Posts filed under 'Gardening'
Birds
Cockatoos descend upon the sunflower patch most days around dusk to gorge on the seeds. I don’t mind — I plant sunflowers to attract birds anyway, but it annoys me when they stray and eat the green tomatoes and green passionfruit. The kookaburra usually visits in the morning, eats a few worms or a small lizard, and then takes off again.
The first photo below is a female bower bird — the male is an iridescent midnight blue, and we don’t see him very often. I’ll add a photo if I ever get one! The sparrows eat insects around the vegie patch. The only plants they seem to touch are the sunflowers.
January 10th, 2002
I’ve been wanting to buy one of those commercial tumbling compost bins for a long time now, but they cost over $300 bought new. You’d have to make truckloads of compost for that price to be worthwhile! Time for some miserly cunning.
When buying bales of lucerne from the feed store at Albion Park Rail, I noticed they had a few large PVC drums lying around. I asked if they were for sale, and got one for $25. They also had smaller ones (about a third this size) for $20 - they’d be good for making comfrey tea or liquid manure. Getting it into the boot of my hatch-back was not easy - these things are about the size of a 44 gallon drum, and I already had two bales of hay in there.
Once home, I drilled a few holes in the drum to let air in and water out, then filled it with leaves, manure, grass clippings and garden prunings. I also chucked in a few handfuls of comfrey, a dash of blood and bone, and a shovel of fresh compost to seed the bacteria and micro-organisms. Every morning I roll it around the yard to mix up the contents, check it’s not too dry inside, and then leave it to stand in the sun. If it works like a normal tumbling compost bin (and I see no reason it shouldn’t!), I should have nice compost within a month or two.
The nice thing about this compost bin is its portability. You just roll it to where you want to use the compost, screw the lid off, and empty it out. It’s the same when filling it with weeds or prunings - it comes to the job with you.
The bin was filled on 9-12-2001. I’ll post more photos as the compost breaks down, to give you an idea how quickly it works.
One thing to note - if you’re going to use a drum like this to make compost, check what it’s been used for first. This one was an old olive barrel, and had more recently been used to store horse feed. You definitely don’t want to make compost in something that once held chemicals, oil or some other noxious substance.
December 11th, 2001
I began building the new vegie patch on 16-9-2001. Railway sleepers are bloody heavy - don’t start a garden like this with a pregnant wife who can’t help!
By 17-10-2001 (hey, nothing works fast in our house!), the retaining walls were set up. I laid a thick layer of newspapers over the grass, then arranged biscuits of lucerne hay on top. In the top bed, I planted pea, corn and sunflower seeds in handfuls of compost.
This is what the sunflowers looked like on 26-11-2001:
On 9-12-2001 we covered the whole back section of the yard with a thick layer of newspaper (hose it down to stop it blowing around), and then spread lucerne hay over the top. That’s another 30 or 40 square metres of lawn I no longer need to mow.
December 11th, 2001
The more beneficial creatures you can get to take up residence in your back yard, the less work you have to do to keep garden pests under control.
Lizards
Lizards clean up slugs, snails and other bugs. All they seem to want in return is a log or rock to live under and a pond or a few shallow containers of water left around the yard. Don’t use snail pellets if you’ve got lizards in your yard - they’ll die if they eat a poisoned snail.
Insects
Despite their sissy name and girly looks, lady beetles are actually ferocious insectivores. They especially love sucking the juices out of aphids and mites. The fellow below didn’t cause that leaf damage - he’s eating the bugs that did!
Bees make sure all the flowers get pollinated properly.
December 9th, 2001
