Apart from getting the house underway we felt it was important to get the garden started. We have learnt from experience that it is best to get everything started, even a little, rather than do tasks one after the other. That way things can get growing while we are working on the building. We spend our spare days either gardening or building.
It has also been a priority to get some trees in as they take so long to get established, we have planted 100 natives so far around our road frontages to help add to our privacy, but there’s a long way to go. We still have 200 plants in pots to plant out!!!
This schedule was interrupted recently due to the fires nearby and we have had to brushcut and mow our firebreak in very hot conditions. Keeping the garden alive has been a challenge recently due to the hot weather and strong winds. Sometimes we have had to water daily as the heat takes it toll.
As we are both vegan it means can we can provide a large part of our diet from our own garden. This means less food miles but more importantly to us it means the food tastes like it should and is nutritious. My mouth is watering as I write this thinking about the food that is coming on to harvest.
We have been getting a bowl of raspberries a day which is great as we only put the canes in 16 weeks ago, and the fruiting wood is bearing well, and new canes sprouting everywhere. We had enough fruit to make raspberry cordial this week, and you can give it to your kids as there are no chemicals or food colourings, just rasberries, sugar and citric acid.
Apart from raspberries, we have planted rainbow chard, kale, various lettuce, radishes (red and black), snow peas, French beans, carrots (white, orange, yellow and red), beetroot, cucumber, zucchini, okra, tomatoes, Florence fennel, parsley, Chinese celery, thyme, marjoram, native peppers, chives, garlic . . . . and so on.
And you remember the poly-tunnel greenhouse that we built a couple of weeks ago . . . well the tomatoes are loving it and have grown like mad as you can see, they are going to be delicious, but keeping them alive is going to be hard with the hot days, we will need to do something better than the 70% shadecloth we have installed as it still gets way too hot in there!!! It will be great in the winter, we have a table and chairs in there and our geranium collection.
Due to the lack of soil we have had to bring some in from a neighbouring property. It is fennel and mint mulch that has composted for the last two years so it is like soil, and smells sweet, almost good enough to eat. To that we have added some of the sandy soil from the site and mixed in 38 bags of organic compost that we bought with us from our property at Bagdad. We have made bio-char from the tree tops that were cleared to make room for the house, and we have mixed all that carbon into the soil too and the plants seem to like it.
Banksia Hollow 