Home-made soil nutrition

Mid-Spring and two months since we’ve had rain on the Adelaide Plains…

About now I’d normally be starting to see the late winter crops drying out and I’d be struggling to start seedlings in drying soil.

But just for once I’ve got the ‘covers’ on the garden in time; a deep layer of barley straw – about 60 bales – covers all the working beds, paths and the orchard floor. Soil moisture levels are under control, needing only 10 tonne of water per week (10 000 litres) to hold steady.

But with watering and the seed table under control I’m forced to face a more insidious problem that’s been creeping up on me for some years now; the nutrition levels in these soils is starting to fall. This is particularly true along the edges of the garden bed (mesh) fences where I grow beans and cucumbers year after year.

Fortunately we’ve been saving kitchen scraps – imported nutrition – for a decade now in three Gedye bins that have been in constant rotation. Each bin takes at least a year to fill even though we throw in a bucketful of scraps each day and occasionally add green cuttings from the garden and a shovel or two of soil. Where does it all go?

So I choose the oldest bin and pull the tapered top off (the bottom is open). Compost worms everywhere! These worms - Tiger worms, Indian Blues and Red Wrigglers - are different from earthworms; they live on the surface and enjoy moist, cool, dark, oxygen-rich places with lots of food scraps to eat. This lot seem particularly fond of the cook’s lecture notes that she dumped in there; they are living between the sheets of these thick wads of old A4 paper and loving it.

This job stinks.

But I wouldn’t know – at sometime in the past I lost my sense of smell, so I’m the perfect guy for this work.

The top layer of the heap is set aside, the worms are moved to the two remaining working Gedye bins by the shovelful, the nutrition-rich worm castings at the bottom of the bin are loaded into the wheelbarrow and sieving begins.

Old cake trays make great coarse sieves for such compost, removing old bones, sticks, avocado pips and other bits of hard rubbish.

New bean trenches are hoed along the fence lines and ‘Lazy Wife’ bean seeds are dropped onto the trench floor with compost then straw mulch added on top; these large bean seeds will push through this as they germinate.

I add a brand-new drip line to totally saturate the root zone so that the beans can get out into the moist surrounding soil for extra nutrition. The cook helps out by planting the cucumber seedlings, adding compost and back-mulching as well.

And that’s that.

Except that – a day later – there’s still a funny smell lingering around wherever I am. Even I can occasionally detect it.

Luckily the cook is away at a seminar in the Barossa Valley or I’d be sleeping down the back-shed tonight…

Weird things in a winter garden

Winter is upon us in southern Australia, yet there is no let-up in the effort required in the garden. If anything, pressures are building back up again as I try to make space for onions, beetroot and spring flowers (still in the seed trays) while trying to keep the rain-fed chaos of self-seeded pathways under control.

I’ve given up even pretending to be on top of things. But I’ve found a few odd moments to catalogue some of the winter wonders springing up all over the place…

 

 

Adding some winter colour to the verdant green of the overflowing beds, my chilli collection is starting to ripen and will be used to refresh my seed collection as they mature.

 

 

And what are the names of all these chillies? Sadly, I forget. Some are spherical, some are small pointy multi-coloured ones with an upright characteristic, others are deep purple and some are the regular long skinny droopy ones alongside a different variety having a bell-lantern shape.

There is beauty in vegetable gardens if one looks closely.

Among the rogue salad collection are the Italian bitter lettuces that I know I grew on purpose, didn’t eat much of, but then let the plants go naturally to seed because of their pretty blue flowers, so unlike the thistle-type flowers of all other lettuces.

Now they are all over the dirt pathways, and we find ourselves making long detours to allow them their own space rather than treading them underfoot.

 

 

In the orchard, one of the peach trees is still suffering from the after-effects of the massive 2013 peach harvest and is now under attack from bracket fungi where limbs had to be removed and the bark on the main trunk started to split.

 

 

 

 

The tomato crops and their bamboo frames have had to be pulled out to make way for the onions. All the old mulch and new weeds have had to be hoed out and thrown onto the pathways for natural composting. This soil and weed mix will soon be covered with new barley straw to over-winter and break down under the scratching of the hens and the softening effects of the winter rains. This ‘path composting’ process will deliver soft mulch and fresh organic matter to garden soil as it accumulates year after year.

All the necessary hoeing turns up plenty of earthworms; the chooks follow my work closely and enjoy the fresh protein. Every meter or so I turn up some soil-borne grubs that I believe (without any evidence) to be ‘mole cricket larvae’; these are a special delicacy to the hens. I pick them out of the trenches and throw them in front of the flock where they are snatched up.

Ah well, that’s my fun for the day. Now its back to planting out all those onions…

Potting up capsicums and chillies

The first day of the southern Australian summer arrives, ushered in by contrary weather marked by dark skies and light rain. The garden and seed trays have survived a one week absence by cook and gardener, but the pressures of watering and transplanting the last of the seedlings gets mixed in with the cook’s birthday lunch and tea plus various social catch-ups.

So silverbeet, spinach, lettuce, coriander, fennel, dill, eggplants (aubergines) and red cabbage finally make it into the garden beds, and remnant seedlings are given away at a seed-savers swap meet on Sunday afternoon. The seed table is almost empty, and the gardener will soon shift gear from planting mode to maintenance mode.

I’m planting into deep straw mulch; this will cover these beds permanently until clean-up in late autumn somewhere in May 2014. Each time I dig out a small scoop of soil to make way for these seedlings, I find a half dozen earthworms enjoying the moist soil and the rich organic matter that is their food source. Recent deep watering has brought these worms to the surface, where they will work around the plant roots to the benefit of both parties.

Capsicums and chillies are slow-growers and need a week or two more on the seed table, along with some late-planted celery. These solanums are pinched out of smaller trays and spaced out in a home-made deeper tray filled with new potting mix. In here are my Chocolate capsicums and various chillies such as Purple Tiger, Mettano, Serrano and Bishop’s Crown chillies.

This week’s water bill: 14 kilolitres, or 3700 US gallons. That’s 14 tonnes of water, or 14 cubic metres. Whichever way you look at it, that’s a lot of water. But the earthworms are there, so these soils are alive once again after the Spring dry out, and now I just need to exercise care in bringing these hundreds of seedlings through to the kitchen table in the months to come. Wet soils are soft soils, so both worms and the delicate roots of seedlings will have no trouble pushing out into these wetted areas and getting established.