This is just a quick update. I am seeing a lot of people are reading my blog, but so far I have had very little actual feedback. My curiosity about who you are is burning a hole in my brain. I would love to see more comments- how about just telling me where you are and your general situation, so I can learn more about all of you.

Thanks

Shane

The main focus of this entry is dealing with the drying weather. It has been a couple of months since we had substantial rain, though summer this year was particularly wet. The grass is still green. But looking around the cultivated areas the bare soil is looking rather dead and lifeless, dusty even. To a casual observer it seems hard to believe that I have only just watered my lettuces once last weekend, and my brassicas a week before that. As in they got no water, even when I sowed the seed. Recently I put some valuable imported Quinoa seed strains into my summer vegetable garden green manure rotation to make sure I successfully bulked up my seed supply for next year. They germinated in a week, in recently disturbed dry looking soil, with no rain falling. The green manures around them are coming up as well. The deadness and dustiness of the soil is actually part of the system. By minimising the amount of leaves drawing on the soil moisture you extend the useful lifespan of your ground water reserves. This means you need to weed meticulously (a topic for an upcoming post). When irrigation isnt an option a last gasp trick to save a struggling crop in drying soil is to thin out every second plant. Those remaining will usually quickly perk up, giving you half an edible crop rather than all of an inedible one.

So why do people anxiously water their newly planted seeds? Unless you are well into a substantial drought there is no point in doing so- it is mostly to feel like you are contributing to the growth. Seeds germinate by absorbing humidity within the air spaces in the soil. Being trapped in water logged soil is often detrimental as the availability of oxygen for growth declines, and also because it usually lowers the temperature of the soil and slows germination. This is especially critical for sowing warmth loving crops early in spring when the soil is already cooler than the air.

Normally people water far too shallowly to have much effect anyway. They rely on cues such as the amount of moisture sitting on leaves or flying through the air to feel like they are doing a good job. In reality the moisture that matters is invisible, deep in the soil. By deeply cracking open that soil (without necessarily turning it) you help the soil to drink deeply when the heavy rains come, and give your plants a fast track to growing deep roots down to the stored water.

Watering newly planted seeds also carries some dangers. You are effectively making a promise to those seeds that you will supply them with all the water they need, regardless of how the season progresses. If you manage to keep your seedlings perfectly and generously moist during a dry season for a few weeks, or a month, but then forget to look at them for a week or two you can expect them to suffer severe moisture stress or death. In contrast if you put your seeds in and let the natural store of ground water do the job there is much less chance of things going wrong. The seedlings will develop deeper root systems and may appear to grow more slowly at first, but the reduced fluctuations in growth are of great benefit to the quality of the final crop. Planting seeds at the end of a dry season in anticipation of coming seasonal rains is the corollary of this process, and once again it is better to put the seed into dry soil and allow it to decide when it is time to grow. Strong healthy seeds are quite capable of waiting six months in dry soil to grow (though what comes out of commercial packets often lacks freshness and vigor).

When you do need to water, and it is quite reasonable to expect to water fast growing tender vegetable crops, you will want to do it properly and as infrequently as possible. The trick is to never exceed the soils capacity to take up the moisture, which for most of the heavier soils on the sunshine coast means a long slow dribble into the ground. I had a large concrete water tank installed uphill from my vegetable garden for this express purpose, partly as an insurance against future water restrictions. At current usage rates its generous 8000L capacity would keep my water demanding vegetable crops going for at least six months with no rain. The slow gravity feed relies on no external power, and matches my dark soils slow deep thirst. My raised beds come in handy too as they seep from the sides once they are filled up.

Out in the field crops the chickpeas are flowering and setting pods vigorously despite being at the higher, drier end of the row. At the lower, wetter end the shelling peas are are doing well after weathering pidgeon attacks, but would probably like some more moisture. These two crops together form a perfect pair to hedge against the changing moisture levels. Chickpeas will grow well in even our driest years, while the shelling peas will grow through moderate water logging. Plant some of each, varying the balance in response to the season that year, and you have a dependable source of legume protein for winter. It should be pointed out my field crops are never watered. In a region where "record breaking drought" means 700 mm a year you have to reflect on how unirrigated crops like wheat would find such an arrangement perfectly comfortable. The trick is learning to change our crops as the rain levels fluctuate, and to not throw up our hands in despair when the occasional season yields next to nothing.

So in summary try and take simple steps to improve your soils moisture holding capacity to make the most use of our ample but unpredictable rains. Cultivate deeply without completely disrupting the soil structure. Soil organic matter helps but deep decompaction is far quicker, cheaper and more effective (also opening up subsoil mineral stores). Time your sowings and plantings to make maximum use of rain when it comes, and liberate yourself whenever possible from the hose!

I have uploaded some photos of the farm. From left to right, top to bottom we have:
1- Winter vegetable crops coming along
2- Summer vegetable area with trash pile and green manures
3- My beloved rooster Clarence
4- Field row showing the first plantings of carrots and parsnips
5- Field row with shelling peas on cowcane
6- Same row as 5 showing chickpeas at drier end
7- Recently solarised row (being prepared for maize, kidney beans and pumpkins in spring)
8- Unsolarised row oversown with random green manures and crops (to be solarised for spring buckwheat soon)

In the spirit of making more regular contributions I am determined to keep progress on the property more up to date to avoid data-dumps like the last post.

The weather has well and truly turned the corner into the cooler end of the year. This is my absolute favourite time of year. Spring may be heavy with blossoms and perfume, but there is something flimsy about them, a tinge of unearned riches. Autumn is the best time of the year for preparation, hard work, long term planning. The air is cooler, the sunsets glorious, and the rain light and reliable most years.

Firstly the vegetable garden. The old summer crops on the lower end are gradually finishing up. I am still getting a fair amount of okra, snake beans, and the winged beans have finally come through (quite neutral but tasty). Rosellas are prolific and jam is piling up for winter. The capsicums and eggplants that finally made it past the slugs at seedling stage are fruiting. Eggplant "redskin" from eden was prolific with tiny fruits full off seeds and quite evil tasting. Result- root pruning and binned the seeds. The italian varieties like rosa bianca by comparison are big and meaty and heavenly when grilled to perfection. Conclusion- varieties matter, so don't beat yourself up when something doesnt perform the way you would like. The jicama did the same thing. I compared two seed sources- one made tiny inedible tubers, the other large crisp ones. If you really want to grow a particular kind of crop buy several varieties of seed from a few different sources and compare the results. It can be truly eye opening.

I have changed the summer veggie rotation to reflect moving a lot of the staple type crops out into the field. So now the most soil pathogen sensitive tomatos get a full six beds in a coordinated assault through spring to give one massive harvest of roma types for bottling and drying. These are followed up by heat loving and more disease tolerant capsicums and eggplants, grown in pots through spring to a decent size, giving them enough time to crop lightly going into winter. They are then over-wintered, allowing them to give early crops the following spring. After that a mix of beans, greens, okra and soft roots (like perennial leeks and spring onions) will follow on in the other half of the rotation. The summer bed is now gradually disappearing under rows of green manures. The bulk oats and barley I got through demeter are alternating with lupins from green harvest and commercial faba beans and lupulini beans (from a commercial wholesale food place in West End-much cheaper). One bed has been left as a trash pile to compost everything down in situ. And sweet peas have been dotted here and there on trellises to spice up the garden over winter/spring. The lobelia weed that went mad in summer is being eradicated, always starting from uphill and working down.

On the upper winter side the unturned raised beds with the manure sandwiched between soil layers have worked quite well. Apart from a little local subsidence as the manure decomposes there were no obvious penalties for not mixing the beds up like dirt smoothie. Lesson learned- endless turning and crumbling of already decent soil can be a waste of energy. Brassicas have been a magnet for pigeons again, meaning having to resow and improve the protective bird netting several times. The broccoli bed received the entire 6 months of food scrap compost to test how much nutrient they could use. As a result the bed shoots out a stream of massive worms any time you stick a trowel in it. The ducks figured this out and started jumping up and down on my broccoli seedlings, meaning I had to build a small fence to slow them down. To take up the space from the potato crop leaving the veggie garden I have added a strawberry rotation, hopefully avoiding the problem of choked permanent strawberry beds that people put in and never get around to thinning out, and giving us a massive crop to bottle. The root crops have been scaled back to onions (a trial, tricky to grow fast enough to bulb well, and daylight sensitive so you need dedicated subtropical varieties while most in circulation are temperate), leeks (a bit fussy) and a smaller amount of turnips and kohl rabi than last year (they tasted pretty ordinary to us). Lettuces have been planted alongside single trellises of snow peas to improve air circulation around the peas and minimise powdery mildew. These combo beds have been staggered (two started in March, one in April, one in May) to spread the harvest of lettuce and peas. The scraped out paths have definitely had less weeds, but the soil moved to the top of the beds needs a fair bit of time to weed by hand and butter knife, though as planned everything comes out very easily, and it is hard to ignore when it is right beside your prized seedlings.

The chickens in the middle of the veggie patch peaked at 5-6 eggs a day from six hens a month ago and have reduced down to 2-3 a day as their moult approaches. One has an injured eye and was always flighty and fearful, and another has a classic spinsters build (while the others are as boxy as tissue box covers) so these two will be culled shortly to make room for a batch of chicks in spring. This way we can replace half our laying birds each year. The gorgeous glossy rooster has turned out dumb and sweet natured, though he does crow when the moon is full, but it is a pleasant enough note since he isn’t a screechy tiny bantam.

In the field the fruit trees have made surprising growth after being waterlogged all summer. The odd precocious fig has been offered up and savoured, and our elderly neighbour let me collect about 20kg of persimmons that were ripened, pulped, and frozen for gradual use. Rough pineapple with persimmon pulp over the top is one of my favourite desserts now- the intensity and mellowness contrast beautifully. The two squares (4x4m each) of trial sweet potato varieties were harvested last week, giving around 50kg despite the lack of weeding, watering (well it was pouring this year) and minimal fertiliser. The interesting thing was that some varieties gave 10kg easily, and others gave zero usable roots. This again emphasises the importance of variety choice, and of not beating yourself up if things go poorly. Imagine if I had only planted the worst variety (“Im a failure”) or the best (“I’m a genius”). The parsnip crop is in and away, with seven squares planned, another one of carrots, probably giving 200kg of roots to get through. I am currently savouring a dish of mashed spiced sweet potato, now making about 30% of my total diet:

Ingredients
4kg sweet potato (or potato or parsnip). Peel, boil and mash. Set aside.

2 Onions (or equivalent with shallots, leeks, garlic, etc)- chopped and fried lightly in olive oil
Spices and herbs (combine to taste: oregano, thyme, basil, rosemary, sage, sesame, black sesame, chilli, pepper, coriander/cumin/fennel seed, cardamom, etc) and fry to release the flavor. Consider timing of adding these ingredients. My failsafe method is to divide all these into 2-3 lots and add them at intervals to the frying onions. This gives a much deeper and more complex flavour as the volatile components are released by the heat in waves.
Put mashed roots into the pan and stir vigorously until a light browning is observed at the base of the pan (scrape it off as it forms to stop it burning). This will add that delicious baked vegetable flavor to the dish, without needing hours in the oven.
Optional- Add peanut butter, tahini or good quality butter (1-2 teaspoons max) to add an element of fat and enhance the mouth feel. Take off the heat immediately and stir it in to avoid oxidising the unstable vegetable fats.
This meal freezes and reheats beautifully, much to the envy of all my work colleagues who must sniff it on a daily basis.
A side helping of braised mushrooms and beans, or tomato sauce and chickpeas adds variety and protein. I also eat it with a boiled egg from my hens or ducks.

The rest of the parsnip field row has newly sourced varieties of quinoa. Local quinoa is hard to source (only from Eden seeds after needling them) and appears to be a food grade dead seed. These just went in after resolarising the bed to remove a fuzz of grassy weeds, so fingers crossed. The next row over has a mass of staggered shelling pea and broad bean plantings. I am trialling about eight varieties of each to compare performance and taste. They have been given old sorghum and cowcane stalks to climb up, saving money on stakes. At the top of this row there are chickpeas (from edible sources mostly, good germination), a few lentils, massed beds of garlic (oriental purple and Italian from NewGippsland seeds bulbed well for me last year growing from April to November- they must have their own space to dry off at the end of the season). The spelt sourced from Eden seeds have ~1% germination. The few plants that made it through will have to serve as a very bottle necked starter population for a better crop next year. Of the remaining two field rows one is being solarised in sections in preparation for a spring sowing of maize, dry beans and pumpkins/melons. The other is still pasture but has been oversown with wheat/barley/oats, lupin/field peas/vetch/fenugreek, sunflower/cosmos/marigold, mustard greens, coriander/parsley etc etc. It is fun to crawl around the grass looking for new species emerging. It will be cut low in late winter, solarised and then planted with a big spring buckwheat crop. I had better get busy on making a hand thresher to process the crop. It is basically a rotating drum covered in a gripping surface that turns against an adjustable board. Once it is spinning the reaped crop is fed into it and the lumpy seeds are stripped off. This mass of seeds and leaves is then spread out to dry and threshed again before winnowing to remove the chaff. Based on last years trial the 15 square row should yield 75kg of unhulled buckwheat.

The best news is that the muscovy ducks, which I was ready to give up on, are now sitting on two large batches of eggs. After blaming the poor sitting duck after several tries at breeding I finally caught the thief (a swamp hen) with an egg in its beak. So a bit more netting and security later and we should be weeks away from having a plague of little baby ducks. Two months of chaos later and we should have a freezer full of succulent dark duck meat.

The scale up continues, but the end is in sight of this phase. By the end of this year we should be producing most of our own calories for the immediate family (meaning plenty to share with the extended family). Up until now I have dealt with a measure of derision from my siblings, and bewilderment from my parents, without feeling massively unappreciated for the endless days of digging and hoeing. By the end of this year they will hopefully be able to see what one person with one set of hands can contribute. Growth in everything is exponential, painfully slow to begin, terrifying by the end.

Gathering my thoughts

March 08

It has been almost a year since I last blogged, so you must be thinking I have oodles of news. And in a way I do. But in another way I don’t.

The garden has been a roaring success, and a perpetual disaster, depending on how you want to look at it.

The winter season in 2007 turned out to be very generous despite the relatively dry weather, virgin unimproved soil and record frost. There was a constant ample supply of collards and kale, snow peas, and turnips and parsnips just to the point of saturation (~15kg each per 4 square meter standard bed, which is also conveniently 1/1000 of an acre), though they are all sorely missed now and their imminent return eagerly anticipated. Weeds were seldom a pressing problem in the winter veggie garden. As August passed the potatoes were put in and ended up yielding a similar amount of roots despite a wave of caterpillars in late spring (just as they were dying down anyway). My Dad pestered me to put in some of his childhood favourite spuds but I insisted it was too late. By the time I relented and let him try them it was way too late, and they were starting to grow just in time to catch the caterpillar plague. When we harvested them there was barely more than we planted, and they were shrivelled and evil looking. Dad wouldn’t let me throw them out at the time (I just tossed them in the compost last week!). Lesson learnt- timing is everything, and there is no shame in overwhelming the munchers with a wave of superabundance (not a cursed “monocrop”, more like the synchronised hatching of baby turtles to beat the seagulls).

Over winter I continued to push along initiating the summer veggie beds, always running behind schedule as the change of season loomed. Unlike the winter veggies I merely green manured these with oats and lupins, slashing repeatedly with my indispensable kama from Green Harvest, then adding a layer of our own horse manure as a coarse mulch. The winter beds by comparison had spottier green manure crops (timing was rushed), but had a few inches of composted commercial horse manure brought in (well worth the money, $150 for 5 cubic meters did the garden wonders as a start, but it shall not be a permanent input). I also prepared four field row squares by literally thrashing the kikuya to death with my bare hands to prepare pumpkin mounds. Kikuya is dormant in winter so solarising or spraying it is a waste of time, hence the heavy-handed approach. In each 4 x 4 m square four wheel barrows of fresh horse manure were piled up, with a few handfuls of either compost or copra (cool fuel) and a handful of lime, then the loose soil hoed and raked up over it. These grew slowly during the dry beginning of spring and got a couple of hand waterings. When the rain finally came they took off, eventually yielding a wheelbarrow of cucumbers, 20 or so rockmelons, and ~300 kg of queensland blue, blue hubbard and crown prince pumpkins (seven heavy wheel barrows full for scale). The watermelons planted alongside the more vigorous pumpkins were buried to start, only yielding three decent fruits.

The summer veggie garden was on reflection adequate but not spectacular. The constant rain made weeding and maintenance difficult, and a previously low priority well behaved Lobelia weed went berserk and spread runners everywhere. I adopted a pattern of always starting at the uphill area of the garden and working downhill, removing every scrap of weeds by hoe or butter knife. When I ran out of time or got sick of weeding I would get out my kama and slash everything with flowers in the rest of the garden to stop any seed ending up back in the soil. Be sure to collect it in a bucket and put it on a separate compost pile (or better yet future bonfire). Starting tomatos and capsicums was a pain- slugs took up residence in the coarse manure mulch and levelled everything as it germinated. In the end one bed of cherry and roma tomatos limped along and gave a meagre harvest(<5 kg per bed)- but this bed had a trickle running past it during the rain. Another drier bed of romas started later gave about 30kg of good fruit from just two plants. Varieties roma and san marzano were good, palmwoods failed twice to produce much. String beans yielded very heavily, but quality was dropping by late November. Snake beans filled the gap nicely (except they need to be cooked), and winged beans were meant to follow but the cool summer slowed them down enormously. They are flowering now but the pods are dropping…next year I guess. The stand-out success was the okra, though the variety star of david was spiny and unpleasant. The best way to cook them is to roll them in polenta and salt, (with optional moisture), then fry in a little oil until the polenta is golden. Delicious. They also went brilliantly with our tomatos, herbs, and homegrown black eyed peas to make a local version of gumbo. Quantifying yields on these regular fresh crops is tricky since they come on gradually over months. I was getting a large basket full of these crops twice a week, meeting our family’s needs. Jicama grew massively but roots are yet to fill out. It is flowering now so I will bide my time while I gather seed. Sweet corn went in late but was planted on top of fish heads and skins (after the chooks had a pick). They grew like rockets and yielded so much corn we were sick of it. In the perennial end of the veggie garden a massive patch of purple kumera (~15 square meters) has given about 20kg of roots so far, with a bit more to come. The Yacon has also done ok, but lost major roots to the rots. The blueberries have done well on a mound of mulch and pinebark dug in downhill from an overflow sump nearby, and will probably be expanded into this patch to fill it out as all berries, along with the rambunctious brambles (will have to wait until spring to see which ones chill enough to fruit).

Out in the field I managed to prepare around one row of 15 field squares for summer (4x4m between trees) to trial staple crops. By staple crops I mean grains, pseudograins, pulses and roots that can be grown with little extra fertility, little weeding, and no irrigation during an average season. From three squares of buckwheat I harvested, threshed and winnowed 15kg of grains. All in all less than three days of work gave 30 days worth of calories- not a bad return. Sorghum grew and set well but was a magnet to the hoards of parrots in our area. Think carefully about where you plant as it is a pain to remove by hand due to its deep roots. Black eyed peas and black kidney beans gave about half a kilo each from half a field square. Millet (mixed proso and foxtail) gave about a kilo from a similar area. The buckwheat has been carefully ground in my hand grinder to feed the starter culture for my fermented oat porridges in the mornings. I cheated a bit in the winter veggie garden and put in more field crop trials instead of a full green manure rotation. More sorghums, buckwheat and beans behaved similarly. Three strains of Amaranth gave good yields of 0.5-1kg per 4m2 bed. This is where the scale to the acre comes in handy- we could grow 1000kg (a tonne) of amaranth if we planted our entire 1 acre/4000sq m field, a consistent behaviour with typical subsistence systems. This is the amount Fukuoka refers to in his Natural Farming book, and I suspect that the energy (chaff and roots) returned to the soil each year, and the green manure rest, allows the soil to draw up any basic mineral nutrients from deep in the soil at a limited rate. Of course you can boost this if the basic geology is deficient, or help out by returning as many wastes as possible (humanure is the next experiment to get right). Next season has just been planted in the field, with the area now doubled. Moving around a big roll of thick black plastic ($160 for 4m x 50m) has made bed preparation a breeze but it only works during the warmer months. The basic balance is between parsnips/carrots, quinoa, spelt/chickpeas/lentils, and field peas/broad beans from May until August. After the frost it should change over to potatos, buckwheat, kidney beans, maize and pumpkins from September until December. Then January to April will be kumera, amaranth, black-eyed peas/cowpeas and millets/sorghum. Only two of the four field rows at any one time will carry a crop, each one starting in spring then cycling back into a deep mixed green manure thicket after a year. These will be slashed by hand (keep it fleshy enough for a short scythe to glide through) with the row about to be recropped mulched with its own growth and with that of the other row, hopefully providing enough density to smother the growth and do without the plastic in the long run. The field green manure rotation will include the veggie garden species but add on other controllable species like Nasturtium, Parsley, Coriander, Daikon, Mustard greens, and some trial ornamentals like shrimp plant (Justicia), African snapdragon (Brilliantasia), some gingers (slow to dig out?), etc etc as trials figure out what works.

Green manures did finally get into most of the beds in the winter veggie garden by January, leaving time for a few slashes before the next cycle. The soil in the winter veggie garden ended up very rich in some places, and stubbornly hard in others. The two worst spots are side-by-side near the drive way, so may be spilled fill, one of them near a water stream, so a little top soil may have been lost. They also got less manure last cycle since they were supporting peas and parsnips. I’ll keep working on them and see how they change with time. The odd thing is even apparently hard soil in some places is finely honeycombed with roots and channels when you look closely. I think you have to get out of the mindset that a root and a finger have the same experience penetrating soil.

The winter veggie bed was slashed and pulled bare in mid February, and just recently I got a final load of manure (now $180!) that will cover both ends of the veggie garden this time. I layered a few inches on top of the green manure wastes, then broke up the top 10cm of the paths in between the beds, and dug them up and on top of the bed uphill from them to work against the direction of erosion. This approach is supposed to do a few things. It makes a deeper bed for the crop roots to spread down into. It also raises them so they are less prone to rotting during heavy rains. The contours in the soil profile mean than run off will get trapped and given more time to soak into the ground. And finally all the weed seeds in the top few centimetres of the compacted paths are moved onto the softer beds, making it easier to remove the weeds and leaving a clean path (recently seeded with milk thistle, my chicken’s favourite). I have been spreading our own horse manure in the hollowed out paths in run off places to act as another water sponge, and to allow me to compost this down and reduce the number of weed seeds in another spongy substrate to make weeding easier. All this was a lot of hard work (now ¾ done in the smaller winter garden, summer to come next before its green manure rotation), hence my reluctance to do anything more than pry deep cracks into the original beds to give the roots and worms a fast lane to the subsoil. Mixing it all up by hand seemed like it may be unnecessary, and some sources say it speeds the loss of organic carbon in the soil. Instead I just used a hand trowel to mix the manure and dirt layers where I am planting seeds, saving a lot of labour. Ill let you know how the experiment turns out. Looking back over summer the green manure crop could have been more effective, not just in terms of being in place for longer. When it was cut down it took quite some time to recover and grow again (2-3 weeks). Next season I am planning on planting the paths with the low species (cowpea, marigold, Japanese millet) and scraping the top off the bed to cover the seeds on the paths, then the beds can be sown with taller species (malu-khia, pidgeon pea, sunflower etc) that can be slashed just to half height, giving them more biomass for growing back quickly, and deeper roots to bring up leached nutrients. The winter green manures are a bit trickier- oats and lupins are excellent low plants but tall plants are less obvious. Ill run a few trials and sort it out. This combo did amazing things to the soil though- oat roots turned it dark and crumbly. The main criteria, apart from nitrogen fixing legumes, and a wide diversity of plant families, is to have fast controllable growth that is easy to slash, easy to remove entirely, and has controllable reproduction (large seeds, or distinct flowering spikes, or propagated from human driven cuttings).

Livestock wise the chickens have recently started laying at 6 months age. I got them as a box of day old hatchlings in September and had them peeping at the bottom of my bed for a couple of months. They are all grown up now and no longer love their mother (unless I have a grasshopper to share). I got an unsexed dozen plus one that died the day it got home, from which I got five roosters and seven hens. One rooster died suddenly during a rainy period (probably gut infection from eating mud), one rooster went to breed on a friend’s farm, and two went into the pot. Killing them was easy (one person holds them down, the other chops) then they were strung up by their feet and skinned. Plucking feathers takes forever, skinning takes mere minutes. They were filleted and ended up giving many meals, including lots of invaluable stock. We are now getting two eggs a day, still small pullet eggs, but of excellent quality. One hen was eaten by an adventurous python, with the enclosure since covered in finer wire. The chooks eat lots of weeds that when pooped on makes a valuable enriched mulch for the veggies. The Australorps have been good natured and quite thrifty with food inputs so far, and their gorgeous glossy black plumage never ceases to impress me.

The other livestock are our muscovy ducks. These were moved into the field in a low enclosure with a secure night box. One of the females got bloated in the chicken pen earlier and was quickly despatched (fantastic low fat dark meat- think kangaroo without the hazards of toughness). The other two were joined by a drake and have botched a few attempts at raising a batch of ducklings. We suspect the eggs were infertile and the drake not doing his job, so he is due to be replaced soon. A batch of fertile eggs is currently being incubated. The ducks are consuming a lot of time and giving little in return compared to the chickens, though we could have done a better job in setting them up properly. They are now roaming the orchard and neighbours forest and seem very happy collecting seeds, leaves and bugs, but may become a problem when my field crop seedlings are germinating, so they may be locked up a few weeks to let them get a go on. The orchard is due to be enclosed in a hedge of giant NZ flax as a barrier to them wandering too far and dogs getting in. An electric fence to hold back our moldy old horse is probably needed before I do that. We double fenced a windbreak planting to shield the veggie garden and he has turned it into spaghetti leaning in to nibble on the lablab bean and scratch his neck. Bees might be the next experiment, maybe this spring.

So that is a long, highly detailed, but probably frustratingly vague account of my first real year in the garden. Production is scaling up rapidly and I am learning all the tricks to make things go as quickly and as smoothly as possible, and also learning not to bite off more than I can chew. A lot of people have lost control during the rainy summer- my only advice is to start in one place and work outwards, and get a good sharp hoe and kama to stop longer lasting damage being done.

Its funny how the human heart can spin on a dime.

Last week I harvested my first turnips. They were looking a little moth eaten, though the leafy tops had expanded admirably through heat and neglect (my experiment with not watering). Not expecting much I pulled a few up for dinner only to find them huge and healthy. This was an important little moment for me, as up to then the vege garden had only yielded less substantial things like lettuce and cucumbers. Sure they are nice, but hardly hearty enough to get by on. And I am still well aware that one bunch of turnips doesnt get a family far, but it is a start. And I have only harvested a small percentage of the larger row (just thinning them out really).

The vege beds that were recently manured and fertilised with seed meal, then briefly rested before sowing (too briefly according to any book you might read), have all germinated fantastically. Ill be thinning heavily in a few weeks I think (but better that than having to resow). The cool weather has finally arrived (at least six weeks late) and a night of gentle soaking rains have perked everything up again.

The chicken shed is basically done, so our hens and a troupe of muscovy ducks will be arriving soon. The muscovy are to be put out in the orchard in a movable pen to help clear the rows for later field crops. Plants like the grains, drying legumes, sweet potato, and roving pumpkins dont belong in a well tended veggie garden. So the rows (I have left about a meter between the rows of trees) will be cycled through crops, allowing the pasture to be improved as it goes back out of field crops.

My first ornamental garden has started making obvious growth also, and my weed control strategies have been a totalitarian success. Only three times as much space to put under mulch and I will be able to breath a real sigh of relief! The ornamental gardens are a strategic investment. In the short term they should provide a source of income if I set up a small nursery, though the business model isn't set in stone in advance. In the longer run if things get really desperate they represent a quarter acre of partially improved soil, so we can yank out the roses and lavenders and stick in some stodgy spuds and yams.

I was a bit disappointed to see a Jackie French article in the paper on balcony self sufficieny. I too would encourage people to garden as much as their circumstances allow, but to call what you could grow on a balcony "self sufficiency" is highly misleading, especially when you take account of all the resources that would go into such an endeavor. Even on two fertile acres I expect we will never be "self sufficient". We will still rely on the outside world for a lot of things and need to stay a part of it. Growing some veggies in pots can be an invaluable learning experience, but the economics of it only work for leafy greens and herbs that can grow fast, and which represent a premium product that is costly (or impossible) to get to market intact. I wish she had encouraged people to connect with their neighborhood and find house dwellers who had space and interest in a veggie patch but no time to tend it. Also as she says you may be able to get away with "ten minutes a week" in the garden in a cooler climate, but here in sunny Brisbane keeping pots of demanding veggies moist and happy is lots of work, especially on a windy balcony. I think giving people the impression that growing food is easy and fast is misleading, and probably leads to those that do start out giving up when it turns out harder than they expected. I think I spend more than ten minutes a week just picking snow peas and lettuces, let alone growing them.....

I was pondering the other day the economics of one person in an extended family spending most of their time growing food for the other members. Say one person in ten manages to grow half the food by calories, probably 75% by dollar value given the high cost of fresh veg and fruit versus starchy staples like rice or grains. Ten people spending a meagre $50 a week on food each, gives a tax free saving of $375, which is the equivalent wage of the worker, and not that far off what I earn part time at the moment. Add in spiraling fresh food prices and the situation looks ever better. The problem comes in when you consider the inputs (high for intensive farming, lower for the more hands on stuff), but more from the "value" of the land it takes up (ridiculously inflated in todays economy). I am very lucky I convinced my baby boomer parents to move to this farm and let me conduct this little experiment. They were initially grumbly. "You are digging up perfectly manageable lawn". "It will become a mess of weeds!". Then with the weeds under control...."It looks like a desert!". Then with crops starting..."you need to spray those caterpillars!" and "you aren't watering things enough". But things kept on progressing. The veg garden is about 2/3 dug now and the summer-crop half will get a full rotation of green manure crops to get the soil moving soon.

But the best part has been their surprise when they saw the bunch of fat turnips in the sink.

"Did you grow those?".

I could only nod silently.

Time has passed on previous initiatives, passing their preliminary judgement.

The weather here has turned dry and windy. The lack of a wind break around the vegetable garden has really taken its toll, but I have resisted the urge to plant it prematurely as damaging the weed matting too soon will allow the weeds dying underneath to pour out. For now I am just observing how things behave for comparison with later on when things are more developed.

The beds that were under green manure then sown with snow peas, greens and root crops germinated well enough without supplementary water as there was plenty held in the soil. Local native pidgeons seem to have taken a toll by pulling up seedlings, but a loosely sprawled layer of chicken wire seems to have saved a later sowing of root crops. The weather also cooled enough to let them get started faster. Those plants from the first sowing that made it through are growing well, if a little sparsely (but then again non-irrigated veggie gardening is all about maintaining adequate spacing, so I still have to get used to what things might look like).

After playing with a few rotation models I have decided to split the garden into two parts, one for the winter growing season (and subdivided into grains/roots/greens/legumes) and the other for summer (subdivided into solanaceae-with their disease burden/grains/roots/greens+legumes). This allows the tail end of a crop from one season to be left around without slowing down the next seasons start, a useful luxury in a frost free climate. It also means the more exposed half can provide winter crops with warmth and light, leaving green manures to cope with the summer heat. On the other end the more protected half will give the best conditions in summer, but leave the darker part of the year to the cool season green manures. A large half of the garden can also be more conveniently used by our chickens for forage, either by fencing the whole lot, or by reducing the distances for moving tractors week to week.

Since only parts of the winter half got green manure, and since a single green manuring even for those beds isnt enough to grow many veggies, I got a 20kg sack each of copra and bran (as suggested as a fertiliser in "gardening when it counts") and 3 cubic meters of good quality horse manure delivered to get the soil and season off to a good start. A 2 inch layer of manure was dug in with the seed meals, and another 2 inch layer added for a surface mulch. I intend to start sowing after letting it settle for a week only, but expect a few things will dislike the conditions (as they usually do).

The veggie garden has been tantalising so far. Just tastes of cucumbers and greens here and there and rows of seedlings expanding imperceptibly. A pile of compost and weedy/grassy top soil piled up from the bed preparation has sprung a healthy crop of pumpkins...probably a good lesson on how often our ideas of doing things "properly" is at odds with what plants really want.

In the orchard a few losses have occurred from the hot and windy weather out of around fifty transplants. An avocado bought on the cheap fell over from phytophthora (probably more stressed than the five healthy others from day one). This raises a good point about not taking it too personally if one of something dies. Even from a batch of apparently similar seedlings you often see some die horrible deaths as the others march along uninterrupted. A longan also died while two others are perfectly happy. It was a recently rooted cutting that I should have held back (though it was raining daily when I planted everything out, so I really couldnt have been sure either way...plant them too late and a frost may have finished everything off).

The chicken shed had been put up, and the foundation carefully wired underground a foot to stop foxes and dogs (and escapes). Wiring and roofing should be quick enough. We are planning on getting six australorp hens to start, then getting fertile eggs from a good local mail order breeder to improve the genetics.

I had a crisis of motivation after a mild flu, wondering if I had left it too late to get started on this "self sufficiency" (though I know it is more a matter of bringing quality back within reach while still enjoying some of the convenience of the modern world). Things are changing rapidly in the world re peak oil, but I realised that sitting around wondering about things wouldnt help matters. I am hopefully at the lowest point of returns versus investments with this little project (from a quality rather than money perspective). Even though I am a practiced gardener, I am working new soil, and unfamiliar soil, and have had to rush to get ahead of ideal planting times. Time spent away from the farm in the city is also limiting my ability to keep track of the necessary routine inputs, but should improve as time goes on. My next goal is to have an adequate veggie supply by the beginning of winter (June) leaving a reasonable 8 week growth period for fast crops like asian greens.

In the last month since I blogged a lot of progress seems to have happened.

The vegetable garden has gone through a frenzy of green manure growth, which was repeatedly slashed, leaving the soil in a remarkably improved condition. The first vegetables have been sown (cool season roots, legumes and greens) but I have been careful to curb my enthusiasm and only planted about a third of the available space for the season so we arent swamped with a brief surplus of harvest. Just this weekend I was putting in a row of snow peas where a pile of grass had just been moved from when I saw the soil move a little. I thought it may be a cane toad until the head of a young taipan (australia's most dangerous snake) poked itself out meekly. After a little hide and seek I decided to find something else to do for the day.

Instead I ended up putting the first twelve trees into the orchard (six macadamias, two malabar chestnuts, a longan, a persimmon, a quince and a pomegranate). In all the half that has been fenced off to protect it from our malingering old horse should take about 45 trees. I have picked nine tree catagories to focus upon so I can collect enough genetic diversity to start making some local seedling selections:
1. Macadamias (sure fire indigenous nuts)
2 and 3- The two best performers out of Malabar chestnut (flood proof/tasty?), Pecan (high yield/cockatoo prone?) and Sterculia (dry tolerant/low performer?).
4. Avocado (oil rich fruit)
5. Persimmon (or Black Sapote or Quince)- long winter storage
6. Jujube (or maybe Shahtoot Mulberry)- early crop/easy drying
7. Plum (or Peach/Nectarine)- Early summer crop/dry
8. Longan (or Lychee)- Late summer crop
9. Pomegranate- Autumn/winter storage.

Small numbers of fruit with poor storage or keeping (eg annonas, loquats, guavas, mango, pitaya) or that are effectively sterile (bananas, figs) will also be included in smaller numbers.

Work-wise the highschool tutoring at Noosa has proven to be a winner. I almost feel guilty charging for it. I really find it that enjoyable. Irregularity of the job is the downside (summer without income) and in the long term the discretionary nature of its funding may prove detrimental, but I will make the most of it while it lasts. The personal assistant position with my PhD supervisor was a bit of a drag at four days a week, but I have scaled back to three and it seems much more bearable. Brisbane still seems uglier every time I visit. It is weird noticing the smell of the pollution after a long weekend in the fields. I also start tutoring university level chemistry at a residential college tonight, which makes the trip to brisbane for the other job more reasonable.

Everything seems to be happening and even my finances have turned around (despite my fairly profligate spending on plants and seeds, which will only get more indulgent as the weather cools). Our local supermarket is expanding soon and I am weighing up applying to work there to give up the weekly trek to Brisbane, but something tells me this isnt quite the right time yet. The stock market jitters have paradoxically made me more reluctant to try and establish myself in a completely new field. Perhaps next year will be the time to move outside my comfort zone?

It has now been three months since we (myself and my parents) made the move from crowded outer suburb to peaceful rural village.

The move itself was fairly traumatic, given my parents had lived in the old place for a quarter of a century and both are obsessive hoarders. After the few essential boxes were unpacked I took a chance to wander around the block with a measuring tape and note pad and make accurate scale drawings of our space. The block is long and narrow running south to north from the road, sloping gently south, mostly level, and the soil seems fertile. The grey-black light clay topsoil overlays a stickier yellow clay, but both have a remarkable ability to retain water already. A couple of improved sections indicate how spectacular it becomes with a little more organic matter.

The front acre is currently occupied by a rangy old horse but will be prepped and halved soon with a view to turning it into an orchard. Liming the site with about 250kg of dolomite (Calcium and magnesium carbonate) and 50kg of Gypsum (calcium sulfate) resulted in a flush of clover growth. The effect was made more noticable by delays between liming different parts of the space. The condition and fly resistance of the old horse improved markedly, and he was observed to spend much of his time grazing the limed areas. I intend to plant about 100 trees, with a strong emphasis on nut crops to allow easier storage of surplus. Later on I will trial muscovy ducks (and maybe chinese geese) to graze the rows. Dividing the space into four will allow directed grazing and possibly growing field crops in the rows.

North of the orchard is the vege patch of about 400 square meters, divided into about forty beds of 1.2m x 4m. In half of the space the soil has been broken but not turned with a fork, limed and left to bake, killing most of the grass off. It was then turned over and shaken out (the residues composted) and planted with a green manure crop of buckwheat, cowpeas and japanese millet. They have all germinated rapidly without any supplementary water. The buckwheat bolted to seed as it is photoperiod sensitive, but its shallow roots have meant it is easy to selectively pull it out without disturbing the other species, adding an early layer of mulch. After a month the crop is about a foot high, and should be dug in at the end of February to allow mid march sowings. A chicken pen is set to go into the middle of the vege patch, with a rotation system of chicken tractors planned. I am aiming to have half the vege patch under green manure at any one time to improve the soil and provide food for the chickens. I estimate 6-12 austrolorp hens should be right.

At the northern end of the block sits the house (a 3 bedroom with magnificent wrap around verandahs) a large four bay work shed, a small garden shed and a couple of ornamental plant houses (put up by us). A poorly planned shrubbery is due for gradual removal to be replaced with carefully weed mat and mulch protected beds for a large ornamental garden for me. I have decided to divide the space into a series of color themed garden rooms. I figure if I am going to make a small business out of it a gimmick like that would have wide appeal. In the middle of my garden I should be building a small liveable shed so I can have my own space away from my parents. The very northernmost strip is for my Dad to grow his orchids and bromeliads. Water collection from the roofs at the top of the block will provide gravity feeds to the vegetable patch (probably essential) and perhaps to the orchard (hopefully optional to boost yields of selected trees at selected times).

Living on the property (now named Caledon, after the one part of Scotland that the Roman Empire never managed to capture) has been surprisingly uplifting. Over most of summer I fell into a routine of waking early for yoga on the verandah while looking out over our local mountains, then working in the garden until it got too hot. A lazy lunch followed by reading or cooking, then returning to the garden around 3-4 to weed and dig until dark, quiet nights reading or planning, repeat.....bliss. I was constantly surprised about how I never tired of its beauty.

Neighbors and community have almost all proven to be friendly and wonderfully quirky. The town has a good mix of sincere old timers and hopeful new arrivals. I finally got to meet a peak oil contact from years ago who happens to live down the street! Swapping seeds and cuttings and carpooling to permaculture meetings have been tangible benefits, though having a like mind to talk to nearby is priceless.

Since then I have managed to get a cheap small room in Brisbane for part of the week to fit in with a part time lab management job with my old PhD supervisor. It provides more regularity than lab tutoring, and opens possible avenues to free lance lab organisation work, or more general admin work (more likely to be on offer closer to home). For this year it is good for balancing out the extra establishment costs. Next year I may be able to rely on highschool tutoring in Noosa (already starting that part time) and Nambour and Gympie. Having most of my daylight hours free to garden would be wonderful. A few years later I should have a better idea of how worthwhile growing surplus for the local markets will be (or maybe a roadside stand?) and I will have built up my plant stocks enough to look into starting a nursery. Linking the supply of plant material with designing and planting (and maybe maintaining) a garden may be the best business model. Time will tell, but I intend to keep you posted.

I'm a new member, so I thought an introduction and summary of my history and plans might be of interest.

I have been following peak oil issues online for about six years now, after growing up with a sense of unease about the foundations and future of our society. My whole family are superficially fairly normal, but always shared the same concerns over modern inefficiency and unsustainability. Like my parents I will keep wearing a bit of clothing until it literally falls apart.

I am trained as a research biochemist, and I am just winding up a year of post PhD research. I always questioned why I took the degree so far. I find science fascinating but I have always been deeply sceptical about its ability to really understand much, let alone bypass human nature and actually make the world a better place. Sniffing the winds of change the career prospects in research science in Australia are dead in the water. Another asian economic crisis will close half our bloated Universities overnight. And there is no real industry to speak of here. And both are very vulnerable to general economic crises.

My main requirements for work were:

1. Stable yet flexible. A job that is unlikely to be outsourced or evaporate. That doesnt need discretionary spending. One you can take a year off and go back to again if need be.

2. Portable. This was a major problem with overspecialising in science. I considered joining a government department. On reflection I couldnt convince myself that I wanted to live most of my life in an office in a polluted, crowded city. I needed something that fitted into a semirural region.

3. Compatible hours with running a small farm for at least partial self sufficiency.

I am luck in that I have gardened obsessively from a small age, thanks to encouragement from my Aunt and Grandmother. My parents are now similarly obsessed, and my two sisters are coming along nicely too. The idea of having a manageable sized property to grow at least all our higher quality food is heaven to me. I believe perishables like fruit, veg and eggs are the place to start since staples like grains are more likely to be available and affordable for longer.

Earlier in the year I surveyed the climate and soils in Australia and took a trip to south west Tasmania, and the Gippsland region east of Melbourne. Both have reliable rains and good soil, and reasonable access to a city and local towns. Tassie was too isolated, but I got serious enough about Gippsland to bid on a lovely 20 acres with a spring running through it, only 2km from a small but thriving town. I accosted my friends to collaborate on the project and reduce the financial risks involved, but despite their universal enthusiasm none were in a position to contribute to getting things of the ground. The project came to a close.

Then, whilst visiting my family back in SE Qld, I visited my sister who had recently moved to the Sunshine coast hinterland. I hadnt been that far out since I was little, and had wrongly assumed it had become as semiarid as the rest of Brisbane since climate change started. Instead I found thriving towns with a good continuous cross section of environmentally aware types and locals (not so much "us" and "them" mentality) and a seemingly fertile environment. Rainfall was as good on average as Gippsland, if a little more variable.

During my study of Gippsland my parents had suggested I could do the property somewhere in Qld with their support, but the idea of temperate farming seemed easier, and more science/gov job opportunities were down south. Once I knew I wanted out of the lab/office prison that took down half of my resistance. And once the effects of oil depletion and economic instability started coming on faster than I had anticipated the faster growth rates in the subtropics won out as I think conservatively we have 3 years to be settled and productive.

Over the last year I picked up highschool tutoring work during the evenings to help accelerate my saving for the gippsland property. But I quickly rediscovered my love for helping people understand new concepts. Reexamining the sunshine coast I decided to take that talent further, and I plan to do a graduate diploma of education next year so I can minimise my need to commute and teach highschool science and math locally. The job fits all my major criteria, and the working hours leave daylight for keeping the farm running smoothly.

At this point I suggested that my parents and I join forces and basically act as each others life boat. They save me from wage slavery, and I support them to keep them out of a nursing home. I sent them a few articles about the state of the economy and peak oil. And I sent them piles of real estate listings from the likely areas. Things have progressed quickly since then. Their old house (choked in the suburbs) is up for sale and we have signed a contract on a lovely house on 2 acres close to the village of Cooran. My sister luckily lives on the other side of town, and we plan to do our dip eds next year (she wants to teach primary school). My other sister has plans to escape the city also in time. I realised earlier as each of my friends dropped out from the gippsland initiative that family is the best immediate network to rely on, and I am grateful that I have got all of mine on board in one form or another.

Two acres in that climate should produce enough for the three of us year round, probably with some excess to sell at the friendly weekly markets too. The year of studying will give me plenty of time to plant out the block also. Ill take a chance on the economy not completely tanking and set up a small nursery to make a little spare money too. Small business possibilities abound, but connecting with the wider community is a higher immediate priority.

Ill be back in Qld to help pot and pack everything up in three weeks, and moving to the sunshine coast should happen a month or two later. My relocalisation plan has started, and though I dont like to boast, I think it is as good as anyone could ask for. A property with no debt. Dependable collaborators. A friendly wider community. A pathway to a reliable, "safe" job.

I would love to hear from other people already relocated in the Pomona area....local networking is high on my to do list.