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.

Community, fresh produce, and education

Today is the 350.org International Day of Climate Action and we've marked it in our own small, local way.

This morning I headed over to the community garden for the monthly Waste Not! Fruit and Vegie swap, loaded with my excess tomato and capsicum seedlings.

Which I exchanged for 2 grapefruits, 4 oranges, some carrots, rhubarb, parsley, and ginger. I also bought a loaf of bread that the Port Kembla Men's Association had baked in their wood-fired oven.

It was a great day to be out in the garden and I enjoyed catching up with people and enjoying a cup of coffee courtesy of the Men's Association.

After heading home briefly for lunch, I went over to Futureworld Eco-Technology Centre to join the Cunning Plans Dept who had headed over in the morning to help with their open day. The open day ran from 10am to 2pm and I understand that they had a really good turn out with over 100 visitors through the doors. They also had an Ideas Tree at the centre for people to write down their ideas about what we can do to move towards a future of 350ppm.

In the evening, we looked at the 350.org website and were amazed at the number of actions and photos flowing in from around the world. Over 5200 events across 181 countries. It feels awesome to have been a part of that and to see so many people being passionate about this.

Update: The Futureworld action photos can be found on the 350.org flickr site here. Wish we'd remembered to take some photos at the vegie swap with the 350 motif.

Tomato seedlings

I just counted 86 tomato seedlings on my front doorstep. This is actually less than was planted due to a bit of natural attrition.

I am resolved to only plant 6-8 tomato plants in the vegie patch this year (10 at the most), partly due to space limitation and partly so we're not drowning in tomatoes in a few months. So why do I have so many seedlings? A few reasons:

1. I'm giving some to family and friends who didn't have time for raising from seed.
   
2. I have a number of different varieties (mostly heirloom varieties) and loads of seed
3. I knew some would either die or be a bit pathetic and this allows me to pick the healthiest looking ones.

The excess seedlings are not going to waste though. Once I've sorted through the seedlings and picked the ones I'm going to plant and set aside some for family and friends, the rest are going to the Waste Not! Vegie Swap tomorrow.

This year I'm following Peter Cundle's advice and being very cruel to my tomato seedlings. He recommends planting them into small tumbler sized containers (or put several in a punnet) and only giving them enough water to stay barely alive. Apparently this will make for tough plants. Molly-coddling is expressively forbidden.

I've planted mine into yogurt pots and a few 3-4 to a punnet/round chinese container. I sprinkled a little sulphate of potash around them, as recommended, and I've been trying to only water them when they are dry or starting to wilt a bit. I must admit that being cruel to my tomatoes does feel slightly counter intuitive, but hopefully the reward will be nice sturdy plants that produce loads of fruit. I'm holding off on planting them out until they start to show signs of flowering, though at the rate they're going this could be a while yet.

Looking back through my photos from this time last year, it was about this time that we bought a couple of tomato seedlings, which then put on a huge amount of growth through November. The photo above was taken mid November last year showing the first fruit forming.

Sustainable living: Tank water

The plumbers came yesterday to do the final stage in our project to get tank water connected to the house. Our two 7000 litre rain water tanks are now connected to a pump, some filters, and plumbed into the house water system. The tanks have a float switch which will switch us back to town water if the water in the tanks run too low. We can also manually switch back to town water if we want to, for example in Summer, if we are getting low on tank water, we might decide to use the tank water for the garden and the town water in the house (as rain water is better for the garden than town water). We don't have a flow meter on the tank system yet, but will be looking to get one soon so that we can still keep track of our water usage.

The Cunning Plans Dept did some calculations and reckons that based on our average rain fall and the collection area of the roof, tank water would be able to cover about half of our annual water usage.

Does it feel any different? Well the taste is definitely different. Rain water tastes much milder and doesn't have that slight chlorine after taste. The water pressure in the house is also less than we had with town water. This doesn't seem to be a problem, but I have noticed that obviously things like the washing machine take longer to fill. It does enforce less water usage in the shower! Also psychologically, I think being aware that you're using water from your own tank does make you think more about your water usage.

The next step will be to get the maximum usage out of our water and get a grey water system running under the backyard to water the trees and shrubs. And we'll also be looking at other ways we can reduce our overall water consumption so that tank water becomes a larger percentage of our total usage.This is the photo of us in our backyard, next to the vegie patch (with the two 7000 litre tanks on the right) that we submitted to the Alternative Technology Association's online event for the 350.org Global Day of Climate Action (this Saturday, 24th October). The ATA is aiming to get 350 photos of real people living sustainable lives. You can check out their gallery here. I like how the photos capture a wide range of things from big projects to small steps.

This saturday, if you're in the Wollongong area, why not check out the Waste Not! Vegie Swap at the Wollongong Community Garden and pop into Futureworld Eco-Technology Centre in Warrawong.

Garden Challenges: Strong Winds

Wollongong can be a bit of a windy place, especially at certain times of the year. We're fortunate that we don't tend to be as exposed to the wind as other places due to being on a hill and the backyards on either side of us are higher, giving us a little bit of protection.

However the two days of strong winds last week were certainly exceptional. First was the red dust storm on 23/9 and then the buffetting winds on 26-27/9.

We only suffered one main garden casualty with the winds, which was the snow peas. They simply couldn't hang on to the vegie patch fence with those strong winds. Most of the upper stalks snapped and fell over. I went down to the patch yesterday and trimmed off all the broken stalks. One plant had broken right down to the ground. The other four plants appear to still have some new shoots forming lower down below all the breakage, so I'm hopeful we may still get a bit more life out of them.

Surprisingly, the broccoli seedlings survived, despite no real protection. The young fruit trees also seem to have survived, though the leaves on one of the apples have all wilted and shrivelled, but I think it was doing that before the dust and wind. Hopefully it will come good. And the apple that I had suspected was dead as it showed no sign of life while the other four were growing leaves and flowers, it has a tiny bit of green showing in the top bud.

Operation Potato Patch

We love spuds, so there was no question that our vegie patch plan would include spuds and lots of them. In anticipation of great mounds of spuds, I eagerly bought a "gourmet combo" of seed potatoes. The pack included six varieties, each with around 8 tubers. The Kipflers and the Nicolas went to Dad as we was keen to give those a go. That left us with the remaining 4 varieties (Desiree, Kind Edward, Royal Blue, and Cranberry Red), or 32 tubers.

Now here is where doing the maths before getting too carried away would have helped. According to a variety of sources, our seed tubers needed to be planted in rows 40-80cm apart with 25-40cm between the spuds along the rows. The packets the seed tubers came in recommended 40cm x 40cm. Now 32 tubers at those spacings meant we were pretty much looking at not only an entire bed, but a bed larger than any of our existing ones. Since we've been thinking about extending the vegie patch down the hill and adding an extra bed anyway, we figured that a no-dig potato patch would be a great way to start.

Preparation and materials

Because gardening in our backyard involves lab-proofing, we needed to figure out what we would use as a barrier around the new patch. The long term plan is that we would use the 2 pool fence panels from the old vegie patch to extend the new vegie patch. However, we're not ready to move those yet so we needed an interim measure. We decided to go with chicken wire.

The no-dig method involves layers of straw, manure, and compost, plus a bit of blood & bone. We already had a good amount of compost and some blood & bone, but needed to buy straw and manure. A trip to Bunnings later and we had 8 bags of pulverised cow manure, 3 bales of sugar cane mulch, and a 10m roll of chicken wire.

Constructing the potato patch

A no-dig patch, as the name suggests, involves no digging. Given our horrible heavy clay soil that is full of rocks, we're a fans of no digging. However, we did need to mow the grass and weeds down, which also served to mark out the area.

While the patch will mostly be a "mound", due to the slope of our yard, we needed something along the lower edge to stop the whole mound slowly sliding down the hill. We re-used some edging from one of the old vegie beds.

To try and keep the kikuyu and weeds at bay around the edges of the bed, we laid down wet newspaper. Unfortunately we didn't have enough to cover all the bits we wanted to, so we will have to add to it later.

The fence was the next thing to go up. The Cunning Plans Dept made some stakes out of branches from the old tea tree and we stretched the chicken wire around the patch, leaving a "gate" at one end.

Next was the layering. Normally with a no-dig patch, you could put the seed potatoes straight on the ground and pile the layers on top. As our ground is hard clay, we figured we'd give our spuds could use a layer between them and the soil.

First we sprinkled a generous amount of gypsum over the ground, which will help break up the clay. Next was a layer of one bale of sugar cane mulch and 4 bags of cow manure mixed up.

The seed potatoes were laid out on this layer, which was ~6-7cm deep. Due to a slight glitch in my mathematical abilities, we had to adjust our layout a bit, but ended up with 3 rows with 9 spuds in each row, with spacing ~40cm x 25cm. I did at least remember to make a note of what we planted where in my garden diary. This, you will note, is only 27 spuds. As it turned out, we only had 30 tubers and I'd previously bought 3 "grow bags", so the leftover 3 spuds went in those.

We then continued with the layers. Sugar cane mulch, then the rest of the cow manure, blood & bone, then more sugar cane mulch, then a layer of compost, and finally a bit more sugar mulch on top. We'd been progressively watering in the heap as we went. Fortunately, the weather decided to be helpful and just as we finished the final layer, the skies opened and we got a brief downpour. I still gave it a bit of Seasol after the rain for good measure.

The final step was to stake the bottom edge of the chicken wire and rig up a bit of plywood (re-cycled from the old dog kennel) as a gate. Voila! One potato patch.

Recap and lessons learnt
We didn't really have an idea of how much manure and straw we would need, but as it turned out we needed more than we got. Ideally, we would have liked to have had the heap at least 30cm deep, but it's probably more around 20-25cm deep. As we will need to keep adding to the heap as the potatoes poke up through the top, we're going to need to get much more straw and manure. Total depth will need to be 50-60cm.

While we like growing our own food for the joy of it and also to grow varieties you can't get commercially, we also like to look at the cost breakdown of growing our own vs buying from the local fruit & veg store. For reference, the rough costs:

• 8 bags of cow manure - $44, will need more so add another 10 bags @ $55
• 3 bales of sugar cane mulch - $36, will need more so add another 3 bales @ $36
• 10m roll of chicken wire - $25
• Seed potatoes - $22
• Grow bags - $13

That's a total of ~$230. If we have good yields, that will be ~1kg per plant, so 30kg of spuds. Current spud prices are ~$2-3/kg for bog standard spuds, and ~$4-5 for "gourmet" varieties, so we could grow maybe $90-110 worth of spuds.

However, much of the costs are because we're starting a bed from scratch, which we won't need to do in future seasons as this bed will become part of the rotation. Next season, we will only need maybe 1/4-1/3 of the straw and manure and can use potatoes from this crop as seed tubers for the next (providing no diseases strike the patch). Next year, we could only be looking at ~$50 on materials for $90-110 worth of spuds. We're also not going to get varieties like the Royal Blue or Cranberry Red at the local fruit & veg.

In terms of time, the whole exercise took the two of us from around 10am to 3pm (with an hour break in the middle for lunch). The absence of digging meant that than heaviest labour was really moving the bags of manure and strewing them over the bed.

Powdery mildew

I recently discovered that one of the snow peas was not looking very well. It's leaves had become yellow and mottled. Not knowing what it was, but guessing it was some kind of disease, I pulled the plant out hoping that it would save the other 5 snow peas from the same fate. A week later I could see that the neighbouring plants have developed odd white-ish spots on their leaves, with some of the lower leaves starting to yellow.

From reading some of our gardening books, I took a guess that this could be a fungal problem. A bit of googling later and I believe we have powdery mildew, which can affect plants like snow peas and is probably the result of my late afternoon watering, a few humid evenings and the way the lower parts of the snow peas are dense in foliage which restricts air movement.

I had a look for some organic options to deal with powdery mildew and found a few home remedies. The main one is a milk spray, which is 1 part full-cream milk to 10 parts water. Unfortunately, I didn't have any milk, so I decided to try another recipe, which used 7 teaspoons of bicarb soda, in a bucket of water with enough soap to make a lather. I mixed this up and put it in a little spray bottle.


The other advice on powdery mildew was to remove the worst affected parts of the plants. I removed most of the lower sections of the snow peas. This will also help air circulation around the plants. The lower halves looked a little naked, but I hope it will help. The rest of the foliage was sprayed with the bicarb & soap spray. I did this in the afternoon once the patch was in shade. I've also made a note to be careful watering in the afternoon. While I water at ground level, the spray tends to wet the bottom 10cm of the plant.


The other thing I did notice on the snow peas, which clued me in to the fact that it might be a fungal problem, was the presence of a number of yellow and black ladybirds. I remember from doing my first year biology bug project that these ladybirds feed on fungus. A quick look on the CSIRO entomology website and I found these little ladybirds are Illeis galbula and feed almost exclusively on powdery mildew. Definitely good bugs to have in your garden.

A few days later and the spray seems to have stopped the powdery mildew from worsening or spreading further. I think I'll leave the plants for a bit to see how they go and let the ladybirds feast on the remains.