Productive Permaculture

There's seven minutes left in the Australia v South Africa World Cup quarter final. Australia is leading by 2. I'm not really into football but Gibbo is making me nervous. Six minutes. I'm walking away. Gonna make a cappucino to use up time. Then I'll be back to post about my day............and give a result. Five minutes.

Yeeeeessssssss..........AUSTRALIA WON. Gibbo's blood pressure is through the roof - we tested it on his machine.......167 over 90 with a pulse of 103! He's gone outside to his chooks to calm down a bit. Phew. The coffee is good.

I went to the nursery again yesterday and bought some more veges.

I bought some vine veges - jap pumpkin, green and yellow button squash and watermelon - and wondered where I was going to plant them; I didn't want to put them in the regular permaculture garden like I did last time as they took up too much space - then I had the brilliant idea of planting them in the remnants of the manure pile. It's leftover from the big pile I had earlier in the year and has had chook pen scrapings and lucerne chucked on top so it should be good.........but it needed a lot of cleaning up around the edges, digging the couch grass out. My hands are a mess.

 I also planted corn right up the middle.

 Mulched.

 And my gofer boy today even helped me build a fence to keep the goats out!

I moved the teenage girls into the pen next to the Plymouth Rocks and put the teenage boys into the permaculture pen.

 The cat helped. A bit. Well sort of. She sat and watched.

I made a new mandala garden inside the permaculture enclosure. All the mandalas have something growing in them now, except for the one the chooks are in. I've run out of bricks so I took the wheelbarrow into the bush out the back and hunted for rocks. I had to do three trips. I was very tired when I finished. My gofer boy was nowhere to be seen when I was lugging the wheelbarrow back and forward.

Into it I planted wombok cabbage and radish.

I also made a worm farm - the frame is lucerne bales and I will fill the space with soaked newspapers and dried cow manure pats and then add 1000 compost worms (I'll buy them online). Then I'll feed them with kitchen scraps and cover them with wet hessian bags........and voila, beautiful soil, all made by worms. That's the theory anyway; the execution may be a little different but it sounds good. I saw it on Gourmet Farmer (SBS Thursdays 7.30pm).

And here's how it looks now when I walk into the garden area.

I also bought some mini pumpkin seedlings. They're a "personal pumpkin producing an abundance of bright red orange mini pumpkins. Fruits are small, approx 6 x 11cm, .5 to 1.5kg on runnerless plants". If nothing else they'll be interesting in the garden.

I also had my gofer boy reposition the concrete tubs (after I'd sent him off to get another tyre "oh and while you're there can you pick me up eight of the spoiled lucerne bales...and don't forget the four steel posts and the rammer. We have to make that fence". I liked having a gofer for a short while; I told him "now I know how you feel all the time, having a gofer girl". He just gave a wry smile and disappeared. I actually wanted them around the other way, with the slanted side out but they're extremely heavy....and I didn't want to push my luck. Plus, he didn't get a very good report at the doctor's during the week - put on weight, cholestrol is up, blood pressure is way too high - he was scolded by both the diabetes nurse and the doctor. He had an ECG. They put him on a cholestrol tablet. He had to bring the blood pressure machine home and record his readings three times a day. On a positive note, his blood sugar level is good. So I didn't want to put too much strain on anything.

I haven't decided yet what to plant in the tubs. I have my herbs in the middle mandala inside the garden so I'll have to think about it.