home green home

more recycling for recycling corner

Discarded aerial reclaimed and is now supporting our climbing beans. We thought about modifying it, but the ground was so soft we just shoved it in and it works! (reception is not enhanced).

Second recycled vegetable garden bed

It's been a few weeks now, but we have finally finished planting up the second, larger, recycled garden bed in our back corner. This is the bit of the yard behind the shed and you can't actually see it from the house. When we bought this place, the back corner was a jumble of palm trees, indoor plants that had been tossed out and creeping grass runners.Now it's become our 'recycled' corner: using only recycled water, sunlight and building materials to create veggies and dry clothes!

We have spent a year rejuvenating the corner: building a retaining wall with old railway sleepers, paving under the clothes line and filling in the bits between the palm trees with garden beds made from recycled timer.

This last garden bed is made from timber slats from our old bed along with some bits of broken packing pallets we salvaged off the side of the road. We tried to keep as much of the project as possible recycled. The big what pot you can see at the left of this photo is our old kitchen sink (which recently had to be replaced), the little table is from the second hand furniture store at the end of our street. And the pavers came from the lovely Bower Reuse and Repair Centre, which is a treasure trove of old floor boards, doors, windows and, strangely perhaps, bike parts.

Much of the soil in the new garden bed is recycled garden soil enriched with manure and compost from our sadly neglected little compost bin. There is also a good thick layer of premium potting mix because we really want the veggies to grow up healthy and strong.

Many of the plants are also recycled: the tomatoes, lettuce and rocket are all 'volunteers' from around the garden. The zucchini, dill, chives and beans are all purchased. I'm sure that I'm not supposed to plant all of those varieties of vegetables together in the same bed, but I will focus on the principles of companion planting and permaculture next year. This year all my energy has gone into getting the hard work of creating the beds done.

Making pickles and preserves

With all my tomato plants fruiting simultaneously, I realise two things: I should have planted them at staggered intervals; and I 'm going to need a good preserving method.

Fortunately, with all my tomato weeds coming up, I will be able to replace the early fruiting plants a little later in the season, which should mean a continuous supply through the summer.

I've also found a lovely website called Green Living that gives very clear instructions about how to preserve tomatoes as cooking sauce. Given that we go through about two jars of sugo and three tins of tomatoes each week, using some of our anticipated tomato glut for preserving sound like it will keep our harvest working for us even longer.

Consider the chickens

Since reading the (food)magazine, from the Fairfax people who make the (sydney) magazine (known in our house as the (pretentious) magazine), I have been considering chickens. The purpose of the magazine, apart from creating ad opportunities for large retailers, was to promote the trend of creating your own food. Whether it's growing veggies, community gardening or producing eggs. They did an experiment where three chefs had rented chooks for a week. While everyone seemed to love the eggs, only one of the three families continued with the chooks.

I have fantasies about having a couple of chooks in our backyard. But I also have fantasies about backyard footy, a trampoline, more veggie garden beds, a hammock, expanding the deck, the list goes on. So I worry that chickens are not the most practical solution for our really quite small block.

On the upside, chickens would eat a lot of scraps and produce free fertilizer.

So I am still considering.

Strawberries in pots

At the beginning of spring I put four strawberry plants in pots and hung them along the front of the verandah, which faces north. I water the pots almost everyday and now we are starting to get a haul of delicious red berries. Four plants cost around $16 so we have to harvest quite a few berries (at $3 a punnet we need to get around 6 punnets' worth), and so far we have reaped about 2 punnets'worth. Usually they ripen one or two at a time, so they get eaten straight off the plant. Today I managed to harvest a whole bowl full. These guys taste so much better than those giant Queensland grown berries, but they are much softer and need to be eaten right away. So far that appears not to be a problem!

Growing tomatoes

Weeds are just plants that are growing in the wrong place. My fight against weeds usually sees me digging out annoying yellow flowering clover or onion weed. But in the past few weeks I have been pulling up unusual weeds like this:

Tomato seedlings sprouting up everywhere. They come from the worm castings I spread over the garden beds before mulching about a month ago. Obviously those castings were laced with tomato seeds and these little plants have been springing up all though my garden. I feel terrible about hauling them out and throwing them away, but I just don't have enough room to successfully grow this many tomatoes!

Some, like these, I am leaving to see how they go. But the rest are going on the compost heap, which seems a shame.

Now, if I could just get coriander to grow wild in my garden...

In celebration of lettuce

This is our fourth summer growing veggies. Truthfully, we didn't have much space devoted to vegetables until last summer, but this year we have a lot more. We're growing tomatoes, zucchini, cucumber, pumpkin, lemons, limes, strawberries, a variety of herbs and, most importantly, salad greens.

Salad greens are the staple of our garden for two reasons: they are quick and easy to grow, and they are expensive and wasteful to buy. I think I've thrown away more soggy lettuce than any other vegetable and there's nothing you can do with old lettuce.

So my number one tip for anyone wanting to start growing food is to start with lettuce, and move on up from there. 

Lettuce grows well in pots - all of our greens grow in old cement laundry tubs or big pots. You need high quality potting mix, and mulch to go around the seedlings. We have grown lettuce from seed collected from last year's lettuces, but it's more risky and time consuming. Punnets of seedlings from the nursery are more reliable and at around $4, not too expensive.

The other great thing about buying lettuce in punnets is that you can get mixed trays - so six seedlings of six different lettuces. If you only have a small garden, or are restricted to pots, six Cos lettuce plants are not nearly as useful as a mix of Cos, Butter, Oak and Mignonette lettuce. 

Once they're in, water lettuces everyday. Lettuce needs constant moisture and will droop quickly telling you it needs water. We also feed ours on diluted 'worm goop' from our worm farm. They seem to thrive on it. 

We find that in Sydney we can grow lettuce almost all year round, although June can be pretty lean on the salad front. I start planting again in July because by September the lettuces are ready to harvest. I also keep sowing more seedlings in different pots every month or so, because lettuces run to seed once the weather heats up.

Next to the lettuce pots I also have a huge pot of rocket which is stupidly easy to grow and gives salads a zing. We also have some spinach seedlings which I harvest when they're young to include in the salad.

At the moment we are eating salad every night, and often at lunch time too. I pick leaves one-at-a-time and they are so crunchy and full of flavour that they need very little dressing.

spring veggies, summer heat

It was incredibly hot here today, so a total change from the wintry weather last week. Despite melting in the heat in the train on the way home (Nell fell asleep and I had to carry her the first 100 metres from the train which makes me realise just how heavy she is getting), I spent the afternoon filling the last of our garden beds with organic soil, chicken manure and potting mix. Hopefully it will be ready for me to plant the bean seedlings I rescued from a slow death by dehydration at Bunnings yesterday.

This is our absolutely perfect home grown brocili which we ate for dinner. And very virtuous I felt about it too.

Bursting into life

Every time that restless 'I've been reading too much' feeling comes over me, I head out to the garden for a little stretch of weeding and planting. It's a pity I am so busy because there is so much to do, with everything sprouting, twisting and climbing at the same time. Including the clover which almost swallowed up the front herb garden.

Lettuces are ready to pick, tomatoes are flowering, jasmine opened yesterday, strawberries are forming their little green fuzzy fruit. Hopefully we'll get a crop before the scorching weather sets in and everything runs to seed.

My biggest tip for getting the whole garden to look fantastic at the same time is worm castings. Our worm farm became overfull and I had to clean out a layer of worm castings - I took them handfull by handful, diluted them in a watering can and poured them over everything that looked like it might grow. The lettuces, in particular, love to be fed this way and we're being rewarded with cheap, abundant and tasty salads every day.

100 miles of food

I love the Good Living section of the SMH even though we don't eat out as much as we used to. We tend to cook at home more these days. Which is why I was fascinated to read this article about the couple who embarked on a 100 mile diet - committing only to eat foods sourced within 100 miles of their home in Vancouver.

Both Simon and I read the article with interest and we both had the same reaction - we could never manage that. I think it's because the restriction was on every ingredient in every food had to be sourced within 100 miles of home. I don't know too many wheat farms in the Sydney basin and we are undeniably a gluten-based family (the kids couldn't go a day within consuming pasta in some form).

But even if we don't source absolutely all our foods locally, perhaps we can start asking our providers where they source their food from, so we can opt for the locally grown stuff whenever we can. I think we can also switch from buying bread and dairy which are shipped all over the country (Lawsons Bread comes from Victoria, how can that be?). I will be on the look out for locally Sydney based bakers and dairy from around NSW.

That also strengthens my resolve to shop at the Farmer's Market on Addison Road in Marrickville every weekend instead of when I feel like it. Even though it's not 100 miles from home, the Saltbush lamb they have there is worth the journey alone.