These photos are from the recent permaculture workshop that Nicola Apps held at Three Churches in Emu Park. It was a great weekend and Three Churches was an amazing venue, the people out there are doing an incredible job and I hope that we will be able to have a L2L meeting out there in the near future!
https://www.facebook.com/nicolaappspermaculturesolutions
Wicking Bed Construction
We have been busy building shade houses lately. Moving in this direction is letting us deal with the crazy heat that we are having and overcomes the issues that we have with cabbage moths and fruit flies. This 36 square meter shade house is one I have put up at my parents house. My mother is a total green thumb so it is always interesting to see how things are going when I drop around.
The next project is to finish the 50 square meter shade house at our place. All the steel was free recycled scrap which I am running out of so I have started welding together shorter lengths to get enough to finish the project.
Lindsay, Luke, Judie and I met Heather and Alan at the recent grafting workshop and were invited out to have a look at their amazing property. Although they mostly grow Lychee's and Mangos commercially there was a wide variety of other fruits and nuts growing around the property. The one that interested me the most was the Jaboticaba trees.
Jaboticaba are a Brazilian fruit that grow on the wood of the tree and have a very pleasant flavour. The skins however have a lot of Tannin and should not be eaten.
I attended an awesome weekend grafting course run by the Capricorn Coast Landcare group and the Capricorn Edible Plants group. The course was free with funding from the Australian Government and expertly managed by local grafting guru’s Tony Welch and Alby Wooler.
I can honestly say that I went along thinking that it would be a useful skill to learn to graft but would mainly just use the knowledge to graft a few avocado and mulberry trees. By the end of the course I had a totally different outlook and believe that I will probably graft tomato’s, egg plants and other fruit and vegetables from now on rather then just relying on chance productivity from seeds. Also there were some great tips like using root stock take from the Devils Fig which has a high resistance to wilt virus and grafting tomatoes and eggplants onto them. This also extends the life of the plant as the root stock has a much longer life span then the tomato root stock.
I really want to thank Tony and Alby and am sure that I will have years of experimenting ahead of me!
Devils Fig
I have been interested in having a go at making Biochar to use as a soil amendment and also to include in the aquaculture system as a final filtration stage after all of the large solids have been removed by the swirl filters and filter mesh.
I picked up 3 steel drums for $5 from the recycle centre at the Livingstone Shire dump. They use to hold motor oil but seem really clean now. I have started packing them with wood as it becomes available and when they are full I plan to turn them upside down in the middle of the burning pile and build a bonfire around them to try and pyrolysis the wood.
Greg
The Bok Choi plants have grown so much faster then the other greens and are getting to the point where they are ready to harvest. This is were I usually lose everything to cabbage moths but this time I have started spraying with DIPEL at the first sign on infestation.
I went out to check the plants this afternoon and there was a cloud of moths flapping around the greens but there was still only one plant showing signs of damage. This was the one I first found that told me it was time to bring out the spray.
You can see the web that forms in the heart of the plant which is the first sign you get that a massive infestation is about to break out. I will put some spray on the next few days to try and fend off the plague.
I have started up the incubator again and am going to begin hatching out chickens on a much larger scale then before. I am not allowed to have a rooster in my zoning but am lucky enough to have a friend who will sell the fertilized eggs to me for the same price as unfertilized ones. It took a fair bit of tweaking to get the incubator to the exact temperature but now that it is set correctly it seems fairly stable.
The incubator didn’t cost much but is a US model so I have plugged it into a 120 volt inverter which is running of a computer power supply. If you are using a PC’s power supply you just have to remember that the red wires are 5 volts, the Yellow wires are 12 volts and the green wire needs to be crossed with the black wire to turn it on.
I picked up a Swiss Brown mushroom kit as I want to work out how to culture my own mushrooms. There is some information on the Milkwood Permaculture site about doing this from scratch but you first need to get hold of fresh mushroom spawn so a mushroom kit seemed to be a good way to get started.
I had some time over the holidays to get stuck into a few projects that have been really neglected for some time. The first thing that I have been meaning to do was to weed out the corn growing hydroponic area that had become terribly over grown and covered in strangler vines. I weeded out the beds and pulled out the stranglers and have started to barrow in loads of free woodchip mulch that Ergon has left in mountains at the Farnborough State School. I will post some more pictures once I have finished rejuvenating the site.
The three fibreglass beds were purchased second hand from a guy in Gladstone and the area that I have put them in could comfortably handle another 7 so I would love to expand this sometime in the future. The three beds that are currently in produce around 150 cobbs of corn with every grow out. Most of this excess gets frozen but I have been thinking that if we can grow enough then it might be worth starting to make our own corn bread.
I have been doing a lot of fencing lately to try to get rid of the problem of “Couch Eggs” where we would wake up every morning to find that we only needed to walk as far as the lounge room to collect our breakfast eggs. We also have the dream of getting a milking goat and a couple of Pygmy goats to keep it company but this can’t happen until the fencing is completed in all the areas to stop the goats from getting into the fruit trees (or the furniture).
The chook run is totally packed with fruit trees. I am happy with they way it has filled in as I wanted to provide protection to the chickens from the hawks that circle our yard and also create some additional forage for the chickens when they get locked away.
The patio is being fenced off as well to keep the animals out and I am planning to take advantage of the northerly facing rear side of the fence to create a pest free greenhouse for growing tomatoes as all previous attempts to grow large tomatoes varieties and Capsicum in the warmer weather had to be surrendered to the fruit flies and other pests.
The rear side of the fence is the perfect spot to build a frame and then stretch bug netting over. This area is going to be used for bathtub wicking beds which should fit neatly along the fence line.
Greg
Denis sent in this tip for getting rid of troublesome ant nests that he tried successfully.
Around the holes of the ants nest Denis sprinkled a thick layer of Diatomaceous Earth and three days later all of the ants were gone.
It’s one week until the Easter holidays and I am absolutely busting to get back into the yard and get some work done. The last few months have seen very little happen as the usual summer heat brings my efforts to a standstill.
The recent combination of rain and high temperatures have seen an explosion in growth in the fruit and nut trees and with an uncharacteristic break in the weather last weekend I finally managed to get out with the whipper snipper and slash back the 6 foot high grasses and weeds that have established themselves throughout the summer.
When I first planted the garden I tried hard to suppress the weed growth but my position was changed by some of the local Waru permaculture gurus who convinced me that the grow and slash method would build up my soil at a far greater rate. This really seems to have been the case especially since a lot of the weeds that are mixed in are legumes and are adding nitrogen back into the soil. The lemon grass and other varieties grow out of control during the hot weather so that when I slash it all in preparation for the cooler months I end up with a thick layer of mulch on the ground to start the growing season with.
I took a load of garbage to the dump the other week and did my usual check out of the recycling area to see if there was anything that would be useful in the garden. To my joy I nabbed two brand new fibreglass bathtubs for $10 each. they still had their delivery plastic on them and when I took them home and removed the plastic I found them to be flawless. This is the forth time that I have found brand new bathtubs at the dump and I really wish I knew which business keeps throwing them out. If they let me know I would even come and pick them up and pay them for the privilege. It must be something to do with them being last seasons models or something but seriously do people really replace their bathtubs seasonally? Who would care if a bathtub doesn’t have the latest aerodynamic fins just stick a lower price on it! Anyway it works out well for the aquaponic beds and I have enough now to seek out Lynn's advice about using bathtubs to make some wicking beds this year.
The aquaponics has been a rollercoaster ride the last few months with one of my industrial air pumps seizing up after two years of flawless performance. I needed to send the pump in for servicing and was running the large tank just on the emergency backup aeration system. After a couple of days I was noticing that because I wasn’t mixing the air flow right through from the bottom of the tank like the big pump does, it was causing all of the fish to gather in the top half of the tank. I gave it some thought and finally decided that it was time for a large scale harvest and freezing session especially since a lot of the fish were starting to hit the 2 kg mark.
The number of fish was ridiculous, I gave a washing basket full to my neighbour and then started crating the rest to my parents house where my dad and I worked into the night to gut and scale them. I wish I had gotten some photos but I was wet and mucky from the beginning to end. I will take some of the bags of Jade Perch out of the chest freezer and grab some photos later.
Some of the fish that mum cooked up with a marinara sauce almost tasted like Barramundi though we found that I had let a lot of them grow much too big. The best tasting ones were plate sized and the really large ones were not nearly as nice. I am using one of my IBC containers as a liquid fertilizer container and find that I can put all of the fish waste into it without any serious smell escaping. This container is also good for holding buckets of cane toad bodies that I collect up and down the street and any other material that can’t go into compost but will dilute down in water. I have been putting this water onto the Asparagus and fruit trees and the results have been explosive.
Although it was a pain at the time, the air pump failing turned out to be a god send as my main fish tank suffered damage during the cyclonic winds we had causing it to drain and killing the remaining few fish I had. I was ok with that as we had harvested so many prior to the incident and I now find myself able to do some work on the tanks that I have wanted to for sometime. I made a lot of mistakes when I first put in the tanks and intend to correct these before restocking.
The big green tank is going to be removed and the base redone in concrete rather then crusher dust, I will be plumbing in through tank aerators rather then feeding in air lines from the top and will raise the fibreglass beds by a couple of feet so that the auto-syphons can work reliably. I also need to fit a better sump to one of the AP systems and build a covered deck over them. One of my neighbours told me that they regularly saw predatory birds diving down to my vastly overstocked 7000 litre tank and then taking off with jade perch. There were so many fish in there that I didn’t worry to much as it was just thinning the load for me.
Greg Rutter
It was Bill M’s birthday recently and this was the present that he got from Colleen and the children, a ‘Carter Built’ native bee hive!
This awesome little hive has already started to pull its own weight as these wonderful little creatures have been seen working throughout the garden carrying out their pollination duties.
Colleen is going to try and organise a group meeting with the hives maker in the new year and hopefully we can get a demonstration of how to split the hive into two hives.
Colleen said the honey is delightful and tastes like butterscotch.
I asked Bill if he had any recently cut hard wood and got a quizzical look in reply. “Haven’t you seen around the side?” he responded. We wandered over to the other side of the house and were greeted with the remnants of his recent venture into arboreal management. The log sizes where just perfect for mushrooms so we decided to lay down some Shiitake future’s. Neither of us have grown Shiitake’s before so we figured we would start w
We don’t have any oak trees but I have found lots of people who have told me that most hardwoods will work just as well.
The wood has to be a hardwood species and needs to have been cut no longer then two weeks previously otherwise non target species of fungus can infiltrate the wood. From what I have read, the logs are protected for the first two weeks but after this period they start to break down.
We selected some logs in the 10 to 15 centimetre diameter range and stacked them up behind the shed on some sacrificial offcuts. These will have to stay here for two months before being inoculated and moved to a cool shady location. It will take a further 6 to 12 months for the logs to start “fruiting”.
Geoff and Llyn have lived on the land all their lives and have made a good living out of organic gardening and some aquaculture enterprises. After recently retiring and moving into Yeppoon the couple made the decision to continue doing what they love and luckily for us have brought their wealth of knowledge into the urban farming arena.
I dropped in to visit 3 months after the big move and am blown away by how much progress has been made in such a short amount of time. Inside the house they have been opening everything up to the light and outside Llyn has a thriving wicking bed system in place that is powering along and is already churning out more greens then they can eat. I was particularly interested in how much shade the greens were growing in and how beneficial it was for them and also the success of Llyn’s potato growing bags which produce all year round except for the very hottest summer months.
I think that the chook pen is going to be my new favourite place to visit when the heat of summer comes around. The forage trees have burst into life and come out in their spring greens. The original plan was to put all of the messy trees within the confines of the chicken run so that the chooks could clean up the fruit fall and and have something to do before they get let out into the rest of the yard in the afternoon.
When I first looked into the Jaboticaba I read that it can take up to 11 years for the plant to start fruiting. This was something that I was prepared to accept but I later found out that the fruiting times can be much shorter.
harder for the females to find a mate. I also juiced a bucket of excess lemons and added yeast, sugar and cloudy ammonia to the juice to see if that would catch the females.
