May 2011 - The Veggie Garden-Cottage Garden

Well finally after carting over tons of Horse manure from a neighbour, adding gypsum and cow manure and a dash of rabbit poo and then letting the rain do it's job, more turning and breaking down the horse manure - someone please remind me to mow the darn stuff first to make it little more fine and workable next time I do this!!!
It's ready! One more rake over with he metal rake and ready for planting, all aligned with the moon planting guide all set!

Ive planted some red onions a couple of weeks ago for this season as they did well last year, Carrots, Turnips a special thin sort though more like a Carrot, a red Turnip also long and thin, Broccoli, loads of it, Rocket, Cress, gourmet Lettuce and some White Pak Choy and snow pea's. Many have been planted as seeds so won't see much action for awhile in this cold weather.

Also planted a few Polyunthus flowers for the front and need to plant up some pansies in some hanging baskets, and that's pretty much my Winter planting done.

I brought some Daffodils to plant after being thoroughly sure I planted and entire 2 beds last year after being really impressed with a friends Daffodils she grows in wine barrels. They never came up, Jordan my eldest son tells me my free ranging rabbit went around and systematically ate every single one as they came up and the tuber!!!! So this year he is I am desperately hoping he will stay in the back paddock to do his free ranging and I can actually grow some! Otherwise I may have to invest in some small wine barrels myself that are too tall for bunnies to raid!

News From the Rabbi try - we had 8 about 9 weeks ago some lovely kits born as Ive mentioned they are all in loving new homes now, which is fantastic, Siam is looking to mate again, I am fairly sure I will be only be breeding twice a year from the Does so she's going to have to wait awhile.

Soon I need to go and poach some leaves from the gutter, sounds awful but we have massive old street trees here in Ballarat and although I live in a very old street this was the miners cottage part of Ballarat and we don't have the lovely large old trees so I need to travel to central Ballarat and find a nice old large tree to rake and take - I always ask the owner first - they generally look at me like I am nuts, can live with that, lol, then the kids and I all help to get at least 4 large garbage bags of leaves for the compost bins. I have this feeling that oak leaves are the best for composting but its something I learnt during Horticulture and I can't remember why that was - maybe some research to do prior to collecting! A subject for the next blog!!

Re-using rabbit waste and rusty ornaments

Had a busy week here with my 2 does Ambika and Sian in the maternity pens, they have each had a litter of kits Sian 4 babies and Ambika 5, the kits are now in their
3-4th week and they are VERY lively little beings! Sians seem to be the more outgoing but Ambika's although a bit more shy now they will certainly come out of themselves by the time they are sold. Took Sians and her kits to the school this week to show the preps in my youngest sons class and the grade 3/4's in my middle sons class, I love showing the kids our pets and seeing their little faces light up when they see babies, gentle handling and lots of it is good for the kits too, although I didn't let the kids hold them they are too young and fragile.

I have had to clean these guys out every 2-3 days especially Sian's pen which also has her daughter from the previous litter so twice the waste! The kits are starting to come out of the nest and venture to the food bowl and water bottle so opening the pen is hard as it's raised and they come close to toppling out each time! I cannot wait to shift them all back to their pen outdoors, I am concerned by the amount of mozzies we still have here though we really need a good cold snap to get rid of them, I don't want to risk the litter getting Myxo.

I have the perfect use for the huge amount of wood shavings/straw and rabbit poo though, I put the whole lot neat onto the garden, I had just weeded the lot over the past 2 weeks and it's not only fantastic mulch but awesome fertiliser too! Doesn't smell the best when I initially apply it but give it a week or so the smell is fine and it looks great!

I love rust, I don't know why, it just reminds me of the past I think, here are a couple of rusty ornaments I have hanging around, I also have a really old bullock wheel in the garden and some old frames and a gate leaning against the fence that has been burnt too in a fire at an old house to give it the added look of rustic, I guess they suite our home which is cottage and was built 1890.

Chickens/veggiebeds and the woodfire

I am slowly starting to suspect that Chick Chick my little chick born late last year from Rocky the Hamburg and Henry the Cochin is actually not a hen but rather a little cockeral!! Last week we noticed the chickens had scaley legs and Id not treated for worms for a while either or mites so I teamed up Ken Jordan and once it got dark for easy access to the girls as there are all roosting and I prepared a syringe with garlic water, Ivomectin in another syringe and a massive tub of Vaseline and lavender. One by one we plucked Henry and his girls off their perches to be given garlic via their mouth, Ivomection on the back of their necks and have Vaseline smothered all over their legs. This suffocates any mites that might be there.

I noticed at the time that Chick Chick had awfully long rear feathers and seemed to be beginning to grow leg spurs. Also saw on Henry he's snapped a spur off and the other one is literally inches long! Thank goodness he's a friendly Rooster! So Chick Chick's days here will be numbered unfortunately as we did try having 2 Roosters once and it was just too noisy, I would love to be tough enough to eat him that is real self sustainability but we can't eat our pets so usually with any Roosters I breed I find homes for them they also won't eat them. Last time Henry's son went to a lovely couple out at Stawell who were vegetarians and had a large property with many Roosters and hens all free ranging. Hopefully I can be lucky enough to find another such family.

In the veggie garden I have completely removed everything bar a few celery plants for the rabbits from the beds. I plan to order some sheep manure they sell large bags up here for around $3.50 per bag the bags are the 40kg feed ones, I was planning on this during this week but unfortunately Ken has started lighting the fire on these cold nights and my Saturday paper with the add in it has been re-used! I will smother the beds with this and then leave for a couple of weeks before planting Winter crops hopefully sometime around the end of April.

We have been busy buying up wood, there was also an add in the paper about cutting your own for about $12.50 per trailer which is very good as we are paying $65m2 for common wood and about $100m2 for redgum and box, we need those thicker slower burning woods in mid-Winter up here because it gets so cold.

Speaking of wood and burning I am always looking for ways to light the fire without having to use firelighters. We use pine cones, gather any small sticks on bush walks and also stuff our toilet rolls with the lint from the dryer and the shredded paper from the fax and scrap paper.
But recently I pulled all the Sunflowers out of the ground and had them all stacked on the trailer and Brahma my Rhodesian Ridgeback pup got to one and must have chewed the stalk and either his throat go irritated or some got a bit stuck because he had a cough for 1 day. In researching the plant and if anything could be dangerous for him I came across a site that mentioned all the uses for Sunflowers there are quite a few and one was that you dry out he flower heads and use as firelighters, of course the seeds are full of Sunflower oil which is going to be pretty flammable so off to the trailer the next day and Ive cut all the heads off and am in the process of drying them all. Can't wait to see how well it works, very hard to store thought as EVERY critter wants to eat them from the bugs to the mice!

Dog Poo Compost

Today I decided the time was right to uncover the cake of dog poo compost I have been collecting for about the past 9 months. I stopped using the compost bin and starting adding to much larger one. We have an awful lot to collect each day with a Rhodesian Ridgeback, Golden Retriever and Border Collie.

I also added straw from the chook pen to the pile and old leaves, but mostly it was dog poo I then left the top open to collect the rain and left for a good 6 months and then turned it probably every 3 months.

There was pretty much no smell after the first 3 months and the end result is a lovely rich loamy type of compost, it was full of worms you may be able to see some when Ive put it in the wheelbarrow. I am not quiet game to throw directly on the veggie patch but I have added to my building compost pile, which currently has rabbit waste, straw and compost mush from the house - peelings and anything really the chooks, rabbits and worm farm won't eat.

Check out the end result for yourself I am really pleased with it. pity we can't do the same with human waste easily, I am not yet game for that though!

Just remember if your ever composting dog poo and you've just wormed the dogs, it WILL kill all the worms in the compost too. I pretty much added for so long it didn't seem to effect it too badly possibly I added some composting worms after the worming of the dogs, just something to remember.

Our Summer Harvesting

Well it's Autumn and we have been harvesting all the produce we have grown from the veggie garden over the past few weeks and I have to say this has been the best little veggie crop we have ever had!

We had more rain this year that we have ever had, in fact in Victoria more rain than ever on record apart from 1 other time!

Still not quiet enough to grow my celery too well although I am using the leaves for the rabbits to eat. The carrots have grown well, the kids frequently pluck them from the bed, corn was delish! It was kind of chewy but really tasty and looked perfect. Potato's did well and we have been eating them for many weeks now, and zucchini, well it's not yet at the back door but it's pretty darn close! No not really but we have a good 5 zucchini's per week for a long time now! Ive made zucchini chocolate cake and soup, I found the key to the soup was not to use 2-3 medium ones but a good 5-6 couple of potato's a carrot 2 onions, stock and blend so it's really thick, that was the best soup I made with them this year.

Lettuce did ok, but went to seed before I could eat it all and with all that rain there were a lot of slugs and they all seemed to be over the lettuce!

Had good success with the cucumbers this year, planted them too late last year unfortunately. The squash did well but it's isn't a huge hit here and it is climbing over 3 other veggie beds suffocating the other plants! So will give that a miss for next year. Bok choy was nice but grew very fast pretty much within 3 weeks it needed to be quickly eaten I imagine because of all the rain.

Its been wonderful having the water tanks full and being able to keep the grass for the boys to play on, first time in a very long time that's happened.

I also planted a very large sunflower patch and it's huge!! This is helpful in attracting the bees to the garden to pollinate the other plants. I have included 2 pictures the initial planting and 2 weeks later then all up 3 month s later they are over 7 feet and flowering, how quickly thing will grow once they in fertile soil! We got an excellent crop of nectarines and also plums but not one apricot this year my son tells me this is because it fruited last year, I knew that but its nice to know he remembers me telling him this very fact.

We have a wire farming fence to the paddock next door and there are blackberries thickly covering it for about 10 metres. We picked a good 4 bowls for a month or so and I ate them on cereal, in yogurt and make muffins with them, they were delicious!

I can't wait to rip everything out to plant the Winter crop, I know I will be putting lots more Broccoli in as we really eat a lot of that in Winter, some more carrots and bok choy, and some Winter lettuce.

The Weather Station

A few weeks ago we purchased a weather station for Kens business to trial for their Kestral weather meter online business.

Its a fancy piece and took a good couple of hours to set up and install and for the following 2 days while Ken was at work I disconnected it as it kept bipping every 30 minutes! Not very pleasant to be receiving a massage with a constant bip in the distance, I fixed this by putting the screen under the towels in the linen press, which worked well until a male client needed to use the facilities and wondered what on earth I was keeping in the cupboard!

Anyway here are some pictures of it, the trial also included a tablet PC and the idea was to mount that on the wall for easier reading. In fact the whole thing works well on a normal computer and the software was not able to be loaded onto the tablet so we now have a spare tablet PC and a lovely weather station.

The station tells us the internal temperature/external, time and date, humidity, wind speed, wind direction, and the barometric pressure, there's a little picture part to say whether it's raining or not and a rain gauge.

You can also load software to your computer and attach the screen of the station and it will chart the weather patterns.

Anyway not sure they will go ahead and sell the product or not the entire concept they had, but for now we have a lovely addition to the roof and know exactly what's happening with the weather at any given moment!

Todays bounty and re-using materials

I just love every day going out to collect the eggs and wondering what we will have for dinner and finding a bounty of food in the garden to add to the meal! Tonight we are having lamb and fetta rissoles, corn and salad and I was able to collect some eggs, a daily thing but eventually they will get used as last night we had an omelette and ate 22 eggs in one meal! Some lettuce and my first although small very tasty cucumber an onion still left over form the huge crop I had in Spring and a zucchini to grate for the rissoles. I am loving that it's all organic I find my home grown food so tasty and it's a wonderful cycle, what we don't eat is fed to the chooks, the chook manure is added to the compost which is then used back on the veggie garden! Bliss!!!

Also a project we start and finished just prior to Christmas day was to hire a large shredder and attempt to regain some usable land from the overhanging trees next door and prune many of our own trees. It took us the entire day and we ended up with a massive pile of mulch to use back on the garden, I used this one one garden bed that was pretty much not used anymore, added some solar lights that by all accounts is amazing they are still there usually the dogs have "remodelled" and moved them by now, we also used wood for the boundaries that were once parts of the old patio that needed to be orn down we made 2 new garden beds near the patio and I had 2 Camellias that were dying in pots from lack of nutrition, they really needed to be re potted and I though last attempt at life I shall plant them in the ground and pray to the Gods the dogs don't chew them!! I am so happy with the look of the beds they good fantastic!

We also re-found a path that we had put in way back 14 years ago, we laid this path from old, old bricks we found out the front, it had been an original path and we stored the bricks and then used out the back , and eventually they all became covered in soil. After sweeping them back - my eldest son's job and he did do this brilliantly I might add we added more mulch to the 4 quadrants, and in one picture you will see there some bushy shrubs I ended up removing all that after Christmas giving us more room and will add more of the mulch to that as we still have quiet a large pile of it.

I really wish I had taken before and after pics, some were taken mid working bee, but we were madly trying to get it to a state of neatness prior to Christmas day and I was a bit time short.

In the middle of all the work I suddenly decided I had a use for my old I believe it was a bullock ring? Anyone who knows different please tell me as I could be incorrect but I found this on a friends farm and they really did think it was rubbish!! I saved it much to Kens disgust and it's now a sculpture in my front garden. I have since added a bird bath behind it so it looks a little different now, but I just love re-using rusty pieces of metal, I wish I was more artistic and could really make things look beautiful but I am rather happy with this piece and where I have placed it.