Our suburban food forests : snails

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

winter solstice, adjustments with raised bed and mirror

The northeast corner of my garden is a difficult place to grow, especially in (southern hemisphere, June etc) winter. There is a wooden paling fence to the north and the east, and with low sun angle, there is no light on the ground, plants here bolt quickly to seed.

I have now adopted a two pronged strategy:

raise the garden bed, with the raised bed away from the northern fence
place a mirror to add light.

Here are photos taken at 7.40am on 18 June, almost the winter solstice, shortest day.

yes, there are tree shadows too

Sun on mirror, beginning to sweep over raised bed
(will continue to left in photo above, right in photo below as sun moves).
Old lace curtain (or net) may be used for blackbird and bowerbird problems.
Blackbirds are interested in macro-life (worms etc) in soil more than plants.
Bowerbirds can destroy winter leafy gardens very quickly.

the raised bed is indeed a steel sofa bed base, with chicken wire and hessian and other fabric lining,
then bark and mulch mix (see earlier entry) manures, compost and 150cm of soil from below
(chooks previously ran on this ground).
In the enlarged photo (click) you may see egg shell around bed foot to deter snails.

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