Bonjour Brunswick!

The move to Melbourne went very well. We arrived last Thursday evening, moved everything in on Friday, and by the end of the weekend were mostly unpacked and ready to start the work week. As of last night, we have finished unpacking all the boxes and have a giant pile of flat packed cardboard boxes to show for it.

Our new place is really a blank slate from the garden perspective. The back yard is a decent size and the only things in it are a shed, a clothesline strung between two concrete posts, and some very bare skinny trees, which I haven't identified yet. The backyard faces north, so gets plenty of sunshine. Right now, in the middle of winter, we're appreciating it, but I'm guessing summer will be another story.

Left: Backyard facing north - Right: Backyard facing south

The front yard is also fairly nondescript. Being on the south side, it's mostly in shade and just has patchy grass.

I can't wait to get started on building new gardens. As we're renting, we just need to check that the landlord is okay with this. We're also thinking about building more of a container garden so that if we move when our lease finishes in 12 months then we'll be able to take most of the garden with us.

We're also going to have to start new compost and worm farms as we left the others behind in Figtree. While we're still waiting to sell the house in Figtree, we're being very conservative with our finances. However, I jumped onto Gumtree and managed to get a second hand compost bin for $20. It's missing one of the side pieces that hold it together (it shouldn't be gaping like that), but that's a fairly easy fix.

I also managed to get a pair of plastic clam shells (kids sand pit/wading pool) for free! This will definitely help keep the pups cool in summer.

I've also found an unused (still in packaging) 2-tier worm farm for $40, but it's about an hours drive from us, so I'm still tossing up whether it's worth a trip that far and when we'd be able to do it.

Farewell Figtree

Well it seems like it was only a few months ago that we made the decision to move to Melbourne, but today seems to have come around fast.

Today we said farewell to Figtree. I was hoping to take some final photos of the garden, but it decided to absolutely bucket with rain (not helpful for the removalists trying to pick the truck). At least it meant I didn't have to water the garden before we went. So sadly, no parting photos.

Yesterday I did some maintenance on the vegie patch to get it ready for being unattended for a while. All the beds are mulched. The new irrigation timer has been installed and set. All the plants are looking healthy. The snow peas are just starting to reach the twine that they'll eventually climb. The broccoli heads are forming nicely. It is finally looking like a well established, mature garden. I would like to hope that it will bring joy to the future occupants.

I don't find myself missing the garden, as I've enjoyed the process of gardening as much as the end product. I would have liked to have seen the fruit trees mature and start to bear fruit. I'm looking forward to the challenge of starting a new garden in Melbourne. I'm bringing our seeds with us, many of which we've saved from what we've grown in Figtree, so it will be like bringing a bit of our Figtree garden with us.

Summer success stories

Despite the last post, it wasn't all gloom and doom in the patch this summer. There were a few success stories.

Beans

We had two different bean varieties this summer. Rattlesnake beans, (below left) which are a climbing variety, where planted in the front garden to climb (and help cover) the bit of lattice underneath the front porch. The other variety is a butter bean called Sex Without Strings (below right), which is a bush variety and was planted into the main vegie patch in a couple of beds where we had space.

Both beans have gone well, with the Rattlesnake beans being the most productive. We only have two plants going, but have probably yielded just over a kilogram of beans so far. I've started to write down the weight of each harvest so we can have a better record.

The Sex Without Strings beans have been pretty productive per bush (we've got 4 going), but probably overall half the yield of the climbing beans. And true to the name, they are a lovely stringless butter bean. Both beans are very tasty and have been a regular addition to our dinners.

Basil

The tomatoes may have failed, but the basil has been going off! I transplanted around 6-7 basil seedlings in around the tomatoes and all have thrived, to the point that I had to seriously cut back some of them as they were smothering the tomatoes and capsicums.

The basil harvest has already been turned into a few jars of basil pesto, some basil butter, and some diced basil frozen into an ice cube tray for use later in the year. And there is still loads in the patch, which the bees love and we'll let go to seed.

Lettuce
We've tried to get in to the habit of have a couple of lettuce plants on the go so that we've got lettuce for salads and meals. The best variety so far has been one of the freebies we received from Digger's Club, Australian Yellow Leaf (left).

It has bright yellow-green leaves and is a 'cut and come again' type of lettuce (non-hearting). Crisp and delicious. We've also been trying some heirloom varieties (middle and right) from a mixed pack. These have been nice, but in the crazy summer weather have tended to bolt to seed.

Strawberries

The strawberry patch was quite productive, and when we managed to beat the birds, slugs and labradors to them, we were treated to the tastiest luscious red fruit. I don't think that many made it to the kitchen, it was too tempting to eat them straight from the garden.

Rhubarb

The two rhubarb plants I put in during winter, which I was so worried I'd killed, sprang into life in spring producing thick stalks and enormous leaves that were so heavy some of the stalks were coming off from the weight of the leaves pulling them down.

We'd read that in the first year you shouldn't harvest any stalks, to let the plant establish and feed the crown, so we left it to grow. It has recently died down to nothing, which I'm hoping is just what rhubarb does and that with all the rain and humidity the crowns haven't rotted. The crowns do look very much like they did when I bought the dormant crowns, so hopefully they'll burst back in to life next spring.

Onions

Last winter, on the winter solstice, we planted a number of onions. We had two varieties of brown onion - Creamgold and Australian Brown - and one red onion. To experiment a bit with yield, we sowed a row of Australian Brown directly into the bed, and sowed the Creamgold and red onion in a seed-raiser tray, then transplanted them as soon as they were big enough to handle. The direct sown seeds certainly produced larger onions, but the others were a good medium-small onion.

We harvested them on the summer solstice (following the traditional planting guide of planting on the shortest day of the year and harvesting on the longest), which was just as well as we got them out before the deluge of summer rain hit. We strung them up in net under cover to dry out, and are now storing them inside in mesh bags. The yield was around 3.8kg of brown onions and 2.4kg of red onions.

Garlic
Like the onion, our garlic harvest went reasonably well. We got around 12 good sized cloves of red italian garlic, plus a few bonus garlics from the compost heap. Interestingly, none of the italian red garlics flowered. We had read that you wait for them to flower before harvesting, but they never did and the stalks just seemed to die off, so we pulled them out. One of the compost heap garlics did flower and the flower ends up producing seeds that look like tiny garlic cloves.

We've probably got enough garlic to last us until next crop, when I think we'll plant some more of the italian red garlic and also try some of the seeds that we saved from the compost garlic.


Other successes in the garden have been the carrots, which continue to grow well though we need to remember to keep sowing more seed to get a progressive crop. The herbs in the front garden are also doing well and it is nice to be able to just duck out the front to snip a few when cooking.

Summer of rain and shine: A tribute to the fallen

Well, to be more accurate, it has been the summer where our poor vegie patch has been scorched and drowned, often in the same week. Back in late spring I was happily raising seedlings and anticipating a summer where our kitchen would be overflowing with produce. Sadly, like many fellow gardeners I've spoken to lately, much of our patch simply didn't survive the scorching hot days, followed by torrential rain, with mould, mildew, and disease inducing humidity in between.

So a tribute to the fallen of the Summer of 2009/2010...

Potatoes

Remember the great potato patch we made back in September? From strong beginnings the plants then seemed to suddenly wilt and die. I suspect either potato blight or black leg. After a while we decided to excavate and see what had happened. Many of the spuds had started well, but the heavy rain had compacted the sugar cane mulch and compost into a thick, wet, rotting layer and anything above that layer died. Our yield was a handful of small deformed potatoes.

However, on the upside, the potatoes that were voluntarily growing in the compost heap seemed to be unaffected and yielded a good number of decent sized spuds. And while some of the ones from the main patch weren't edible, they were possibly the rudest looking potatoes ever grown, so we got some giggles.

Tomatoes
Back in October I had started planting tomato seeds and by early November I had so many seedlings I was giving the excess away to family, friends and anyone who happened to drive past. Later in November saw us going on holidays for a week, during which we had several absolute scorchers and I came home to some rather scalded and sorry looking tomato seedlings. Still, we planted them out and thought they might just come good, only to have them drowned in rains, scorched again and getting every tomato affliction under the sun. A number have rust, much of the fruit has blossom end rot from the erratic rain, a lot of fruit has simply split or rotted while still green, and to top it off we've got fruit fly. I've tried spraying a Bordeaux mix to see if that helps with the rust. We've had a few good, if small, tomatoes from what I think is a Red Tommy Toe. Sadly, I think what I need to do is pull them all out to try and stop disease spreading further.

Capsicums
We had 4-5 mini capsicum plants and 2 regular size plants. They've been strong and early on had lots of flowers and fruit developing, but the insane weather has meant that most of the fruit are rotting before they're ripe. We have managed to get a couple of very cute mini capsicums, but don't hold much hope for the rest in this humid weather.


Corn
I really thought the corn was going to be alright. Sadly, the humid weather isn't great for corn either. A lot of the cobs had aphids and some kind of borer. The ones that looked okay were very disappointing to eat. They tasted like glue - bland and starchy. I don't know whether we didn't have enough of them to get good pollination or there was some nutrient deficiency, or both.

Cucumber
There is one lone apple cucumber that has survived against the odds. Two plants were lost when the dogs got into the patch and had a bit of a rampage. The other one succumbed to the rampant powder mildew that threatened to cover every curcubit in sight. Diligent spraying with diluted milk seems to have saved my lone survivor and we even got a decent sized and quite edible cucumber from it.

Rhubarb
The rhubarb grew to epic proportions with massive leaves and thick stalks. However, in the last few weeks, I think the rain and humidity has taken its toll as many of the stalks became rotten and I think the crowns may actually have rot from being too wet for too long. This is the first time I've grown rhubarb so I don't know if they're meant to die back at the end of summer or whether this is actually crown rot. There are still some new green stalks emerging from one so I'm hoping it will hang in there.

However, it hasn't all been bad and in many ways we've learnt a lot from those plants that didn't make it.

Van Gogh Vision: Sunflower Summer

A few months ago I had this idea - a Van Gogh inspired vision - of sunflowers along the back fence. I had seeds for both Giant Russian and Yellow Pollenless sunflowers and planned a double row, with the 3-4m tall Giant Russians at the back with the shorter 1.5m tall Yellow Pollenless in front. I could picture the magnificent image in my head so clearly.

The first issue I encountered was a logistical issue. Our back fence has been steadily falling down, not helped by the fact that our two dogs and the dog that lives behind us like to try and play together and scratch and push at the palings. So we had a chat to the people behind us and agreed to replace the aging wood paling fence with a colorbond fence. Which meant that I needed to hold off planting anything in front of the back fence until it had been replaced (unless I wanted my sunflower seedlings trampled).

The fence got replaced around the end of November. Here we have old fence and new fence:

We asked the fence guys to leave the old palings in our yard. We plan to reuse them to make a nicer vegie patch and compost area fence.

The planting was done in an afternoon in December. First we mowed the strip along the back fence. As the soil is heavy clay, we decided to dig holes and fill them with compost to get the new seeds a good start on life.

After the seedlings started to emerge, we realised that they were at risk of getting squashed or trampled by the dogs, so I made some wire mesh collars to give the ones in prime "trampling" zones a little bit of protection. Then as they were also getting some stiff competition from the grass, we started to mulch around them using wet newspaper to smother the grass first before laying the mulch on top. Unfortunately we only had enough mulch to half the row, so it looked a bit odd for a few weeks.

By the end of January the sunflowers were starting to bloom and were looking gorgeous. Once we got another trailer load of mulch, courtesy of Mum & Dad having some trees lopped and a gigantic pile of mulch, we finished mulching the row around the end of February.

Once open, the sunflowers were truly beautiful to behold. The bees certainly loved the big giant russian flowers. The yellow pollenless put out little mini sunflower side shoots, often with "double-heads".

Sadly our sunflower joy was rather short-lived. The first issue was that the sunflowers seemed to struggle to hold up the weight of their heads. We're not sure if this is a nutrient deficiency or perhaps we were growing them at the wrong time of year. The giant russians in particular needed some propping up (or perhaps a hug), while the rest just looked a bit droopy and depressed. And on overcast days, they seemed a bit confused about which way to face.

Then we discovered we weren't the only ones who enjoyed sunflowers. The local population of sulphur-crested cockatoos had discovered the tasty buffet in our backyard, We thought of the Woolworths ad when the the woman yells to her husband "Stavros!" when the cockatoos are on their vegie patch. Sadly the back fence was a bit too far away from our kitchen window to rig up a scare mechanism (though the CPD was tempted to try), so we tried training Hudson to chase the cockatoos off the flowers by yelling "Stavros!" out the window. Can't say it worked particularly well, though once pointed out, he gave a good show of chasing them.

And while the cockatoos started the demise of our sunflowers, their fate was doomed once the dogs discovered that sunflowers are tasty and jumping up, grabbing the heads, and pulling them out of the group or snapping them off was a great new game.

One by one, our sunflowers succumbed to our playful pups. What can I say? It was fun while it lasted and I'd probably do it again :)

The end.

Welcome to 2010 - The Year of the Move

Happy New Year and Welcome to 2010!

The big news in our lives is that we've decided to move to Melbourne. When exactly is "sometime this year".

Why Melbourne? Oddly enough this is part of us embracing a downsized and less complicated lifestyle. I know many people move OUT of major cities to downsize, so why are we moving from the lovely, coastal Illawarra to a major metropolitan city? A number of reasons.

Friends
Something I've learnt over the last couple of years is that a key part of a sustainable lifestyle is sustainable relationships, with your partner, your family, and your friends. Over the years, most of our close friends have moved out of the Illawarra and a lot of them are now in Melbourne. Being closer to them will greatly enrich our lives.

Functional Public Transport
I'll admit it, I'm enamoured with trams. Ever since my first visit to Melbourne, I have loved how easy it is to get around the city on public transport. Coming from NSW, the land of completely non-functional public transport, it's been a novel concept. We currently have an embarrassing 3 vehicles (the 3rd is a work car that is part of the Cunning Plans Dept's job package). I drive pretty much everywhere since my health prevents long distances of walking and there is no public transport near us. By moving to Melbourne, we hope to become a one vehicle household. A number of our friends in Melbourne don't own vehicles and are loving it. We probably need to maintain one vehicle, mainly due to the nature of the CPD's work involving site visits. We also need something that can transport to the two dogs when necessary. I'm hoping we can get rid of the current vehicles and get something more efficient an environmentally friendly. The CPD has been thinking of a DIY electric conversion for a while so that might be a goer.

Job Opportunities
This is a big one. While we've not had any problem finding work in the Illawarra, we've both hit points in our careers where we want to do something different and that something isn't on offer here. I'd like to get into government policy, especially environmental policy, and the CPD would like to do engineering that isn't coal-enabling and is more along sustainable design lines. Melbourne presents much better opportunities for both of us to end up doing something we really want to do.

And of course the is the attraction that is Melbourne itself. The number of environmental and sustainability focused groups and events is staggering.

So the plan is to think about what we want to do with our house (sell or rent), start applying for jobs, and then find somewhere to rent in Melbourne (definitely not buying while the market is this insane). It feels a bit sad to be leaving the house and the garden that we've put a lot of work into. The garden I don't feel too sad for as the joy in gardening for me has always been about the process of doing it, not the end result so much. Until we actually up sticks and move, I plan to still be gardening as often as I can. I'm excited about the prospect of starting a new garden and even the challenge of gardening at a rental property where we may need to be creative.

Bring on 2010 - Year of the Move.

Oh bugger!

I just wandered down to the vegie patch to plant another row of carrots and put the corn in and discovered that when the Cunning Plans Dept was doing his slug patrol last night, he forgot to close the vegie patch gate properly. Which means the dogs got in...

This is all that remains of the broccoli:
Every plant has been pulled out and chomped. There are only the remnants of leaves and roots. They also ate the top off the lettuce that I was allowing to go to seed, flattened half of the onions, ate the parsley that was in a pot down to the stubble and because the beds were wet from the rain, left inch deep paw prints through most of the beds.

On the plus side, the carrots look okay, as do the onions that were along the lower edge of bed 3. I think the bean seedlings will pull through as they only look a little knocked, not ripped out. The strawberry plants are okay, though there is not a red strawberry in sight. They also appear to have left the rhubarb alone.

So on a positive note, it could have been worse. But still...BUGGER!

Free Tomatoes

This year's tomato raising resulted in around 90-100 seedlings. Around two weeks ago, natural attrition had reduced this to 86 seedlings. I planned to only keep around 10 for our plot, so 70+ seedlings needed to find new homes.

• 14 plants went to Dad
• 10 or so were set aside for friends
  
• 16 where swapped at the Community Garden Vegie Swap (I took along 44 and brought home the excess)

A stock take revealed I still had 28 plants I didn't want to keep. The solution? Put them out the front with a sign saying "Free Tomatoes" and see if anyone will take them.
Sign writing credit goes to the Cunning Plans Dept who thought it might be wise to put some kind of limit to remind people that taking all of the seedlings at once may be greedy (trying to encourage community sharing etc..). We also made sure that the boxes we put them in were old cardboard boxes we wouldn't miss if they were taken or damaged.

We put the seedlings out on Saturday 31st, thinking that perhaps if there was anyone out trick or treating for Halloween they may wish to add some tomatoes to their booty. By Sunday evening, 4 seedlings had gone. When we got up on Monday morning and went out, the whole lot had gone. Boxes and all. At least they left the sign!

While the point of putting of the tomatoes out the front was to give them away, I'm a little disappointed that someone took 24 seedlings, and the boxes, in one go. I'd like to think it was an enthusiastic gardener, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it is more likely someone who will probably try and sell them at the markets to make a quick buck. I guess even then they'd still eventually end up in someones garden.