ecological complexity: spring, rain and a red-bellied black snake

We have had much rain. Then a couple of very hot days. Late yesterday having watered heat-shocked plants we sat at the table outside Helen's kitchen window.

There is a black snake, said Helen. And indeed there was. Slithering up from the strawberry bed at the top of the first brick wall, up the bricks into the garden. This photo from the kitchen today, no snake... and we have not seen the snake today.

It's quite small I said, impressed by how slender it looked (about 3 or 4cm diameter.
But quite long, said Helen.

Yes, I said, perhaps 1.2 metres... we both were surprised as this slender creature continued to reveal more of its length, coming up from the strawberries. Still young, we thought.

I've hoped to have a snake in the compost, said Helen. But I had in mind a diamond python.

source wikipedia: wikipedia says these snakes are 'not generally fatal'.

Well, the lizards are abundant today and Helen saw one looking very pregnant. So the snake has not been able to predate all her wonderful lizards. But if a snake were resident, it would feast well.

We are both very familiar with red-bellied black snakes, and we agree with the Australian Museum which advises:

This beautiful serpent shares our love of sunshine and water, and is a familiar sight to many outdoor adventurers in eastern Australia. Attitudes towards these largely inoffensive snakes are slowly changing, however they are still often seen as a dangerous menace and unjustly persecuted. 

On the farm, the startled black snake hastens away towards water. And you talk to the dog and distract it away from seeing the snake.

In suburbia, the situation is more complex. Fences trap and may make it hard for a snake to flee, dogs may get too adventurous. We have told the neighbours who have children and a young Jack Russell Terrier about the snake. The terrier is the one likely to be silly.

The Australian Museum also advises that:

During the spring breeding season males actively search for females and consequently spend more time in the open and travel further than females generally do (up to 1220m in a single day). As the breeding season winds down males reduce their activity and by summer there is no significant difference between males and females in the amount of time spent in the open, either basking or moving, and both sexes bask less and become less active than they were in spring.

 So it's possible the snake was passing through and took exception to our use of cold water and our voices, heading on up the hill. There is a metal fence on three sides of the garden, uphill, but perhaps the snake could happily climb via trees and passionfruit vines to get over the fence.

The Medical Journal of Australia has some 2010 clinical notes on black snake bites. Which provide comfort that the bite is not lethal. There is a recommendation for use of tiger snake antivenom, but disconcerting advice that more than a third of patients administered the antivenom have severe allergic reactions including anaphylaxis in some cases.

Meanwhile we will depart a little from Teddy Roosevelt's admonition to speak softly and carry a big stick, walking noisily in the garden so the snake knows we are there and moves on. We carry the long-handled weed tool, wearing solid footwear and thick trousers. And rejoice a little at this added complexity, but hoping it will depart for somewhere more sensible soon.

Summer arriving at Helen's garden

 Only a few weeks ago, Helen was up in the mulberry, artfully crafting the launch tube for the Queen of Freedom.

but a few weeks later the artful craftiness has been swallowed by spring growth.


There are several lessons and learnings:

• we despair of the mulberry producing good fruit. Despite its label when purchased, it's not really fruitful... but by golly it's brilliant at vegetative growth;
• The pruning of the upperworks needs followup now in summer, when it's not raining, as it is right now, every day;
• Viewed from above, from the front veranda, third photo, you can see that some under-pruning soon will provide a valuable summer shade space.

DETAIL: In the third photo, you will also see a trap to catch Indian Myna birds. The problem is discussed here, in a 2004 report. The problem has grown since then. This YouTube link is to a discussion of how a cage (of slightly different design) works. We have a problem with getting Mynas into this cage. While a lot of mynas come round, especially when there are chickens here and expectation of stealing chicken feed, the dominant bird at Helen's house is the vicious pied currawong. To get Myna birds into the trap we put dried dog food in the  entrance. While the currawong is boss of the garden, no one gets to the dog food before the currawong. They have no concern for mynas going for chicken food, the currawongs are meat eaters.

Helen's garden is sloping. The soil is rich dark red, volcanic. This is a contrast to the soil at my place, which is shallow and sits on top of a sandstone plateau, through which water is easily lost... mulch and development of a depth of good humus soil requires work. At Helen's place, this single dig with a fork reveals a very different, richer soil:

Which makes everything flourish. 

Helen's garden is packed with plants. 

With the addition this morning of two guavas and a kiwiberry, Helen advises that the fairly small garden now contains 31 fruit trees, bushes and vines, plus a macadamia nut which has its first small crop evident now. 

For the rest there are many herbs and vegetables, seedling trays and a chook house and run (the beach house of the chooks shown at my place, previous story. They need to come to Helen's soon to give their space at my house a rest.

Help today in planting (and shifting locations of a blood orange and a quince because of their sun needs) from Japanese WWOOFers Kanna and Daisuke, ballet dancer/model and engineering graduate... so well equipped! 

For the rest of this entry, a quick walk around:

Up from the street

Along the street

We have difficulty getting the thyme and other herbs established in these front steps,
because this is west facing and very hot in the afternoon.

This needs a bit of a trim. Helen has developed a keyhole in this front hedge,
through which you can see lemons and a chilli bush.

This garden above, beside the steep driveway, has begun to thrive since, with the help of WWOOFer Tatsuya we built a swale in January. 

Water previously just ran away. Now it enters the ground up there below the (grown larger) grapefruit and is retained in the soil below.

The swale is very simple. Most discussion online is about huge swales. But micromanagement of water is very easy. 
Rules 1-10:Get the water under the ground! There is no Rule 11.

Here is a photo from January.

This single passionfruit vine extends over ten metres along the side fence and also feeds the neighbours.
You don't pick passionfruit, you collect them when they drop.
A pleasant thing to do after coming home.
Necessary also to check downhill for the runaways!

healthy cuttings of prostrate thyme, for further reducing grass areas...

on right, banana passionfruit

 Because the house is cut into a slope, there is an area of concrete and a brick wall embankment behind the house, imposing on design, but whose severity of look is reduced by plant vigour.

Summer arriving

Traditionally, when we have wanted to think about our relationship to nature, we have gone to the wilderness, to places untouched by man.
... I think this is unfortunate... Americans [and Australians too] have a deeply in-grained habit of seeing nature and culture as irreconcilably opposed; we automatically assume that whenever one gains, the other must lose.
Michael Pollan

I walked past a front yard in Melbourne last week with a poster stuck in the middle of dead dead nothing in front of the house. The poster read: "This time I'm voting for The Greens". Sort of exemplifies the problem set out by MP. It should be easy to be green, even if renting. Read this and swoon.

=====

It has been a spring of record heat, mostly with nice rain intervals, some heavy rain, producing great growth. One severe dry heat day killing young blueberries.

No longer a north-facing warm winter sunroom to work in, the new growth of peach and rose make this a shady room.

These first two photos point to an underlying principle (or cluster of 'em) around the necessity that a suburban food forest enhance the human species, with its needs sybaritic, comfortable and comforting, inspiring and cheerful, as well as practical. We are in the garden, the garden gets in us.

Earlier, at the back of the house, the bedroom french doors that I installed in place of a window in 2013 extend human morning coffee life out into the garden. I pick up the camera after harvesting rhubarb for dessert later. While Helen dreams...

I was slightly alarmed to encounter the seemingly protestant ethic driven website 100kilos.org with its invocation that every Australian family should grow 100kgs of food per year. I suppose if I grudgingly give space to pumpkins we'd be there in a flash, though they take so much space so boringly, but when I look at my raised bed of spinach and 'lawns' of herbs I think I focus more on quality than weight.

If we use our compost there are always volunteer cherry tomatoes.
If it's in the garden, there are always volunteer spring onions.

In the understorey: rocket, parsley, water cress, water chestnuts, yarrow, bush basil, spearmint and other mints, chamomile, broad beans and decorative stuff too...

Lettuce (seeding), parsley, golden marjoram, spring onion, nasturtium, young tamarillo tree. All self-sown.

And then I lift my eyes to the fruit forming on tamarillo and fig and lemon and orange, guava and passionfruit and realise we will rush past the 100kgs without lifting one potato.

Tamarillos: the fruit will be like red-orange eggs, with hard skins which mean no grubs, not vulnerable to birds.
We regularly now get seedling trees from fallen fruit. The trees only last a few years, but arrange their own succession
... plus more little trees to give to others.
An unusual fruit but far more versatile than tomato or kiwifruit, needing kitchen experiments.
Fruit from February to August. Perhaps 100kgs from four trees. 

Yes look closely (click to enlarge) — there are tiny figs coming now.
We will have a constant struggle to harvest them before birds, particularly the satin bowerbird.
They know the right day, I know the right day, it's who gets up earliest...

The lemons are doing OK, espaliered, north facing. When a little older should hold fruit most of the year.
Fruit hang on the tree ripe for quite some time, ideally successive crops overlap.

... but this orange (capable or producing 100kg on its own) seems to have dropped a lot of young fruit
in the heat and wind and tempests. Ripe fruit autumn-winter and fewer fruit means bigger.
 I have also found this year that picked at the right time, green fruit can make a verjus of startling quality,
far more valuable in the kitchen than the raw edge of lemon.
Over and over wikipedia uses the word sour but in fact there is a delicacy in verjus not found in wine or lemon or vinegar in the kitchen.
Please note that we are talking here at the culture-garden edge, interface, interaction, place of imagination and experiment.

This guava seems to think it's in heaven [a.k.a. India] and is covered in fruit (click to enlarge and see fruit) which will be wonderful in January-February. Bird-vulnerable, but relatively thick-skinned, low risk of fruit fly grubs.

and behind the guava, one of now several passionfruit vines. Long season, no problems with birds or grubs. 

 Which brings us to the other garden producers, the chooks ('chooks' is a non-gender Australian word to include hens, roosters, chickens).

These three young hens, or pullets, are only five months old, so they will not produce eggs for some time. But they are already an important part of the garden. Their digestive systems will take in weeds and scraps and snails collected the night before. Their digestive systems produce a product of enormous value, which we put through the compost rather than use directly on the garden.

How do I love thee? Let me count the eggs. 
with apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning

And dare I say, these three young women – Ancona (black and white), Livorno (top-left: the rare golden-salmon colour) and (foreground) x-breed Hairy Legs (you might see the patchy hairy legs if the photo is enlarged) – add class to our establishment: they can be admired and praised and are more entertaining than most television. We had brought them in in the dark of night some weeks ago, to join two elderly dames, generally if you put hens together in the dark on a perch they work things out in the morning without too much fuss. But the elderly dames went beyond establishing pecking order, persisting for days in slashing and wounding... which earned them an early place in the compost.

Violence. There is necessarily violence at various levels in the garden. We get more fidgety about violence between and towards animals and birds, though somehow relaxed about violence towards innocent plants that can't run away... To garden is to intervene in nature, to shift the ecology from nature's outcomes to things that serve us.

Chemical farming tends to ignore the soil and add chemicals to directly force feed plants while neglecting the soil, then to bomb with poisons. Natural farming ensures the soil continues to improve and plants thrive on good nutrition. And within the notion of natural farming there is considerable variation, from orderly regimentation with regulation of inputs to a slithering in to be somewhat in nature, with minimal distortion. Dig deeper here, in Masanobu Fukuoka's One Straw Revolution.***

Which brings us back to the 100kgs question. There is more to our kind of gardening than that nice objective. But please go see them... they seek to assemble lots of practical ideas.

I go back to Fukuoka, as quoted in the right column here:

The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.

It's challenging to read and try to follow that, it has a zenly quality. But it works. And bears fruit.

=========
***
From Fukuoka's One Straw Revolution

....among natural farming methods two kinds could be distinguished: broad, transcendent natural farming, and the narrow natural farming of the relative world [this is the world as understood by the intellect]. If I were pressed to talk about it in Buddhist terms, the two could be called respectively as Mahayana and Hinayana natural farming. 

Broad, Mahayana natural farming arises of itself when a unity exists between man and nature. It conforms to nature as it is, and to the mind as it is. It proceeds from the conviction that if the individual temporarily abandons human will and so allows himself to be guided by nature, nature responds by providing everything. To give a simple analogy, in transcendent natural farming the relationship between humanity and nature can be compared with a husband and wife joined in perfect marriage. The marriage is not bestowed, not received; the perfect pair comes into existence of itself. 

Narrow natural farming, on the other hand, is pursuing the way of nature; it self-consciously attempts, by "organic" or other methods, to follow nature. Farming is used for achieving a given objective. Although sincerely loving nature and earnestly proposing to her, the relationship is still tentative. Modern industrial farming desires heaven's wisdom, without grasping its meaning, and at the same time wants to make use of nature. Restlessly searching, it is unable to find anyone to propose to. 

Edge, Michael Pollan, complexity

We have returned from two weeks away to find the garden, described in its pruned state on 13 September is unrecognisable, rampant. Wonderful. Such a spring of unprecedented heat and bucketing rain.

I have some photos, which will put up shortly. Meanwhile I discovered just before we left that I had somehow missed Michael Pollan's Second Nature, A Gardener's Education published way back in 1991... though I had read other books of his. And yesterday I got it from the post office, courtesy of my favourite bookshop (no commercial advantage to me if you click).

The beginning is so close to my mind, perhaps to many others.

This book is the story of my education in the garden. The garden in question is actually two, one more or less imaginary, the other insistently real...
Both of these gardens had a lot to teach me... [and also] I soon came to the realization that I would not learn to garden very well before I'd also learned about a few other things: about my proper place in nature...; about the somewhat peculiar attitudes towards the land that an American [or Australian] is born with (why is it the neighbors have taken such a keen interest in the state of my lawn?); about the troubled borders between nature and culture; and about the experience of place, the moral implications of landscape design, and several other questions that the wish to harvest a few decent tomatoes had not prepared me for. It may be my nature to complicate matters unduly, to search for large meaning in small things, but it did seem to me that there was a lot more going on in the garden than I'd expected to find.

Yes, absolutely. And reinforcing my own sense that to go out into and seek to develop a garden is immensely intellectually complex, if you open your mind and allow nature in, allow the garden to evolve.

And there are social dimensions too. One small example: I find on return that where my banana should have one main trunk and one 'follower' for the next crop, there are five new suckers come up. My first inclination was to whack them off one a day and give them to the chickens, but then I remembered that R... had said she would take as many as possible and so would her daughter. Fortunately I have two Japanese wwoofers here to assist with the more arduous task of digging them out (compared to whacking them off) and transporting them to Helen's house for R... And so we interact with R...'s farm ... This just one of a hundred details of things to do, things to plan and things to adjust, seeing the garden after two weeks. An edge element.

An important principle in permaculture is that of the productive 'edge'. In Melbourne we met and Helen was able to visit Angelo's Deep Green Permaculture based on a small garden a short walk from where we were staying. Here is Angelo's writing on edge.

Edge is productive, overlaps are productive, edge is the basis of creativity, not only for plant life but also for human life in community. No edge, no connection – no multiculturalism – no new life, limited creativity and imagination. Perhaps I should also write about this in my strategic directions blog, my country seems increasingly anxious about shoulders that come to rub it in this complex world. Seize the day, not shut the door... Which leads back to Michael's comment about peoples' concerns about his lawn. The dominant meme being that gardening is about plonking in and then maintaining the barricades with weapons various, to keep permanent all those arrangements you stubbornly want unchanged.

But actually, can't.

——————

Oh and we return to see a disastrous early arrival in the front garden!!!