Dave Riley's Blog (211)

All vaxed up and nowhere to go!

I'm therefore sentenced to potting around outback. Mind you, I gotta make a list of what is to be done?

Otherwise, I won't build a head of steam and I need to last to the end of the week outdoors, outback, quarantined at home...

And such gardening weather!…

I have a milk crate LEGO garden where I grow my herbs.

It works a treat.

Since I wanted to explore the grow bag experience for growing tubers -- especially Sweet Potatoes -- I've tweaked the milk crate + weedmat system to engineer a deeper soil trough to accommodate underground tuber development.

Here's the DIY.…

Last time we blog-interacted I was talking up the pleasures of cardboard as a garden mulch.  As of today it looks something like this:

It offers a certain rustic charm as the fibres begin their rotting journey.

Sentenced…

I may be a registered member of the Mulch Supporters Club but I never understood the Permaculture fetish for wet paper.

More trouble than it's worth.

Laying out the beds at the Vetiver plantation sure enamoured me to cardboard as a mulch understory and now it looks like I'm addicted.

Cardboard, after all, is mashed up wood chips...and it's available any and everywhere. More so, in fact, than newspaper.

So I started using cardboard keenly and experimentally in the…

April is always the best time outback. The transition is palpable and you get more opportunities to spend time relating to the dirt because  the days are no longer so darn hot.

I'm in the process of reducing my veg garden size -- that is the plots for annuals -- by engineering some efficiency changes via group and intense plantings. I'm also culling my plantings by staggering them more.

I have expanded the chook pen yet again, which now encompasses the Vetiver nursery. That's…

You know how it is...

You do one thing and that suggests another in way of flow on. What with the change in the weather and my collection of seedlings I've been out back making things happen.

Maybe I'll add some photos tomorrow when it is daylight...but my garden is a sea of fluro bamboo stakes like these shown right.

I've…

One of my chooks died a couple of days ago. It happens.

So I had to bury her deep so that the dogs didn't dig her up.

See! the chickens round the gate

For their morning portion wait;

Fill the basket from the store,

Let us open wide the door;

Throw out crumbs…

Spending time in the patch can be inspirational. Look and you shall see...

Worst of all, look and plan.

Does this obsession ever stop?

When you think the greenery is 'just so' you have to maybe do this or that.

The plants are a collective that maybe can do without you, but you can't help…

The year past in review.

Highlights both ecological and gastronomical.

1. Dragon Fruit Salsa: For me this is the most delicious way to partake of the exotic looking pitaya. I've planted Dragon fruits all over the place. Mine clamber over chook pens, prickly pear and frangipani alike. Now the…

I have seen a few Summers here. They come and go while the plants respond to the weather.

But this time around...

I am overwhelmed by the verdant growth. I've had to hack my way along the paths to get from A to…

Back to jungle mode. Ups and downs and undergrowth is the way I like it. No bare soil. Wall to wall Scurvy Weed (Egads!). Talk about greeeeen!

Spring onions,sweet peppers and maybe a Calabacitas...

Daikon…

I guess that I eat a lot of greens. My every day consumption is not of raw, but cooked, leaves.

I am not of the salad persuasion. Nor am I of the lightly stir-fried sort.

I try to grow the greens I like to eat. That way I always have plenty of different stems to forage.

Among my preferred leafy comestibles…

My garden of earthly delights. I like to grow what I like to eat.

White chokoes. Better tasting than their green cousins. Maybe not as prolific -- usually -- but this year I have them hanging down a'plenty. Much less slimy than the green and present to the mouth as a crisp veg. Ants, regrettably, love them.…

I invested energy  in drag and drop today. Did 2 beds in double quick time.

Just wrenched the verdant Scurvy Weed from its anchorage and dropped it as mulch where it used to grow but a moment before.

I'd been…

We are on the cusp of this season's great Vetiver venture.

Almost all of the clumps in our backyards have been harvested and we are 'bringing them on' (pictured at right) as divisions which are almost ready to plant out…

Today is a great day in the Kitchen Garden.'Tis also the first day of the rest of its life.It being at peace with the world.…

I eat soup every day for lunch. I love soup....and I guess I'm skilled at soupology.

Essentially my soup making works to a template.

1.STOCK

I make up a weak chicken stock by steaming up chicken necks for the dogs. I always have that on hand. I also make stock by collecting all our leftover bones -- cooked…

I just ate some fresh corn I harvested outback. So over Winter it is possible here in SEQ to grow corn...albeit on the coast.

I ate the corn with some shishito peppers I'd grown. They were from my frozen collection...but there are still some on the bushes.

Wee…