Tend the Garden

On the east coast of this continent, lives the vast majority of the population down under. Myself included, albeit way down in the south. About four million buildings here have solar panels feeding daytime electricity into the mains grid. It’s an astounding achievement, especially given that there are only ten million customers for the electricity. At certain times of the day, especially during the cooler spring months, this solar powered energy source is meeting half of the demand for the entire grid on the east coast. You’d imagine it would be a cause for celebration, but au contraire: AEMO says emergency powers to switch off solar needed in every state amid ‘system collapse’ fears

It would be nice if the solar panels reliably produced enough energy to meet half of the demand, at all times and hours of the year, except it doesn’t. The technology just doesn’t work that way. The bulk of solar electricity is delivered around the middle of the day for a few hours. For the rest of the day and night, well the current social response seems to be along the lines of an amusing observation I once heard spoken aloud in a film: Bore someone else with the details.

The clever folks who have to manage the mains electricity grid have other ideas, and are now facing the practical problem as to how to deal with more solar powered electricity at certain times of the week, than anyone humanly knows what to do with. And without getting bogged down in technical details, grid tied solar technology does not provide stability like the really big spinning coal, hydro and gas generators do. There’s a very real risk that the system may pop.

What to do? Switching off the solar power is one option, and the ability to do that is being negotiated. Right now. Funnily enough, that’s what the off grid solar power system here has to do, every single day of the year. If more solar power is being generated than can either be stored or used, it gets wasted. That’s how the technology works, and I’ve known about this aspect since the very early days of mucking around with solar panels, way back in 2007.

It amuses me that the nice grid controller folks, and also the owners of the four million grid tied systems, are only now slowly catching up to this news. Years ago on the interweb I happened to casually mention this aspect of the technology, and received a rather ungentlemanly reply with the words: “Your system is so wasteful!” Yeah, sure, and at that point, further dialogue was a lost cause.

It’s hard to explain these technical matters, so I won’t. Nowadays, I’d prefer to think about gardens anyway. You learn a thing or two by getting your hands in the dirt. Did you know that in the depths of winter when exposure to the cold winds freezes your very bones, there’s not much energy to be had from solar? The sun is low in the sky, and only graces us with it’s feeble presence for a brief window each day. The plants barely grow at all, if they can survive the cold temperatures in the first place.

The opposite is true in summer. The radiation from that huge fusion reactor is fierce and burns your skin. It makes you sweat and worry about succumbing to heat exhaustion during outdoors work days. The plants lap up the excess energy and push their rapidly growing leaves towards the sky. Dogs are wont at such times to find a shady tree to hide beneath. When the ultra-violet radiation ratings reach extreme, often the plant growth slows to a crawl. Weaker plants go into shock. It can all be a bit much sometimes.

Over the years we’ve trialled a lot of different varieties of edible plants for suitability to this climate. It’s unwise in the extreme to rely upon only a few sources of edible plants. Early on, in our inexperience, we utterly failed to manage the plants, and completely ran out of anything to eat from the garden. Failure is a good motivator though, and when things get bad enough, you can make some hard calls, learn, adapt and move on. These days, we have our choice of things to eat. Do we want to add the Babaco, or the raspberries to the breakfast fruit, or maybe even both? Mind you, the raspberries are better used in jam which will enliven freshly baked bread in the winter months, so that settles the matter. Babaco, get thee to breakfast!

We’ve been growing edible plants in one form or another, for about a quarter of century now. If we had to rely upon our early knowledge of this subject, we probably would have died of starvation. You have to be patient and observant. Turns out, growing lettuce in composted woody mulch is a really dumb idea down here. But people will tell you with a serious face that it should work. It doesn’t. Nowadays, we might even know enough to be able to survive on what we grow, maybe.

There’s an economic dimension to all this too. Early on, in an attempt to reduce the mad cash demands from this epic garden, we chucked on the cheapest fertiliser in the form of any organic matter we could get our hands on. Quantities of coffee grounds that would defy your imagination have been added to the soils here over the years, as has our own manure. The cheapest of mulches and composts too, and I’m talking hundreds of cubic metres (cubic yards) of the stuff. Did the soil improve, yes. Did the fruit trees and plants grow as expected, no. Elsewhere on the planet with less impoverished soils, may do just fine with all that feed, but not so here. Nowadays, it costs a lot to look this cheap in the garden, and prices for soil mineral additives are only ever ascending. The outcomes from applying the minerals however, are simply better all around.

Years ago we planted a number of wormwood shrubs, and they’ve all grown well in the climate, except their woody nature provides excellent cover for rabbits. An undocumented feature! Generally perfection is an unobtainable state, and sometimes you can live with a good enough result. Rabbits are cute creatures, but unfortunately their actions and side effects are not so cute. Slowly, the wormwood shrubs are being removed one by one, and the rabbits are increasingly nervous. It’s hard to get things right, first attempt. And when you don’t, that’s when you face up to re-doing the systems.

I’m writing about the garden, but really, each of those lessons can equally apply to renewable energy technology (and life in general). What’s going on in this corner of the world is an epic renewable energy experiment. There have been some very close calls recently, and in the not too distant future we’ll get to find out just how it works out. Despite the mind bending scale of the electricity grid, it’s not really all that different from learning-as-you-go in the garden.

There’s been some rather hot weather this week, and the heat has brought it’s fair share of tropical-like conditions.

Thick tall clouds have brought heat, humidity and rain

With the now warmer conditions, it was decided to clean up the sapling fenced enclosure and get the pumpkin seeds in the ground. The enclosure had been over run by weeds, which were all chopped down to ground level and mulched up by a push mower. The soil was then given a heavy feed of all sorts of stuff. The various seeds were chitted over night (i.e. left in warm water to soak), then planted out.

The sapling fenced enclosure has now been ready for the warmer crops

We were about a week too late doing that planting job. A few days ago some feral pumpkin seeds sprouted in the orchard. Turns out, chucking the seeds in the chicken enclosure months ago, was the easier process!

Feral pumpkins are now growing in the shady orchard

We’ve run short of rocks, both small and large, and need them to complete plenty of projects about the farm. Two boulders were broken up into much more easy-to-relocate sized rocks.

Two boulders were broken up this week

The recent warmer weather inspired me to install the second low voltage water pump on one of the water tanks. That pump runs a single tap and a bushfire sprinkler adjacent to the firewood shed. Not a bad idea to have the system working, just in case.

Another low voltage water pump was installed which runs this bushfire sprinkler

Another cement step was poured on the new concrete staircase.

Nine steps leading up from the sunny orchard into the courtyard

Then another was poured.

Hot and dry weather is perfect for curing cement into concrete

The wormwood shrubs in the garden are eventually going to be replaced with Japanese maples. They already happily self seed here, and I’ve potted up eight of the seedlings.

Japanese maple seedlings will eventually be planted out in the garden beds

In breaking produce news:

The lazy housewife variety of beans (that’s really their varietal name) have begun to sprout from seed. They’re a super prolific variety of white navy bean.

Lazy housewife beans reach upwards for the chicken wire supports

The turmeric tubers in the greenhouse have finally sprouted leaves. I’m yet to harvest any of the tubers, and they’re now in their third year.

Turmeric tubers in the greenhouse have produced leaves

The chilli plants are in their third year also, and have already produced fresh chillis. They’ll ripen over the next few months, and should produce a decent crop which will zing up winter meals.

Fresh chillis hang off this three year old plant

The raspberry harvest is in full swing this week. The tasty berries are picked morning and evening, and already we’ve picked two plastic containers of them. They get frozen and then when there are enough, like now, we’ll make a batch of super tasty jam. Home made raspberry jam is the best.

Two of these containers have now been filled this week

Fingers crossed it will be an excellent apple harvest. Each week, the fruit get larger and display more colour. Most of the harvest will be made into cider.

Cider, an excellent use for a decent harvest of fresh apples

Every day I observe the apricot crop, and ask the hard question: Are you lot ready to eat, or what? Each day I’m denied. Patience…

Could be our best year for apricots in about five years

Pears are a super tasty fruit, if allowed to ripen. That’s not as easy to judge as you’d imagine, and many pears happily ripen off the tree. This next red variety of pear, is my favourite:

A most excellent red variety of pear

This year, some of the plum trees have decided to thank us for the lavish care and attention we’ve applied to their soil feed.

Lots of plums on this tree

The other night when I went down to take the photo of the broken apart boulder, there was a very large bull kangaroo who stood his ground. I’ve got no beef with him, and after a while he ignored me and went back to grazing.

A very large and powerful bull kangaroo stood his ground

This weeks video is the second part of making the tiramisu, it shows how I made the lady finger biscuits:

Onto the flowers:

This climbing rose happily rambles through the garden bed
The warmer weather has been agreeable with the roses
This wall of geraniums provides plenty of feed for the insects
Canary Island Foxgloves love the conditions here
Gazanias have also enjoyed the warmer weather

The temperature outside now at about 9am is 8’C (46’F). So far for last year there has been 929.0mm (36.6 inches) which is up from last weeks total of 896.8mm (35.3 inches)