Time leaves little pieces of us etched upon the land. It’s been sixteen years, almost to the day, since we moved into a half finished house high up above sea level in the Australian bush. You can never really be sure whether you’ve done the right thing, and that life move was no exception. I mentioned the possibility that we don’t know nearly as much as we think we do, to a young bloke in casual conversation many months ago. Mysticism is an unfortunate habit of mine, and the dude just laughed at me. But I’m being serious! How much can any of us ever really know?
After dinner, Ollie and I went out into the dark and poked around the orchards just to see what is going on. There wasn’t much activity, but it’s the early evening, and marsupials and other forest critters are err, night owls. It sure is cold though, which is typical for September. 6’C / 43’F and the memory surfaced of the half finished house we moved into all those years ago, because it still wasn’t fully sealed from the outside world. However, cold spring conditions were preferable to being sent nasty demand letters from the nice real estate agent requesting us to cut the grass. Totally my fault. Before we moved in to the nearby project housing rental property whilst building this place, the front yard was an industrial waste land. Should have just left it as is, but instead the soil was coaxed back into life.
Way up on this forested property, even before that time, the soil here was also slowly being brought back into life. Regular readers may be surprised to learn that it’s been half a year since I stopped recovering the 70kg to 80kg (150 to 180 pounds) of used coffee grounds a fortnight from a busy café in Melbourne. Twenty years of doing that activity and you’d imagine that the place would smell of coffee, but no. What amazed me was that the material was spread over the ground, or added into compost mixtures, and within days it’d be gone. Hard to know where, but the plants sure are growing.
That’s wasn’t entirely true though. The first few years the plants didn’t grow much at all. In a nod to Claire for persisting with my bone-headedness, I learned that in addition to the coffee grounds, the soil needed blood and bone, something from the sea, and lime, lots of lime, and in three different varieties. Who knew? I sure didn’t, and had begun my gardening journey with the well indoctrinated belief that all I needed to add was mulch. Lot’s of mulch. The experiment has been done, it is candidly hard to grow vegetables, or even fruit trees at this location in soils fed lots of mulch.
Funnily enough, whilst working about the property today, we uncovered a blast from the past! An aluminium plant tag with the word: ‘Coffee’ engraved into it.
What the plant tag refers to is that long ago, we trialled many varieties of fruit trees which were from growing zones outside this cool mountainous environment. I can assure concerned readers that snow does in fact kill coffee shrubs – just in case you feel the need to duplicate the experiment. Yet, before the snow, the shrub was growing amazingly. Oh well. After the snow, the plant blackened and shrivelled up within two days. There were other failures too, like the White Sapote which is meant to survive light frosts: Au contraire! That tree turned toes up too.
Fruit trees take a long time to become productive, so before we’d even fully clad the house to protect us from the cold early spring air, hundreds of fruit trees had already been planted. In those days, it was not an unreasonable expectation to purchase a bare rooted tree in winter for about ten bucks. A canny person would visit speciality nurseries and have their choice of scion wood grafted onto various rootstocks. Those trees cost under ten bucks each, which for the price included a stern lecture about how they may not survive. They all did, and because we had the choice of various rootstocks, some of the apple trees here in particular have become enormous over the intervening years.
There are still a few places around which will graft varieties to rootstock of your choice, but you have to be in the know. Sadly however, inflation is a thing, and fruit trees are no longer cheap and an apple tree will set a person back around forty bucks. The canny person today could learn to do it all on the cheap by either purchasing or raising rootstock, and then graft their own varieties to it. It’s not complicated, and you avoid the stern lecture about how the tree could die.
Scion wood is not hard to obtain either. People regularly prune fruit trees, and I doubt a person would notice if a small branch or three disappeared from an established plant. I used to hang out with a local seed saving group, and one of the members used to say that the best gardeners were thieves, although I’m uncertain what the lady meant, and can’t endorse her activities.
The earliest trees were planted twenty years ago here, and now they’re lush and huge. Regrets are things we all have, and one of those is that I wish I’d not become gripped by the idea of the food forest. The orchards are lovely and shady on a hot summer’s day, but the trees could have used a bit more spacing. The newer plantings by contrast, are better spaced, and the trees grow much faster due to less competition for light, minerals and water. Some of the older ones though, are planted a bit too close for their own good.
Those trees planted too close together require more attention with regular pruning, but the real nuisance are the possums which happily benefit from the tree canopy super highway I’ve inadvertently created. If they had to climb down out of one tree in order to get up into the next, there’d be less possums. Oh well, if any trees sicken and die they are ruthlessly removed. The stumps are grubbed out and this opens up the older orchard a bit. With hundreds of trees, a person doesn’t have to worry if a few of them don’t do well.
It’s kind of funny to think that after sixteen years of living here, we’re still improving and fixing up systems, plus learning as we go. It’s getting easier to live here, and more productive. But it takes time to get things right, fix up mistakes, and that’s all part of life’s journey.
On this note, work on the new path below the house continued. Earlier in the week a day was spent splitting boulders into large rocks. These were then hauled back uphill. One interesting aspect about living on the side of an ancient super volcano, is that we have our own sort-of quarry. It’s a useful resource.
Another day was spent positioning these rocks on the uphill side of the path. The sun shone with glorious spring warmth, and candidly it felt quite toasty by mid afternoon.
In order to ensure that the rocks are positioned at a fixed width and along a straight line, a 4m steel channel is used.
Observant readers will notice that just above the second to the forth rocks there is an agricultural 3/4 inch plastic black and green stripe water pipe. We had to be very careful to place the rocks in such a way that the water pipe was protected. In fact, rocks and soil have now been placed over the pipe so that it cannot be accidentally broken.
Concerned readers should know that I have never experienced a winter storm harsh enough to freeze a water pipe, but it does get cold enough here to kill sub-tropical plants. The only sub-tropical exception is the Babaco which grows in the unheated greenhouse, and even that tough survivor looks very crook during the depths of winter,
By the end of the work day, that end of the path was completed.
By Sunday, the weather had turned Antarctic again as a cold front blew up from the frozen continent. A touch brisk! Work began on completing the uphill rock wall at the western end of path. Here is what it looked like early on in the day:
More boulders were split, with the large rocks being hauled back up the hill.
Years ago we’d trialled a wind turbine so as to add some extra oomph to the house power system. A 600W very heavy turbine sat perched atop an eight metre (26ft) tower. After two months I determined that it just wasn’t very windy here, and decided to add more solar panels instead. The first morning the panels were connected up to the battery, they produced more electricity than the turbine did over the previous two months. It was a pleasure to remove the tower and sell off the turbine machine!
Unfortunately such a tall tower requires a solid base, and I’d asked the local cement supplier to mix up an extra strong mix, and the stuff is as tough, if not harder, than granite. The remains of the tower base sat in the path and the edges had to be adjusted using a jackhammer.
Eventually the concrete was given a shape which matched the rock wall.
Another four or five rocks were added to the uphill side of the path, and the entire job was declared: Done!
It doesn’t look long in the photos, but I’m guessing the length of the path from end to end is about 30m / 100ft.
With a lot of different systems, something always needs repairs, and this week one of the garden water pumps stopped working. After a bit of investigation, it turns out a 12V DC circuit breaker failed due to corrosion. Fortunately I keep spare parts, so another breaker was installed and the supposedly water proof enclosure was doused with insect spray and lanolin oil. I’d presumed that the moisture had gotten into the enclosure due to condensation because the seals (an O-ring) looked OK.
The grapevine cuttings continue to amaze.
Varroa mite is now present on this continent, and the European honeybees will surely have a hard time adjusting to this pest. Over the past few weeks I’ve been taking particular note of insect pollinators, particularly with the very early fruit trees such as almonds and apricots. It is good to see that there are plenty of early pollinating insects here, which is probably due to the diverse range of plants and flowers grown. How a mono-culture orchard manages this issue with the honeybees and pollination of crops, is beyond my understanding.
Onto the flowers:
The temperature outside now at about 11am is 13’C (55’F). So far for this year there has been 926.6mm (36.5 inches) which is up from last weeks total of 915.8mm (36.1 inches)