Good news for the urban backyard farmer who for whatever reason doesn't have rainwater tanks - from September 1st you can now water your vegies more with the cessation of Stage 3a water restrictions in Melbourne. Instead Stage 2 restrictions mean:
"Automatic watering systems must not be used except between the hours of midnight and 4:00am on alternative days*. Hand-held hoses with a trigger nozzle, a bucket or watering can may be used at any time.
*Alternate days means odd numbered houses can water on odd dates of the month and even numbered houses can water on even numbered dates. Both odd and even numbered houses can water on the 31st of the month. Where there is no house number the property is considered an even numbered house."
Remember it's almost impossible to use more water growing vegies at home than what is used to grow supermarket vegies, so get those tomatoes and corn seedlings in the ground now! More info here and here.
We're continuing the process of creating broader recognition of the benefits of Permaculture Design with several talks on over the next few days at the Herald Sun Home Show and Garden Expo and a stall next door at the HIA Build Green show, showing off our new style of cypress vegie beds this weekend.
Check out the beds, which we've commissioned in cypress and made with exacting detail by Joe from Wallmaster.
You'll see some of our standard cypress vegie beds below, next to the sanded and finished beds at our HIA stall, which Joe has begun making for us. Both benefit from being free of pesticides, arsenic or chromium, naturally long life and termite resistant, and look and smell great, while being ethically sourced from dying trees on farm shelterbelts. So fantastic. You can contact us for a free quote.
The last three days I (Dan) did the first course in the ReganAg series. The topic was holistic management and the facilitator was Kirk Gadzia. It was a very worthwhile three days, and during the course of the workshop I wrote down a few insights (all paraphrased not direct quoted) which made me recall others from other teachers. Here they are:
General
All the tools available to us in managing biological systems (e.g., a garden or farm) are like stones we throw into a pond. Each makes ripples that overlap and resonate throughout the system Kirk Gadzia
We don't break ecosystem rules. We break ourselves against them Kirk Gadzia
Good patriots build soil (Bumper Sticker seen by Darren Doherty)
The best fertiliser is the footsteps of the gardener Chinese saying
Our true wealth is the fertility and health of our soil. It's like capital sitting in a bank. If we're foolish we'll squander our capital. If we're wise, we'll live off the interest and reinvest it to further build our asset (harvest a yield and build soil and the same time) Geoff Lawton
The golden rule of water flow: Making water travel the longest distance over the most time is the most fertile Geoff Lawton
More appropriate on farm-scale
First we make our properties blue (get our water sorted), then green (produce biomass), then black (build carbon-rich soils) Darren Doherty
Water & wire are the two most important minerals to get right on your farm Gwyn Jones
Time for a few snapshots of recent VEG activity. It's been a very full month, with over twenty vegie beds going in and three full design implementations underway. So it's all been about the likes of shovels, wheelbarrows, and cordless drills this month. We've lucked out with one client who has been spoiling us rotten with cups of tea and fresh muffins (thanks Pam!).
It was a thrill to see how quickly the vegies we planted very recently at Senior Citizen's centre were coming up. We even saw a group of Greek ladies out harvesting with much enthusiasm and words we couldn't understand!
...and here's Nath and Lex mulching a front-yard food forest in Kew - we guarantee our swales are level with natures supreme level tester - water!
...Adam finishing off a very swish corner yesterday afternoon...
...and the irrepressible Nath wrapping up the week with a big thumbs up!
Nath, Adam and Dan from VEG had a great weekend visiting our friends at Melliodora, the permaculture demonstration site and residence of David Holmgren and his partner Su Dennet. David is one of permaculture's two co-founders, so it was fantastic to be able to sit down and get some feedback on some of our recent design and soil analysis and remediation work here in Melbourne. As well as eating a lot of home-grown and highly-wholesome food grown on the property, celebrating Adam's birthday at a local bar, and pruning their elderly next-door neighbour's fruit trees, we helped on a long-term project of David and Su's - the revegetation of Spring Creek Gully. Dan shot a bit of footage of David explaing the project you can check out below. Watch out for Adam bouncing up and down on a blackberry trampoline in the background!
