The Tree Mugger

(via www.communitygarden.org.au )

A series of introductory fact sheets from the Community Gardening Network Australia;

• Checklist for new community gardens
• Safety in the community garden
• What is community gardening?
• What is organic gardening?
• How to compost
• How to build a no-dig garden
• Intergrated pest management
• What is crop rotation?
• What is permaculture?
• The sustainable home

gardensinunexpectedplaces:

Via djohnstone:

Today I learned how to make a landless garden with a burlap bag, a few sticks, and a bit of gravel and soil. It a really neat and inexpensive way to create a mini vertical garden. I’m planning on starting one on our back porch soon. :)

P.S. It’s compostable when you’re finished with it!

Also, I learned this at the Boston Skillshare. If you haven’t checked it out yet, you should!

Bug Story

If the slideshow is working as intended, you’ll be able to see images of:

• a ravaged salad plant
• a container with my home-made bug spray and book on natural bug control methods
• a ‘before’ bug picture of the salad plants when healthy
•  my arch nemesis, the leafhopper.

I tried this about two months ago, when leafhoppers were ravaging any salad seedlings I tried planting.

The spray is one of the simplest and common DIY organic pest mixes: a dash of crushed, fresh garlic and chilli in water. It’s the odor, as much as the chilli nom repellent factor, that deters insects by confusing or diminishing the ability of passing insects to smell out your garden edibles. This is additional to always planting a variety of edibles, in a pattern other than straight rows, for the same reason. Best to make just a little of this spray at a time and use it up quickly though, so the condiment content doesn’t degrade into slime water. 

Another version is adding [ground, plain] soap - which coats leaves more thickly and is supposed to prevent some insects from chewing them. I only tried this once: it’s so sunny and dry here, that the tiniest bit of soap residue encouraged leaf burn followed by quicker rotting the next rains: definitely not worth any slug repellant trade off.

A brutally Darwinian version - for non-vegans only - suggests crushing up several of the type of bug you’re trying to kill in your water mix.  Possibly just a gross out urban myth of pest control. [Crushed chicken eggshells, otoh, really do work to limit snail attacks on seedlings if spread around their bases - anything unappealing abrasive would probably work as well for vegan gardeners].

My little spray trial did work a bit. I did notice slightly reduced leaf attack on the seedlings I’d sprayed compared to the ones I hadn’t [I left some unsprayed for comparison, and for the permaculture principle of always factoring in a little spare growth for the birds, insects that you do want in the garden to eat].

But these hoppers were damn nearly swarming, way to many of my greens were being eaten back to the stems for me to plan a decent kitchen garden harvest  relative to the space used.

I was getting frustrated enough to consider physical barriers for the whole fruit and salads bed - reviving the mesh covers over wire frames I use when possums attack. Also I was worried that even selective spraying seemed to be repelling the bees. 

Then the seasons shifted and all the nasturniums, marigolds, wattles, grevillias and borage plants bloomed. Which suddenly brought all the higher up the food chain insects and some birds to the yard, resolving my leafhopper mini-plauge instantly.

Zero problems since.

I’ve also cleared some dense tall grasses that were growing near our water tank, because I was concerned that the cover and damp earth would attract cane toads. Unsurprisingly, it turned out that several types of insects had laid their eggs in the thicker clumps of grasses, on the underneath of the blades near the center of the patch:nicely covered from any predators or my spray. I removed the lot and replaced them with just a few [pregrown] flowering herbs, to prevent any swarm V2 next season.

Verdict = live flowers beat crushed bugs, permaculture beats ‘natural’ approaches used in traditional ‘single issue, single strategy’ ways. 

Building a Worm Farm

Only feed a little bit at this stage because they are getting settled into the bedding material. Use lettuce, old bits of banana, anything that you’ve got that’s wasteful in the kitchen sink. Then add just enough newspaper or hessian over the top to keep them moist. Always make sure that the newspaper, or hessian, is kept moist. They will start to feed and after about two weeks, add the next layer on top and that’s the time to start feeding all organic waste and the worms will travel up through the perforations.

[via Gardening Australia - Fact Sheet]

This morning I trowled through the worm farm that got soaked in the floods a few months back, which I’d consequently given up for dead. Happiness then was finding many health worms and a very rich layer of freshly turned soil inside. It saved me the effort of finding another nursery or gardener who could sell/trade some of the red worms needed for worm farming [a different species to the earth worms you can attract to your garden with mulch], and the built up worm tea has already revived my little flood damanged lemon myrtle tree seedlings.

This is the benefit of doing everything organic and diy, especially if you’re lazy and have a really changable routine like me. It takes a bit more planning to set up a garden that’s largely self-sustaining for fertilizer and seed [but less cost and chemicals]. Once you’ve got it set up though, things adapts through set backs much better than a high maintenance, commercial fertilizer dependent garden full of exotics does. 

Even my tomato plants, rosemary and coriander self seeded and came back in a bed I’d also thought too soil damaged to plant in yet. Woot permaculture!

Homework, plant pest and disease identification [baby steps!]

thesustainable:

You Grow Girl™

This is just a placeholder to remind me to look for this when it comes out.

I know a bit about gardening and have opportunities to learn hands on too, but I really like these kind of books that are self help with lots of illustration. Trail’s earlier book, You Grow Girl, is still the one I refer to most although it’s very 101 level.

It helps me work around my tendency, learning any new skill, to be quicker than average at getting the actual knowledge, but slower or more stop/start than average at applying it due to my disabilities. In other words, the essentials mixed with enough shiny visuals to make learning the slow way feel relaxing = ideal resource for someone like me. 

That is all.

thesustainable:

trellis spacing - Growing Tomatoes Forum - GardenWeb

The trellis I set up this week looks nothing like this! Love the idea, but my space is smaller. 

Reblog because I really like the curvy mesh trellis idea. I installed circular frames, which took almost no time because they were rubber encased wire I got second hand, which was sturdy and flexible enough to just chop it up, ‘plant it’ around the tomatoe bushes and use some old stockings to tie them together.

[The stocking use is just handy recycling, but also a popular alternative to plastic plant ties because it’s stretchy softness means that on windy days, the plant and frame can both ‘wobble’ a bit without either falling over, or the ties cutting into the greener parts of the bushes flesh.]

Also appealing was the hanging plant method of growing tomatoes. Do away with staking completely! Just plant the bush in a hanging planter, and let the stalks grown down like a flowering vine. It works best with small lightweight tomatoes like the cherry ones though: I planted a winter growth variety with much bigger fruits.

These are my adventures in learning about food planting for today. 

p.s I’m tempted to make a bamboo scarecrow.

They’re kind of cute and silly to  brighten up my otherwise permaculture random/shabby looking garden. Using one as a trellis for little flowering herbs would be pretty and convenient. OTOH, I want to attract and support native birds. 

Thought: do scarecrows really influence urban birdlife anyway?