Winter

Our first frost was crunching underfoot this morning.

Sydney only gets light frosts, but they don't usually arrive in June! Of course, it is only just June. July is usually our coldest month, and we normally would only see frost on the ground -- yes, just on the ground -- half a dozen times a year at most. We'll have to see how many frosts we get this year, but it touched some of the lettuces in yesterday's photo... Normally the vegie beds are too high or too sheltered to get frost, so I am a bit worried!

Permaculture Basics: Guild Planting

Well, finally, I think I've figured out the whole photo-to-blog bit, so here's part of my vegie patch:
Is it chaotic? Yes. Deliberately so. This is guild planting. Guild planting, like all gardening, is a way of recreating nature -- but in order to take advantage of some of its processes.
Most ecosystems are mixtures of plants and animals, rather than vast monocultures. Why?

• each species uses slightly different resources (the 'ecological niche')
• each species has slightly different outputs, which are used by other elements in the system
• taller plants shelter tender young plants from extremes of weather
• not all species are susceptible to the same pests and diseases
• some species shelter pest predators
• potential exists for symbiotic relationships
  

A guild is a mixture of species organised to provide similar benefits, including benefits to the human designer. In a typical vegetable patch, plants are lined up in rows by cultivar. Snails call this a supermarket, I suspect. In a mixed planting, it's harder for pests to see or smell the plants they prefer, so there should be less pest damage. I haven't entirely managed to avoid rows here. That's because of the broad beans -- they are so tall that they need to be grown together so they can be tied up to prevent wind and rain damage. Behind them, however, is a random planting of Florence fennel, broccoli, Tuscan kale and volunteer parsnips.

Another idea of guild planting is to keep the ground covered by plantings all the time so as to minimise space for weeds to colonise, so that when one crop is pulled out, it should be replaced by another -- either by a new plant, or by a neighbouring plant growing bigger. In the picture above, you might be able to see radishes growing between the two rows of broad beans. They are a very fast-growing crop and I expect to pick them this week. The broad beans are now big enough to cope with root competition from weeds. The bok choy and the lettuces will also be eaten before the beans need the extra space.

And by the time the beans are out, it will be time for spring planting, which seems very far away!

Slowly does it...

It has been raining off and on for some weeks in Sydney. My garden is saturated. It is so wet that mud comes up on the grass when I walk on it. I am getting a bit twitchy through lack of gardening, but there isn't much you can do when the soil is as wet as this.

So what has been going on at our place?

• The chooks have moved out of their dome to under the quince tree.
• The broad beans have come up.
• The Brussels sprouts are looking happy, but the bok choi has been chewed a bit.
• Some nasturtiums did come up. Their first leaves are a really interesting shape!
• My Fringe Wattle and Sydney Golden Wattle are both just starting to bloom.
• The Council will charge us $300 for three square metres of concrete. Moral: one you have succeeded with a development application, don't change anything. Except that not making this change will annoy me for the rest of my life.

In other words, things are a bit frustrating around here at the moment. Reading Northern Hemisphere gardening blogs is not helping!

Book Review: Smart Permaculture Design

Jenny Allen's book is a beguiling exploration of permaculture for the novice. Filled with fascinating ideas, it emphasises the creative side of permaculture while still explaining the basic concepts that define it.

The photographs are beautiful and I enjoyed the quotations that wander through the pages, as well as the sly humour that peeps out from time to time. It is endearing to find a gardener who admits her mistakes. Her bush food garden, she points out, is very hardy, yet she has it in Zone 1 (ie, adjoining the house). Plants that really do require care are thus further away, meaning that they are less under her eye and require a little more effort to look after. She has a comfrey saga as well...

The Aspirational Trees impressed me; I hadn't seen them before. These are a more focussed alternative to brainstorming. You start with a bubble. Inside it, write something that is important to you, such as "fresh food". Draw lines out from the bubble (branches) and write what you might do in the garden to achieve it: "herbs" or "vegie patch" or "strawberries", for example.

The list of possible garden features provides intriguing options. I've never considered an aphrodisiac garden, though no doubt The Geek would be impressed. More amusing was the zoo garden, planted with such animals as tiger lilies, dragon fruit and snake beans!

There is a comprehensive list of categories of beneficial insects and how to attract them. Regular gardening books spend almost no time on this. As permaculturists might point out, a predatory wasp is very successful at removing caterpillars, requires no work of the gardener, kills no beneficial insects by mistake, and is fascinating to watch. Perhaps as the Western world becomes a bit more Green, we might see the regular gardening books change their emphases.

Now for the quibbles. The book opens with a poetic description of life in permie paradise, as do most permie books. I know why they all do it but gosh, it gets annoying after a while, particularly at a time when I am finding organic methods of kikuyu control to be pretty useless. But perhaps this battle is telling on my temper.

The main strength and weakness of the book, in my view, is due to the writer's location. Maleny, in Queensland, is a hub of permaculture, having some of the most fertile soil in Australia and a tropical climate. The list of unusual edible plants for the tropics is fascinating -- but only useful if one is in the tropics, on acreage. Suburban permaculture in the temperate zone is, I can't help thinking, a touch more difficult. Gardeners in the tropics and subtropics will gain most from the practical chapters, but the creative ideas are adaptable to any climate.

I would class this in the 'nice ideas' category rather than in 'essential reference', even for tropical gardeners. Borrow a copy through your local library before purchase.

Allen, Jenny
Smart Permaculture Design
Frenchs Forest : New Holland, c. 2002
ISBN: 187706917-5

Life is what happens...

... while you are making gardening plans!

Thank you to Staycalm for asking how I am! Nothing's gone very wrong here; it's just been very busy. There have been a number of family birthdays -- the Sprig turned three, for example, so that meant party preparations one weekend instead of gardening.

I also managed to re-injure my neck. It was much more painful than the car accident injury, but unfortunately unrelated to it, so I have to pay for the physio myself instead of relying on Workcover. It's much better now, but the physio believes I have an underlying problem, and that means more exercises.

We've just had a full week of rain and the back yard is saturated. No planting here for a while, especially as more rain is forecast for this week. We did manage to plant our 'Social Climber' sweet peas and 'Turkish Delight' pansies as planned. I also got the Sprig to plant some Nasturtium 'Peach Melba' seeds, but I suspect the rain has probably done for them. We'll see.

Mothers' Day

My present from the Geek (as requested) was one of these:
I am still getting my head around the instructions and around digital cameras generally, but I hope to bring you more pictures of my own garden soon!

Today we did manage to get some planting done, and the kids helped. With the aid of a mattock, we planted Freesia refracta albas and Tritonias, both light and dark blue, in the front lawn. Some sparaxis went in between my "Grandmere Jenny" rose and the Sedum "Autumn Joy".

In the vegetable patch, the boys helped me plant "Aquadulce" broad beans yesterday. Today I have planted seedlings of Brussels sprouts, lettuce, leeks and bok choy. I'm not expecting to eat a lot of lettuce as the weather grows colder: they are there more as sacrifical plants. I am hoping that the snails go for the lettuces rather than the sprouts. Brussels sprouts are planted 40cm apart and are slow growers. All that space around them is just weed-growing, snail-hiding space unless it's used for growing quick crops like bok choy, lettuces and radishes, so that's what I use it for. And I use snail bait at planting as well-- even with chooks in the garden, my losses are just too high if I don't.

The chook dome has been rotated to a new spot and the chooks re-caged in it. They are not impressed, but I am sure that tomorrow they will be busy removing the snails from the area and other enjoyable tasks.

The Sydney Morning Herald and the (Horti)Cultural Cringe

Today, the Herald, our local broadsheet, published what passes for its weekly gardening page. As the concept of growing backyard vegetables is having a renaissance, we had an article by Mari Gibson on starting her vegie patch. Mari Gibson claims not to be an expert, which is fine, except that there's another novice writing about his vegie patch on the Eco pages. And still no regular gardening columnist.

Mari's article isn't available online, but it details how she started a small vegie patch by doing some pulling-out, then having a buy-up of seedlings at the nearest garden centre and plonking them in with some mulch. Then she invited Jackie French to tell her what she'd done wrong.

For those who haven't read her books yet, Jackie is a writer of gardening books as well as books for children. Her emphasis is on organic gardening, and she writes with wit, knowledge and the enthusiasm, nay obsessiveness, that we gardeners know so well in ourselves.

There is only one problem. Jackie French has been gardening for years in the Araluen Valley, where the Southern Highlands begin to turn into the Australian Alps. Three hundred kilometres south of Sydney, and a completely different climate. If Jackie ever gardened in Sydney, it was a long time ago. There were a number of errors in the article as a result.

Apparently, autumn is a bad time to start a garden bed -- except that in Sydney, it's not. The heavy work of uprooting plants and carrying compost about can be done in less discomfort than summer, and our weeds aren't growing as fast. Our winters are almost frost-free, so autumn is a good time to plant perennials -- they can develop their root systems through the cooler weather before being blasted by our summer heat. Our springs are short in the extreme.

Jackie said that Mari should have left her plantings till spring, when they will grow faster. Not true (except for the chillies). The vegetables she chose were all cool-weather crops which Sydney-siders always grow in winter -- some would languish or bolt in our summers.
The only real mistake in plant choice that Mari made was in buying a couple of chillies. They really are a warm-weather crop. If she is lucky and the bushes are in a sheltered position, the chillies may over-winter, but it's not something I'd count on, especially with new plants.

Mari's garden is described as a "tiny urban patch"; almost certainly in our inner city. Jackie's comments about plants needing to be frost-resistant must be based on her own garden rather than Sydney conditions. We simply don't get heavy enough frosts to worry about, particularly in small, sheltered inner-city gardens.

Jackie encourages Mari to put in six to ten varieties of dwarf apples for continuous cropping. It's true that some parts of Sydney were under apple orchards, and that the famous Granny Smith appeared here -- but even now those parts are not in the inner city. Um, can we find six to ten varieties of low-chill dwarf apples anyway? And how do we keep our rampant fruit fly away from them without spraying?

The Herald seems to have a sort of horticultural cringe going when it comes to Sydney-based gardening experts. Their previous Resident Expert (on weekends, and what did happen to that column?) was Cheryl Maddocks -- another fantastic garden writer, but she lives in the Blue Mountains, and it was obvious in her plant choices. The gardening blog on the Herald website is actually pulled across from The Age, which is based in Melbourne.

Yet gardening is fundamentally a local endeavour. Your geology, climate, terrain and biota all matter when you garden, and lead to a deeper appreciation of your own immediate surroundings. When will the Herald find an expert that actually lives in the Sydney basin, who can properly support four million potential and actual gardeners?