Our suburban food forests : Meanwhile, at Helen's house

Monday, April 13, 2015

Meanwhile, at Helen's house

Although Helen's soil is volcanic in origin, Helen has installed two 'WormFeast' mini-and-underground composters, as described in yesterday's post. Whether, given the quality of her soil, worms will rush in to the WormFeast or rush out to the garden, we shall see. Certainly in digging to install them there were lots of worms relocated from the soil!

Helen has also built a light frame for a thornless blackberry to climb on, removed from poor performance in a dark location in the back to a brighter location in the front.

The structure being built using hard last-winter prunings from the mulberry also–for the top structure –some long whippy green branches just cut to expose the Queen of Liberty, who remains in glory, flying from the mulberry.

A WormFeast discreetly lurks at one end of a swale above that little garden. Swales are very important on this sloping ground, to catch water and get it underground, not run-off to the street.
There was earlier discussion of swales here.

while further up, near the house, the second WormFeast being installed on a slope above a lively garden with apple, citrus and herbs (and of course volunteer tomatoes):

with a live mulch of thyme, dug from where it's running rampant, nearby

Meanwhile in the backyard, the chooks (non-gender generic Australian word for chicken, rooster, hen, etc) are in jungle heaven, having been moved from their well-worn pen at Dennis's house to four months wild growth at their beach jungle at Helen's.

Welcome to the backyard, the passionfruit crop has been big for months.

the three hens came here first when bought at auction end of October 2014. You can see the growth inside the fence and inside their house since they left... in January?

The Livorno (Leghorn) who is the only one laying so far made a huge song and dance setting up her space in the nest box (right hand end of the house) and producing a fine egg straight away.

These are really creature of the jungle and so happy here in this old vegetable garden run wild.

Meanwhile I will plant seed in their run at my house to refresh it for their return in some weeks.

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Looking forward to your thoughts, write as much as you wish, ask questions. Comments do not appear until moderated. I will try to do that quickly. Thanks for looking and thinking!!

Dennis Argall, the writer here, is a retired ambassador etc who has also been custodian of a small certified organic orchard and who obtained a Permaculture Designer's Certificate in 1993. Now applying skills and happy hopes to discover just how much life can be loaded into a town block.

Dennis's partner Helen Backhouse is a social policy activist and regional manager for a non-clinical mental health services organisation who has a long term passion for planning and growing a garden and getting dirty in it... and whose garden displays art as well as plant life.

Having two gardens means we can enthusiastically support each other's vision and efforts rather than squabble over one. :-)

Dennis began writing the blog in his garden, but Helen's has often been much more interesting!

some guiding thoughts...

These three quotes from an old site of mine:

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

The richness of our lives depends on our surroundings and what we fill them with.
Jackie French

That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology,
but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.
That land yields a cultural harvest is a fact long-known, but latterly often forgotten.
Aldo Leopold

And borrowing from Todd's Big Blog of Gardening:

"Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed.

Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is.

We lose our health — and create profitable diseases and dependencies — by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving.

In gardening, for instance, one works with the body to feed the body. The work, if it is knowledgeable, makes for excellent food. And it makes one hungry. The work thus makes eating both nourishing and joyful, not consumptive, and keeps the eater from getting fat and weak.

This is health, wholeness, a source of delight. And such a solution, unlike the typical industrial solution, does not cause problems.

The ‘drudgery’ of growing one’s own food, then, is not drudgery at all. (If we make the growing of food a drudgery, which is what ‘agribusiness’ does make of it, then we also make a drudgery of eating and living.) It is — in addition to being the appropriate fulfillment of a practical need — a sacrament, as eating is also, by which we enact and understand our oneness with the Creation, the conviviality of one body with all bodies.”

Wendell Berry