Yesterday Dan shot this little clip of the just-completed VEG bed irrigation and chook watering system at Auburn South Primary School in Melbourne.

This weekend (October 20th & 21) VEG will be out in force, with day one of our flagship two-day Intro to Permaculture on Saturday and a presence at the Stringybark festival all weekend and both Spring Fling in North Melbourne and Whitehorse Spring Fest in Nunawading on Sunday with a stall and lots of free talks.  At Stringybark on Saturday Dan will be presenting on Growing your own Fruit Forest then at Spring Fling Dan will take to the stage re the power of chook, creating an edible oasis in your back yard, and growing fruit trees in pots, while at Spring Fest Kim will talk compost and Isobel growing subtropical edibles in Melbourne.  Hope to see you at one of these events spread out right across Melbourne!

Thanks to Phil from Highett for putting together this awesome album of photos from the kitset VEG bed he's just finished putting together in his front yard!

From this...

To this!

Happy growing Phil - may your veggies flourish!

When designing edible gardens, a site-specific problem will often crop up. One of the most enjoyable aspects of permaculture design for us is devising site-specific solutions to those problems. In this short series we give examples from our experience in Melbourne, with a new one whenever we get around to it...

Part Three – How to Drain a Duck Pond without getting Poo on your Hands

The Site-Specific Design Problem

The problem was how do you drain a duck pond in a way that

a) directs the overflow to the same exit pipe as when you drain it totally
b) doesn’t involve reaching your hand to the bottom of a pond full of duck poo
c) lets you easily drain out every last millimetre of sludge, and
d) lets you refill the pond without having to wait around to turn the tap off when it’s full

Here's the design in which this conundrum arose.  The duckpond is just above the tank in the lower left (under an apricot) and the infiltration path/trench it feeds is the worm-like thing curving up and around under the fruit trees...

The Site-Specific Design Solution

After trying a few ideas that were expensive and only partially effective, the solution came to us.  We added a bathplug to the lowest point on the base of the pond, which would mean draining every last millimetre of water when it was opened up.  We then crafted a short length of 50mm PVC pipe with a rubber adapter that pushed snugly into both the pipe and the plughole.  In a single system this both defined the overflow point and allowed the whole pond to be drained by simply lifting the pipe up.  We then added a simple twist timer on the inlet pipe meaning you can pull the overflow pipe / plug out, let the pond drain in about 1 minute, twist the timer to however long it takes to full the pond, shove the overflow pipe / plug back in, and walk away.  It works so well we’ll be using it in future duck ponds for sure.

Here's an album showing the installation of the pond...

...and here's a youtube of what the ducks do when the plug is pulled.

This morning two VEGers (Michael & Dan) installed three roughsawn VEG beds (1.2m wide by 2.2m long by 40cm high) in record time - four hours from arriving to leaving.  All fully leveled on secure chocks with internal bracing to prevent movement over time, a double layer of special fabric to prevent the couch grass from entering, and a double handfull of both blood & bone and rock dust per bed.  Happy growing to Tricia their happy owner!

We recently put a few photos of some of our chook systems together into a little booklet.  The photos are accompanied with text orienting folk planning for chooks to some of the key considerations and some of the tricks we have picked up during the last seven years designing and implementing chook systems across Melbourne.  As of right now you can download this booklet as a free PDF ebook (just like our VEG 2012 portfolio) by clicking on the image below (warning - it's 33 megabytes in size). Enjoy, hope it is of use, let us know if you need a hand, and happy chickening!

Congratulations to Lillian from Noble Park who is the winner of a standard kitset VEG bed.  Thanks to all our entrants for having a go, and if you were keen on one of the beds and didn't win, good news! - we're offering a 10% discount for the next week (closing 5pm Sunday October 14 2012) on our entire kitset VEG bed range.  Note we've increased the length of this discount due to an earlier typo that may have been confusing!

To access the discount, select a kitset bed or beds of your desired dimensions then go to the shopping cart and where it asks for a coupon code enter RMS2012 and 10% will automatically be deducted from your order.

A big thanks to our friend Pete the Magnificent Permie for contributing a whole bunch of his gorgeous fruit trees to our stall, and to the one and only Vasili for coming by and being in a photograph with us.

VEG's Will & Dan had a lovely time commencing the edibilisation of a Kew backyard today.  Nice when everything goes like clockwork and you go home with smile, feeling blessed to get to design & set up food gardens for a living.  When the owner and budding backyard farmer Josh got home this afternoon we was so stoked to see his new beds we joked we should get his statements on film.  Josh said "totally - let's do it" so we filmed a short, unedited totally spontaneous 'moment' in Josh's backyard:

Josh's TopShelf VEG beds were on the large and hence heavy side (these things are built so solid they'll last generations!) so we used a delivery method we have never used before - check it out!

...and here are a few photos from the day.

We will continue to document Josh's (and his wife Tania's) project as it unfolds, and we are keen to get more footage of Josh as he gets seriously edible at home, so stay tuned - this is a live story that will continue to evolve.  Phases to come include an orchard and full chook system as per the design below which we completed last March.