September garden

Here is what happens when you mulch the garden beds and then don’t go outside in daylight for the next three months.

It goes mental.

Here’s what’s happening in this photo. In the foreground are some brassicas – purple brussel sprouts and sprouting broccoli - that started out in a garden bed to the left. This bed gets pretty much zero direct light, so I don’t know why I bothered planting in it – it’s great for lettuce in the summer but that’s about it. Anyway, because it gets no light the brassicas did nothing for three months, then escaped the beds to find some sun. Now they’re actually sprouting and I haven’t the heart to pull them up because they are finally doing something.

There’s a raised garden bed at the back of this photo. Behind all the seeding rocket. Also, three mostly-clear beds which you can’t see because they’re behind weeds.

(Please excuse the horror in the shed, and the drying washing looking for some sun)

In the ongoing battle with the three cornered jacks, if it’s not a three cornered jack, or in a place where I want to plant something else, it gets to stay.

I was going to just mow the weeds this weekend, but I’ve come down with some horrible disease (feeling very sorry for myself at the moment)  so the most I managed was this:

Hypothetically that’s a herb bed. There’s still some sage, and a parsley bush going mental – those are big stalks of parsley that I hacked off and used as mulch, at the front. There’s also a tonne of self seeded silverbeet, which is excellent. I’m mostly going to plant tomatoes and leafy stuff this year, since that’s mostly what I eat, and it’s also hard to buy good quality greens etc. I will eat pretty much 100% of all tomatoes and leafy greens I grow, so it’s a lot of bang for the gardening buck.

Tomatoes are stupidly expensive at the moment because of the Queensland shenanigans – I went to a farmer’s market on the weekend where there was a single stall with non-blemished tomatoes. They were $8 a kilo which is actually pretty good (it’s up the $12 in the supermarket near me) and there was an absolute scrum to get to them. I just bought blemished ones at $4 a kilo and they’re very nice, thank you. But not the same as home grown ones.

I’ve given up on curcurbits, even though I’ll eat all the zucchini I can get, because something nearby has powdery mildew – I blame my own and the neighbour’s frangipanis – and I just can’t fight it. Besides, they’re cheap in season and pretty easy to buy good ones. So I’ll concentrate on silverbeet, lettuce and rocket, all of which I’ve grown with great success. See: massive rocket weeds above. The flowers are very pretty, I think. They WERE moderate, bushy plants before I just went inside for winter, so these ones’ll come up but the next lot which are springing up now can stay, and I’ll see how they taste. And I’ll plant more from seed. My problem last year was that I got excited about all the different things I could grow and over committed. If I have leafy greens, a decent herb garden, tomatoes and maybe an eggplant and capsicum bush, I’ve always got dinner. That’s enough commitment while I’m working full time. If I’m sensible about it I might be able to plan it well enough not to need to bed it all down over winter.

I made it slightly further down the bed. Jeez, look at those weeds. Just ridiculous. I wasn’t kidding about not having been outside in daylight for the last three months, you know. In weeding this bed I found THREE secret chicken nests. Sneaky buggers. Who knows where they’re laying now. They’re so small they just look like shadows, and I just can’t see them when they’re hiding. They love the weeds, but were equally pleased with the grubs uncovered and the straw to muck about it.

Dome-icile

In September, S. helped me make a new chicken dome. When I first moved in, a friend helped me make a dome, a la Linda Woodrow. Here it is, already looking shonky (my, how my garden has grown since then! And by ‘garden’ I mostly mean ‘weeds’).

If you click through you can see said friend commenting on said dodginess. It wasn’t his fault. He had inferior materials to work with. See, I needed the dome to be small, because I was getting bantams and I wanted lots of smaller garden beds, so I could tesselate them around my awkward space. But that meant that pvc was too thick to bend into such a small circle. The dome needed to be about 1.5m in diametre. So I got polypipe, which was alright. Except that it’s obviously not very rigid. So when the chickens roosted on the roost, which depends from the top of the dome, it buckled. I reinforced it with wire inside the pipes and cross bracing, but after about 18 months of being moved around teh garden, it had had it.

This was taken in April 2010. All those weeds are now some potatoes and some brassicas that really should have finished maturing and come out, because I planted things under them. But it’s a cold, dark corner behind the house so they’re taking their time. Perfect place for summer lettuces, I think.

I wanted to make a geodesic dome. I’d seen milkwood’s version. But the problem with that was, with my tiny bed size, there just wouldn’t be enough height to give the chooks good roosting room. Plus, that factor would make it unsafe. The gels freerange around the garden, and make their way to the dome at night. I try to lock them up at night, but I often forget. One of the advantages of the dome is that while things like cats and foxes can jump high, they have to jump long to do so. So they have trouble getting up to chooks roosting in a small space (well, ideally, anyway). Anyway, after some googling I found a really great example here. The great thing about this was that it was the top 2/3 of a sphere, rather than the top 1/3. This would mean that the chooks have the maximum possible scratching room, for when I do lock them in, and adequate roosting room. I followed up on the people mentioned in the post and found that they’d done the math for me, along with an easy-to-follow tutorial.

So I had a crack at it, but everything I tried looked wrong. I figured I’d missed a step or was doing something wrong, and I asked S to help me. After doing some modelling, we figured out the problem. The maths was for the massive dome. Ours was scaled way down. The difference for us between the long struts and the small was only 1cm. This meant the margin for error was teeny. Given that we needed about 90 of each length, and that they would have to be cut and drilled precisely… we gave up.

But I still needed a dome! So, we improvised. To be honest, it was mostly S, because I was feeling very unwell that weekend and had to keep going into the house for drinks. I was heavily involved at the start, so there are no pics of that. And then I retreated to taking pictures, handing him the drill, and wilting delicately.

Here is basically what we did.

Ingredients:

Quite a lot of polypipe. I think I bought a 20m roll and we used almost all of it, although some of that was on the failed geodesic attempt.

Something to cut the polypipe – scissors will do. The evil pair, obviously.

A tape measure.

Lots of bolts. I think we used about 75 in this. Measure how thick your polypipe is, and get bolts that are at least as twice as long as that.

As many nuts as you have bolts.

A drill with a drillbit that matches the bolts.

Pliers, to tighten the nuts.

Something to make the roost from (we used bamboo stakes and twine salvaged from straw bales, because I am shonky a trendy upcycler.

Some chicken wire. I got fine birdwire in an attempt to foil the sparrows (it didn’t work. Curse them)

Lots of cable ties. You should have these anyway because cable ties are AWESOME.

Lots of patience. And tea. But no alcohol.

• Measured the existing beds. If you haven’t established beds yet, you should plot out where you want them using string or chalk/flour. Make sure you can comfortably walk around them, and the paths are logical. Do this now, even if you aren’t going to establish some of the beds for a while, because it will affect the size of the beds, and therefore the dome. Feel free to make little maps of your garden (fun!) and move things around on paper a bit before deciding. My beds are a few cms bigger than the dome, so that the dome sits comfortably inside them.
• Lay out your bottom circle of poly pipe until it is the correct size. Have one person hold it into shape. They’ll probably have to sit in the middle and hold both sides.
• Have the person in charge of Practicality and Aesthetics (this was me) decide how tall they want it. Have the holder hold one end of a piece of polypipe to the bottom circle, and arch it over the top until it looks right. Cut it at that length, then use it as a template to cut two more.
• There are actually four struts, though. Well, three and a half, plus a gap where the door is. I’ve sort of tried to make that clear below but maybe I just made it more colourful?

• Anyway. So you want three long struts, and one that is just over half the length.
• We attached the pipe by drilling a hole through it, sticking a bolt in, and screwing a nut on. You don’t want to screw this too tight, or it will create a fold in the pipe, making it less strong. You can see where we’ve screwed the nut too tight on the second circle up, and the struts are bending a bit.
• We definitely did not have a fight about this. But if we did, I definitely won.
• Ok, so attach each of the three struts, plus the half strut. Basically, you will need to mark eight points around your base. They should be an equal distance apart from each other. Drill a hole through the side of the base, and through the bottom of your strut, about 2cm from the end. Obviously use the same size drill but as your bolt is. I WAS going to use the size up. We did not have a fight about this either, but if we did, I definitely lost.

• So, now you’ll have your base, and your four struts attached. The struts will be flopping all over the place, flipping the base up, etc. Have one person hold the all together at the top, and the most OCD person (not me) adjust it so that they are roughly even. This doesn’t have to be perfect, but it does have to be good.
• Once you’ve got them about right, drill through all the struts right at the peak. You will need a really long bolt for this, but it’s also ok to compress this join a bit more.
• You can trim any ends that are sticking out a long way past the bottom circle, now.

• It will still be all floppy. Have the OCD person sit inside the dome, and hold the struts up. They should all be sitting up in the position you want them to be in the end. So, not all wibbly wobbly, and DEFINITELY not all timey wimey. Have the Person in Charge (me) make another circle of polypipe, the same size as the base. They should run it down the dome until it sits about where it looks right. The struts should get sucked in a bit – this is not really a dome anymore. It’s a… curve topped cylinder. Or something. Anyway, the second support circle should suck them in, and also not be higher than your chickens are comfortable jumping.
• Mark where the circle needs to go, or measure how far up the strut. Drill holes where holes need to be. If you are the OCD person, do this from inside the dome, just holding the struts in the air. If you are the Person in Charge (PiC) close your eyes and wince every time, as you are convinced that the OCD person is going to drill through his own hand.
• Drill through the circle at the appropriate points, and join it up.

This is getting pretty wordy, so here's a picture of a cabbage I grew. It was delicious.

• OK. Now you should have the bottom circle, the second circle, and the struts. It will be less wobbly, and might sort of be standing up by itself.
• Attach the top circle. This is stabalising, but not load bearing, so it’s less essential. Make a circle of polypipe and slide it down until it’s where you want it. Cut it to that length, attach. Make sure the gap between the second circle and the top one is big enough for your chickens to perch on the second circle.
• Now you need to stabalise the dome. We did this with triangular bracing. Have the OCD person sit inside the dome. They can run the polypipe from corner to corner within the rectangles of the bottom section, guessing how much they need. The other person will need to hold the dome stable, as otherwise it will shift around and the lengths will change.
• Repeat previous method of drilling from inside of the dome. Don’t skimp of the wincing and flinching.
• This bit takes FOREVER. Also, it is very boring

• We double reinforced the front part, because that’s where the chickens jump in. They perch on the rim and so it will sag if you don’t prop it up.
• You probably should brace the rest of the dome, too. If you are the PiC, go inside for a lie down at this point. Be unable to rest because you feel to guilty that the OCD person is doing a thing for you without your help. Make them a cup of tea, instead.

• Make the roost. We made a triangle of stakes, lashed them together, and suspended them from the top any old how. My chickens are pretty light, so we didn’t get too detailed with the reinforcing. But if yours are actual-sized ones, you might want to rest it on the sides of the dome as well. Make sure they gap between the roost and where the roof will be is big enough for your chickens to be comfortable.

• By this stage it is getting dark, but you really really want the chickens to go in their new dome tonight. Really. It’s important. It just is. So whack the chickenwire on in a hurry. We cut a rectangle for the bottom section that is mostly a cylinder, and cable tied that to the struts. You might need one person sitting inside, and one outside. Then we just kind of placed the bits we had over the top and tied it in, however it made sense.

• Suspend water and food containers from the roost. We put in that extra strut because the chickens couldn’t work out how to get up to their roost, since it was so much higher than their last one. They kept trying to perch on the entry. They worked it out in a day or so and I took the white strut out.

Those tires in the front have potatoes in them. Please don't look in that disaster in my shed. I swear only the front 1/3 of that stuff is mine.

• Cover the dome with a heavy duty tarp, and cable tie into place. Linda says not to attach it to the dome, because in a wind it can basically lift off. However, I found with the smaller dome, in my fairly sheltered backyard, that it’s fine. Your mileage my vary, obviously. Tie it down fairly tight so it doesn’t flap and freak out your chooks.
• The red thing in there is the old mop bucket that is SUPPOSED to be a nesting box. They liked it fine before, but for some reason in the new dome it’s not good enough. Now they prefer waiting to be let out (squawking all the while) to find secret nests. Maybe this would be less of a problem if my backyard weren’t overgrown with weeds, with many many good places for secret nests.

After that we were buggered. I did the door by myself the next day.

Basically, I tied pieces of bird wire to the sides with cable ties. I folded down the edges, so they wouldn’t catch on things. I attached the inner edges to pieces of smaller polypipe that I’d bought for something else. Then I cut little bits of the larger pipe, and attached it to the dome. The smaller pipe slides into the bits of big pipe, top and bottom. It doesn’t fit exactly, so I pull it closed with a springy thing that’s meant for tents. It’s not perfect, and it doesn’t keep the f-er sparrows out, but it basically does the job.

Tada! Brand new, actually functioning, chicken dome! It’s lovely and it’s possibly one of my favourite things I’ve ever owned. For serious. It’s very very light, which is important as I have to move it myself.

It’s still totally August!

I am holding onto that thought.  Because, you know.  I’m not ready for September. I mean, I have no problem with September as such.  In fact, I am pretty pro-September, in general.  Just not NOW, I’m not done with August!  Heck, I’m not done with JUNE, who stole June and replaced it with Septmeber.  This isn’t funny guys!  I’m onto you!  Bring June back right now, and I won’t even ask where it’s been, ok?  Guys?

Well, anyway.  Here are some photos of my chickens.

They are lovely.  Their tentative names are Dorothy S. Layer (Dot for short of course, although I would never call the real Dorothy L. Sayers that, it would be disrespectful), Agatha and Harriet.  Except I can’t decide who should be who and in fact I can’t really tell them apart yet.  Except for the youngest one, who looks smaller, obviously, as she is about 2 months more youthful than the others.  She was the first to get comfortable enough to lay an egg:

Why yes, I was very excited about it, why do you ask?  This is not my hand, btw, it’s the manpanions.  The better to make it look teeny and also take an in-focus photo. They’ve been churning out the teeny eggs, actually.  Here is a not very good or useful photo that I took of my fridge this morning, showing the eggs from my chooks in comparison with commercial eggs – the two up the back.

Perfectly salad-sized

They seem to be pretty peacable and there’s not been too much pecking etc.  They all came from the same place, so probably that was already settled.  They do kick up a fuss before laying, but who can blame them, really.

Let’s all take a moment to think of that poor chicken’s cloaca

Otherwise, I find the clucking and bokking to be a very soothing garden noise, and I am very pleased to have them.  I seem to have acquired many animals to feed, it’s nice to have some that feed me back.  Given that I am not really an animal-person.  As in, I quite like having a cat, but not as much as I like NOT scooping cat litter.  If you see what I mean.

The other thing happening in my garden is that the tulips are blooming.  I planted the raised bed FULL of bulbs, and the tulips have been up for a while, and are now pumping out flowers:

I planted rows of particular… breeds?  Species?  Whatever. Ones with names, like ‘queen of the night’, and in between I chucked in random bulbs from a big bag.  Looks like some of the randoms are first up, all the orange ones.  Although I was very excited to see this morning that there are some red, yellow and white ones now coming in.  Yes, I am easily excited by things happening in my garden WHAT OF IT??

Some of the edging grape hyacinths are having a go too, but something been nibbling them, much to my displeasure.  There are enough tulips up that I have felt ok about picking them, which was the whole point of planting them in the first place, so that’s good.  Also, given that I don’t really get to see them in the garden, I have started picking what there is on Sunday afternoon so I can see them during the week.

Luverly.  I am partial to tulips.

Thoughts and links

A couple of things that have come up that pertain to the last few posts.  Den of Chaos (I love her blog) talked a bit about the difference between ‘rest’ and ‘inertia’.  A valuable distinction, and one that I’ve neglected a lot this year.

Sara sent me a link to this post about changing habits, which really hit the nail on the head.  Pretty much all of my ‘resolutions’ could be summed up by the phrase ‘be more conscious’.  More on that later.

And in return I sent her this post.  This, among others on that blog, inspired me to write down anything at all, and to make them things that I could actually do.  That is why I said ‘ride in 1-2 times a week’ instead of ‘ride my bike more’.  And I can say that I don’t know if I would have ridden in at all last week if I hadn’t put it like that.  I would have thought ‘I’ll make up for it next week.’  Instead, on Monday when I was whiney about it, I thought ‘if I ride in now, I don’t HAVE to later in the week if I don’t want to.’  So I rode in.  And then on Wednesday, I thought ‘well, I will feel really pleased with myself if I max out my goal.’  So I rode in.  If I treat my brain like a three year old, we get a lot more done around here.

Also, I now have  a new obsession: the garden in my new house. 

The week before christmas I decided I wanted to plant a native garden, leaving some space down the back for veggies and maybe chooks later.  My sister, who did a whole course on this at uni for her architecture degree, told me it is called a ‘wirra’, and lent me some books on it.  (The best one has headings in Papyrus and all the text is justified.  I am finding this makes it very hard to read.  I am a snob.)  I also found this really good website.  It has loads of information and, if you’re in Adelaide, a list of local growers, as well as this great map that shows you what type of plant life originally grew where you live.  It can then also search for appropriate plants to meet certain conditions (attract butterflies or birds, provide shelter or food, etc).  There are plenty of similar resources for other states, if you look.

But this week, Bek has been telling me about Linda Woodrow’s book, the permaculture home garden.  I bought the book through the bookshop at work (should get it in a week or two), and started googling.  I am now thoroughly in love with the idea of a mandala garden.

The idea of setting up a garden for the minimum possible effort is infinitely appealing to me.  Also, chickens.  And a chicken dome. 

I realised, though, that I had this sense of fear about it.  Of… dread almost.  Of ‘it’s too hard’.  Not about the garden itself – I know how to do most of that except maybe the planning, but the book, apparently, provides step by step planting guides for the nervous and inexperienced.  No, it was about the end result.

I realised that I was scared of growing my own food.

What?!  Why on earth?  I boiled it down to two things.  One is, growing your own food makes you realise what a scarce resource it is, and how labour, water, and energy intensive it is to produce.  I almost never succeed even at herbs, because I am too afraid to pick them.  Mine always look so scraggly and impoverished.  But of course, constant picking helps make herbs bushy and luxurious.  So the answer to this is two things: the permaculture aspect of this method is somewhat soothing, because it is circular.  I can see the plan for it – even when the garden bed is bare, it’s not done. The chickens are on it, or it’s waiting for its next season’s plant, which is already planned.  It is not empty or wasted space, it’s not failure. 

The second part of the answer is: yes.  Food is a scarce resource, and that is precisely why it is worth growing your own.  It snaps you out of the idea that there is always more at the supermarket.  Don’t go and buy any of the abundant (but limp and tasteless) basil.  Pick the leaves off your own scraggly plant and be thankful. 

The second fear links back to consciousness.  I realised I was scared of what I would do once I harvested my imaginary bounty.  I would no longer be able to leaf through a magazine until something caught my flagging attention, trot off to the shops and spend money on rare and out of season ingredients, and plan out my meals that way.  I would have, instead, to consider what I had on hand, and work from that.  That takes effort!  Ok, so, less actual effort than reading a mag, making a list, shopping for a million things and lugging them home by hand.  But FAR more consciousness.

And once I realised that, I was even more sold on the idea.  Ok, I’m still nervous.  I’m still worried that this will be a fad and I’ll lose enthusiasm.  That it’ll be a lot of work, and I will get tired and want to quit.  I don’t think that those are unfounded worries.  But as that post from the Den of Chaos says, what kind of life do I want to live?  It’s no use saying I want to make my own food and clothes and live sustainably and simply and well if what I acutally do is let my tomato plants die in the first heatwave and buy crappy supermarket vegetables and sweat shop clothes.  Ok, so it’s more effort.  But what am I saving the effort for?  And don’t I spend that much effort feeding myself anyway?  I don’t mean shopping and cooking, I mean at my job.  Why do I work?  To feed, house and clothe myself.  Anything else is extras.  And I love the extras, but… maybe not as much as I’d love working less?  Knowing (and remembering) that I can do things for myself – things like feeding and clothing myself, being a bit less dependant on things beyond my control – gives me options.  Maybe not options for right now, but still.  Options.

Life isn’t about expending the least energy possible.  It’s about enjoying things and getting value from your time, even if that’s hard work.  And a garden I can eat from (with a native one around it) is worthwhile and valuable.  Here’s hoping I can maintain my enthusiasm!