Today's photos!

Just thought I'd share some photos I took today as it was a lovely and sunny day.

Gorgeous little broccoli head

My dear DH came out and helped with weeding!! Such a rare sight so fortunate I've got photos to prove that he can weed! :D

Weeding the oldest boy's bed

The north side of the beds - see potato plants!

Mid beds - all green eh?

I think all the rains have helped a bit...

Another potato plants bed in front

From ALS, I thought I'd have a go with making home-made lemon oil vinegar for both cooking and cleaning.

My Lemonade tree's full of fruits and its' still flowering! So gotta lighten up its load and used the peels for this special project.

Lemonade oil infused vinegar

The idea is to infuse the vinegar (in this case I used cheap white vinegar) in a glass jar with citrus peels for two weeks to allow the oils to leach out into the vinegar. From 5 mins after peeling lemonade skins into the jar, the vinegary smell has been replaced with lemony smell! So it will be interesting to see how it goes over the time.

I will juice the lemonades for juice and freeze them for summer - lemonade sorbet anyone? :D

A bucketful of citrus fruits from our Citrus orchard - lucky us, eh?

Cheers till later!

Greening the wicking vegie beds

Here it is. The photos were taken almost 4 weeks ago and now it have doubled the sizes and growth rates. Yah! Will take photos later the week when sun's out again.

Let's go on a wicking vegie beds tour now...

Here we see the first bed, with its baby or english spinach plants, celery and beetroot seedlings growing. I am hoping to plant in carrot seeds next week here. And you can see bed #10 at the back, it's full of allium spp. (onions, garlic, shallots) along with a couple of curly-leaf parsley plants and a small number of purple carrot seedlings.

Bed 1 in front and Bed 10 at back

Move along to the next bed, here we see the same stuff as bed 10 but we have leeks growing in the middle. Everything's growing great here, it remains to be seen if it's successful though. The bed at the back has a climbing thingo there for peas and snowpeas. In the bed, there are lots - swedes, broccoli, cos lettuce and a sage plant.

Bed 2 in front and Bed 9 at back

Now to the next bed, here I've planted only two things - potatoes and lettuces! Pretty dull but I am interested in how well potatoes do in wicking beds. Hence a trial here anyway. The bed at back is full of root and big leaf plants - red cabbage, broccoli, swedes...

Bed 3 in front and Bed 8 at back

Now we've reached the slim vegie beds and they belongs to kids. Bed 4 is for my oldest boy Nat while the other bed, bed 7 is for my baby boy and my only girl. So far all's doing well, but kids got bored as it's a slow growing season. They're waiting for spring/summer... In both beds they've got a good mixture of leeks, shallots, lettuces, beetroots, spinach, silver-beet and chives. My baby boy got a strawberry plant growing in his half and he can't wait to munch on the fruits as they'd be all HIS.

Kids' - Bed 4 in front and Bed 7 at back

This is the non-wicking beds area, bed 5 and 6 at the back. We decided to have those beds free draining so we can be more experimental with what to grow because there are certain plants that may not do well in a wicking bed. At the moment, there must be over 50 potato plants growing crazy along with 10 lettuces, and a row of peas at the back. It is interesting to see that wild mushrooms grows more on those beds than on the wicking beds. Location or something else cause this?? Something to keep an eye on anyway.

Non-wicking beds - Bed 5 in front and Bed 6 at back

The rest of photos here are self-explanatory anyway so enjoy the rest of the tour...

Bed 8 - red cabbage, broccoli seedlings

Beetroot leaves

A purple carrot seedling growing between onion seedlings

Celery seedling

East side of the area, facing south

The west side of area, facing south

Garlics!! Lots of them

Thought it was a lovely photo to share... garlic sprout

Bed 7 in front and Bed 4 at back - kids'

Kiwifruits of 2010/2011 awaiting to be harvested

Leeks, lots of them - yummo!

onions, garlic and leeks everywhere!

In Bed 9, snowpeas, swedes and cos lettuces growing together

Potato plants growing like crazy from Bed 3

Onion and garlic seedlings growing next to each other in rows

Baby/English spinach leaves - there are 5 plants of two types growing well - harvesting this for a while now.

Any questions or comments?

Cheers till later!

Finally this blog works!

Sorry for a long silence. I was having trouble with this blog.

Anyhow I do hope it will be fine after this post.

Thought I'd share how we built our wicking vegie beds.

We are going with the concept of wicking - you know how an oil candle/lamp works? Inside a bottle, a long strand of cotton with its end at bottom of the bottle and the top just poking out of top of the bottle, right. And with the oil in bottle, and a flame going on the top tip of the strand, it will continue to burn as long there are oil that is going up by soaking into the cotton. So with this idea (it's not our brilliant original idea though as we 'stole' it from others!), we built similar for vegies, where we have water behaving like oil with soil as the 'strand' for the vegies on top. Sounds complicated, eh? Not really.

We got the corrugated beds from 'Birdies' (actually we bought them from Bunnings when it was on special, our bad I know). It is measured at 2.9m long x 1.5m wide and 820mm high, quite large. We got 8 of those, however we shortened two of those into 2.9m long x 1.3m wide as we removed one panel at both end because of the space available. The two 'slim' beds are for our kids to grow their own produce there, while I have other 6 modular beds and 2 'homemade' beds for my use.

We built each bed on both side (East and West as I am facing North when I was taking the photo below!). Then we fill it up, and move to build the next set of beds heading south. 

Now we put in the lining (we used Pond lining - it may not be good due to plastic but it's the best we can do to get this going). The lining goes up to about 50 cm high, but we are not getting pools here. To prevent floodings, we put in a drain-point at about 30cm high from the bottom.

Here Tony was sealing the pipe to plastic with glue - he sealed behind the plastic and now here you can see him sealing it on plastic. So this is to ensure the water exit one point rather than slip through the hole in plastic and flood out the bottom.

This is the outside drain-point of bed. It is also sealed. 

 

 There is no way we can do it manually, so we got to call in the dingo!

 

Being a typical male, Tony would not let me have a go at all on the dingo! 

Anyway, we first filled the bed with river sand, just to cover plastic before pouring in the aggerated blue stone, which goes up to about 30cm. We then added in poor quality soil and topped it up with very good quality soil up to about 50cm below the top rim of bed (50% garden 'organic' soil and 50% compost - it smelt so nice!). Mulched it with both old hay and 'minced' straw to keep stray weeds/seeds from growing.

Oh, forgot to add that we have put in the water pipe - no photo unfortunately as I was busy trying to hold it while the base was being covered with stones! The slotted ag-pipe (its not covered with 'stocking') with the end being capped is shaped as 'S' to ensure the water is distributed 'evenly' across the bottom of bed. The ag-pipe is joined with an elbow and a straight pvc pipe that stood just at the rim of the bed. The pipe is also capped with a removable cap. This is where I put in water if we haven't got rain. Since we built the beds, it has been raining quite heavily and regularly - so I've never got to fill those beds with water yet. I can see the reflection of water at bottom of the pipe which tells me that the water is holding there from the rains.

I intend to put in a small bucket with holes at bottom and sides for compost worms in each bed, where I can add compost in each bed - feeding the worms there. At the moment the beds are rich in compost so I am leaving it till after winter.

I drew up a diagram but it is located at other computer so I cannot use it yet. Will have to dig it up soon for those who want a bit more visual example of a wicking bed.

I am happy to report that the vegies are growing really well at the moment! :D

As of the beginning of June, I've got 3 beds full of potato plants (peppered with lettuces), 2 beds with onions, garlic, shallots and leeks, 1 bed with baby spinach, celery, beetroot, 1 bed with broccoli, red cabbage, swedes, and 1 bed with peas, snowpeas, swedes, cos lettuces, bit of broccoli.

Coming next with vegies in beds. It's raining lots here lately so fingers crossed all will be fine.

I've harvested elderberries and will need to do more harvestings. There are kiwifruits and  citrus fruits waiting to be harvested.

Cheers till later!

YES!! All's done!

Yep, all the pavings done!

Here are the photos - Enjoy. Just ignore weeds, mess, etc!

 

The path from house to the Chook Palace... I am never without my furry assistants around

 

At the future Vegie Garden Zone - all paved, just waiting to have the weedy holes to be levelled and the garden beds on them then I can go happy sowing/planting vegies, herbs, etc!

 From the Chook Palace to the house...Almost a straight paved line, eh?

 

The Compost area - just need to make slats to keep dogs off the compost mix!

 

The end of Compost area - we have ensure that the pavers goes under the fence so there would be no chooks digging under to get to the delicious fresh tucker...

  

See the contrast of new and old pavers! We got the factory seconds pavers for great price and it looks good. Now my challenge is to keep weeds out of the gaps between pavers!! Any tips or tricks, apart from pulling them every day? :D

  

The trampoline view over the paved area... 

 

 

Not bad for two amateur landscapers... :D  - Your comments?

Sorry we cannot accept any commissions at any time!

Cheers till later!

Finally here!

My dear readers, please excuse the mishmash postings for a while while I catch up here...

We were blessed with beautiful weather by God of Landscaping - so we decided to do something here...

PAVING!

I am pretty sure I heard him rolling on 'heavenly floor' laughing hard at this - us ignorant and puny heathens wanted to pave!!

I also think there may have been a meeting held up there between gods (of landscaping, gardening, and weather) - debating whether they should stop us here.

We need to have a path between our house and that chook palace. We had few years to think it over and we finally decided it's time - we'd do it ourselves!

See that pile of gorgeous dirt - that's a pile of brown gold for me and God of Vegetables! It consists 2 years worth of compost, from the old garden beds that we've demolished to make way for 6 new vegie beds!

What new bed? This!

We will do an experiment called Wicking Bed with them and will have them standing close to the path - so kids have no excuse for not collecting, munching or planting more vegies! Bwahaha...

You can see where we've marked the path, from the old paved area to the house. There's a dip half way there and we hope God of Pond will bless us with a pond in a year or two.

His most loyal subject is working hard here - scooping the precious dirt so we can prepare the area for more paving and build beds on it.

DAY TWO

(Please understand that we're not blessed with super powers the half-gods seemed to have been bestowed by their godly parents, unfortunately so when we say day two, it doesn't mean the right next day. We're working on this mostly on weekends.)

Hallelujah, an outline of path is revealed! We're just using edges to ensure the grass would not begin its invasion here.

Putting in edgers was a challenge itself - curves and degree of slope here. But we did it, we know our God of Landscaping would be so proud of us!

We're having a row of 6 pavers across so there'd be enough room to walk over...

I am sure the God of Landscaping and God of Gardening are fuming with us as we may have broken many laws here - remember we're a bunch of ignorant peasants who have no experience with this!

More digging here - see the old beds are gone. The ground is quite hard after only 5 cm were dug up. Mattocks are used heavily here...

We're also having the compost area renovated...

Not much to see from this end, but just wait for Day 3 photos which will be proclaimed tomorrow!

We do hope the God of Landscaping is pleased with our offering!

Cheers till later!