Bathtub gardens update

As promised, a picture of a bathtub garden actually growing stuff.

This one contains a yacon, also known as a peruvian ground apple, sweet fruit root or jicama (but not to be confused with the yam bean jicama-these foreign crops get so confusing!) Also, it contains five garlics, two Darwin lettuces and a pak choi. All are growing well with complete ignorance from me-thinking of that, i’ll give it a dose of worm wee tomorrow.

  The watering pipes are also proving to be excellent habitat for frogs, we have tree frogs living in each one. We’ve also discovered another bonus-the winter sun on the metal in the early morning ensures the soil is always significantly warmer than the ground. Currently they’re growing much better than the ground beds, probably also related to the fact that our backyard is somewhat boggy and the wetter than usual autumn means it’s just not drying out.

Making a bathtub garden

  Moving into a rental means gardening downsizes. There’s no point spending time and money on improving someone else’s soil, when the odds are we’ll move within a year. But small pots are so troublesome to look after, so I came up with this idea-now even our garden beds are transportable! We’ll just load them up onto the hire truck and take our soil and crops with us, and have no break in garden productivity. This one is based loosely on the wicking worm beds design, so it will suit us perfectly over winter here in Queensland. If you’re in a different climate you may want to do your drainage differently to suit. I know now I definitely need to cover them over summer-they dealt very badly with 100mL+ of rain in a day. Repeatedly.

  Here’s how to do it. (note: i’d been stockpiling fill for this one in it, hence the dirtiness-I had to dig it all out to do it)

  1. Find yourself a bathtub. Tip shops are a great place to start-ours charges $10 for a basic one, $15 with fittings.

  2. Give it a good scrub out, taking special care to clean and dry the plughole. Now, silicon a 20cm length of pipe (pvc, poly etc) into the plug, making sure it’s watertight. Slather it on. Leave to dry completely.

  3. Rubber band some flywire or nylon netting (something that won’t rot) over the opening of your pipe. This is your drainage outlet, and it is higher than the base to give you a water reservoir.

  4. Make your two watering pipes. These are anchored in the beds, allowing you to water straight to the bottom of the bath, minimising evaporation. The length of pipe you will need depends on your bath-one end needs to sit on the bottom while the other will protrude from the soil. Drill holes all around the base of your pipes, to about 20cm up.

  5. Fill your base with drainage material. Some people advocate rocks or sand, but they’re tiresome to clean out (which will need doing every few years). Sticks, unfit macadamias and poinciana pods from the backyard are a better option IMO-wood is a great water retainer, and they break down so sloooowly that nitrogen draw-down shouldn’t be a problem. Just keep it chunky.

  6. Anchor your watering pipes in their places, using some of your soil. I went to step 7 before remembering to take the photo, sorry.

  7. Throw a layer of mulch in-I used sugar cane, use whatever is available to you locally, that is weed-free. This gives it bulk and aeration. STOP worrying about nitrogen draw-down, i’ve got it under control here.

8. Now, add anything you’ve got in your garden that will give it nutrients. I’ve got  comfrey leaves and a couple of borage plants that keeled over and died in the floods. Plus a few banana peels that the kids threw in on their way past-it’s all organic material, right?

  9. Fill it up with growing medium! I think there’s some potting mix, cow manure and mushroom compost here, with a little dug-up garden soil to fill it up. Plus more of the icky macadamias, to save our bare feet. The food you get out of it will be equivalent to the quality of what you put in, so don’t be tempted to fill it up with crap-or you will eat crap.

  10. Mulch well, water thoroughly and let sit for a couple of weeks. Then plant, wait and dine!

  You could also build boxes for them out of timber from old pallets if they’re permanent, and paint them up nicely. You could use them around the edge of a patio, or instead of a rail along an edge in the garden. Grow herbs in them next to the BBQ, or right next to the back door…………

Sorry I don’t have any raging success photos to show you-they didn’t do too well with torrential rain and they’re just getting back on their feet after I replanted them. However, they’re full and growing well now, give me another month or so!

MAINTENANCE

They’re pretty easy to look after, but here’s a few pointers.

-Like any plant in a container, they’ll need regular feeding. I throw on a few handfuls of mulch from the chook run when it’s getting sparse-this will not burn them in small amounts. Any mulch that will also feed it is great. We also have a slow-release organic fertiliser-make sure anything you buy is CERTIFIED organic. Organic is slapped on many, many garden products that aren’t ‘organic’ in the non-chemical means.

-Don’t let them get too wet. They do not drain quickly. That is the idea, so there’s plenty of moisture in dry times.

-Seedlings and seeds will need water from above until their roots hit the wet zone.

-They will probably need to be dug out and re-done periodically. I’ve had some going for 9 months and they’re fine, so I have no idea how often. It sounds like a crappy task so look after the soil in them and you should be able to drag it out to once every couple of years.

Just use good sense, follow basic container planting guidelines, and you should be fine.

A romantic evening out………dumpster diving?

What, you mean you wouldn’t choose to spend your first evening in two years without children digging through bins? Madness! We had a ball-especially with the treasures we found.

A huge Rhino toolbox-one side was caved in but after some quick work with the hammer it shuts properly. With a bit more work it’ll probably be barely noticeable.

Glazed pot-it has a smallish crack down one corner, nothing that isn’t fixable with 15 spare minutes. It has been earmarked for a blood orange tree.

And a garden’s worth of plants-mostly African daisies but there’s quite a few rosemarys in there, plus two Callistemons, a couple of punnets of Italian parsley and some mini Syzigiums (probably not edible, but i’ll check anyway). They were all a bit unwell, but most have recovered spectacularly in the week we’ve had them, and half have been planted in the ground already.

All of this was in one bin, from one store infamous for crushing local businesses. Their bins are the only way any stock from their store enters my possession-hopefully with their attitude to waste they don’t realise the wannabe freegans are onto them anytime soon and lock them up. I’ll be checking more regularly!

Gardening, rental style.

We have really moved in here. To the point where the first question neighbours have been asking is whether we’ve bought it. We’ve been so transient for so long, but my spirit of adventure has been thoroughly beaten from me. I don’t want to travel, or go on any holidays longer than three days that take more than four hours to get to. I’d rather lounge around at home-trust me, it’s a massive step for me.

Food gardens are a must-have now, they’ve gone beyond a hobby to something I need to have. They’re in the same league to me as televisions are to most people-I cannot imagine life without food growing around me. Plus pottering around checking out new growth and paying close attention to what’s happening is immensely relaxing and a great way to slow down and defrag my head when i’m feeling frantic.

Which is why within a week we had transformed this ratty front garden of weeds and ugly plants into something productive. We did cheat a bit-we pulled up a lot of seedlings from the property and transplanted them. Insta-garden! There’s many mature edible trees here, a macadamia, lychee, guava, lemon and an overhanging mango tree, plus our rear neighbour keeps giving us bags of mandarines. I do love old suburbs for their productive trees, mock oranges and other crap featured in designer gardens that has been developed specifically NOT to feed us, as if fresh fruit is a problem, does my head in.

In the back corner of the yard was accumulated years of garden crap-as well as three trailerloads to the tip I also found a garden bed which i’ve green manured ready for a pumpkin patch, a rampant Monstera Deliciosa of which the base has been found and potted up (never eaten it but there’s one in town i’m planning to raid when it’s mature), piles of compost and leaf mould and some fantastic concrete garden edging. The latter three, along with newspaper to smother the grass, food scraps and straw have made this bed.

The leaf mould also held less wanted prizes, like four of these strange little burrowing snakes. Four! Anyone know more about them? They’re about 30cm long, with no discernable neck and a blunted tail, and were living under the dirt.

This one tied itself into a knot.

OK, since I started posting this i’ve quizzed the neighbour, who told us they’re legless lizards. They actually have tiny little useless legs a bit behind their head, but as these can’t be seen unless you’re really close, we didn’t see them. And their tails fall off.

But now we know, we can play with them. It’s still rather disconcerting to have your child run upstairs with what looks very much like a snake in her hands. But still much preferred to the giant centipedes we got at the property-I found this pic of one that made it’s way into our tent when it was airing after camping. Seriously, these were about 30cm long. They freak me out.

OK, I wandered off there for a little bit-but the gardens have begun!

Gardens, May 2010

This year got off to a crappy start. Everything was going well in January, then the firemen came and torched the place (they called it backburning, but i've never seen anyone backburning 30-odd acres all at once. Including half the irrigation, our waterbike and nearly my husband). But anyway, the bushfire didn't burn the house down, so all was well in the end.

Then the skies opened. And it rained, and rained, and rained. And everything died and died and died. While the temperature was perfect, it was too humid and mould was rampant. So we just green manured everything, and now we're back to dry the gardens are just getting up again. The malabar spinach lived, as it always does, so i'm making more of an effort to source tropical vegies, as insurance against it happening again.

 OK, vegie garden. There's now five beds 1.5 wide and around 8m long.

Sweet potato, which loved the wet. The vine is from the common orange one, and there's now a patch of one with white skin and purple flesh down the left hand end.

The kids beds-there's four sections seperated by a couple of rows of garlic. There's a bit of everything here, from broad beans to chia.

his one has the malabar spinach, a 2.2m tall Giant Russian sunflower (and growing), and a bearing Tommy Toe tomato. Coming up is more garlic (pick the couple with European blood), strawberries, Thumbelina carrots, loose leaf lettuce (Lollo Rosso and Darwin) and.....stuff. I've gone blank here.

There's also a bed with Balinese corn and a couple of tomatoes (Thai Pink Egg and something else), and a bed with cassava canes planted and an empty end.

Passionfruit, which have certainly thrived.

Fruit trees, which mostly liked it. But the grumichana died so we stuck in another ice-cream bean for more nitrogen fixing. We've also added in a tamarillo and pepino and now the chooks are away will start on an understorey. Pulling the tyres off is on the to-do list, again now that the chooks aren't out to bare-root them.

This bed is unfenced, so we've only just planted into it now we've imprisoned the chickens (seriously, their run is about 1/4 of an acre, but they mope around like battery hens.) Lots of zucchinis and pumpkins in here so far, and sunflowers-I want a wild ramble of food and to discover massive fruits completely by accident. What i'll probably get is an outbreak of mildew and everything rotting and dying on the verge of producing. And that's a lemon tree in the middle, ringbarked repeatedly by the geese (now banished to the dam) but fighting back.

Mulch pit, still charging along. Surely there'll be some edible action soon, it's been a year now?

The inside-the sheer volume of mulch required to keep this filled is mind boggling. Especially as we don't buy mulch (except to begin the food forest off as the ground resembled concrete.) As well as the spent banana leaves and suckers it seems we're constantly throwing cardboard, palm leaves, gum leaves, weeds, old bedsheets and sticks in there, and the next day it's sunk a foot again. We have some red pawpaw seeds germinating so should be able to fill the gaps soon.

An example of our version of an ornamental garden-we stuck a heliconia and bromeliad in there, but then couldn't resist a pineapple and a pawpaw. Food! FOOD!

My sad-looking herb bed-it's producing really well and survived the heat with minimum casualties, but i've been too slack to fill the gaps. Shorty has taken to eating garlic chives raw, his breath is truly revolting afterwards.

Plus there's a feral pumpkin on the fence (the only sort we can grow).

Phew, that was exhausting. And i'm not doing it again until i'm drowing in food, it's rather depressing to see how much the rain slowed us down. Although the soil improvement from the green manure was probably well worth it, and great to see. Considering the gravelly, dusty, impermeable stuff we began with it's very satisfying to see lots of worms and be well on the way to good soil in such a short time with very little imported.

Food gardens, January 2010

If i'm going to hit my target of 20% of our food being home grown this year, I need to expand! The current gardens are below. We let everything die off when we went to Melbourne in October, and it was too hot and dry to start again until the rain hit in late December. So it's pretty woeful ATM.

The vegie beds-the left is under a green manure, the right has malabar spinach climbing up the reo, a few ramblers, a round zucchini and a couple of strawberries. I just can't seem to get out there ATM-there's room for another three beds to be marked out and dug.

 

The herb bed, right outside the door-chives, garlic chives, society garlic, perennial basil, parsley, italian parsley, curry bush, a tiny red malabar spinach and two cherry tomatoes.

 

The food forest, more of a hodge-podge of permaculture ideas crossed with Jackie French's groves. Off the top of my head, mandarine, lemonade, malabar chestnut, Darwin bush lime, jaboticaba, wampi, pomegranate, black sapote, white sapote, native tamarind, macadamia.........and I forget the rest.

 

A lime, plus tropical apple, peach and pear, with mint and lemongrass in the pots. The chooks have had a mulch party by the looks of it, they've already eaten all the lemongrass.

 

More fruit trees ready to go in........somewhere. Plus a purple and yellow passionfruit to cover the ugly shed wall.

Apart from some nasturtiums and native flax in the fairy garden, a lemon tree in the middle of an unused (unfenced) circle bed and the bananas and paw paw around the mulch pit that's it. There's not much in the way of soil here (think gravel over solid rock) so establishing beds takes a bit of work. We're also concentrating more on low-maintenance perennials as i'd rather easy food that doesn't die when I don't get around to looking at it for a few weeks!

Building the mulch pit/banana circle

This was fairly urgent when we moved in-the existing greywater system involved it all running onto the grass next to the house in a big sludgy mess. Not good.

Solution? Mulch pit. The basic premise is to feed all the water into a big hole that you have plants growing around. The plants take the nutrients from the water, thereby filtering it, and don't need additional watering. You can also throw anything organic in there to dispose of-we're sticking to plant waste at the moment, it's a great place for the endless gum leaves.

We'd worked out the placement before we moved in, so I got the husband to dig us a great big hole. He likes digging, the crazy man, and managed this in a pretty short time, even though he had to revert to banging away with the crowbar for most of it. He used all the dirt he dug out to build up the walls around it. We stuck the bananas we already had in straight away as they were looking rather sickly in their buckets of water, and stuck the greywater hose in and emptied the washing machine to check the level.

Once it was all sitting fairly evenly it was time to put all our wrecked moving boxes to good use-it's simply too dry here for sheet mulching. I also chucked some compost in, to give it a nice headstart on the organic base. There's no worries about the water percolating too quickly here, but I thought the compost and boxes in the bottom would slow it further. 

 

Next, we filled it with anything organic we could find. I was throwing whole saplings and such in there. It was a convenient place for all the weeds around the area, which was previously cleared but then abandoned. So the pit received lots of stinking roger, wild cotton and of course the infernal periwinkles and lots of lantana.

 

 We're slowly planting paw-paws between the bananas, and will fill the rest of the edge as soon as we can. There's also comfrey on the bottom wall-now i've finally cracked germinating it (only took me a whole packet *blush*) i'll be able to cover the wall much quicker.

 So far it all seems to be working really well-there's rarely any smell and when there is it's very faint, and only discernable when you're right next to it. And it gets everything, even the nappy wash water-I know it's a no-no, but where else am I supposed to put it? I figure we're not touching it and it's well buried under all the mulch. 'Everything' is of course all greywater safe, low sodium and low phosphate, i'm not pouring Draino down there.The main issue is keeping it topped up with mulch, it eats mulch at an astounding rate. To give you an example of just how well it's working, here it is after three weeks of no water (us away), in stinking hot, dry, windy weather.

The bananas looked utterly fantastic, and the weeds are loving it (easy mulch!). It's now fenced, as the wildlife found paw-paws and comfrey quite tasty.

Further plans include

-Filling the whole edge with alternating banana/paw-paws.

-Using the comfrey wall to slash for mulch/teas/compost, much needed with our awful soils.

-Some reed beds on the upper side, for more mulch.

Must chill out........

I really have to work out how to chill out and relax. I always begin to, but before I know it i'm back to doing 90 things at once, and none of them well. Cooking and gardening work well, even better when you combine them. Forrest going off to bed early has certainly helped tonight-I can actually feel myself relaxing, with the aid of a bit of JBT as background music.

The girls are obsessed with 'the olden days', and have wanted to make bread by hand for a while. As i'm still working my way back up to full bread production even with the assistance of the breadmaker we used it for the dough and did the final kneading, rising and shaping by hand. They had a ball bashing the bread around and seeing how much it puffed up.

The final result-a spinach and parmesan bloomer, made with malabar spinach from the backyard. A bit burnt on the outside but that's the oven-I hate scabby landlords who think a $500 oven will be great for their rental. They suck!

Tomorrows chill out can be to help the kids plant their flowers out-the seedlings are starting to outgrow the tray.

The garden

Is both very good and very bad.

I'll get the bad out of the way first. The zucchinis were all going fantastically after their early bout of mildew. Then, just before harvest, they all got end rot, then succumbed to yellow mosaic virus (I think anyway, it's all self-diagnosed). So did the pumpkins, bar one golden nugget, and the squash. So they all went in the bin. The tomatoes were taking ages to ripen for some reason I haven't yet determined, so all got infested with fruit fly. In the bin. I'm still not having much luck in the herb department, I really don't think i'm meant to grow them. And I ended up realising that our ladybugs are the plant eating type, but not before they decimated the potato plants.

In positives, we've got lots of corn and banana capsicums nearing readiness, and are eating quite a bit of silverbeet and shallots. We got a lot of potatoes even though they were attacked, and the garlic is nearly ready. Parsley, basil, stevia and apple mint can all be munched on infrequently. One pumpkin is still going, fingers crossed it'll remain healthy. I've also germinated fenugreek, marjoram, coriander and chives inside and hopefully continuing to have them under my nose will mean they'll survive. There's also a sweet potato on the kitchen bench in a tray of water in dire need of planting, there's tendrils up to the ceiling that are growing over a foot a day-but it's pretty fun to watch and I have nowhere to put it!

We're concentrating now on leafy, heat tolerant plants as the temperature is hovering around 30, so more silverbeet, some leaf lettuces, malabar spinach and shallots, plus some beetroot. I've got a couple of the quickest maturing cherry tomatoes in and plan to hurry them along to avoid more fruit fly. And I couldn't resist melons, but i'm sticking to one of each (water, rock and honey) for now. Plus just one straightneck zucchini, it did the best. Hopefully sticking to small and manageable for now will mean a better success rate!

Who needs ornamentals?

I've borrowed Jenny Allen's Paradise in Your Garden-Smart Permaculture Design from the library again-I love it, and will buy it one day. I love how her whole property is lush and productive and looks fantastic and it makes me want to go out and buy a block (any block!) so that I can get cracking on a food forest. But for the moment we're stuck in this rental so I decided to potter around and see if I could get some nice pics of our rather woeful 'gardens', inspired by the ones in the book. I'm no photographer but I can try!

This one's obvious-scrummy strawberries.

Zucchini Nimba flower

Mmm, fresh peas-i've already eaten them. Rockmelon or honeydew flowers-I have two next to each other and can't remember which is which!

Macro wasn't good enough for me to get a clear close-up of any of the zillions of ladybugs on the potatoes, but you get the idea. Raspberries-in the subtropics! They don't taste as succulent and I doubt they'll fruit again-they got to chill in Tassie before coming here. We'll probably end up giving them to family the next time we go south.

Garden this week

Bought a Jaboticaba (yummy-black berries with bitter skin, but the flesh tastes a lot like a lychee)

Malabar chestnut

Star apple

Loquat

Black passionfruit

Gotta love the $2.80 plants at the market.

The kids ate one not-quite-ready strawberry today! There's lots more becoming ready, i'm not a great fan by everyone else is.

Repotted the rather ill-looking medlar (oh alright, I stuck it in a juice container) and it's now rewarded me with green shoots. I didn't want it to die, at $24 it's the most expensive things we have! Also planted echinacea, comfrey and borage in a polystyrene box, and planted four zucchinis out in a trench garden. Trench garden=digging a trench, chucking half-rotted compost in, topping up with clover from the lawn, then dirt, then newspaper as weed mat, then lots of mulch raked up from under the mango. We left it to stew for a few days then poked a hole in the newspaper and stuck the seedlings in. I've never done it before, so i'll see how they fare. The Nimbas are doing far better than the Lebanese ATM, the transplant didn't worry them.

I think i'm definitely going to end up with a garden of things people have never heard of! I love odd foods, I want to start getting into Australian bush foods next. It really makes you realise supermarkets are woeful-there's so much more out there, most of it better tasting, more pest-resistant and more plentiful.

Our 'garden'

Rentals and pot gardening is challenging so far, to say the least. Especially from the POV of wanting to produce as much of our food as we can-I think most people who pot garden are happy to grow a few things, but I want it all! But nowhere near as challenging as heavy frosts from March-November, Tassie was rather discouraging.

Not very inspiring so far-but we've only had a few weeks and very limited cash. The list of things we have is more impressive, here goes. Numbers refer to varieties, not number of plants.

2 potatoes (chitting on the side there)

3 raspberries

loganberries

blackcurrant

blueberry

strawberry and chilean guavas

pomegranate

medlar

macadamia

stevia

apple mint

3 strawberries

4 garlics

2 peas

2 tomatoes

cabbage

pumpkin

gourds

honeydew

watermelon

rockmelon

tatsoi

pak choi

2 spring onions

2 bulb onions

spuash

3 succhinis

broad beans

corn

basil

2 parsley

oregano

dill

mustard spinach

coriander

Plus the masses of bulbs we can't seem to identify yet, the happy plant cuttings and the kids' cacti and succulents.

Most are seedlings, obviously. I'm getting D to dig a trench for the ramblers as advised by Jackie French in her pumpkin book. We're trying to get polystyrene boxes, but so far can't find anyone who doesn't charge for them-ludicrous! I also have piles more seeds to plant, and a list longer than this one of things to get. Note also that i'm only the brains behind all this-I have a black thumb, i'm too forgetful to be trusted with food production. Luckily D could potter around all day outside so I do the research and he's the grunt, it works extremely well. We're also keeping a detailed garden journal now so we can work out the best times and varieties to plant. The theory is we can get as much garden as possible set up here and do as much learning as possible (neither of us have gardened in sub-tropics before) so then when we do buy land we'll only have to concentrate on the other incidentals-like building ourselves somewhere to live :P

Next on the list-a tip trip to try and find stuff to build another chook tractor and a worm farm. I'm trying to find Australorps now but can only seem to find bantams, I may have to change my mind on the breed I want. Then a hive of native bees-they're stingless so we can get them in suburbia. And hopefully along the way a decent acreage will come up that we can afford-there seems to be a lot available around here so i'm positive.

Woohoo! We've talked about this for over seven years now, and can finally do it!