the egg does not fall far from the hen

Down there in the out of focus short distance, the hen house.

Here for my Sunday lunch, three eggs fetched this morning from the hens not long before their conversion into light scrambled-omelet with fresh garden herbs and rocket (arugola) too. Helen out to lunch with her sister, a Sunday sororal pattern.

Thus I have another chance of a moment or 20 in this magic garden. During the week I had cause to write somewhere else about last Sunday at this table and how

as I sat in dreamy sunlight at a small mosaic table in my garden, eating crumbed fish on a plate with knife and fork, a tiny beautiful wasp-waisted paper wasp alighted on the other edge of the table, opposite me, almost missing the table edge in its sensory stupefaction, straightened itself, waggled its antennae to clarify and reconfirm the fishness that brought it thus far, then set out, straight line, gentle march, across the table towards me. 

I ended that piece of writing with such suspense. I can report (alas no camera) that the small drop-dead-gorgeous wasp did continue forward and did disappear under the edge of my plate. I waited silently to see if it could find its way to the top of the plate (as a fly or cockroach might, if permitted) but no, eventually it wandered disconsolately away slowly towards my 2 o'clock. I picked a tiny crumb from my plate and dropped it at 10 o'clock but the act of doing so broke the spell and the wasp wimped and flew instantly off.

I am reminded writing this and recalling these instances of beauty of Masanobu Fukuoka's observation in One Straw Revolution, in the box on the left.

Fukuoka has been a great influence on me. I agree with the virtue of that quote more than anything as a jolt for the mind, a what-the-hell-is-he-getting-at.

The purpose of the old mosaic table being – this week and last, everything changes – to meet the wasp and show respect for the hens and the eggs. AND for the sunlight in cool late winter. Looking at bare things around me, trying to be here and now, not just planning the look and yields of summer. Mindful.

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.

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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.

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***
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. 

a baseline - photos on 12 April 2013

I set out to provide a baseline of photos but an essay about thought-baselines has crept in first!

I've postponed, doing too many other things, keeping a proper record of my home garden. I have been in this house since 2008, not always focused on the garden.

A record becomes important as something grows and changes — just as children grow, we can forget the simple beginnings. I will have to retrieve old photos to show earlier history. Oh wait, here are some photos taken December 2011 (summer here) and placed in my main blog.

Also been the case that for health reasons and other distractions the garden has been somewhat less elegant than an untidy construction site.

It remains and will continue to be a construction site. I am not one of those gardeners who lays out a plan, smacks it all down on the ground (so often as a margin to vast grass) and proceeds to keep whipping the thing into line. Down garden, down garden!

My garden is a complex ecology. I seek the complexity because nature likes it.

People like to remember the Second Law of Thermodynamics as saying if you leave things alone they get in a mess. But in the past few years the kings of rules have decided that this is wrong, what happens is that things shift from Homo sapiens shaped order towards nature's order.

The business of farming, or producing food in a suburban environment, is about shifting natural order in favour of things we want to eat. The big issue is how we do it.

Fukuoka, in One Straw Revolution (see pp118-9) made some interesting observations on the differences between conventional agriculture and different forms of organic agriculture. I prefer the end of the spectrum with minimal departure from nature.

I have a Permaculture Design Certificate. In the 1990s I had a small orchard which was certified organic by the National Association for Sustainable Agriculture - Australia. I bring those concepts and history to a suburban garden now. This garden is huge for personal needs. These thoughts I expressed on radio in 2006 are relevant.

I combine that 'farming-gardening' perspective with a view that if it's worth doing, it's worth doing aesthetically well. You have to pursue beauty and happiness and fun or it's not worth doing.

This fits comfortably with the permaculturist's perspective, in fact, if one gives the aesthetic sufficient space in mind. Here are key principles:
• stack plants, in mixture, be concerned to get more per cubic metre of life than individual plants... and from the organic farming perspective, a muddling of plants, rather than straight rows of the same reduces disease prospect
• every element (plant, wall, microclimate, animal, fixture, bloke, art object) should serve multiple functions
• every function should be supported by multiple elements.

From this thinking about elements and functions comes complexity of thought, discovery of imagination, perhaps even fun... all to be fed by the most powerful necessity of all: observation.

• My garden evolves and changes, and my ideas about it change, my understanding of how to get results and happiness from it change... so the observation is critical to an ongoing process of enjoyment.

• I turn 70 in July 2013, and it is very important to me to make it possible to enjoy it for as long as possible. This makes an energy budget essential. Well, really, I have more free time than many others for the garden, so energy budgets are surely important for all. For me it means understanding, as in martial arts, where energy is going, and moving with that.

It is odd, to my mind, that among gardeners the instinct to segregation continues: "Flowers here, you vegetables get round the back out of sight!!" No segregation in my garden.

So to some photos. Midday April 2013, approx 34 degrees south, 150 degrees east. 24 degrees celsius.

My front garden excites different people in different ways :-)  It remains a construction site. On the left, you see the driveway has shadecloth (mounted on Corinthian columns (from eBay of course) with pediments still under design, bird cages at the top, with faux birds and solar powered lights. Solar panels on the house face west. This garden is a heat trap, a very warm microclimate. Thus a I have put a banana among the rhubarb. The rhubarb started in compost from several cubic metres of grass cuttings dumped at my asking by contract lawnmowing men. Behind the banana see my wood carved Ceres guarding the raised beds, currently salad gone to seed (to be nurtured and grown) and potting up site, so many things come from the home compost, especially tamarillos this season. A bit more detail below...

Shadecloth (below) not only covers cars but modifies the climate and air flow at this north west corner of the house (if reading this in the northern hemisphere, think southwest corner. The oranges do well in the gap by the fence. The rocks - well, they haven't found a home elsewhere in the garden yet...

This photo below shows some more of the garden, but (especially when enlarged (click on photo) this wide angled shot offers things you don't realise are before your eyes when 'just looking', including the shadows of the shadecloths. Photos provide insights.

This next is the entry to the backyard. Things take time. From 2008 until a few months ago, the lemon happily espaliered on the lattice on the right, was knee high. Now heading for the roof. Time... and more recently, a better diet, more to drink, and more attention to the snail nests that build in the bottom of the lattice. Note the lack of grass. A small raised bed in the shade of a Callistemon on the left. Dining/etc-ing table beyond.

This is another view of the backyard, from the back veranda area. Yes, there is a Fisher-Price caterpillar with its coloured feet in that peach tree, applying traction to a branch. This seedling tree (fruit quality yet unknown) shades a north facing window at dining table, during summer.

That table is under white genoa fig (have to work hard to get to them before birds!), tamarillo and one of three Bangalow palms which will change the whole garden again when they are tall. To the left a pond of water chestnuts

Ten steps from the back veranda, the compost bin. black plastic in sun, cooks quickly, if enough water. Sitting on its lid is my compost stirrer, an invaluable corkscrew device that lifts and mixes and speeds up the compost process: if you have the right things in there: water, air, nitrogenous waste (20%), carbonaceous waste (80%) and a zillion macro and micro creatures. In our climate, you have to work to keep it moist. Leaving the lid off if rain coming in the night is good. Adding water (especially hot water wastes) to the kitchen compost bucket begins the decomposition inside, keeps down possible odours from the bucket and rinses all the new additions down through the bin when you add it.

I keep two hens in this fine henhouse. The curtain dumped on the end is to insulate the egg-laying compartment from the sun. The curtain plonked over the door keeps the food from sparrows. The wire mesh fence is easily moved: the chooks*** are not just there to lay eggs and look pretty, they are my fertilisers and ploughs and they rotate though different areas of the garden. The manure collected from their house sometimes goes directly to plants of big appetite, like bananas, but mainly it goes into the compost bin.

*** chook is a delightfully gender-free Australian word for domestic fowl: hen, rooster, chicken, chick.. all are chooks. Also as in: "how are you my old chook?" — an expression of endearment to be used judiciously. Also as in the expression of a highly controversial former state premier in a deep northern state as it then was, Joh Bjelke-Petersen. announcing that he was going to hold a press conference: "Excuse me, I've got to go and feed the chooks."

When I was on my way to China as ambassador in 1984, I called on that Premier, who seemed, in the behaviour of his minions, something of a demigod. Joh was delayed. I waited in his grand office, he swept in and said: "China, eh, China. I like it. I like the way they crush the unionists!"

That story not entirely relevant here, but I've not put it on the record anywhere else.

I made this feeder from 100mm (4 inch) pvc pipe (load food from top, chooks feed from side spout) to be rodent proof.

The chooks have only had the run of this back corner garden area (below) in the last month or so. I planted asparagus and strawberries and herbs a year ago or so. Overrun by grasses in the summer, see the work the chook tractor has done in a short time to clear the grass away. While dropping some manure and scratching generally. The soil in this garden recently treated with dolomite (magnesium-calcium limestone) — the eggs shells are now very very strong and doubtless the two hens are strong in bone and muscle too.

Mostly the things the chooks have left are the things they want. However, there is a problem in that they really like worms which abound in the well-watered and fed ground around valued plants. So I've put a couple of pavers around the base of a newly planted Cherimoya (cooler tolerant custard apple). The seed heads in the foreground are mainly parsley, which grows in abundance (including cracks in the concrete drive).

Back corners tend to the wild. Permaculture design considers zones. Zone 1 is the things you must have daily. Zone 4 on a farm is where cattle roam. But zones are very relevant to a suburban garden too. I have had to learn again from getting things wrong here that you start close and work out. A design must have a centre. This is where 'lawn in the middle, plants at the edge' thinking doesn't work. One thing I've had to realise about this garden area is that with that fence running east west, winter vegetables don't like the back corner because there is so little sun light, their days are short, the vegetables bolt to seed.

I have begun to used raised beds recently for several reasons: they are operator friendly, easy to go pick salads for dinner (all this lot gone to seed in summer heat despite having shade over them, I now await seedlings), they are far above snails (my style anyway, containers on legs, in this case a very large old dog bed from garage sale, on two old saw horses) AND the chooks patrol under them.

Well, I was too close to this tree below to get a good photo, but it's one of four tamarillos I have (they only live a few years). It was planted only a year and a half ago but I have to use a ladder to get to the fruit. It sits next to the chook house, the chooks sit under it. Well fed! And exactly the same age as the one in the front yard (photo 4, click any photo to see all photos together)

Well that's the end of my argument for integrating animals into an organic enterprise. It's about ecological complexity and health.

That will do for a start, I think!