We have gone Crazy this Year!

Crazy at planting vegetables that is!  We organise and plant our food gardens to ensure we have a steady supply of produce all year. However spring is always our main event, with many plants supplying food for us in summer, autumn, through winter and into the following spring.


Ortzi planting beans

This spring we have had a mad compulsion to plant even more than normal. We couldn’t have done this by ourselves. During 2012 we have been hosts to many enthusiastic and energetic helpers (such as Ortzi above) and this has inspired us to “stretch our horizons”.  With the help of these wonderful visitors, we planted most of the main garden beds, then we cleared out any underutilised smaller areas and filled them with veggies too. To top it all off, we also established six small vegetable beds in spaces in the orchard.

Cucumber, lettuce and basil in one corner of the hothouse

Part of our compulsion to plant, is because of the future results that we can see projected in our imagination. When we plant a bed of sunflower seed, we don’t see 30 seeds or 30 little green plants- we see a forest of 30 tall plants covered in huge yellow smiley sunflowers. And so it is with every crop – we can actually see the future (in our minds) and that is one of the main driving forces behind our compulsion.

So what have we planted this year?

·       Tomatoes.  6 varieties and over 50 plants. Heather grew plenty of healthy seedlings and we tried our best to find “homes’ for as many as we could.

·       Corn. Two beds planted a month apart to give successive crops, with a total of around 80 plants (or 160 cobs if all goes well).

·       Climbing beans 3 plantings to give a continuous harvest over a longer period of time

·       Capsicum   -- 14 plants

·       Carrots two large beds to supply us right into next spring

·       Parsnip one large bed

·       Beetroot one bed

·       Celery one large bed to allow side picking of stalks all next year

·       Continuous plantings of salad greens (too many to count) including varieties of several varieties of lettuce, raddichio and rocket

·       Cucumbers 2 varieties spread around 4 areas with plenty of space for them to climb

·       Zucchini. 6 plants with 2 different varieties

·       Silverbeet and perennial spinach – too many to count

·       Pumpkins 5 varieties in 8 separate small beds A few plants of each to give us plenty of variety. We still have 3 pumpkins from last year and had one of these for Christmas lunch

·       Herbs such as parsley, basil and many perennial ones



Spinnach,basil, lettuce & much more

And with all that, we still have a couple of garden beds left over. These will provide room to start planting winter crops such as brassicas in summer. These beds currently have other crops that are about to be harvested (two beds of garlic and one large bed of broadbeans).

Of course it would be a big mistake to “count our chickens before they hatch”. There are so many variables, that no matter how hard we try to make our imagined crops turn into reality, we know that there is a possibility that the results won’t be as perfect as in our dreams. Over the years, there have been a variety of reasons for harvests being less than what we hoped eg rodents eating corn, heat and drought stressing plants, birds digging up seedlings etc. We know that this is part of the journey, but it doesn’t stop us dreaming of bumper harvests!

So what do we do with the produce when we have excess, which we certainly hope will be the case this year. Our family, friends and helpers will get a good share and then we sell any excess after that at Healesville Organic Farmers Market in Coronation Park every Saturday morning. Perhaps we will see you there and you can share some of our harvest too!


Our market stall

Eating our Green manure Crop!

Each year we aim to plant at least one of our vegetable areas with a green manure crop. However, we often find that other tasks are more demanding and we don’t always get a crop in the ground. This year though, we excelled in the green manure department and actually planted three beds; two with barley and one with broad beans.

Heather hoeing in the barley

All three crops germinated well and the plan was to cut the crops down when they were still quite young and let all the organic material decompose; effectively becoming a green fertiliser for the next crop. We cut the two beds of barley back as planned, forked it in with a good sprinkling of blood and bone and left it for 4-5 weeks to allow the decomposition process to work. This apparently adds phosphate to the soil and encourages a rich life force of microbial activity . Compost was added on top, then we planted two beds of tomatoes that Heather grew from seed. The beds were well mulched. So far the plants look stronger and more vibrant than previous crops, so our hopes are for a bumper crop. We will have to do an update when they are ready to harvest.

However with the broad beans, things did not proceed as originally planned. When we saw how beautiful the plants looked, we couldn’t bring ourselves to cut them down. We love eating broad beans and our taste buds convinced us to let them grow to maturity.

The broad bean crop

We were not disappointed; we have been having feasts of broad beans for weeks now, and still the beans keep coming. We have sold quite a lot at our market stall but as they ripen when the weather warms up people tend to eat less cooked food and more salads. So we have had an excess which has stimulated a bit of cooking creativity. Our favourite recipes are Broad Bean Dip (Moroccan dip) and Broad Beans with tomato, onion and basil sauce on gnocchi. The newest recipe Heather has come up with is ....steamed broad beans, cooled, then tossed with olive oil and lemon juice.....great with salads. Having eaten many kilos of broad beans we have turned into “human beans”.

The growing pods

We have competitions to see who can prong the most steamed broad beans on their fork, who can pod 1kg of broad beans in the shortest time, who can balance the greatest number of broad beans seeds on on top of the other on a solid flat surface, who can make a single broad bean spin for longer than 3 seconds.

Delicious Broad Bean Dip

We looked forward so much to tasting and eating the first broad beans of the season. Now we are really grateful that this wonderful bean is seasonal in our climate, and it will soon be replaced in our diet by the delicious climbing green bean......Can’t wait...Yum!

Sarah from Germany

Sarah is our first Helpx helper from Germany. She is on a short working holiday in Australia and stayed with us for the past couple of weeks.

Some of the jobs she helped with included weeding many areas of the garden (we have renamed Sarah - Wonder Woman Weeder), helped with our market stall, collected firewood, planted our beetroot crop (and it looks like all the seeds germinated), harvested berries, helped with composting, helped clear around one km of tracks that had become overgrown after the 2009 bushfires, helped out with most of the daily chores and more. She was such a great worker and always asking if she could help.

Of course she was very keen to meet the local native animals, and had a close up encounter with an echidna. Whilst here, she also saw mobs of kangaroos and many of our colourful parrots and other birds.

There was some wildlife that Sarah was not particularly fond of –spiders. We do occasionally come across these beautiful creatures but she would rather they kept their distance. We think she may not be quite as afraid now- in fact she may want to keep one as a pet!

The stay was not all work of course. We enjoyed each other’s company and spent much time sharing stories and laughing together. Ruby the dog thought she was wonderful because Sarah took her for walks around our tracks and spoiled her with loving pats and cuddles.

She has now left our place and managed to find paid work on a local berry farm to help fund the rest of her adventures in Australia and New Zealand. Once again we have enjoyed the company of a wonderful person and helper and we hope Sarah enjoys the rest of her trip around Australia.

Our New Multi-Function Battery Room

Earlier in the year we wrote about the big solar shift when we moved our batteries and inverter from under the solar panels outside, to inside the house at the back of our workshop. As the workshop gets quite dusty from time to time when we are sanding or sawing wood etc., we thought it would be wise to build a dividing wall to separate the battery room from the workshop area.



Battery room shelves under construction

Fortunately, we were able to make use of quite a bit of recycled material, most of which was completely free. The whole project of creating our new battery room cost less than $200 made up of:-

• Door –purchased second hand
• Box for the battery set – second hand and left over timber from other jobs
• Pine studs for the wall frame- gleaned from a skip behind a shop where they were remodelling. We asked first!
• Timber for the shelving. The uprights came from another shop makeover and the wood for the shelves from various free sources
• Grain bench.  A cupboard no longer wanted by a family member
• Wall paint was half price because another customer was unhappy with the tint

The shelves are filling up with produce

 

We built a wall of shelves in the room, which now serves multiple functions including:-

• Storage for all our bottling and jam making equipment and supplies
• Storage our ginger beer making gear as well as the bottles of ginger beer
• Storage area for some long lasting crops including pumpkins (about 60 this year), potatoes, garlic and other produce

The power management system and battery box

Other uses of the room include

• Storage for our battery bank (in a vented cupboard)
• Shelving for our inverter, regulator and associated equipment
• Space for our grain processing bench with oat roller and grain grinder attached (storage underneath)
• Provides a mouse proof storage area for bulk grains (oats and wheat)

The thermal mass in the slab and mudbrick walls ensures temperatures in the battery room do not vary greatly. Our new verandah helps in this regard, by keeping the sun off the external walls. This makes it an ideal space for storing vegetables, grain and produce.



The dividing wall with one side to be finished

The dividing wall that separates the battery room from the workshop has one other benefit. We intend finishing off the project by building shelves on the workshop side of it, so all our tools, workshop equipment and materials can be housed together in an orderly fashion.  This extra storage area will massively improve the way the workshop functions as well. However,  we know from past experience that any spare shelves will mysteriously fill up with objects we need to store, as well as objects that we keep because we are sure they will come in handy one day!

Karen & Alex

Mastering the wood splitter

Our latest helpers (via Helpx) were Alex and Karen who came from Hong Kong on a working holiday in Australia. They are in their early 20’s, were keen to learn about Australia and were very enthusiastic in giving us a hand with various tasks. Although they only stayed with us for eleven days they helped get much work done.

Some of the jobs they helped with, included clearing an area for a new orange tree (to be known as the Karelex orange - a blend of their names ), weeded many areas of the garden, shifted bricks and a pile of building timber, helped with our market stall, washed windows, cut back bushes that were blocking paths, mowed the grass in the orchard, shifted, split and stacked a large amount of firewood, helped out with most of the daily chores and more. Phew!!!

Weeding the asparagus with Ruby on guard!

Karen especially enjoyed collecting eggs (although she was not quite brave enough to collect them from under a sitting hen. She also made us a delicious meal of sushi, that was so tasty and beautifully presented that we ate it before we remembered to take a photo – so you will have to take our word for it.

Alex washing dishes

Of course they were very keen to meet the local native animals, and for once the animals cooperated. Whilst here, they had regular sightings of a pair of swamp wallabies (who are normally very secretive and shy) and also saw mobs of kangaroos, echidnas, a wombat, a goanna and many of our colourful parrots and other birds.


Helping with our market stall

The stay was not all work of course. We enjoyed each other’s company and spent much time laughing together. Ruby the dog thought they were wonderful because they took her for walks around our tracks each day. We also spent some time exploring a bit of the Yarra Valley including Maroondah Dam and Mt Dandenong. Once again we have enjoyed the company of some wonderful helpers and we hope both Karen and Alex enjoy the rest of their stay in Australia


On our way to the wall of Maroondah Dam

A Bump in the Road

It has been quite a while since we did a post on the blog.  Every now and again events conspire to distract us from our path, and then out of the blue things are suddenly different to what they were yesterday. This is probably not a bad thing, because it gives us a chance to catch our breath, slow down and enjoy our piece of “paradise” and reassess where we are going. It also gives us a chance to recharge our batteries.

About two months ago I pulled some muscles in my hip, which ended up giving me a constant low grade pain. We have a friend who did some damage to his shoulder and (as many people do) he couldn’t resist the temptation to keep working on tasks that needed doing. The result was more damage on top of the existing muscle tears. We didn’t want to take the risk of something similar happening. As my pain didn’t go away, even after a couple of weeks of rest, we basically put most of our gardening and building activities on hold.

At first I found this enforced rest, very hard to adapt to. And as much of the everyday workload had to be taken up by Heather she found it hard as well. The frustration of it all started to get us down, until Heather had a brainwave. She suggested we do something we hadn’t done in a long time - visit our local library and check out the fiction shelves. (Most of our reading over the past 10 years has been all about practical things like growing food or building things.) The visit to the library saved our sanity as we rediscovered the joys of reading novels. In fact we were going through several great stories each week- totally absorbed in the lives of the characters we were reading about. Whilst all this was going on, I went for a few tests to make sure my aches were nothing more than just strained muscles. The results all came back ok and this also helped take any pressure off our minds- it just became a waiting game.

One of the consequences of feeling a bit low and wanting to be distracted by other things is that we steered clear of our blog. It was too much of a reminder of the work that we had planned to do. We needed to have a break for a while and feel good about it.

Just over a week ago our next lot of Helpers from Helpx.com arrived;  just as the pain in my side was finally beginning to reduce.  They not only helped with many tasks – especially more heavy duty ones, but they also inspired us to put our “toe back in the water” and start getting back into action. We will write more about Karen and Alex in our next post.

Right now we are happy to report that things are getting back on track. We have started planting our summer garden, are getting stuck into some fire prevention work, are about to commence work on the remodelling of our barn ( http://www.tenderbreak.blogspot.com.au/2012/09/the-year-of-barn.html) and are feeling better about blogging again.  However this whole episode has left one legacy – we have now rediscovered the habit of getting absorbed in a good work of fiction. Each night (and even during the daytime sometimes if it is a particularly riveting story) we settle down to read before bed. In fact we’ll finish this post right here, because that is exactly what we are going to do right now!

Sarah from Brunei

Over the past 12 months we have had many helpers from different countries. Our latest helper is Sarah, who is Australian, and has been living overseas with her family for over a decade.  At present she lives in Brunei, but also spent a few years in Dubai. One of the reasons she came to our place was to get some ideas about sustainable living and property design that her family could put into practice when they return to Australia in the future.

Sarah "liberating" broadbeans from the weeds

Sarah adjusted really well to the change in climate from tropical weather with temperatures in the thirties to temperatures here in the teens. She has been very helpful and although only here for a short time, has helped us out with many tasks. She helped set up and run our stall at the Healesville Organic Farmers’ Market on Saturday, thoroughly weeded our broad bean and garlic  patches (which were drowning in a sea of competitors) , planted and mulched a new garden of native plants and helped with daily chores.

Putting mulch around a new native garden

 It was such a pleasure meeting Sarah and sharing our lives for a time. As we worked, we chatted and laughed, and shared thoughts on how people could become more sustainable in their ways of life. We also learnt about life in Brunei and the Middle East

We feel really privileged to have people like Sarah come here.   We wish her all the best in the future and hope she finds her dream property when she eventually returns to the Land of Oz.