Progress in the Kitchen Garden!

Well, it seemed to take forever but the kitchen garden is now finally weed free!

The garlic I planted in the north-east corner has sprouted and even though I want to reconfigure the garden beds, I needed to get a few things in the ground so I have planted them against the southern border.

We now have planted in this garden:

- Garlic
- Strawberries
- Heritage Lettuce
- Chives
- Coriander
- Parsley
- Oregano

And the passionfruit vines are doing nicely along the fences.

Making Kombucha

In the last 6 months or so my husband and I have become aware of Kombucha and started to consume it on a daily basis.

It is a fermented drink made from tea and sugar which carbonates naturally, so it is a fizzy and refreshing alternative to soft drink AND it's good for you!

Kombucha is a probiotic and many people believe that it has a range of health benefits, from reducing the grey in your hair to boosting your immune system and aiding liver function.

It is about $8-10 for a 700ml bottle at health food shops, so I decided to try making it myself.

I mentioned this to the lovely people at Peninsula Fresh Organics and they happily gave me tiny SCOBY from their brew to grow, though you can leave a bit of kombucha in the bottom of a bottle and it will start to form solid parts, these are tiny new scobys forming.

What is a SCOBY? It is an acronym- Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast- anyone who has worked in a bar will have seen (and smelled) the beer yeast forming into a scoby, but this SCOBY is formed using tea and sugar which is then allowed to ferment.

I kept my tiny SCOBY in a container with about a cup of kombucha, in a warm, dark place for about two months and after that time something that looked a bit like a jellyfish began to form.

I then looked up recipes for Kombucha on the internet- this is an amalgamation of the info I found:

 You need:
- 1 SCOBY
- 1 cup of kombucha
- 2 large (2litre or more) glass jars- cleaned and sterilized
- 5-6 organic teabags (green or black)
- 1 cup of organic sugar (I used Panela, so my kombucha turned brown)
- 5 cups of water
- a piece of cloth to cover the jar and string or a rubber band to secure the cloth

Instructions:
- Boil 4 cups of water
- Add the teabags and let them steep for 15 minutes
- Add the sugar and stir until dissolved
- Add another cup of water
- Leave mixture for about an hour or until completely cooled
- Place the SCOBY and the ready-made cup of kombucha in a glass jar
- When the tea and sugar mixture is cool, pour it into the jar as well
- Place the cloth cover over the top of the jar and secure
- Leave undisturbed in a warm, dark place (like a cupboard near the stove) for 7 days- must be kept out of sunlight.
- Test your Kombucha after 7 days by dipping in a straw, holding your finger over the end, and drawing out some of the liquid.
- If it is too sweet, leave it for another day or two.
- Don't leave it too long or it will turn bitter.
- Pour into a bottle, leaving the scoby and a cup of kombucha in the jar for the next batch, and store in the fridge.
- Consume about 200ml per day
- Kombucha is naturally fermented product that will become alcoholic if you leave it for too long...

The things you take for granted living in the suburbs...

So I was talking to a friend the other day, she was wondering how well we are settling in to our new home. I didn't immediately gush about the wonders of country life and just said honestly that, even though this is amazing, it has been an adjustment.

It isn't just a new house, it is a completely new way of living.

A lot of the things I took for granted living in the city and the suburbs just don't happen here, or you have to work harder for them.

Take rubbish collection for example. We used to sort rubbish from recycling and green waste, put the bins out every week and have it all magically taken away.

We don't have any rubbish collection here, so we have to sort into 5 bins:

- Compost (and we have 2 compost bins outside but I think I've been putting things in there that you're not supposed to like citrus and bread)
- Paper and cardboard- this goes into the wood fire
- Green waste- which is either composted or burnt off
- Recycling- bottles and plastic containers that I cannot re-use
- Rubbish- mainly plastic packaging

Interestingly, we now seem to only accumulate about one small shopping bag full of actual rubbish (sometimes not even that) per week and about the same of recycling. We take this with us when we visit someone with rubbish collection and put it in their bin usually, otherwise it would have to collect until we had enough to take to a tip somewhere.

Then there is the water. We are on tank water, this means using water more carefully (not taking excessively long showers), and filtering all drinking and cooking water through a Brita Jug, even to brush your teeth. We have an electric pump to push the water through the pipes and we can turn it off at night or when we go away to save power.

The mail delivery is different here, twice a week the postie does the rounds of the letterboxes on the main road (which is a dirt road too narrow for cars to pass in some areas). We had a charming little dilapidated letterbox until last week when someone took a corner too fast in their car and took out our letterbox in the process (our neighbour believes this was not accidental and was rather annoyed). So we collect our mail once a week at the local post office in Mirboo North, which is a 15 minute drive from here.

The last really obvious difference, particularly now in the middle of winter, is our heating. Our entire house is heated by a slow combustion wood heater. This works quite well and gets the house surprisingly toasty for its size but of course, we need to supply the wood for it.

Our nearest neighbour dropped over a few barrow loads full of hardwood and kindling when we first got here, which was a really nice thing to do, but that lasted about 2 weeks and the small supply of wood left by the previous owners was dwindling fast. We could buy it, which is an expensive exercise at $180+ per cubic metre, (about enough for 3-4 weeks) and that's when you go and get it in your own trailer. Or you can cut it up yourself, from wood available on your property.

On our small farm of 11.5 acres, we had 2 dead trees that needed chopping down and could be used for firewood, so we bought a chainsaw and after a few u-tube lessons, my husband got to work chopping one down. It all went really well and fell where it was supposed to, not damaging anything else in the process. He cut it up and we all took it in wheelbarrow loads back to the hayshed to stack up ready for use, which really boosted our depleted stores.

Some of it was huge and wouldn't fit in the heater, so we had to buy a splitter (an axe with a different shaped head) to chop it apart. I had a go at this and it is hard work. The cyprus falls apart fairly easily but you can hack away at the gum for ages before it breaks.

So the first thing I do every morning at the moment is to empty the ash pan outside, grab some kindling and larger pieces from the wheelbarrows full of different sized wood parked on the veranda, bring it inside, scrunch up newspaper and start the fire.

I'm not yet longing for the simplicity of turning on a switch and having instant heat, but all of this gives you a greater appreciation of how easy it has been to enjoy modern home comforts available in the suburbs.

Progress on the Kitchen Garden...

A couple more afternoons digging up weeds and I almost have a clear kitchen garden!

This revealed more garden beds and the remnants of an irrigation system:

With the end of the weeds in sight, I now have to decide how to arrange the new garden beds. The ones that are already in place don't seem to make a lot of sense to me, though I admit that being new to all this, there may be very good reason for them to be configured the way they are.

I think that it might be easiest to start with 8 rectangular beds, raised about 20cm. This is not only the easiest to build but the easiest to work with to start.

Then I need to find some soil to fill them with, preferably from somewhere I was going to excavate anyway, add compost, manure, MycoGold and rockdust.

Then it might be time to plant something...

The Kitchen Garden...

There is an existing fenced vegetable patch not far from the house, about 8x12 metres, completely overgrown with weeds.

The first gardening task is to get it up and running as a kitchen garden with herbs and whatever vegetables I can plant in winter.

I have spent a few hours over a couple of days digging out the weeds with a mattock. It's pretty hard going for someone whose body has not been conditioned to heavy manual labour, but we're getting there....

A bit of a mess to begin with, that's the passionfruit vine along the north fence.

 The first few hours clearing uncovered trellises, a couple of drums for water and garden bed outlines...

The next lot of clearing, it's starting to look like something you might recognise as a garden bed. We planted 5 small rows of garlic in the northeast corner, we'll see how it goes, they might have been put in a bit late.

Even after all this, it might be a bit too shaded to grow vegetables, there are a some large gum trees which block the sun in the afternoon.

Like everything else here it will be a bit of an experiment at first!

Selling fruit

I have a ridiculous amount to learn about gardening and cannot even identify all of the fruit trees as it is almost winter and a lot of them are pretty bare, but so far this is what we know we have:

- Figs
- Granny Smith Apples
- Walnuts
- Hazelnuts
- Grapefruit
- Several types of Lemons
- Cumquats
- Mandarins
- Oranges
- Feijoas
- Kiwifruit
- Passionfruit (the regular Purple and an interesting variety with a soft orange skin and deep red pulp around the pips inside that Wiki thinks is Passiflora caerulea)

There are many others and I suspect we may also have:

- Peaches
- Nectarines
- Apricots
- Another variety of Apple
- Cherries
- Plums

I have called around trying to find someone who knowledgeable about fruit trees and is willing to provide a consultation, to identify what we have, to see what needs work (pruning/removal/grafting) and to teach me how to do all this. 

So far I have managed to line up a local tree expert, Leigh Stone, who is coming next week to see what we can do in the orchard.

We have been here for 3 weeks and have made a bit of progress. The first week I asked the local organic shop if they would be interested in purchasing our fruit for sale and to my delight they said yes, so we dropped off Granny Smith Apples, Grapefruit, Oranges, Lemons and Cumquats. About 2kg of each, which we had carefully picked, individually washed and packed. This earned us about $50 which I took to Heronswood and used to purchase MycoGold and Rockdust to prep the vegetable beds, a book to teach me about gardening, a moon planting calendar and a few freebie plants and seeds because I spent so much, including rhubarb, Algerian oaks and an old-fashioned rose. Needless to say I spent slightly more than our profits, but all in a good cause :)

I was wondering whether the shop would need/want any more of our fruit when I called on Friday to see how it had sold and happily, they wanted everything again and this time about 3 kg of each!

On Saturday, we were showing some friends who had come over for lunch the orchard and there were plenty of apples on the Granny Smith tree, but when I came to pick the fruit on Sunday the tree was almost bare! There were 4 apples left and one that looked a bit chewed. We were seriously perplexed, we couldn't imagine any person could have done this, not without a ladder at any rate. Everyone had told us that the birds would get the fruit if it wasn't netted and lo and behold, my husband found chewed bits of apple on the roof of the tank shed near the tree. And then we remembered how many king parrots we had seen that morning....

So they got a meal and we got a lesson...NET the fruit trees!

They had also had a good nibble at the unripe kiwifruit and feijoas, so after we dropped off our second lot of beautiful fruit to the local organic/health food shop, (oranges, lemons, grapefruit, cumquats and passionfruit), we headed to the local nursery and bought bird netting with the proceeds. 

We had a hilarious time trying to get a 4x4 net and two 4x5 nets over the kiwi fruit vine and feijoa tree. The kiwifruit vine is about 3 metres tall, about the same wide and incredibly easy to get nets tangled in, I had to give it a bit of a prune before we could even attempt to net it. Then we only managed it by loosely tying a corner of the net each to large poles to lift it up and over the plants, all the while my daughter was running amok with the secateurs, fun and games. 

The feijoa tree was easier but the net wasn't nearly big enough, so I had to peg it around the bottom as best I could and hope that this deters the birds.

We will have to wait and see...

Hapley Park

Home-grown organic fruit and veg here we come!

We are finally in the new place! A cosy 3 bedroom cottage on 11.5 acres in the beautiful South Gippsland hills! We have decided to call it Hapley Park and have envisioned using 2-3 acres for organic fruit and veg, 2-3 acres for a park around the house and formal gardens and the rest will become a small vineyard in time. There will also be an area dedicated to bee hives, a large chicken shed and hopefully we will be able to build a small cottage on the separate 2/3rds of an acre title for farmstays. 

That's the plan and though we don't have mountains of cash, we have plenty of time and energy to do it.

We're not starting from scratch though. Already on the property is the lovely house, which doesn't need any work, 5 water tanks (3x10,000 litre Poly tanks, a massive 30,000 litre concrete tank which is cracked and leaking and will cost about $3,500 to repair, and a small 3,000 corrugated iron tank in the orchard). There is also a dam at the bottom of one of the paddocks but the neighbour tells us it has never held water, so that will need attention before we can use it.

There is an orchard of 25 fruit and nut trees, another 10 or so dotted around the house and park and several fruit vines, none of which have had any attention in about 3 years. There is a veggie patch which is completely overgrown with weeds and I'm not sure it even gets enough light to grow vegetables. There is also a lovely garden including a park area with lots of 20-30 year old European deciduous trees, which look just beautiful right now with their autumn foliage. 

There are things that need changing though, the trees and shrubs in the park have been planted in neat rows, which is not particularly appealing visually and doesn't make the space very usable, so at some stage we will look to re-position a couple of these to open it up in the middle a bit.

There are also lots of plants around the house, too close, that are too large, camellias, rhododendrons and azaleas mainly, with some miniature and full size rose bushes that never get enough sun. These will be moved to create a formal garden at the front of the house in the future.

As I mentioned, there is also a 2nd title of about 2/3rds of an acre at the far south of the property. At the moment there is a small stockyard there, but as we don't ever intend to keep significant numbers of stock, I would like to remove this and replace it with a small cottage (adobe, cob, straw-bale or mud-brick) for luxury farm-stay holidays.

There is a double garage with a concrete floor, brilliant work bench and power, which will be perfect for my furniture restoration, and a large hay shed that my husband has plans of turning into a blacksmithing studio.

We are so incredibly excited and looking forward to our organic adventure!