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We are well into autumn now! The last days of March and the beginning of
April bring heavy rain. All our water tanks are full again. The winter creek
runs again and the sky is grey. It's getting a bit colder, too. A good
excuse to spend the evenings in front of the woodstove!
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Rain in autumn is the signal for the potatoes to be dug up. If we would
leave them in the ground for much longer, they might rot. We had planted
Pink Eyes, Kennebec, Dutch Cream, Bintje and Tasman in three eight metre
rows. The total harvest was 112kg. The October plantings produced twice as
much as the earlier ones! From now on the main potato crop will go in around
the middle of October.
April 2nd, 2008: lots of tomatoes are now ripe as well. We use an
old fashioned mouli to make tomato sauce and Silke had brought her
grandmother's preserving unit from Germany last year. It works very well
with our first batch of tomato sauce!
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Our new chooks
One of our brown chooks died. It was only a little over a year old
and hadn't seemed sick at all. These first chooks were ISA Browns.
They lay large brown eggs and are very gentle and affectionate birds.
At least, ours are (were). We researched ISA Browns a little more and
were surprised: ISA Browns are a designer breed and were bred for the
production of large eggs, more than 300 in the first year. After that,
the birds will die or the egg farmers get rid of them. Not really a
good situation, and absolutely not what we stand for. We want to
have healthy birds that live longer, and it doesn't matter, if they
lay less eggs and smaller ones.
We found a free range poultry farm not far from Hobart, that breeds
Australorps, White Leghorns and Crossbreds, a cross between White
Leghorns and Australorps. We bought 3 Crossbreds at point of lay.
Let's see how we go with this breed! More
about chickens
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April 3rd, 2008: a major storm system passes over Tasmania.
The maximum wind speed registered in Hobart was over 170km/h. Our
chimneys rattle during the night, we loose power for half a day, but
apart from the corn stalks nothing gets damaged. No big loss, really,
because this batch of corn was planted too late and wouldn't have had
enough time to properly develop cobs anyway.
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April 15th, 2008: we woke up to a beautiful clear autumn
morning today. Unfortunately, there is a
dark side to Tasmania. Every year Third World practices are
used by the forestry industry. We see it as government sponsored
vandalism when napalm is dropped from helicopters on clear felled
areas of forests. Huge smoke plumes fill the sky and make breathing
difficult for thousands of Tasmanians. In this age of global warming
awareness this is no longer a justifiable practice. Today thirty-nine
high intensity burns are scheduled for Tasmania, burns that not only
make life difficult for the people living in these areas, but burns
that contribute immensely to global warming with their co2 and ash
particle output. We have documented a trip
through the Styx Valley here. Giant swamp gums, eucalyptus
regnans, hundreds of years old and eighty to ninety metres high
are logged to make room for plantation timber.
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April 21st, 2004: these Dutch Cream potatoes were planted very late
on October 21st. Even though the plants haven't withered yet, we harvest
them. It's just getting too late in the year. The soil is very wet and we
don't want them to rot! We used organic potatoes from the supermarket,
because we couldn't buy any seed potatoes in October any more. The result is
terrific: 30kg from 2kg of seed.
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Autumn in the vegie garden: almost everything is harvested now, corn,
pumpkins, squash, zucchini, cucumber, capsicum, eggplant, potatoes and most
beans. The asparagus is starting to yellow and we'll cut it down to ground level
in May. The tomatoes are still going strong, lots of fruit on the plants,
but the plants are starting to die off. We'll use those tomatoes that won't
ripen any more to make chutneys! The strawberries are full of fruit as well,
but not much is left for us. It's late in the year and the Green Rosellas
and Currawongs are very hungry now and much faster than we are.
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Autumn in the vegie garden
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A green manure crop
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A not so scary scare-crow
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We rotary-hoe the empty beds in the vegie garden thoroughly and plant green
manure. Even though we rake soil back over the seeds and cover the beds with
a thin layer of hay, the birds just love the green manure seeds! The scare
crow and reflective tape make hardly any difference.
Green manure: we use a green manure seed-mix containing rye corn,
oats, tic bean, blue lupins and grey peas.
Green manure is all about putting something back into the earth after we
have taken out our harvest. Most of these plants are "nitrogen
fixers", they enrich the soil with nitrogen they produce. They also
create bulk when they are slashed and turned back into the soil.
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Leeks planted in 15cm deep trenches and slowly backfilled
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Savoy Cabbages
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The last beans: red kidney beans planted in early January
are not doing well, next year we will plant them in November
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