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2006: Our first
project is the kitchen garden
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March 2006: the view from the sea. We
have moved into our house. Summer is almost over, though. |
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May 2006:
The only reasonably flat area next to the house will become the kitchen garden. We
find many old logs on the property and use them to build up the garden
beds. The poles for the orchard are already in place (upper left
corner). |
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Position of the kitchen garden:
The photo shows the afternoon sun in May. Unfortunately this is not the
ideal place for a vegetable garden. There is not much we can do, though.
The house sits on a slope facing west and lots of trees -over thirty
metres high- shield the garden from the afternoon sun. We just hope, that
somehow we'll still be able to grow veggies here. |
2006: The orchard |
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July 2006:
We have bought most of our fruit trees from Bob Magnus in Woodbridge,
just a few kilometres away from us on the other side of the hills. Bob
grafts heritage varieties of fruit trees onto dwarf root stock. We plan to
cover the complete orchard with bird mesh; trees on dwarf root stock
are small enough to grow underneath the cover. |
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This winter we plant in the orchard:
12 apple trees
2 plums
2 nashi pears
1 apricot
1 nectarine
4 cherry trees
1 sour cherry
10 hazelnuts |
2 Jostaberries
3 black currants
4 red currants
8 blueberries
20 raspberry canes
2 loganberries
2 boysenberries
and many strawberries |
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The wildlife: possums and wallabies:
Half a dozen or more wallabies sometimes feed on our paddocks in the evening.
Possums climb up to our verandah and curiously look through the windows at
night. We know we should share and we wouldn't mind sharing, but without
fences there wouldn't be anything left for ourselves. Especially since the
possums prefer their apples very, very green! And we don't. |
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Fencing:
The three metre high fence posts will carry the
bird netting. The fence itself is only about a metre high. The locals tell
us, that possums hate floppy fences. If they feel unsafe because a fence
starts to wobble, they won't climb it. We hope that that is true. We use
fencing wire to bend "outriggers" and half a metre of
"floppy fencing" is attached to these outriggers. We don't dig
the bottom of the fence into the ground but we fold it outwards and peg it
down with pegs bend from fencing wire. |
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More fencing:
We don't trust the floppy fencing completely. We use electric fencing
around the horse paddocks. As that's already in place we decide to run one
electric wire around the orchard fence as well. Possums can act very crazy
when fruit are on the trees and they can do a lot of damage in very short
time. Better safe than sorry.
Raised beds
We built up raised beds with a lot of pony manure and old hay. We planted
everything in holes filled with potting mix. |
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Apple trees on trellises
The ten apple trees in the uppermost row are trained to trellises. The
height of the poles is 2.4m and we use three wires. These trees are
trained as the photo on the right shows: the tree is trained sidewise and
a new shoot will (hopefully!) grow straight up to the next wire and then
be trained sidewise again, and again at the last wire. With a bit of luck
other branches will appear at each junction that can be trained to the opposite
direction.
The "beer dish snail trap" in the left
photo did not work but
snails didn't create a big problem for us anyway.
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Cherry tree Stella |
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Companion plants: sour cherry and lavender |
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Cherry tree Lapin |
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Strawberries |
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Several types of blueberries |
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Red and black currants |
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Ten hazelnut bushes |
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Watering:
we are not connected to town water but rely on rain water or truckloads of
water carted in from Cygnet over a distance of 12km. Our toilet is a
composting toilet and the grey water only contains the waste from the
washing machine, the shower and the kitchen. We only use grey water
friendly soap and detergents, and only as little as possible. An
irrigation system for the plants is not an option. We plan
only to use the grey water and will water by hand to conserve as much
water as possible. Will it work? Let's hope so. Right now the hot summer
is a long way away and we don't need to water at all at this time of the
year. |
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Raspberries |
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2006: The native garden and olives and nut trees
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| Crab apple tree |
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"winter plantings" in July and August
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Natives planted in front of the house |
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| Walnut tree next to the orchard |
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| We planted three chestnuts below the
orchard |
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Our small olive grove. Four different types of
olives are planted in grow tubes |
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2006: Snow, bushfires and Christmas
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October 2006:
all the trees are planted. There still is plenty of rain around and we
don't need to do much watering. We have planted the first lettuces in the
kitchen garden. We had to use timber off-cuts from the local saw mill to
build retaining walls in the orchard and the kitchen garden. They won't
last for a very long time, but for now they make a big difference and hold
the soil back in the beds and make it easier to keep out the weeds. |
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October 28th, 2006:
late snow on Esperance Peak. |
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December 13th, 2006:
smoky haze drastically reduces visibility. Big bushfires burn in
Victoria and Tasmania, luckily not in our area, though! |
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Christmas!
The end of a very, very busy year. |
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