My edible garden

It's time I write about my edible garden, in which I am trying to incorporate permaculture principles.

This is not my first garden, we'd had one, similar to this, about ten years ago, before we moved away for some years.  

Then, we had to pull up everything and put down a new lawn - what a heartache it was to watch! - so the house could be rented out.  Here are some pictures of my old beautifully productive  garden, towards the end of its first summer season:

we had three white leghorn chickens, they were regularly let out to graze for themselves
here, they are still very young, probably just coming onto lay

herb garden, comfrey and the steps built by my father who was visiting us just then

the pumpkin, ready for picking
we had them grow over an arch

Here are some more pictures about the creation of that no-dig garden.

Hot weather

The forecast was 37 celsius for Thursday.  Thankfully it did not eventuate; the southerly came through very early in the afternoon.

The heat is very hard on the plants and the chickens; they all switch into survival mode and they need some help from us to make it through alive.  Yes, I believe it is that serious.


What I do first of all is I try to provide some shade.

For the plants:

young plants covered during the middle of a hot day

We made some arches from irrigation pipes which are held up by some casually placed bamboo sticks, and over those I draped some old curtain material, held in place by bulldog clips.

Raspberries don't like being in very hot sun, they are more a temperate climate fruit.  They are just kind enough to fruit for us in warmer temperatures provided we help them through when needed.

Freshly planted seedlings can't survive being out in the sun even on a moderately hot summer day.   These are some of my casualties, and it wasn't even a very hot day when I took these photos.  Fortunately they did survive.

   

After the plants are well established they can usually cope better.  Lettuces like buttercrunch and the red type lettuces however, they will always need extra care in the sun.
Watering them weekly with some seaweed solution strengthens them so they have a better chance of recovering.

Tomatoes, cucumber, raspberries I also cover when it's above 32 celsius, they seem to stress or even burn to death otherwise.

I water by hand at the moment, sometimes in the morning sometimes late afternoon.  The irrigation systems I've tried so far just don't seem to work, this is something of a future project for me to learn more about.

For the chooks, well, that will be another post I think - chooks in the heat.

The other day when it was so very hot, luckily I was home all day, and kept checking on them.  I even let the gate open so if they wanted to find a cooler spot anywhere else, they could.

I watered the grounds a couple of times for cooling. put blocks of ice in their water, put frozen water bottles around the run so they could sit next to it if they wanted.  I also switched the hose for mist and left it there propped up for a little while, hoping they might go under it for cooling.  They didn't.  Somehow we survived though.

Funny, how guilty I felt to turn on the air-con inside.  So I saved a lot of electricity, because I didn't, apart from half an hour twice on that day. LOL.  It just seemed not fair, me, sitting inside nice and cool, them, hanging onto their life outside.

In summer I keep different sizes of blocks of ice in the freezer for very hot days.

Also some frozen water bottles to use around the run.