veggie patch

1 Comment Posted on Garden

Not so Cheep Cheep

OK – as I said we endeavor to do DIY and only buy second hand… occasionally, only occasionally, it gets too hard and we splurge. Like this adorable chook pen….  ( and sorry if you got excited about being able to build this!)

IMAG0890

Chook Chic

We decided to buy rather then build for a couple of reasons, the big one being time.

Being really time poor at the moment, we wanted to use the longer warmer days to settle in our pet chooks, so had to make a call, buy a pen and have time to settle in the ladies, or wait and possibly be looking at frost with chicks.  I also had begun to wonder about  second hand coop and possible disease issues.

So we settled on buy a pen – this had the added bonuses of being super fast to build (and hour or so flat pack?), it is secure, bird friendly, and with an extra coat of polyurethane, fully water proof.

And inspiration didn’t strike this time about alternative building ideas… but in Autumn I’m hoping to building a mobile chicken tractor so I can put the chooks out through the day on the veggie beds to turn them over.

Oh – and it is also adorable  ( and yes, I will totally be attaching a wee window box with red geraniums) Having built the coop we conferred with our local chook breeder who has said we can comfortably fit 3 bantams in it, and what sort of breed we should get, which are black orpington bantams – which look like normal chooks but smaller. I had been all excited about getting little balls of fluff and hand rearing, but not sure we’ll go ahead with that as there a more risks involved… but we’ll see if I crack hey?

The last couple of weeks have been massive in the garden, and when I wrote the following list a few weeks ago, I didn’t think it would all happen… but other then buying, rather then building the chook pen, (and the gate for the compost bins, we are evaluating extending the chook run that way?) we got everything done in a little over three days.  Epic!

  • finish cladding the deck
  • finish and paint the final section of the pergola (we’re adding an extra upright and cross beam so we can try to grow strawberries in PVC pipes)
  • sow beans, carrots, celery, lettuce, and peas (by sow I mean plant outside directly)
  • build a potato tower (I’ll add another blog)
  • hot house sow cucumbers, eggplants, pumpkins, capsicum, and maybe more tomatoes ( first lot was done three weeks ago and are starting to pop out)…
  • make enough paper pots to do all the above
  • weed the front yard (boring…)
  • prune the correas
  • Build a gate/fence for the compost bins ( pending decisions!)
  • AND build a chook pen for three laying ladies

The best bit it now enjoying watching everything grow!  Less then two weeks and all the seeds have sprouted, the apple trees are blossoming and late spring bulbs have come the party.   IMAG0889

2 Comments Posted on Garden, Upcycling and DIY

Street Front Vegie Patch 4; How to make it pretty….

So last we spoke the front yard was filled with bath tubs….  like so I believe.

 

_MG_3744

Which – while practical, is not aesthetically pleasing, and as we like our neighbors we decided that beautification was necessary.  As mentioned last week, check that the tubs are water tight – we found that a couple weren’t, which was easily remedied with the “this will stick to anything glue“.

At this stage we began the cladding process, or to clarify – I shoveled dirt while Joel clad. We knew that the tip had a lot of scrap corrugated iron so we’d bought a few sheets earlier.  In Australia (and everywhere else for all I know) corrugated iron is a popular product for gardens beds, so we knew that using it to clad our beds would produce an appearance that was considered pleasing to the eye.  It lasts forever, is fairly easy to attach and is a somewhat forgiving material.

We purposely purchased mismatched sheets as we knew there wouldn’t be enough to match all the tubs.  For the edging we used the off-cuts from the deck we built last year and to top the beds we used old bed frames – which is untreated wood.  These had to be done piecemeal as nothing was the same size and we wanted to use up as much scrap as we could.

Tools that you’ll need (ideally)

  • a drop saw 
  • a couple of drills, ideally one electric (more force)
  • an angle grinder
  • spirit level

Safety tip; wear the personal safety equipment recommended, these can be gloves, goggles, ear muffs or a face mask, check your environment, make sure your phone is accessible (in case of accident), and have someone else around.  If you do hurt yourself – get help!  For more details check with your local hardware store, or online at places like this.

(We budget for medical bills on the big jobs…at the end of the day we’re amateurs and accidents do happen, and unlike work, we’re not covered by insurance for a mishap at home.  It is normally just a couple of hundred that we ensure is accessible if we need to do an emergency trip to the GP for stitches or a booster tetanus shot.  As a normal rule we do avoid injury and the money goes back into the kitty but just in case….)

After much measuring and noise making we decided how to best cut the iron to minimize waste and effort- using a couple of bricks as support we started cutting…..

_MG_3740

This was the first piece we attached – as you can see it took almost a full day of noise making to reach a decision…! We screwed it directly into the bath with a tech screws along the top. IMG_3749

In this shot you can see that we’ve overlapped a portion – in areas like this we’d add another screw half way down for safety.   What we did realize was that we didn’t have enough corrugated iron to wrap all the tubs entirely, but what we did have was a lot of wood off cuts – we again measured and made noises and figured out the most effective way to use scrap wood (as you may have figured, we hoard wood.)

IMG_3751

Of big importance was to cover any sharp edges so we covered corners as required and over the top of all the baths we added a frame of non treated wood.  This is awesome – a) it covers the iron, b) is covers the bath and C) with the big pieces made out of old bed frames, it makes a great seat or place to balance tools while you’re planting.

We paved around the baths using old pavers in the below pattern –  paving is incredibly easy – smooth your surface, throw down some paving sand and create a flat surface, then start laying. It’s easy but physically hard! We were using old pavers from the the back yard so weren’t expecting a perfect finish – but we got very lucky  and had just enough to finish the job.

The green squares indicate planting holes in which we planted thyme plants. We added plants to the paving for a few reasons, hopefully to reduce run off as water will be trapped by the plants, to reduce reflected heat in summer by breaking up the pavers and that walking over thyme smells delicious!

bricks

Around the outside edge of the whole patch we planted agapanthas ( we have an excessive amount in our yard), these will again hopefully reduce water run off and heat, as well as provide flowers and on the inside edges we planted punnets of perennials which are hardy and colorful.  I honestly can not remember what type they are.. guess we’ll see when they bloom!

This is the finished product and we’ll share photos with you as it settles in – fingers crossed it all works!

wicking beds

Some photos for how it looks from other angles

IMG_3758IMG_3757

Leave a comment Posted on Garden

Of pots, plants and paper

IMAG0729 I know inevitably I’ll buy plants this spring – like some people have a weakness for shoes or records, mine is plants. I can never have too many plants and I don’t always think through how appropriate they are for our climate, and I’m not allowed to have indoors plants due to allergies. (Excepting the bathroom – and you know what? If I can’t have a kitten I’m going to have a plant in the bathroom and it will love me. Fluffykins is adorable and may or may not be a cyclamen.)

But I digress. Last season I noticed that the tomato plants I purchased really struggled – where as the tomato seeds from compost (accidentally planted so to speak) grew really well – everywhere. Except the veggie garden…

This bought me around to try growing more plants from seed this year and learn the zen patience that comes from that process. I’m still learning the patience…

Even though in Canberra we are having one of the coldest Augusts in over 20 years, it’s time to start sowing seeds outside (onion, kale etc) and starting to grow seedlings somewhere warm – in this case, my bathroom.  (it’s a good look, deodorant, hairspray, bulb, sunscreen, jalapenos….) Turns out my bathroom is the shangri-la for seedlings and in only a week they’ve out grown their communal pots so I need to move them to something bigger.

As I am a) cheap, b) trying to up-cycle and reuse this year and c) lazy I’ve decided to go with newspaper seedling pots.

This is a great video about how to make pots from newspaper  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dlGQP81yfo  and is the technique I used. I took home old papers from work, and this means I can just plant the pots directly into the ground when they get bigger. (that’s the lazy part)

Growing from seed is more cost effective, and I can also minimize the trauma to the plants as transport is kept to a minimum. They will also acclimatize to our immediate micro-climate hopefully improving their rates of survival.  Where I can I’m taking the seeds out of my vegetables and I’ll try to grow plants form those… see how we go I guess.

In the meantime, Fluffykins can bond with the jalapeno seedlings in the bathroom.

1 Comment Posted on Garden, Uncategorized

The Street Front Veggie Patch: 2

 

Untitled

What is a wicking bed I hear you say?

Sometimes known as self watering pots, they are garden beds that have a reservoir underneath the soil that is full of water. The soil and the water is separated by a fabric of some kind (like a geotextile)  so it doesn’t create mud, and the soil remains moist by wicking up the water from the reservoir.

It awesomeness is manifold –

  • Firstly – your plants water themselves (woot!)
  • The soil remains at a higher temperature over winter because the reservoir and the moist soil retain heat better so you can ( in theory, I have yet to try) start seedlings earlier in the season
  • It seriously reduces evaporation as the water is under the soil
  • It saves on water as when it rains the reservoirs fill up ( rather then running down the drain…)
  • You can  keep the soil up to a high quality by adding worms and compost increasing your crop density
  • They can be built higher to save your back
  • If you do have to top up the reservoirs it is a sometimes activity, not daily and you can more easily stick to any water restrictions if your region has them
  • By watering from the bottom up you minimise water damage, such as rot, or ‘sunburn’ to your veggies
  • And did I mention your plants water themselves?

Easy right?

We struggled initially about how to build them as there a lot different instructions out in the interwebs and more importantly, we wanted to use only second hand stuff and build it on the cheap. We settled on bathtubs as the ideal containers to start with as our local tip had a lot –   and this was the ingredient list… (all purchased from the tip) –

  • 2 bath tubs
  • 3 corner baths
  • lots of corrugated iron
  • PVC pipe of various widths and lengths
  • Old bed frames ( it makes sense eventually)

We had a lot of left over scrap wood from a project last year which we used to clad the beds, but other stuff we used from the shed and garden;

  • A whole lot of pavers
  • old bed ribs (i’m not sure what they are actually called but they hold your bed up?)
  • Agapanthus from the front yard (after the apocalypse the world is going to be populated by cockroaches and agapanthus…nothing kills those things – including be left out of the ground in the frost for a month)

Make sure you use untreated wood if it is above the garden bed.  Treated wood is treated with pesticides, so while it’s great to keep out termites, you don’t want your veggies exposed to any chemicals that leak out. I have no idea about the level of risk, but as we are hoping to be eating mainly from these beds I figure it’s safer to avoid it.

But we did have to buy some new things

  • Permeate fabric – sometimes called geo fabric – we realised afterwards we could have used old carpet which would have been cheaper and second hand, but ah well… just make sure whatever you use won’t leak toxic stuff – as i am unsure about how to check this I suspect that permeate is still easier…. 
  • Hex screws –  they screw through anything to anything so made bolting sections together easier – we tried to reuse stuff from the shed, but as it put our marriage at risk we made the call to buy new. download
  • Another half tonne of soil (much less clay like!)
  • 2 bags of paving sand
  • 12 x 99 cent punnets of thyme
  • 1 giant punnet of colour ground cover

 

Needless to say – our garage looked like we’d collected the remains of a demolition job from a seedy motel, but it did eventually look fabulous –

How?

I’ll tell you next week – because I’m heading home to plant onion seeds.

 

1 Comment Posted on Garden

The Street Front Veggie Patch; 1

The way our block is positioned the ideal place for a veggie patch would be where our current car port is. Eventually we’d love to move that – but in the interim we had to come up with an alternative – so last season we experimented with building up the soil in the front yard as well a few soft plastic planters – we even had veggies potting mix delivered.

Other then a kilo of green beans it was a disaster!

We spent a fortune on seedlings which died or never produced a crop – the soil we ordered was like clay and the soil in the front yard was water resistance, in fact, I’m fairly sure I’ve seen more porous rocks…!  And to top it all off, a week of 40 + in February wiped out what  had grown at all.   But like all failed experiments these were our learnings;

  • raised gardens beds are better, it means weeding can be done with out kneeling so you can do it the morning on the way to the car
  • 5 beds are ideal for long term crop rotation (every garden books tells me so!)
  • Tomatoes should be not be planted before November in our region
  • Stagger your planting
  • Mix up your plants so pests don’t wipe out your whole crop
  • A watering system is vital
  • Frost protection for winter and sun protection for summer
  • Don’t be too gungho with compost – it causes the soil to over heat killing seedlings
  • DRAINAGE!
  • And ( most importantly) our neighbours , (and not just the immediate neighbours, but people who walked their dogs passed our house and so on) liked our veggie patch!  We’d been really concerned that people wouldn’t like it so we went to quite a bit of effort to make it aesthetically pleasing  but it turns out that wasn’t the important bit – it was seeing stuff grow and seeing the changes week to week.

Only recently we had a lovely woman stop by ( with the most adorable chocolate Labrador called Rosie) because she saw the car boot open – she’d been hoping to meet us since last spring and wanted to chat about the veggie patch!  Even better when we explained the year of nothing new, she offered to raid her gardening shed for old shade cloth and plastic sheeting to help us build a green house.

So these lessons learnt – combined with a determination to grow our own veggies led to the the massive project that we jokingly call our “home grown community garden”.  Over the next few weeks we’ll take you through the process as over the next year we’ll update you on the crops ( and success… hopefully…)

But here’s a taster for next week…  “wicking beds”..