Archive for the ‘Garden’ Category

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Goals for the Year of the Ox

Saturday, February 28th, 2009

1. The first goal has to be something for Owen, of course! Go for a walk, or spend time doing yoga or dancing with Owen every day. Owen loves to dance, and has progressed recently from squatting up and down in time to the music to doing cute little moves. We love dancing with him. It’s also neat to take him for a walk and watch him charge through the undergrowth, tackling obstacles headlong. It should be no hardship to reach this goal!


Owen likes to dance

2. Finish setting up chook house and run, and GET SOME CHOOKS! We are well on the way to achieving this one already, but have to keep up the momentum.

3. Install solar hot water.

4. Make camembert, feta, and hard cheese. Also do some goat cheese experiments in the spring.

5. Cure some of our own meat. Specifically, I want to have a go at making corned beef and corned tongue.

6. Experiment with cooking corn and amaranth.

7. Start milking the goats in spring. This is a big one because it requires that we arrange some extra goat housing and a sheltered place to milk goats. It also requires that we find a suitable buck for our dear Daphne and Lulu.

8. Start “bushman’s toilet paper” seedlings. I’d also like to start some other tree seedlings, perhaps including carob, Japanese raisin tree and stone pine.

9. Improve winter vegetable garden over last year’s effort. I have to hurry up and get organised for autumn seed planting if I’m serious about achieving this one! We are a bit pinched for space at the moment due to work on the chook runs, so I’m going to have to employ all my garden cunning to fit in the crops we want to grow.

10. Save onion seed, and plant our first onion crop from home-saved seed. The seedheads are already ripening on the onions, so I’ll be embarking on this project very soon.

11. Get rid of the kikuyu in the areas around the lemon and lime trees in the house paddock, and work on establishing perennial ground cover to keep weeds at bay. The chooks will have an important part to play here.

12. Complete Playcentre Course 2. This might seem a bit off-topic for Farmlet, but our local Playcentre is an important part of our lifestyle here. Playcentre is a parent-run co-op where New Zealand children up to age 6 can go for free. Playcentre funding depends (among other things) on having enough parents present who have completed Playcentre training courses. Peria Playcentre is small and rather struggling to muster enough qualified parents at the moment. Owen and I love going to Playcentre, and I’m keen to do my part to support our Centre.

13. Update the Farmlet website at least once a week. I haven’t got off to a very good start on this goal, but the year of the Ox is still young and there are lots of things I want to write about!

Posted in Energy, Food and Recipes, Garden, Land Management, Owen | Comments Closed

The Year of the Rat in Review

Sunday, February 15th, 2009

About one year ago, I wrote a list of goals for the Year of the Rat. Now that the year is over, it’s time to review the list. How did we get on?

1. Do “baby yoga” with Owen and have lots of fun. I’m proud to say that we really over-achieved on this goal. As well as having fun yoga time together at home, Owen and I arranged to get together for weekly yoga sessions with a couple of other mums and babies. This has been a lovely way to spend time together and make friends. Owen continues to enjoy some of his “baby yoga” moves, even as he’s becoming more interested in mimicking the “grown-up moves” that I do. He still loves to sit peacefully on my lap or in front of me while I chant Sanskrit prayers.

2. Build a chook house and chook run. I guess we score about 50% on this one. The construction of the chook runs is largely finished. Big thanks are due to my father for his work on this project. After thinking long and hard about plans for a chook house, and assessing our resources and building skills (Let’s face it: Building is not what we are best at.), Kevin has ordered a kitset henhouse. We can’t wait for it to arrive! There’s still quite a lot to do before the chooks can move in, but we are well on the way. We are looking forward to doing some big chook-system documentary posts for Farmlet once the show is up.

3. Install a solar water heater. Not done yet, I’m afraid, but steps have been taken. We have earmarked the funds for this project, and Kevin has been in touch with the vendors about the size of the system and how to install it.

4. We plan that calves and goat kids will be born on the Farmlet this coming spring. We had mixed fortunes on this one, with the bull not staying long enough for Rosie to get in calf. Still, Miss Scarlett Beef-Shanks (Coco’s calf this season) is thriving. We were especially delighted to see Coco deliver a healthy calf after the trouble she had the previous year.


Scarlett Beef-Shanks, about twelve hours old

5. Carrying on from #4: Extend the small goat house and build a milking stand for the goats. A big zero for this! This one just looked like too much to tackle last year. We decided to put off doing this work and breeding the goats for another year.

6. Undertake some cool cheese projects using fresh cow and goat milk.
I think we’ve made a strong start on the cheese. Owen and I attended a fantastic cheese making course back in October. I have already made kefir parmesan, aged kefir cheese, pressed curd, and ricotta. Still to come: cheddar, feta, camembert, and maybe gouda.


Heirloom tomatoes and homemade, raw milk cheese

7. Make delicious meals using meat raised on the Farmlet. Yes!! And I’ve enjoyed sharing recipes for beef liver pate and steak and kidney pie on the Farmlet website.

8. Experiment with grinding and cooking cornmeal, including some from our own corn. Oh, dear! I dropped the ball on this one. I still haven’t even figured out how to fit to corn augur into our grain mill. . .

9. Save seeds from more of our vegetables, herbs, and flowers. We’ve made some good progress on our seed saving. Some of the varieties we are saving include: borlotti beans, black spanish radish, black beauty zucchini, onion, cilantro, selugia bean, soldier poppy, cosmos, calendula, naked oats, pygmy torch amaranth, dill, and land cress. With the fruiting season now upon us, I’m also about to save seed from several varieties of tomato, tomatillo, runner bean, zinnia, and russian giant sunflowers.

10. Continue to battle kikuyu and work on “taming” the house paddock. We hope to work on weed barriers this year, with the aim of reducing the ongoing effort. We have done quite a lot of work on this front, due to the design of the chook runs we are making. We can’t wait to test our new barrier system when we finally get some chooks.

11. Attempt to make some more crusty fermented beverages. I’ve had a go at making a number of different fermented drinks: ginger beer, honey mead, and rosehip-hibiscus soda were all delicious. The last two were made using water kefir grains and honey from our neighbour’s bees. We were hoping to make wine from our grapes last year, as well, but the grape crop was pretty poor and it didn’t happen.

12. Raise some seedlings of “bushman’s toilet paper” to plant out in the garden. Can’t believe this one is still on the “to do” list after all this time. I’ve found a source of seed, so should buy it and get on with the project.

13. Last but not least: I want to write at least one update per week for the Farmlet website! This still seems like an excellent goal to strive for, even though it has seemed so unattainable over the past month or so. I’ll keep trying!

Well, that was the Year of the Rat in review. Overall, I think it was a good year for us here on the Farmlet. Lots of good stuff happened, but it looks like we still have plenty of work left to do in the Year of the Ox, doesn’t it! My next post will be our new list of goals for the Year of the Ox.

Posted in Cows, Energy, Food and Recipes, Garden, Owen | 4 Comments »

Happy New Year from the Garden

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009

Happy New Year to you all! The garden is wonderful at this time of the year — full of lush green leaves and bright flowers. We are still enjoying fresh salad greens. Amazingly, some of our lettuces and arugula still haven’t bolted yet. We are also feasting on plenty of summer squash (“black beauty” zucchini and tromboncino) and green beans. The potatoes are flowering, and tomatoes, peppers and grape are setting fruit. It feels like a happy New Year, for sure!

Owen loves to be outside in the garden, and already knows what to do with a spade. He’s so busy and keen to help and explore. I’m finding that I have to send him and Kevin off on little adventures if I’m to get much work done.

Some volunteer swan plants have come up in our garden. As luck would have it, one is right outside the kitchen window. Several monarch butterflies have been visiting, and we are seeing the first little caterpillars hatching out. When Owen is a bit older, it will be fun to make a proper butterfly garden together.

Posted in Garden, Owen, Wildlife | 8 Comments »

Spring Gardening Frenzy

Friday, October 3rd, 2008

With the soil warming up and winter rain over, we have been hurrying to prepare the garden beds for spring planting. There is a lot of weeding and clearing out to be done. Mulch and compost need to be spread. New batches of compost need to be started. We are moving ahead with all these tasks, even as I plant seeds in trays and punnets and transfer the first seedlings into the waiting soil. Mizuna, lettuces (“deer’s tongue” and “half century”), shungiku chrysanthemum, multiplying spring onions, red cabbage, calendula, mustard lettuce and New Zealand spinach all seem to be thriving. Sadly our tat soi has fallen victim to slugs and birds. I guess I’ll plant some more. I’ve also planted out the best bulbs from last season’s onion crop, in hopes that they’ll sprout and run to seed. This is my first attempt at saving seed from bulbing onions, so I hope my timing is right.


Baxter bush cherry tomato seedling

The first tomato seedlings, “Baxter’s Early Bush,” already have their first true leaves and will soon be ready to transplant. Pepper, zucchini, amaranth, and more tomato seedlings are poking their heads out of the soil.

Tomatoes:
Most of the tomato varieties we are planting are the same as last year: Money Maker, Russian Red, Humboltti and Green Zebra. The Green Zebra suffered from extreme neglect and didn’t fruit well last year. I’m determined to give it a fair trial this time around, since the few fruit we did get from it were beautiful and delicious. I have to pay more attention to staking and removing laterals, since it’s an indeterminate variety. Humboltti, a small yellow cherry tomato, fruited prolifically and stayed disease free last year despite almost total neglect. We are growing it again, since it is tasty and easy to grow, although it seems to split rather too readily. Baxter’s Early Bush Cherry Tomato is a new variety for us. We are hoping to grow some of these in containers in a warm spot, in order to have an early crop of cherry tomatoes and save space in the garden.
Zucchini:
I saved seed from Black Beauty Zucchini the season before last. To avoid crossing with the Austrian Oilseed Pumpkin (also a Curcurbita pepo), I planted a late zucchini crop after we had harvested the oilseed pumpkins.
Amaranth:
We are planting two varieties of amaranth this year. We have grown the leaf amaranth before. It’s an attractive coleus leafed variety called “Tampala.” Grain amaranth is a new crop for us. We are excited to be trialling a variety called “Pygmy Torch.” It is meant to be very ornamental and can produce a prolific grain crop in the right conditions. I have sown the grain amaranth in trays, and plan to plant it out in the garden at 8cm spacings as per the advice in an old Koanga Gardens seed catalogue.

Posted in Garden | 10 Comments »

Bill Mollison, 1981: Permaculture Design Course Transcript

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

Interesting, useful, free: Permaculture Design Course Transcript.

Research Credit: TF

Posted in Composting, Energy, Fellowship, Food Forest, Garden, Land Management, Money, Tools, Water | 2 Comments »

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