Edible verge gardens

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Growing edible plants – as well as or instead of purely ornamental ones – is something that many, many Australians have been doing for decades. A recent study by Australian Institute quantified just how many ‘many, many’ actually is. According to their research, 52% of Australian households produce garden crops of some description. Most of these crops (74%) are produced in back (or front) yard veggie patches and include herbs, vegetables and/or fruit trees. A much smaller number of households have developed verge gardens (13%), grow balcony plants (12%), or are involved in community gardens (1%). Whichever way you look at it, there’s a lot of productive gardening going on in Australia.

Until fairly recently I fell squarely into the 74%; my raised garden beds and mini orchard keep us in cherry tomatoes, basil, mint, spinach, citrus, plums, pears and a few other seasonal crops. Maintaining the mulching, fertilising, pruning, crop rotation and watering keeps me and various lucky minions well and truly out of free time. So why on earth have I set the whole attempt-to-develop-a-verge-garden thing in motion?

Party it’s the endless, pointless and unrewarding mowing of the verge. Because we have a corner block, it’s a very wide verge, and because we’re on a hill, it’s a very steep verge. It is also ‘graced’ with a couple of Corymbia ficifolia (red flowering gum trees), which drop a surprising number of large gumnuts. These factors combined make mowing it a slightly daunting prospect (for me) and seem to carry a surcharge (for contractors). Then there’s the ongoing damage to the reticulation when parents doing their school run drive over the well-disguised sprinklers (yes, we live opposite a primary school), or the infrequently used mower does the same.

Having attended a number of permaculture and water-wise workshops over the past few years, I eventually concluded that it might simply be easier to remove the grass. Not only would I not have to think about mowing/finding someone to do it affordably long-term, it would also mean that our helpful neighbours wouldn’t feel that they need to randomly employ a contractor on our behalf from time to time to tidy things up.

mulch pileAs phase one of Operation Verge Garden, I ordered five cubic metres of mulch. The overly enthusiastic contractor delivered 10. That’s a lot of mulch. A lot. By the time we’d spread about half of it around our fruit trees, on the veggie garden and on part of the verge-garden-to-be, our backs were stiff and sore and enthusiasm was starting to ebb. Then one of the gum trees succumbed to long term (untreated) tree rot and had to be removed from the middle of the remaining mulch.

mulch pile2More help was recruited to get the rest of the seemingly never-ending mulch pile moved and spread. In retrospect it would’ve been a good idea to put some cardboard down under the mulch first, as this would have limited the amount of light getting in and probably killed off the grass more effectively. If I’d found this publication by Russ Grayson  a little sooner (or listened to my permaculture/greenie daughter), things may have been a tad easier – but, as with many things garden related, it’s been a learning curve for us all.

A few very hot months have passed since the project started and not a lot of verge garden has emerged in that time. We did plant a loquat tree, however, and that’s thriving quietly. We also planted a variety of seeds, just to see what sorts of things would make it through the summer with very little water or attention. It turns out that sunflowers and pumpkins are the stand out winners.

I did give some thought to the possibility of theft or vandalism to plants and crops when we started on all this, but decided that I’m not really too concerned. I’m reasonably confident that most locals who see veggies growing on the verge will be interested and engaged, rather than destructive and vindictive. Perhaps they’ll even fell inspired to do something similar on their verge. I remain perennially hopeful about the nature of the human animal.

Now that the weather is starting to cool down a little, it’s probably time to start cropping the pumpkins and thinking about what we want to grow through the autumn and winter.

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Growing things

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I was sitting outside the other day and I noticed just how many passionfruit are hanging on the vines. There are more than many – perhaps even many-many! I’m starting to think along the lines of passionfruit sorbet and pavlova and suchlike and really looking forward to harvesting some of the garden produce. Actually, come to think of it, the plum tree is also pretty laden down with fruit and so is the grapefruit tree and at least one of the olives trees. It’s only a matter of time before we’re knee deep in preserves, pies and chutneys – again.

Little did we know when we planted our first three fruit trees just over a decade ago that we’d end up with our own urban orchard. A quick count tells me that we have somewhere around 20 productive trees or vines: blood orange, calamondin, finger lime, three passionfruit vines, a bay tree (in a half wine barrel) and two grapevines (just planted) at the back. Then our original three: the ruby blood plum, Tahitian lime and pink grapefruit around the side of the house, along with an ornamental(ish) plum (which appears to fertilise the other plum), an olive tree and a blueberry bush. Moving to our (not very large) front garden, we have a black cherry, a lillipilly, two miniature apple trees, another olive and a cumquat. Oh, and a pear tree (also in a half wine barrel) and another bay tree (ditto).

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What were we thinking? Or, more to the point, what was I thinking?! Every time we’ve done any serious work in the garden (redoing reticulation, putting in a small retaining wall, replacing the fish pond), I seem to have  had a rush of blood to the brain and headed off to the local nursery / purveyor of fine fruit trees. Sometimes I just wandered in there to  pick up some essential item relating to the current project… but the outcome is always fairly predictable: we suddenly need to find a space for yet another fruit tree!

Since we also have three raised garden beds for growing vegetables – and since I find seed propagation only intermittently successful, this also requires the occasional stop to select seedlings and, since I’m there…

I guess some people shop for yet another pair of natty high heels, others for that perfect piece of jewellery or technology… my weakness appears to be plants, specifically fruit trees. As long as I don’t go near the nursery section of the local hardware store or – even worse – happen to stop in at the more well stocked nursery, conveniently on my way home from work (if I take the long way home), then all is well.

So what is it about gardening, about planting a tree and watching it grow and, in time, become productive that has such appeal? Part of it is that work/home life tend to be busy, time is perennially at a premium and stress piggybacks all too easily on top of all that. So I find it relaxing to actively take time to potter around in the garden, to plant and trim, prune and mulch. The simple acts of watering the veggie garden and picking and eating a cherry tomato while I do so, of throwing the windfall fruit to the chickens and of noticing how much things grow day by day – these are amongst my meditative practices. They replenish my chi and make my world a better place.

Suburban Agrarian – a farmer’s life for me?

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I’ve been told that an urban agrarian lifestyle at its simplest incorporates slight lifestyle changes – growing as much of your food as you plausibly can in your backyard / window box / allotment, using renewable energy, making use of public transport or HPV (human powered vehicles), keeping a couple of chickens for fresh eggs (and, in due course, fresh chicken), buying local produce to fill the gaps and sharing resources wherever possible.

None of those things are particularly hard to do and most of them are even good fun. It does take a certain level of commitment, however, since they take time, which is perennially in short supply for the average nine-to-five worker. Some days it feels like there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to sustain the dream.

Our solution to that was to start small and work our way up. The first step was to plant fruit trees so that we’d (hopefully) be able to produce and share quality fruit that hasn’t been treated with pesticides. After a few years of putting in the odd tree here and there, we now have a veritable orchard: cumquat, calamondin, Australian finger lime, blood orange, plum, cherry, loquat, blueberries, Tahitian lime, pink grapefruit, pear, passionfruit vines, olives and apples. The apples and pear tree are dwarf stock, since our property isn’t really very large, but they’re starting to fruitpears_1dec14 and we have high hopes for good crops from them in the future. Trees are pretty low maintenance and it’s been great to be able to share some of the fruit – and the jams and chutneys – with friends and family. At various times of the year it’s actually unwise to visit us unless you’re resigned to leaving with at least one jar of cumquat marmalade – the tree fruits prolifically!

Our next bold step was to install four raised garden beds and to start to grow seasonal vegetables and herbs. This takes more effort than the trees and is intermittently rewarding. Basil, mint, tomatoes, kale, spinach and beans have been the winners; most other crops have been a bit disappointing. Sometimes this is simply because the garden beds aren’t well positioned as far as sun/shade goes for a particular crop, sometimes because critters have invaded and I’ve been unwilling to spray – but also not diligent enough to do a daily critter parade. At the moment I have corn, cherry tomatoes, basil and spinach growing, but we do need to augment the home grown produce with visits to the markets. The local Farmer’s Markets are great for this – although the prices aren’t really competitive, so it’s certainly not a cost saving.

Solar hot water is a great solution in summer, but since I’m a sucker for a hot shower we use an electric booster through the winter. A 4.5-kilowatt array of solar panels on the roof means that we could theoretically go off-grid and be self sufficient for power, but before that can happen we’d need to be able to store the energy. Batteries are probably the most obvious and cost effective option and that may be a future project. In the meantime we feed power back into the grid, which in turn offsets our power bill to some extent. In terms of transport, our future plans hinge on the electric utility vehicle that’s under construction in our garage. Meantime we use conventional internal combustion vehicles and winge about the cost of fuel and I use my bicycle from time to time and public transport whenever possible.

About a year ago we ended up with two backyard chooks. This isn’t something I ever thought of as likely, since I’m not a fan of feathered things unless they’re in trees, the sky or a tasty casserole, but the promise of fresh eggs was pretty tempting. Once we’d built a chicken run under the fruit trees as a temporary ‘chicken daycare centre’ for my daughter’s chickens whilst she was away, it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that we’d eventually end putting the run to more permanent use. Two of the chickens simply didn’t end up going home with her last November. Instead, we inherited a pair of rather attractive Australorps (http://www.backyardchickens.com/products/australorp) and they rampage around in their run fairly happily. We tried having them on the loose in the garden, but the darn things seem to think that the froblackchooks_2014nt doormat is the chicken equivalent of a kitty litter tray. This does not please me, so their free ranging has been curtailed.

The downside of chickens is that they are a bit noisy early in the morning. Actually, they’re darn noisy! By early, I mean 5.30am – and this is not an hour at which I’m usually terribly sociable or, indeed, amenable to loud noises. I’m pretty sure that this applies to our neighbours as well, although no-one (other than me!) has complained so we’re either shutting them up fast enough by staggering out to feed them at the crack of dawn – or the neighbours haven’t figured out where the noise is coming from… yet. Other than that, though, they’re pretty easy to manage in terms of care and maintenance and do provide us with a steady supply of eggs. I haven’t actually bought eggs since they started laying early this year and we often end up having to give eggs away when production overtakes consumption.

Although each step along  our suburban agrarian journey has been fun, collectively it can be exhausting. The combination of planting, mulching, watering, weeding, feeding, pruning, making preserves and egg-related dishes and cleaning chicken hutches is sometimes quite a load, particularly when in conduction with early mooring wake-up calls from our avian buddies. I’ve concluded that whilst I do enjoy home-grown vegetables, making jams and chutneys and using freshly laid free range eggs, I am at heart a city girl and I may have reached the limits of my suburban agrarian dreamscape.

Overambitious? Never!

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I’m one of those people who work best in a moderately orderly environment. With visitors coming to stay for a few months and a new puppy about to arrive, ‘orderly’ is starting to fall into the same headspace as ‘challenge’. The puppy arrives at the end of this week, the guests at the end of the month – along with their four chickens, five quail and two kittens. Luckily no partridge – and I already have the pear tree.

Our place has rather aptly been renamed Menagerie10 and will really be living up to that name over the next few months. To accommodate the various changes to our lifestyle, three rooms need to be compressed into one  and the contents of those rooms put away somewhere, baby-gates (repurposed as puppy-gates) have to go up to protect some areas from sharp little teeth and a cat run needs to be built. Since that’s clearly not a big enough challenge, we also decided to replace the water repellent, smelly back lawn with an all new buffalo variant. The existing lawn gets to be replanted out on the verge, after digging up the mostly-dead wild grass out there as well. The final item on the agenda is to lay down the conduit for a below ground power cable up to my art shed.

Clearly this little lot could only ever be achieved by chunking it into manageable mini-tasks, then working through those until the whole lot’s done … so phase one has been to accept that there is no room for scope creep, to actively set aside any bright new ideas that pop up and to focus on the core objectives.

Phase two has been to implement replacing the lawn with new turf. After a weekend of back-breaking digging, we recruited the help of strong backs (friends, family), acquired extra spades and hired a backhoe – then spent yet another weekend in the garden. Getting the back lawn up and moved was a fairly straightforward job, even if it was a long, hard slog, and it was done by mid afternoon of day one.

Phase three has taken longer and cost more, both in terms of dollars and sweat. The trench for the power cable was a fairly epic digging job and finding that a section of concrete had to be attacked with an angle grinder and chisels was just one not-so-small small hiccough along the way. By close of business yesterday the pipes were laid in readiness for the electrician and the trench was filled. At this point it was clear that there will need to be some late night gardening activity under spotlights this week in order to get the back lawn down by puppy-day (Friday). Replanting the verge was re-evaluated and has gone into the too-hard-for-now basket.
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Phase four, the three-into-one room compression, is ongoing. After flailing ineffectually at the task or a week or so, it became clear that the only strategic way forward was to take a step sideways. So I started by emptying the two rooms of everything that needed to come out, leaving one room furnished with guest beds and the other with a bookcase, table and two chairs. This effectively created guest sleeping and chill-out accommodation, so that part of the to-do list can be ticked off.

Unfortunately , this also left my study fair bursting with a combination of office equipment, books, toys, xmas decorations, craft equipment, old university notes and kitchen appliances that somehow don’t fit in the kitchen. Even though it was all stacked in neat piles, the increase in chaos in my workspace definitely pushed my limits. So it was back to decluttering basics for me: do a little every day, starting with one pile and working towards having everything either put away, boxed for storage, given away or binned. It’s the good old four box method and works pretty well for me since it forces choices: keep / unsure / re-home / chuck. The ‘unsure’ pile gets revisited for a second round of selection at the end of the process, by which stage the whole ‘do I really need or want this’ mindset is fully engaged and the decisions are easier to make.

Although it took a while, I could feel calm returning with every decision made, even if some of the harder ones stalled me out for a while. Keeping my goal of an uncluttered workspace in sight, I’ve made two trips to the Op Shop to donate some of the more useful gear and a lot more trips out to the bin with bags of junk so far. After unearthing the label-machine, all the boxes and drawers got shiny new labels as I put things away. My theory is that this will make it much easier – and less frustrating – to finding the left-hand widget (or whatever) that I know I had somewhere.

It’s been pretty satisfying to do a little every day, working around a slightly anxious dog and see the goalposts getting closer. Next step: getting that lawn down. We shall make it so 🙂

A week of downtime and relaxing

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The past week was my almost-holiday between terms. This is the relatively quiet time when I generally get to enjoy some downtime, with only a few hours of work thrown into the mix each week. I managed to be out of work-mode for a while, but have had to wrack my brains a bit to figure out just what – exactly – I did with my time (other than the usual daily thingos).

Well, first there was brunch down in Fremantle with a dozen or so people to celebrate a couple of birthdays, followed by a quick foray down onto the beach to laze around, paddle or – for the bravest amongst us – to swim.

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On one day we adventured off to meet our puppy for the first time. At all of six weeks old, Miss Molly turned out to be a-dor-able in every way. We get to bring her home in early November – and then the fun really begins!

Over the next couple days I managed to pack in quite a few things, now that I think about it. I rode my bike in the sun, zipping off on sundry missions to shops, library and friends. I’d almost forgotten just how much l love my bike and what fun it is to fly down hills with the wind in my hair. More of that to come over the summer, for sure. I read some books, planted some seedlings and a rose bush and finished the penultimate round of edits on my memoir. One more reader on that, then it’s time to hit up a publisher and see what emerges.

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Thursday morning was spent at work – so that wasn’t downtime at all, really, but putting nine volunteers through a training programme on the new computer system will make life easier for me next week, so it was a worthwhile investment. Afterwards I visited a damaged sibling – she broke her ankle earlier in the week and needed some cheering up. It felt good to be the one visiting and cheering for once, rather than on the receiving end. I think I make a better visitor than patient!

I attended week 4 of my ‘Smart Busy’ programme at Murdoch Uni, which motivated me to declutter several cupboards and get rid of some unnecessary stuff. VERY satisfying. During that process I came across some artwork that my brother did for me for a wedding invitation – nearly forty years ago, when he was living in Melbourne. How the wheel turns: I’m now in Perth and he’s in Johannesburg. Sadly he seldom sketches these days, but I’ve sent this one to him to see if it inspires him to start drawing again. We’ll see how that goes.

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A family dinner on one night included experimental Magic Bean Cake. It’s gluten free and very chocolatey – lots of good quality cocoa in there. Made as per the recipe it turned out super delicious and the unanimous vote was that it’s a definite do-again option. We had it for dessert, dusted with icing sugar and served with raspberries and custard. Yum. You can find the recipe I used here.  On Saturday we hit the veggie markets for fruit and veg and came away with an amazing haul of great stuff at bargain prices. I now need recipes for things to do with oranges – lots of oranges! Maybe the next magic bean cake should be orange flavoured…  The week has finally staggered to a close with gardening, a waterlogged German Shepherd (our water baby strikes again) and a trip to the cinema for ice-cream and a vampire movie.

It’s possible that I now need to go back to work to recover enough for more ‘down-time’!