Tea, anyone?

I have a wish list of what I want to have in my garden. I'm doing this on a budget, and don't want to add any  pesticides, herbicides or other poisons. This is food after all and I need to be able to feed it to my family! My next project was to make some tea. Not tea that you'd want to drink though. This will be plant food. An instant boost to my plants to keep them in tip top shape.

This is just a regular rubbish bin you can buy at a hardware shop. When I bought it, I also bought a tap. I drilled a hole a few inches above the base, and inserted the tap (the instructions were with the tap). That's it, all I needed to do to set it up. I set it up on some old bricks (they really do come in handy!) so that I could get a watering can under the tap, then got the hose to it & filled it to about 6 inches from the top. Next, I filled it with lovely nutrient-rich stuff. I got salmon heads & fish skeletons from my brother-in law, added comfrey leaves, (this is a great plant, with a really long tap root which mines the nutrients from way down in the soil/subsoil and brings it up to store in it's leaves). I also added leftover bones from the kitchen, some twitch/couch grass (that I normally would put in the rubbish bin as it will regrow even from tiny pieces of root and the compost doesn't always kill it), and other food scraps that I didn't want to compost. The meat bones I put into a net bag like you get when you buy oranges, and tied a piece of string to it. Use quite fine string, as if your string is too think, there will be a gap between the lid and the bin, which will allow flies to get in.

I tied the other end around the handle of the bin so I could take the bones out after the flesh is gone, without putting my hand in the goop. Otherwise the bottom would get clogged with old bones. Plant material should break down totally as long as you don't put wood in there. Rinsed seaweed is another excellent ingredient if you can get hold of it. Finally, I put the lid on & left it, adding to it whenever I had something suitable to dispose of.

Well once this lovely mixture had steeped for a few months, I started using it. Mmmm! Before you apply a mixture like this you must water the garden, then dilute it 1 part to about 5 parts of water in your watering can. The tea is too strong to apply straight, and will burn your plants. It's great on fruiting plants like tomatoes which are really hungry, and also as a foliar spray, where you put it in a misting bottle & spray directly onto the leaves. Do this on a cloudy day, or in the evening so it doesn't burn.

Such an easy way to make your own plant food, and a great way to reduce and recycle the waste you produce.

My No-Dig Garden

 We moved into our home in December 2011. It had been a topsy turvy year of earthquakes. Everyone (& everything) was quite unsettled. My dream had always been to live in the country on a lifestyle block, of a couple of acres, grow my own food, have a few animals and be as sustainable as possible. We had to settle for something a bit smaller, about 3/4 of an acre, but I knew from the moment I first saw it that this was the place!

It had large lawns, a sunny deck, and an orchard area. Here are some pictures of what it was like then.

Lovely, wasn't it? My son saw me sketching and scheming and begged me not to mess it up. Who would put their veggie garden right in front of their outdoor living area? 'Leave it as it is' he said. Well, I did have my doubts, but I knew exactly what I wanted.

What I wanted:
I wanted a cheap, low maintenance (no digging) vegetable garden, that was pretty, visible and accessible  from the house, not tucked away down the back corner. My thinking here was that if it was always in front of me I couldn't ignore it! I wanted to have a continuous supply of vegetables that I knew had not been sprayed with any nasties. It would be nice to be as self reliant in vegies as possible. I really like the whole permaculture thing & will implement these ideas in the garden. Permaculture means permanent agriculture. The idea behind it is that energy stays on your property. You work with nature, rather than fighting it, starting with looking after your soil.

What I used:
Cardboard Boxes - enough to cover the entire area, beds and paths. I have seen a lot of gardens like mine where they leave the paths in grass. It looks great for a while, but the grass is hard to cut, and before too long it starts to invade the vegetable beds. Be warned!  I collected all the cardboard boxes we'd used when we moved in. There weren't enough, so I raided several supermarkets as well. You could use newspaper instead, but would have to have a lot of thickness. The staff at the supermarket thought I was bonkers filling up the car with their rubbish, but it saved them having to get rid of them, so were all quite happy for me to help myself. A quick note here, try and get boxes as big as possible, and not the ones with lots of holes in them.Flatten them out and remove sticky tape (quick note; get your kids to help - take away their ipods or pacifier of choice until it's done. It won't take long!) The idea with the cardboard is to cover the grass & kill it off, stop weeds coming up, but to allow your plant roots to go down through it, as by that time it will be rotting. All adding to the good stuff in your beds!

Something to separate the paths from the beds. I used wood, 4.5 metre lengths of 10" x 1". For later beds I used large stones, about the size of a brick. Upended wine bottles, old pieces of corrugated iron, bricks, old pallets, logs - look around and see what you've got before shelling out.
Something for the paths. Shredded bark was the cheapest option for me. Bark chips, straw, pebbles (these would work out quite expensive, but would look lovely!) Anything you can walk on. Bear in mind that if it is a plant-based material, it will break down over time & need to be topped up. We hire a chipper once a year and put pruned branches through it which provides material for the paths.
Bricks I used old bricks to hold down the cardboard, and later used them as an edging between the garden area and the lawn.

What I did:
The first step was to mark out the area I wanted to turn into my vegetable garden using pegs and string, and water it well. I chose a north-facing, sheltered site (or south facing in the northern hemisphere) to get the maximum sun. Next, I laid out the cardboard with a couple of inches overlapping. Important to prevent light from reaching the grass, which is pretty persistent stuff & will grow throw a gap if given the chance. Here's how I laid them out. I used old bricks to hold them down. I kept the water going while I was doing it. It was lovely and refreshing on a really hot day!

Next I needed to work out where the paths & beds would go. I wanted to use wooden frames to put my beds into, but didn't want to use treated wood despite everyone around me advising to the contrary. 'It won't last very long' they all said, but I really didn't want to, so I bought untreated wood. It came in 4.5 metre lengths, so to make things easier, I decided to make that the length of the beds, with 1.5 metre widths so that I could get 3 width pieces out of a 4.5 metre length. One on each end, and one across the middle dividing each bed into 2 parts. (Clever hey?) The wood was the most expensive part of the exercise.

I made 4 rectangular boxes 4.5 x 1.5m and the back one 4.5m x 1m as I could only get to it from one side. Because the lawn was an oval shape, I made a triangle bed for each end to fit in the curved shape, plus another smaller triangley wedge shape because there was a big gap. I worked out the width of paths by measuring how much room I would need for my wheel barrow to fit comfortably.

I did all the work myself - here is my other half making sure I did it right... Giving lots of advice!

I added a bird bath I had made to the middle, and voila!

On the paths, I covered the cardboard with the shredded bark. They're much cheaper than bark chips which had been used as mulch on the rest of the garden. I soon learned that you can't walk barefoot on shredded bark as it's full of splinters. They would even go through my rubber jandals (flip flops/thongs).

It was nearly Christmas by this time,  half way through the growing season. So to be able to grow straight away I filled 2 beds with a bought compost mixture, and planted them up. For the other beds I layered grass clippings, manure bought from various farm gates, vegetable scraps (this was before my hens!), coffee grounds from a cafe, peastraw, basically anything of plant or animal poo origin went in. It was amazing. I gave them a good soaking and topped them off with wet news paper and another layer of peastraw. I was planting in them by about March, and the plants just went bonkers!

So that's how it got built, more stuff coming soon, but here are some more pictures:

I'd love your comments!