Peas to the world

My world at least. Have started to harvest the peas, got enough in the first harvest for a good family meal. Will not be challenging the pea industry just yet but it's a start!

Onions now clearly distinguishable from weeds which is nice.

Beans continue to grow, will be forming actual edible beany beans very soon

What a difference a bit o water makes. These critters show up every year. I assume they're hanging out somewhere we cant see in winter but tis spring here so they're getting more visible ATM. Great for eating flies (Australia, mate) and generally showing the health of the garden, frogs are a litmus test for life friendly gardening. Western Green Tree Frog, or motorbike frog, if you're interested. Here we have Him and Her, respectively.

Big Deck Man

Progress on the kit home: I shot up to the land of plenty with Bret and got most of the deck done in three days. The character of the house is starting to emerge. It is slowly starting to dawn on me that after all this building is done I will have an actual house here. Here is Bret as we near 3/4 of the deck down and dusted. Looks bonza I reckon. There's a man who's earned some beers on the deck in the Land Of Plenty. Pretty hard to get started on a job like this with one row (or less) of decking 2 1/2 meters off the ground, but it would've been an absolute horror show doing it alone. I'm right on track for the rest of the house to be delivered and that will be a milestone! Had the compost dunny(toilet) delivered a couple o days ago. Once that dunny is in I'm calling it a house. Pretty hot in the Land Of Plenty, which makes decking thirsty work, but the solar system will lap it up. Of course we could also burn fallen timber in a steam engine for power: Check out this post from factorefarm about modern, open source steam: http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/2010/09/cyclone-technologies/  

                                                           
Wandoo View.  Good venue for a summer get together I reckon. With the addition of a railing. And a house.             

The Evil Beak Bird

Ok so here I am wondering, like a poor naive fool, what kind of rodent is burrowing into my corn mounds (see previous post). It's really getting to me and I'm contemplating what kind of small rat or large mouse is doing it and thereby causing all my mounds to dry out. Secretly I am blaming the unseen plague of super-rodent on the non germination of my three sisters corn crop which has put out one measly seedling. But I am unprepared for the horror of meeting my nemesis, the Evil Beak Bird, from the swamp down he road, who is shoving his satanic beak into my garden beds to get at the buggy and wormy compost within. Shouting at him works temporarily, and he flies lazily away, not even respectful enough to put up a good show of flight response. To my shame he returns within an hour with a mate, to feast upon my soil life and disturb the innocent corn seeds within. That night I am awoken by the taunting honk of the Evil Beak Bird as he  and some hanger-on relative devour my compost critters. I resist the temptation to run outside in my underwear, yelling in a shrill feminine voice. But I do not forget. I plot. I scheme. Deep in the recesses of my shamed and troubled mind I hatch a plan to protect my corn. The next morning I erect this brilliant scheme, an invisible force field made of fishing line, designed to freak the freak of that freakin' Evil Beak Bird. I imagine him swooping in for a free feed, graceful until he is rebuffed by my scheme. Perhaps he gets his foot stuck and flaps pathetically, the laughing stock of bird life throughout the neighborhood. I can sleep easily now, awaiting the germination of my corn safe in the knowledge that evil is at bay.

In Print

Hey I'm published. On paper, that is. You know, the fibrous stuff that your printer spits out. The Zine is Loose Leaf, and you can get it here and read my article here. Unplug the masses! get them yanking their pins out of the wall!

green shoots and greensand

Corn's up! Course just the one plant, the other 40 or so are no shows. Too early? Inappropriate planting for climate? Who knows. We shall overcome, I'll dig a mound up tomorrow and see if I can find any seeds. maybe they rotted. Also I have been constructing a small charcol furnace: here's me ramming the refactory lining into the bucket I'm using for the furnace body. This should fireproof it and after I've made the lid out of the same fireproof furncace clay I should be able to fire it up to fire the lining, then melt some aluminium and do some greensand casting, a useful skill for unpluggers everywhere. Slowly though, I have to do this in between building a  house!

New Life!

Hazzah, spring is here, and with it the new peas. Don't they have beautiful flowers? More new life soon, tis the season. Still waiting for my corn to come up! Time to get your vegies in here in the southern hemisphere.

The weedy truth

Want to unplug? It  means unplugging from all sorts of things, including the agrochemical industry. That means no weed killer, not a  bad thing considering the junk that stuff may leave in the soil. Feel some permaculture coming on? Fair dinkum. Here's the space between the beans and the peas. Weedy as all getout. Now I could weed the area and clear it, but blank real estate just invites more weeds.

In organic growing you have to think differently.  You need to stop excluding the weeds from the garden in your thinking, because the weeds are  a part of the garden's ecosystem. Then you need to consider them as separate elements and consider what inputs and outputs they have. Well inputs are sunlight, space, water, nutrients and outputs are foliage, thorns, and seeds. Ive chosen to leave most of the weeds but pull the bindi because it's the one which spreads and has the output of thorns whereas the others don't. The other stuff actually has some useful outputs: it occupies real estate to muscle out the bindi, sucks sunlight to shade out any bindi which might  get in and actually provides some green manure for the soil when you uproot it and dig it in. In addition, funny enough I have been whinging about not having enough vegetative matter for my compost whilst whining about having too many weeds in the garden. A classic permaculture solution is to mate the two problems to gain a solution- foliage for the compost.

Of course this is not a perfect solution, the diabolical onion weed (boo, hiss) is still a problem but use of poisons (inputs: chemicals, industry, lots of energy, outputs: waste, money for fatcats, poisoned soil, interrupted eco systems) is just going to kill everything and leave the ground blank for more weeds to invade and, of course, necessitate more poison. Seems to be how it usually works with corporate agriculture, or corporate anything. Silly fatcats are too fat to get out into the garden and discover that nature is more interesting than money!

kit home

Here's me working on the house. I drive up to Toodyay every week and work, eat, work, work, work and sleep. And work. It's taken three months to get to here, working three days a week. I have now finished the floor and tomorrow will do the decking timber.It's called platform construction: first the floor and floor coverings then the walls and roof. So all that should be done tomorrow or soon. Then it's waiting for the rest of the house to be delivered in October. Hopefully I might get the roof on before summer and 40 degrees arrives. Eventually it'll be a three bedroom house with 50 square meters of deck at bird level in the forest, 130000 liter water tank and compost toilet.
 I'm loving the experience and its going to be a pretty, strong house. Really well insulated against hot Toodyay summers and it'll look great. The problem is it's really expensive, unnecessarily complex and quite toxic. Floor coverings, adhesive and insulation contain formaldehyde, steel conducts heat necessitating full on insulation which is plastic, and you need a whole bucket of completely different skills from foundation placing to plaster boarding. It's no different from any other contemporary housing in terms of expense, complexity and toxicity but I think I can do better with earth construction, and that's what I will be looking at for my ultimate unplugging experience in the future. Much cheaper, like a twentieth if the cost, non toxic, sturdy and beautiful. But one thing at a time, for now it's the steel kit. Bonza!

Look what I found on the roof

Just had these installed. An unplugger classic, and you can't get any more classic colouring than black. Australia had an $8000 rebate on panels so now we're generating and selling power back to the grid, no batteries needed. Only generates 1.36 likowatts which is 1/3 of our power but solar panels are a good thing to have in an emergency, (not so good without batteries but there you go) and we could always haul them up the hill to the uncompleted house in the land of plenty (toodyay)   Good-o!