just outside the vegie patches. and the birds!! the rainbow lorikeet i found the other day was not an unusual visitor, she seemed totally appropriate.

anyway, i'm compiling a couple of lists of "possible" plants for each area of the garden that still has room (ie not the vegie patches). to be considered "possible", a plant has to be native, have low-water requirements, be happy with the amount of sun the area gets, be fast-growing and attractive. then, once i have a list of all the "possibles", then i'll start matching colours, flowering seasons, etc. it's a really nerdy way to garden - i used to just go to the nursery and pick the pretty ones and hope for the best - but this is teaching me so much and it's amazing how much pleasure you can get from a garden when you know more stuff about it. i mean i get so excited when plants do what i predict, like flourish when i water them the way they need (e.g. big drinks instead of surface watering) or grow from tiny seeds into being a proper pumpkin or carrot.

will keep updating on the garden's progress :>

Finished fencing

So, yesterday, i finished fencing off the bits of the garden where i am growing things.

a few days ago, the chooks were on the roof of their house, apparently disgruntled at being left in their coop for about a week without any time in the garden. it was funny cos they could have flown down into the neighbours' garden (which they've done before), except that they have a dog and the dog was in their yard. so the chooks were just sitting on the roof, hanging out.

i realised that i couldn't keep them out of the garden indefinitely. but whenever they have come into the garden, they have eaten and scratched everything in reach. so, i bit the bullet, or rather opened up my wallet, and bought heaps of fencing wire and fenced off all the main areas. and i've put a fence up on the side of the house, so that i can shut them in and have jessie (the dog) out and about. jess killed a chook (emma) in the first few weeks after the chooks started living here, and i've no doubt she'd do the same again given the chance.

anyway, it was a huge job, and i'm not 100% sure it will actually work, cos i wanted to keep the fences low, to keep the garden beds accessible to me, when i want to plant stuff. the chooks could just jump over the fences if they wanted to. but, let's hope they don't!

this morning i finished the gate on the side fence, or rather put the hinges on the gate and nailed in a piece of wood that sticks up above the fence. This bit of wood is there so that i can hang flags along the length of the fence, so that the chooks are deterred from trying to fly over the fence. I'll make the flags some time in the next week or so.