Age is not a kind mistress. It’d be nice to imagine that we’d all grow in wisdom and stature whilst the years accumulate, and that sure does sound good. Reality may be otherwise. Rest assured dear readers, there’s no complaints here. I enjoy the moments given to me, even if they are filled with hard work, uncertainty and struggle. Mid last year I accidentally dropped the 50kg / 110 pound generator, which suggested that the machine is probably a two person lift nowadays. Adapt to circumstances, and move on.
Sandra and I are hard at it on the property these days, making the systems super easy to maintain and be productive. People have said to me that gardening is hard, but really, the last I checked, given the right conditions, plants tend to just do their own thing, which is: grow. Ensuring our vegetative companions each have the perfect circumstances, now that’s where things get tricky.
Adaption, yeah. Long term readers would have noticed the many rock lined paths and staircases wending their ways through the various garden beds. They give a pleasing solidity, which is sort of needed when eeking out produce on sloping land. That’s what you get when living upon the side of an extinct super volcano. Flat land would be a wonderful thing, but beyond our finances. The rock walls on those paths do silent work too: In heavy rains, the flows of water hit the solid barrier, come to a halt, only to then sink into the soil. Better for everything to store water in the subsoil on this dry continent, especially where it is less likely to evaporate during the next hot day.
Observant readers would also have noticed the white-ish looking crushed rock on the path surfaces. That stuff has heaps of Calcium Carbonate in it. Rain washes the mineral fines into the acidic soil – this in turn lifts the overall pH. You wouldn’t think it would make much of a difference, but the reality is that with pH neutral soils, plants are able to access a whole bunch of other minerals which they couldn’t previously get. They then grow faster. You can see the difference in growth with any plants that are lucky enough to be close to a path. It just works, and we’ve brought in enough truck loads of the stuff for several lifetimes. However, on a long enough timescale, the forest will eventually consume all of the goodies, recycle some of it into new plants, but the rest will wash downhill. Our mark is made for but a time, and then no more.
On Saturday I put the new battery powered hedge trimmer to work. Blackberries had become established in the steep embankment on the uphill side of the house. There were a lot of the canes growing, and I have zero chance of ever terminating them all. In other words: They’ll be back. And in ten thousand years, there will still be blackberry plants growing here. Adapt, accept and move on. So they were cut back hard, and burnt off.
A huge number of ferns grow on the steep embankment, all of which work to hold the soil together and provide summer shade. There are some very pretty spring flowering hellebores, a Japanese maple here and there, and the ever rampant elderberry. A path runs up above the slope, and presumably mineral goodies leach downhill. The rock wall on the path up there may have stopped landslides, after all, one occurred prior to that chunk of infrastructure being installed.
The blackberry canes were all burnt off. Of course cutting, ripping and hauling the spiky monsters meant much personal discomfiture, and it was a real treat to watch them burn – which they did, green. There is a lesson there for other landowners in the area who may have huge patches of the tasty berries.
It’s not immediately obvious in the above photo, but that day we also ‘chopped and dropped’ all of the dense woody vegetation growing in the garden bed up above the courtyard. It was quite a large chunk of land to clear.
They say that there will be a super El Nino this year, and who am I to argue with such predictions? It doesn’t necessarily suggest anything about the increased fire risk, despite what the media says. So far the rainfall has been about spot-on average. But why tempt fate with so much dense woody fuel close to the house? Adapt and clean up. Leaving the vegetation laying on the ground for the soil critters to consume will really lift the fertility. There are even plans to plant a Japanese maple into that area. The complete shade such a small tree will provide, should result in a clearer and simpler garden bed. Plus it will look pretty.
And we’ll cut a path through there. In its original format, the garden bed was way too big, and never properly maintained. Of late we’ve been breaking up all of the garden beds into smaller sized chunks, simplifying the variety of plants, all of which is hard work now, but makes life easier in the future – plus we have better access to enjoy the floral displays.
The big dog Ollie is getting older. Here’s him in early 2018 at almost half a year old.
I’d planned this evening to write an amusing story about how reliance on the output of computerised Large Language Models is dumbing the population down. But then I took the big dog out in the dark off lead. Us two old fellas ambled along the path towards the chicken enclosure. A wallaby bounced away in fright. Ollie gave the marsupial a cursory and appreciative nod for it’s display of fright. The Milky Way sure is bright in the winter air. Hang around for long enough, and you’ll see a shooting star. I reckon old school astronomers do it tough, it’d be cold work. We however, felt the cool conditions and decided indoors was the better place to be.
Ollie had to take a dump, which is a fine thing to do outdoors. Very civilised, and he is respectful of his indoor creature comforts. One chunk. Then another. What’s going on here? It’d needed to be said by someone, and dogs sure can’t talk, so I said: “Dude, why are you acting so odd?” A quick investigation under the tail revealed the worst, for there was grass protruding. “Sandra, bring some toilet paper! Quickly!” I yelled. My fine lady rushed out from the house, with the roll, which had had only two sheets left. Probably not enough, but one must endure the occasional hardship when it comes to their friends. I felt so much closer my canine companion when pulling the wet chunk of grass and other organic matter from the rear. I’d become his poo roadie. And he positively wiggled with excited relief. Yup, getting older is a mixed bag, and we can only but hope to have someone nice to wipe our bums when needed. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong, but I reckon artificial intelligence would be no good at that job.
This week has been rather wet, and cold. At times the dogs would head outdoors, run around in the rain, then retreat back inside to warm themselves in front of the wood fire. You’d imagine the younger Kelpies would give the elder dog preferential seating nearest to the warmth, but no.
By late Friday, the many consecutive days of clouds lifted. The sun finally shone. A lovely rainbow formed over the valley. It’s actually a double rainbow, but it’s a bit hard to see that in the next photograph:
Earlier in the week, we cleaned out the greenhouse of all of the summer plants. Some of the soil was removed and fed to the trees in the orchard, and replacement minerals were added to the raised garden beds.
The newest raised bed in the greenhouse was not draining properly. The lower soil layers were quite stinky redolent of Hydrogen Sulphide (rotten egg gas), which has strong overtones of tar. What a stench! The soil in that bed was mixed up and aerated. Next the six foot steel wrecking bar was used to open up the clay underneath that pongy raised garden bed.
The chilli plants were also thinned out, and most relocated into a single long bed. We’ve learned with the greenhouse, that growing less plants with more spacing in the raised beds, provides a higher overall yield. Go figure, but it is consistently true.
One of the best producing plants in the greenhouse, is the Babaco. During summer, we ate fresh Babaco fruit with breakfast for at least six months. And the two plants have three large clusters of ripening fruit which should be ready to begin consuming by around November.
The turmeric tubers were also permanently planted into a garden bed. They were too hard to harvest when grown in a large pot. We’re also adding some to the dogs biscuit mixture, because it is apparently a potent anti-inflammatory. That will be especially good for Ollie who is feeling the cold this winter.
On that note, the large rose garden is also providing plentiful rose hips. Those are also added to the dogs afternoon baked biscuits, for much the same reasons.
We tried an experiment with the tomato vines earlier this year so as to get the green fruit to ripen quickly. In March, I just stopped watering the vines and let them slowly die back. Heaps of fruit ripened on the drying vines, and the rest has now been brought inside where it is continuing to ripening in the kitchen. The chilli plants in the greenhouse live for up to six years. They had to be watered once per day. However, the green fruit brought into the house, has also ripened to a nice fiery red colour. For those whom are curious, at most the greenhouse required 70L or 18 gallons of water per day during the hottest days of summer.
Bizarrely, the combination of decent winter rain and occasional sunshine has caused the grass to grow. It may well be that I’ll have to mow some of the paddocks, which is not usually required at this wintry time of year, in fact it’s downright odd. Anywhoo, the grass around the many citrus trees was removed using a brush cutter in that large citrus enclosure.
On Sunday we began constructing a steel rock gabion cage. This will commence the third and final level of the long line of cages.
Having a third level of cages will look pretty cool, and also allow us to eventually (in about two years, it’ requires a lot of rocks) widen the thornless blackberry enclosure.
And in some other examples of strange winter weirdness. Today we spotted a European honeybee out and about harvesting pollen and nectar from citrus flowers:
And this is early, but two groups of Daffodils have pushed their leaves out of the soil. Most unusual for June, and downright weird.
Onto the flowers:
The temperature outside now at about 10am is 7’C (44’F). So far for this year there has been 475.4mm (18.7 inches) which is up from last weeks total of 400.8mm (15.8 inches)
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