Fixie's Shelf

Tour of my house and garden 2014

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Our place has changed heaps since I last posted about it.  It's looking really lovely just now so I thought I'd give you a photo tour.  This is what you see when you come in from the front gate.  The front half I built when I was 22, with no building experience!  It cost $10,000, and I kept it cheap by doing absolutely everything myself.  The back half, we added last year.

Here you can see the front of the original house, with its beautiful gothic arched windows that I got from an old church.  Back right is the chook house, and a wooden gate that goes to the chook area and our son Jesse's garden.

This is the entrance to the new part of the house, the kitchen door.  You can just make out the table through the window - we have many happy family meals at that kitchen table.

Here's the pretty herb garden beneath that kitchen window:

 

And here's our home from the other side.  I was inspired by French country farm houses, and I think it really does look a bit like one:

 Now come inside, let me show you the kitchen:

All the cabinets are made from old weather boards.  What you see here is Paula's bench.  She has a nice work area with easy access to the stove, fridge (out of sight on the left) and her own sink.  She also has the most glorious view from the window, which you can see in this photo here:

On the other side is my bench, with my own sink and fridge.  It means we can both be working in the kitchen at the same time, preparing separate meals, without tripping over each other:

And here's the table where we eat, chat, and watch each other do silly interpretive dance routines on the 'stage' that is our kitchen floor.

When we eat, the rabbit, who free ranges in the garden, likes to hang out near us outside the window, entertaining us.  It's nearly as good as interpretive dance.

There's a lovely little Alice-In-Wonderland style arched doorway that goes from the kitchen to the lounge room:

 

Now step through into the lounge room, and you'll see we've finally got a wood stove, which makes me very, very happy in winter.  When everything is grey and dark and wet, lighting the fire lifts my spirits.  I always did intend to have a wood stove but the one I installed when I first built the house was stolen (!!) and then we put a cupboard in its space, and after that we couldn't figure out what to do with all the STUFF that we depended on in the cupboard, so I couldn't replace the woodstove!  Now that we've added to our home, the kitchen is in the new bit, and the woodstove is in the lounge room.

You can see next to the stove is a little pile of green presents.  They are all wrapped in fabric, ready for Paula's birthday.  It's a collection of handmade goodies I've made for her.

Now here's our front door, and through the arch window, you can see my fishing girl statue.  She's been trying to catch fish in that pond for months, but no go yet, unfortunately.

Right in front of those lovely arched windows is my art desk, where I spend most of my time:

Paula and I are in the process of making new shelves - boxes out of papier mache - in which to store all my art supplies, so I'm expecting this space to change fairly soon.

I also make art in the bathroom (which you have to go outside to get to), where I have a bench for dirty/stinky jobs like plastering, soldering and spray-painting:

It's pretty squishy in there, and the only reason I'm allowed in there at all with my dangerous tools is because the room is in shocking state of disrepair with the roof about to fall in and holes on the wall.  It's next up on our home-improvements agenda.  In the meantime, you can see we still have our composting toilet:

Which works great and doesn't stink at all.

Now come back inside and upstairs. This is the loft, which is home to our bath, and originally Paula, Jesse and I all slept here. Yes - all squished in like peas in a pod.  Now that we've expanded, Paula and I have a new bedroom, and the loft is just for Jesse:

And here is Paula's and my bedroom, which is my favourite room in the house:

Sitting up in bed, journaling, is probably my favourite switch-off activity, the best possible way to restore myself.  When we slept in the loft, that was pretty hard on my back, as I never had anything to lean against, and had to sit right in the middle of the bed so I wouldn't hit my head on the ceiling.  Now that we have a bedroom, we made ourselves the perfect bed.  Paula and I built the bed from scavenged parts, and upholstered the bedhead ourselves.  Now it's the perfect backrest for my journaling.

See the bedside table?  Paula made that for me for my last birthday.  It holds my journal and other supplies, neat, organised and easily accessible from my bed.

I think my favourite feature of the room is the chandelier, which existed as a dream in my journal for years before I finally had space for one.  I made it from old forks, pewter jugs and other scavenged metals.  I took a metalsmithing course just to learn how to do this, and now as a result, I've got the skills to do other metalwork - it heralded the beginning of a jewellery making career!

Our bedroom has a lovely arched window:

 

And a wardrobe made from salvaged timber:

 

With this little corset I found in France, hanging on my grandmother's coathanger:

 

And a little bit of wall made by Paula from all the bits of wood we had lying around at the end of our building project.  The wall was supposed to be plastered, but it was kind of expensive, and I really liked what Paula could do for us for free!

Ok, let's head outside and I'll show you the garden.  

If you go through that little wooden gate I mentioned back at the start of this post, you'll find yourself standing in front of the chook pen.  They have a little yellow house to roost in, and a big pen covered with a grape vine to play in.  But through the day we open the gate and they hang out in the orchard too.  See the black square bin in the photo above?  Worms live in there.

 

Here's Jesse's vegie garden and cubby, fenced off from the chooks, who would otherwise destroy it:

We've got a separate pen for our meat chickens, and they hang out under our fig and mandarine trees:

Now on the other side of the house, if you step outside our new kitchen door, there's a garden of wild greens, and the beautiful mosaic path Paula made, leading to my vegie garden:

My favourite piece of garden art is here too, a stencil I painted onto a piece of tin Paula gave me.  She flattened it and added some barbed wire as a frame:

Now here's my vegie garden, where most of my gardening efforts are concentrated:

It's got raised beds, and a fence around it that Paula built, to keep out animals.  I try to plant out roughly a square metre each month for us to eat.  To know more about how I produce maximum food from this, read my page, How To Really Grow Food In Your Backyard.  

This bed here is just ripening up, and we'll be eating from it soon:

But we're already eating zucchinis while we polish off the last of winter's spinach, broccoli and beetroots:

 

Past my vegie garden is my 'food forest', which sports this lovely sign that Paula made:

It's actually a bit small to be a real forest, and its forrestiness is rather reduced since I asked Paula to build me garden edges and paths... But people were walking on the beds and it was too hard to see what was what, and it was all a little out of hand.  This way it's clear and easy to navigate.

 

At one end of the food forest is our composting station.  This is where the composting toilet results go, and all food and garden scraps, and entire dead animals.  In fact, my neighbours bring me their expired animals to dispose of here.  It burns hot and fast.  When I empty stuff onto it, and come back a week later, it all looks like dirt.  Ultimately, this feeds our vegies and fruit trees, which makes for a nearly-closed system of fertility.

Paula made this pretty wood-collage front for the compost, so that when we look out the kitchen window, this is what we see instead of all those buckets and the general utility scene:

The food forest is also home to our bees:

Who think they own the forest and sometimes buzz me when I'm out there doing destructive things like weeding.  I've learnt from experience that if buzzed, I get two warnings and then a sting.  If it's not a good day for a bee sting, I head inside after the first warning.

 

There's a fair bit of food hidden in my forest:

 

And some lovely little spots like this one:

And there we have it, folks.  Thanks for looking around with me...

If you'd like to see this place for real, I'm having an open house, open garden and art exhibition all in one, on 7 December, so if you are in Melbourne, feel free to come and look around.

 

Garden Guide 2013-2014

I've just worked out my entire garden calender for the upcoming year. By following this calender, I should have vegies ready to eat every single month of the year (except when naughty critters get my seedlings).  I'm sharing it here for those of you in Melbourne who would like to make use of the dates and details.  If you live somewhere else, you can still use this as a base to create your own planting guide.

To use the planting and harvest chart, click on the image below, print it out, and then in the top row of the table, write down which garden bed you will use for each crop.  Some of my beds are 1 square metre, others are two - in general I try to plant out one spare metre per month, for my family of three.  I'd like more but that's all the space I have.

I sow all my seedlings during the winter / early spring months in a little plastic covered green house.  They are cheap to buy/make, and essential, otherwise you won't be able to start your tomatoes in winter.  Alternatively you could plant them inside, if you have a sunny North facing window.

I have also made some plastic row covers which I use on my garden beds.  I plant out my tomatoes in August, surrounded by spinach, lettuce and baby carrot which will all be finished before the tomatoes take over, and cover the whole bed with a plastic tunnel.  If you don't have a tunnel, leave a space for the tomatoes, and plant them in September instead of August.  If you don't have tunnels for the summer veg bed and summer vines bed, plant them out in October instead of September.

One more tip: once you've planted your seedlings into the garden, PROTECT THEM!  Nets help to ward off birds, chooks, rabbits, possums, rats and other small creatures, and so do plastic greenhouse tunnels.  Snails can be a big problem late winter and in Spring.  Go out on rainy nights and pick them off.  If you can't manage that, use a bait.  In autumn, the cabbage moth is my biggest enemy - mosquito netting over the beds will protect from them.  Or go out every few days and squish the baby caterpillars and wipe eggs from the back of the brassica leaves.

Once you've worked out where you'll plant everything, the next step is to translate that into individual tasks which you'll put in your diary. The list below shows moon planting dates for the coming year.  Click on the image below, print it out, and then transfer the tasks into your diary on the day you plan to do them, so that you will remember to leave time for them - don't book in other appointments for those days if possible.  The specified dates are the ideal dates, according to the moon, but if you can't plant on the ideal date, just reschedule for a suitable day around that time.

Happy growing, everyone.  If you use my guide, let me know how it goes!

The perfect veggie garden

My friend Loz is moving house and designing her vegie garden.  I've been helping her with her design, and I think what she's come up with now is absolutely fabulous.  In fact, I'm dead jealous, since my garden is an ergonomic disaster, having gradually evolved in bits and pieces over the years.  Just in case you are in the fortunate position of being able to start a garden from scratch, I thought I'd share with you Loz's garden plans, and what I think is good about it.

For various reasons required by the council, Loz's garden needs to be enclosed - so it will be contained inside a frame covered with wire.  The entire enclosure will be 10 metres x 15 metres - a great size for serious food production. 

 

In case it's not clear from the picture, the front strip is a chook run with fruit trees.  The chook house is on the left, at the end nearest the house, with nesting boxes accessible from outside, so it's a quick easy trip to collect the eggs.

 

Behind the chook run is the vegie garden.  The fence between the chooks and vegies will be high enough to stop flighty chooks from heading over, but low enough for a "throw over the fence" method of weeding.  I can't tell you how much I've loved this when I had it.  Every time I spotted a weed or a snail or a caterpillar, I'd call out to the chooks, and they'd rush over to the fence to receive my goodies.  I could just toss them from the vegie garden.  It means that instead of waiting until I get something to put the snails in, and then cart them down to the chook pen, I tended to do things on the spot - a very valuable habit for food gardeners.

 

When you enter the vegie garden from the house end at the left, on your right are three compost piles, 1 cubic metre each.  Three piles means you can put compost materials and weeds in the middle section as you generate them, can have one pile in current use, and the other pile waiting and breaking down.  For more details about how to run this kind of compost system, which is even capable of processing human toilet waste, see composting toilets on my side bar.

 

On your right, opposite the compost piles, is a small walk-in glasshouse for raising seedlings - very valuable to get summer seedlings started in advance.  I plant tomatoes and other summer vegies in an unheated greenhouse mid-winter, and this works well in Melbourne.

 

In front of the compost bins is a good-sized workstation.  I wish I had one of these.  There's a tool cupboard, a worm farm, a sink and tap, and a work bench to use for potting seedlings.  This area is conveniently close to the glasshouse where seedlings are raised, the compost, and the tools, so as to minimise carrying from one place to another.  When potting up seedlings you need tools, you need compost, you need worm castings, you need water - and with this plan, they are all right there.  There's also plenty of space here to bring in a wheel barrow and even to dump stuff you've just brought home, like big bags of autumn leaves, until you are able to process them.  There is an entrance to the chook run from this work area, so that to rake out muck from the bottom of the chook yard and pile it in the compost requires minimal travel.

 

The vegie garden beds themselves are raised, 1m wide, so that every part of the bed can be reached from the path without standing on the bed, ever.  The paths are nice and wide which makes for easy movement around the garden, even with a wheelbarrow.  Loz's original design had the beds down the centre of the garden, with an aisle at each side, but by changing to a central aisle we had more garden bed area and less path.  Also the path is in a more pleasing position to make it easy to pass through the garden.

On the far right is an extra fruit tree area which the chooks don't have access to.  This is the perfect place for Loz to plant herbs, perennials, and plants that attract beneficial insects.  She'll also put a small pond down here, again to attract beneficial insects.

 

Tour of my Garden 2012

It's spring here, and for some reason that usually inspires me to post a litte photo tour of my garden.

Here's my home - a sweet little mudbrick cottage with solar electricity, solar hot water and solar heater, built by me when I was 22 years old:

At the back there you can see my chook house, with tiny little red "windows" to match the main house.

The most used patch of garden this winter has been this patch of beet greens, self-seeded, from a chioggia beetroot that I left to go to seed last spring.  Chioggia beets have gorgeously soft leaves, and all winter we've been juicing them and eating them as spinach.  I'm hoping soon the roots will turn into fat beets and we'll harvest them all for eating and making kvass (traditional Russian drink made of fermented beetroot):

Since once the weather really warms up, this will all go to seed, I'm thinking ahead to our next patch of greens.  I've sown seed from the same chioggia plant here in this box, and they are just starting to come up.  Hoping this will be my summer juicing patch:

My greenhouse shelves are bursting with plants for summer - eggplant, capsicum, basil, celery, cucumber, zucchini and pumpkin seedlings:

I've already planted out my tomatoes, into a bed that has a plastic cover on it that works like a greenhouse.  Once the tomatoes get too tall or the weather warms up too much, I'll remove the cover.  I've worked out a great system for getting the most from my tomato bed.  I put in the plants early spring (that way I get an earlier crop than if I wait until November to put them in), and surround them with plants that will all be finished by December, such as spinach, baby carrots, peas, and lettuce.  Then just as those plants are done and the tomatoes are starting to shade everything out, I pull up the remnants of the surrounding plants, give the tomatoes an extra burst of compost, and leave the bed to them.  Here's a tiny tomato plant surrounded by some spinach seedlngs:

I have two square metres of garden bed coming along, the rightmost one to eat in October (though we're eating the lettuce already), the leftmost one to eat in November:

You can see my vegies in the above bed arranged in rows - lettuce at the front for easy daily harvest, the carrot, then chinese cabbage, behind that red cabbage, and then a row each of broccoli and cauliflower.

Thinking ahead to what we'll eat in December, while we still wait for the summer vegies to kick off, I've planted out most of this square meter:

It's all the same vegies as the Oct Nov beds - just arranged differently.  In the empty corner I'm still to plant the broccoli and cauliflower, which are hardening off as I type:

Going back to the larger garden, outside my fenced off vegie patch, we've reclaimed a bit of ground back from the chooks, so I am very excited to have these new garden beds to play with.  The seedlings in the above photo, as well as being used for my December bed, will also fill out these new garden beds.

And last of all, the most exciting thing for me this spring is that my new peach tree in my food forest is covered with blossom!  Does that mean we'll get peaches this year?  I hope so!  Whoohoo!

Coming up in the garden now is planting out my summer vegies - I'll put the zucchini and cucumber in a covered bed soon, hoping for an earlier crop this year.  I'll wait until October to plant out the capsicum and eggplant - in their own bed since they keep producing into late autumn, when all the other summer vegies are long dead.  And then I have a little break from planting, since the summer vegies will really feed us for a few months - just some regular sowings of beans and corn are needed.  In December, I'll start planting seeds for vegies to eat in autumn and winter, when the summer vegies slow.

 

Bees - a top bar hive!

 

 

I've wanted bees for years and years - and at long last I've got a hive in my garden! They came in the night last week, delivered by the lovely Martin O'Callaghan, who brought them round in the dark and helped to settle them in.

I have been very put off by the complexities of a box hive. I went to a workshop at Ceres, and while it might have been a good one, I was pretty confounded. I couldn't understand the teacher at all. I had a lovely friend who was trying to interpret for me, but when suited up in bee gear, it became pretty damned hard for her to sign. I couldn't make sense of it.

My hive is a top bar hive, not a box hive, and apparently much simpler to manage. You don't need as much training to look after a top bar hive, and the little training I will need, Martin is happy to provide. He communicates nice and visually, so hopefully I won't have the suited up interpreting problems I had in the past.

The wonderful thing about a top bar hive is that the bees live a much more natural life than they do in a box hive. The bees make their comb by building onto a little strip of wax along the inside of the "top bar". They build their comb downwards, in the shape that they like to make it. They make cells of different sizes, depending on what it will be used for. It could be used for the queen to lay an egg, which could become a worker bee, or a drone bee, or even a new queen bee, or it could be used for honey storage. The bees collect pollen from flowers within a 5km radius, turn that into honey, and store to use as food now and during winter.

The people who invented box hives, had this idea that they could force the bees to make more honey, by building the honeycomb for them. With a box hive, you put in a frame that has "foundation" wax on it - ie wax in the shape of honeycomb, with predetermined numbers of worker bee cells, honey storage cells etc. By doing this they could reduce the number of drone bees, considered redundant, since they aren't collectors of honey. They could increase the number of worker bees and honey storage cells. They eliminated the work done by bees to build the honeycomb, and hence freed up more worker bees to focus on collecting honey. With this arrangement, the bees DO create more honey. Vastly more. But the drawback is that the bees are more vulnerable to problems, and hence need quite a bit of management and looking-after.

With a top bar hive, the bees get to choose how to structure their colony, who will do what, how many bees are redundant and so on. With this kind of management, they can make sure they maintain a healthy colony with good resistance to diseases and pests.

So this summer, my job is to add a new top bar every time the hive is getting kind of full. Martin will drop by to show me how to do it. And later in summer, Martin will host a harvest at his home, and all the novices like me who have bought bees from him in the past year, will gather to watch him harvest the honey from his hive, and learn how to do it with our own. I can't wait!

Even better than the honey (apparently at the end of summer I should be able to harvest 10-20 litres), is the fact that the bees are already buzzing around, pollinating the blossom on my almond tree, and gearing up for some top-scale pollination in my vegie garden this summer. Hopefully I won't need to "diddle" by hand any more! :)

Tour of my garden 2010

This blog has moved! A new and updated post about this can be found here. Please update your bookmarks as this blog will be taken down soon.

After a few requests, I thought I'd post another tour of my garden, now that it's Spring.  

First a few pics of my house.... which I built myself 13 years ago, out of mud brick. On the roof you can see a solar panel and our new solar heater. The red cupboard contains the gizards of our solar electricity system.








Here's the entrance to my vegie garden, with our chook, Speckle, thoughtfully posed in front of the "Real Food" sign Paula made me. When I'm working Speckle hovers here, ready to catch weeds and snails I chuck over the fence. And if I leave the gate open for even a second, she's in, having a nip at the cabbages.



 
A snap of my vegie garden. I'm disappointed with this photo though, because at the front is my tomato bed which is barely grown, while the abundant beds that are really feeding us right now, are in the distance behind it. 



Here's a close up of one of my spring vegie beds. For the first time ever I grew picture-perfect broccoli, snowy heads of cauli, and my cabbages are fattening up on schedule, looking beautiful.  



 

 



 

I think the secret to this best bed of brassicas ever is:

1) it's in a nice sunny spot

2) I double dug it - ie loosened the soil to twice the depth of my garden fork

3) I fed it with homemade compost made of oak leaves gathered in autumn, chook poo from my chooks, and seaweed I collected from the beach. I've come to believe that any old compost isn't necessarily good enough. Good quality compost like this one makes a difference.

4) I planted it with good quality seed, purchased from New Gippsland Seed company. I'm going to post another time about seeds, but basically I think many seed companies can't be trusted to give you good seed. So far I've had brilliant results from New Gipps. 

Here's the same bed a few months ago, not long after I planted it out:



Damn - I didn't get a photo of my beetroot, carrot and spinach bed, another one with all the above secrets applied to it. I've pulled up everything but the carrots now, as they were starting to seed. I've got a sandbox full of beetroots, ready for me to make kvass. We've eaten meal after meal of the best and most luscious spinach ever. I've had lots of failures, but this seed I bought from New Gipps. Actually, in this bed I had a mix of four different types of spinach, and one of them was from New Gipps. That was the one we ate. The others put out a pathetic number of miniscule leaves and went to seeds. I did, however, get a snap of it a few months ago, back when the beets and spinach were tiny seedlings:



In the bed behind it, you can see row upon row of leeks, onions and garlic. We've just pulled all the leeks, fat and tall, and I snuck a peek to find the garlic is bulbing now too. Hopefully it won't be long til we can eat the garlic and onions.

This here is my food forest. You wouldn't know it was the same bare ground I laid out in winter. We got home from a tour to Sydney in Sept and ran around screaming because while we were away it had transformed itself into a mini forest.



We are getting a fair bit of food from it already - armloads of broadbeans, three artichokes a week, some odd brassicas that I dumped there when I didn't have space in my vegie garden, herbs, parsley, food for my animals, and we've just started pulling big fat beets and vibrant orange carrots.

Here's Jesse's garden, complete with his cubby. This photo doesn't showcase it very well - but it has two beds thick with strawberries, which are ripening up as I type. His other summer plants are in but quite small, so there's a lot of bare space for now. I think in a couple of months it'll look gorgeous. He's very proud of it. He goes out every day to water it, and recently drew up a map showing what plants he has, where. This is my idea of "homeschool" for a 7 year old.



There's heaps more to show you, such as the new chook food areas I've planted out, so my chooks will have greens year round-ish, but I was too distracted to take enough photos. I'm on tour now, so it'll have to wait till I get home.

But I'll finish with a photo of harvest bounty. Before we left for tour we pulled up armloads of stuff to store, so that it wouldn't go to seed in our absence and become inedible.



Here's Jesse and me, proud as anything!



 

My Food Forest

 

Here it is. It's not looking very foresty yet, as it's quite new. I've been reading up on Food Forests, which as far as I can tell is a permaculture idea developed by Bill Mollison, though maybe he adapted it from somewhere else. The basic idea is that it's planted according to the principles of naturally occurring forests, but with species of plants that are good for us humans to eat. In theory, such a forest should be self-maintaining, like the forests in the wild, with a canopy of tall trees mixed with smaller trees, and underplantings of shrubs, groundcovers and roots, with some vines in the mix to clamber over everything. It sounds great doesn't it? Bill Mollison really sells the idea, though I have a bit of a gripe about permaculture, and that is that it appears to be a theoretical method of gardening/planning, and no-one seems to be doing any ongoing testing to see which of his ideas work and which don't. Now I'm fairly sure that the food forest presented by Bill Mollison wouldn't quite work in practice, mainly because he appears to disregard issues of tree root competition and the amount of shade cast by trees. Think of big trees you know that cast a lot of shade on the ground. Grass doesn't grow under them, and nothing else will either. The other reason I think it doesn't make sense is that we have bred the wildness out of our favourite food plants, so that they will give us delicious food, but only if we give them the attention, sun, water, and weed-free environments that they need. They aren't really the tough survive-anywhere kind of plants that tend to flourish in a forest.

So I've been a bit sceptical, but I am seduced by the idea regardless. I did find a book by Patrick Whitefield who lives in England and who does actually have practical experience with his own food forest, and his book sets out concerns and limitations in a way that match with my own experience of gardening. I can't use it to help me select plant species though, as many of the plants he recommends really work best in England, and it's unlikely they'd be good choices for an Australian climate. However, I got a lot of ideas from him, and I'm now experimenting with my own version of a food forest. Here's my take on a food forest:

A food forest is not something you plant and then enjoy while it self-manages. Because food species are not hardy, we need to do a lot of management. Patrick Whitefield suggests daily is is what's required. Each day you wander through the forest, picking your dinner, and as you go you check out how the plants are doing. If a plant is looking too vigorous, threatening to take over and smother the other species, cut it back. You can just break off a bit and drop the results on the ground to become mulch. If a plant is not doing well, cut back its neighbours to give it a bit more light and root space. With this kind of management you can keep a variety of species going strong in the forest. Without management you'll end up with your trees, and then a few vigorous understorey plants that dominate everything like weeds. If they're climbers they might smother your trees too.

A food forest is something that can evolve over the years. For example, you start with baby fruit trees, and surround them with short lived perennials like berries, passionfruit, and artichokes. You could add in some annuals in the early years too. As the fruit trees grow bigger, they will gradually shade out the other plants, which will be at the end of their lives anyway. At this tme the soft-fruit harvest is replaced by a decent harvest from the trees. The trees need protecting in the early years to help them get established without too much competition.

Here's what I'm doing in my food forest:

I'm planting five fruit trees. I could fit in more but I want to let sunshine in for the long term so that I can always grow other plants as well.

I've marked off a one metre diameter space around each fruit tree as a no-competition zone, which I'll mulch well and ensure no other plants can take root in there.

I've measured out a 2 metre ring around each tree, which I'm assuming will be the eventual root zone of the tree. In this ring I'm planting short lived perenials including artichokes, comfrey, fennel, perennial beans and alfalfa. Amongst these I'll add in groundcovers such as chammomile, thyme, nasturtium, mint and more. In one of these rings, the one closest to the entry to the forest, I'm planting herbs, so Paula will be able to easily find and help herself to them as she needs them.

I've marked out a couple of areas that are not within an eventual root zone of a tree, and in one of them I've planted root vegetables (I'll let several go to seed, hope they self-seed, and then do daily management in the hope I can maintain a thriving diversity), and in the other I'll plant self-seeding leaf and fruiting annual vegies. Mostly I won't do any regular digging in my forest, but I will need to dig the root zone from time to time. Every few years I'll swap the root area for the annual self-seed area, as a kind of crop rotation, but only if I think it needs it.

I've marked out paths that will enable me to reach most of the areas I need to access (but not the no-competition fruit tree zones - I figure by the time there's a harvest the trees will be reachable from the path), without standing on any planted areas. I've dug the paths to make them lower than the rest of the garden, to give visitors a cue for where to walk and where not to walk. I'll plant ground covers along the edges of the paths, so hopefully they'll run right over the paths and give continuous green. Some of them, like the thyme, will be nice scented plants that smell good as we walk on them.

I've designated the furthest end of the forest as a thorny zone and put my thorny black berries, raspberries and stinging nettles down there. All these plants, including the apricot tree in that part of the forest, should fruit early summer, then after that we won't need to go there again. In the midst of the thorny zone I've left a sunny spot to plant vines such as melon, choko or pumpkin. By the time we've finished our December harvest, it will be getting big and can take over that entire area. I'm particularly pleased with the synchronicity of this part of the design, though I've yet to see how well it actually works.

I've kept several spaces for raspberries and blackberries that should still be good for growing berries even when the fruit trees are grown up - I don't really want to forego my berries.

Next to the forest is a rather bleak looking area where we'll park Bertha, our campervan. To make that area prettier I'll plant a passionfruit next to the edge, and let it clamber right down into that space, and even get walked on if need.

For this year, while I'm waiting for plants to grow, I've added several annuals such as broadbeans, brassicas, and other leftover seedlings from my vegie garden.

I'm hoping to harvest from my forest:
-  tree fruit (2 varieties of apple, peaches, pears, and apricots),
-  soft fruit (summer and autumn fruiting raspberries and blackberries, passionfruit, strawberries and watermelons),
-  leafy greens (warrigul greens, perpetual spinach beet and other greens),
- some perennial vegies (artichokes, fennel, beans),
- herbs (lemon grass, perennial basil, chives, spring onions, thyme, oregano, curry plant, horseradish, stevia, nasturtium, marigold, valerian),
- chook and rabbit food (tree lucerne, alfalfa, comfrey, chamomile, apple branches, as well as vegies),
- root vegies (jerusalem artichokes, beets, onions, garlic, spring onions, carrots)

and as well as this I'm hoping to end up with plenty of material to use as cover materials for my composting toilet; to be able to use the mint planted right next to the compost pile as a "toilet brush"; and to attract predators to deal with pests, thanks to the variety of herbs and flowers included.

How To Grow More Vegetables

I got this fantastic book, How To Grow More Vegetables, Fruit and Nuts on Less Land Than You Can Imagine. It gives very detailed instructions for how to get the absolute most out of a limited number of garden beds. I'm making some changes to the way I garden and water, based on the ideas in this book.  

I love this book because a) it answers so many of my questions about gardening, and b) the entire approach is centred around sustainable principles. So often I've read gardening advice that suggests we bring home tonnes of compost, organic fertiliser, straw for mulch and more, and it all seems so costly. This book focuses on how to get as quickly as possible to a "closed system" where you can recycle all nutrients on the property and not need to bring in more. There is no mention of raised garden beds or special compost bins to be built, because as the author points out, the timber used to build them is probably better put to another use - it's a waste of resources. Indeed, the entire system of gardening is focussed on using minimal resources, including water, for maximum gain.

The only thing lacking in the book, I think, is the use of of the compost pile to compost human waste (I'm talking about poo) - as this would really bring it to a closed system.

I think if you are a beginning gardener and need a way to get started that isn't daunting at all, you'd be better to get One Magic Square, which makes it feel so easy to get started and is very inspiring. But if you already grow vegies and are looking for ways to increase your yield, this book is fantastic.

Here's a few of the key ideas the book presents:

- Do a proper soil test to find out exactly what nutrients your soil really needs, then add the right amount of organic matter to balance out the nutrients (the book tells you what and how much to use). This way you can avoid low yields and yellow leaves and other plant problems, because the soil is perfectly balanced.

- Double dig the soil before every crop to airate it, and give it a nice layer of compost on top. Be very careful not to compact the soil after digging, as this makes it harder for the plants to extend their roots.  The method described loosens the soil without destroying the structure.

- Build a big, proper compost pile, and recycle all your nutrients and garden waste here. If you grow the right plants within your garden bed, they will make enough material to build the amount of compost you need to feed that amount of soil. This is more sustainable than using, say cow manure, where the cow has destroyed a piece of land in order to generate the fertiliser for your garden.

- Plant your vegies exactly the correct distance apart. Each plant has a root ball of a particular size, and by planting them as close as possible but not too close, then you create the right micro-climate beneath the leaves for healthy soil, and the plants don't need to compete for water and nutrients.

- Use a "breakfast-lunch-dinner" concept to raise plants from seed. First you plant the seeds one inch apart in a seed tray, and let them grow there for a specified amount of time, usually two weeks. This is breakfast. Then you transplant into a deeper seed tray, two inches apart, which gives the plants a fresh burst of nutrients and newly airated soil, and they grow there for a certain amount of time. This is lunch. Then finally you transplant them into the growing bed, which again has fresh compost and moist airated soil, which works as dinner for the plants. By doing this you also use less water, than you would if you'd planted directly into the growing bed. It's more work, transplanting everything, but it means you can have other food growing in the bed until the last minute, and it really shortens the time a plant needs to be in your garden bed before it starts producing food.

- Water with a soft shower head, similar to rain. Don't blast the soil with a heavy spray, as this can compact the soil. Water the soil rather than the plants, and make sure you keep all the soil moist, even in beds where nothing is currently growing. When soil dries out it is very hard to re-wet as it repels water rather than absorbing it.

My very favourite part of the book is the plans they have for sustainable gardens. They suggest that 100 square feet is a good starting size (my vegie garden is about 125 square feet of growing beds, plus I have other beds around the house for permanent crops), but to be sustainable you really need 300 square feet per person! Yikes. With the plans the authors tell you exactly what to plant, when to plant it, where to put it in the garden bed, and what to replace it with throughout the growing season. I am a bit surprised you'd get to harvest some of these vegies so quickly, so am interested to test it out for myself.

I've planned my own winter garden, using ideas from all the garden plans offered, and have planted my seeds with the last new moon. They came up beautifully and you can see them in the photo. Then just after the full moon, I transplanted them to their second tray. Fingers crossed this results in a winter full of food.  With the next new moon I popped them into the garden bed.  I was astonished to see how much they grew each day, compared with the previous lot of beet seedlings I put into a garden bed.  I'm not sure which of the many things I'm doing differently is the key, but something's working and my beets are growing like never before.

My spring garden, by the way, did indeed supply food for the summer - we've hardly had to buy vegetables since late December.  Even though you need more garden space for three people to be self-sufficient, our garden is very much meeting our vegetable needs already, and with a bit more careful planning and hopefully the above techniques, I hope we can continue to do that year-round.  My next focus is to try and increase the flow of fruit, because we really could use more, and a more steady supply too.