ENTHUSIASM IN A TIGHT SPACE

Kids rendering the earthbags at the Flemington Permablitz
SSitting up with a gasp at 4am we heard rain rocketing down on our tin roof as loud as gunfire and we rush outside to make sure our newly rendered garden beds didn’t bear any rain shaped bullet wounds. We were lucky, it had dried just in time.

With a backdrop of grey morning we began to set up the garden for the Edible Gardens Open Day. As the sky darkened Kelly from our local council and the volunteers from MINTI (the Flemington Transition Group) began to arrive with 50 fliers in hand to give out, 50 we laughed, perhaps 30 people will come to have a look. Between 10:30 and 4pm the skies cleared to a glorious blue day and over 200 people passed through our front gate!

It is quite surreal to see 80 people at a time crammed into our small garden, with a bemused sense of unreality we explained our design to the group. The overwhelming sense of good will they offered us with their smiles and eager questions was beautiful. After our rush to get our garden ready, which the bees resented giving us two stings the day before, it was delightful and relieving to see everyone having such a good time (and no stings!). Even the render stood up to being walked on by children and adults alike, being used as a motorway for toy trucks and as a springboard for gymnastic tricks (children only).

My uncarefully laid plans of showing the time-lapse of our garden to a small huddle of people was unrealistic, so I will share it with you here and hope you get as much a kick out of it as me. After the first few viewing I had way too much fun watching minor details like our sunflowers growing and dying and where the neighbours’ cat is going to show up next!


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AMATEUR APIARISTS

Removing bars from top bar hive

Honey bee close up on a glove

Smoker for bees being lit

Removing bars from top bar hive

Worker bees on bar

Jess brushing bees off honeycomb

Honeycomb oozing with honey

Looking up at the comb from below

Honey dripping off comb

Jess with a bee sting, taking one for the team

Top bar hive with roof off

Jess watching from a safer distance after her sting

Honey on the raised earthbag garden beds

Brushing off bees after the collection

 

The warm, sweet smell of honey was so strong it had begun to sway towards the sickly side of delicious. We thought it might be time to harvest a few bars.

Last year when bee mania hit our sharehouse the newspaper arrived on our doorstep with a front page cautionary tale of beekeeping gone wrong in Flemington. We considered ourselves safe as long as we steered clear of “bizarre nocturnal attempt(s) to move a beehive onto a roof” and “beer fueled escapade(s)” . But when it came time to try harvesting our honey, finding ourselves short of a suit, smoker and experience, we thought who better to call than our Irish neighbour of “bee bungle” fame, we bee keepers have to stick together and afterall 60 stings later he would surely be a lot wiser for his experience.

Quick to laugh and enjoy the challenges of the bee keeping experience, Andrew was a delightful addition to our little honey gang. And challenges are never shy around us, culminating in our bees having been very busy over spring fusing the bars diagonally to each other rather than in neat little lines. So the removal experience wasn’t quite as easy as we had hoped, a call to the bee man, Martin, informed us we would probably have to remove the offending combs in winter and start afresh! There weren’t many stings, although one did involve an unfortunate incident of a bee flying up someone’s pants which elicited gales of laughter from the flats above.

The gorgeous, golden Flemington honey was worth our misadventures and hopefully with a little bit of experience we will be running our bee operation in a less chaotic fashion next year.

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AUTUMN FLOWERS AND UNRULY CLIMBERS

Happy hens demanding food scrap treats

Happy hens demanding food scrap treats

Cleaning up the garden for the open garden in April

 

Zucchini tromboncino in umbelliferae bed

Sunflowers in the driveway

Raised earthbag garden beds in autumn

Maize in the orchard

Pots on the deck

Pepperfish chilli varigated leaves

 

Watercress in the bird bath

Yellow viola bordering the legume garden bed

Eating green beans in the garden

Purple violas in the legume bed

Harvesting beetroot

Orange poppy in the legume bed

Legume bed with flower and herbs around the border

White zinnia in the brassica bed

View from legume bed into solanace bed

Painted lady runner beans

Garden beds in full autumn flush

 

For a while the garden was inconsolable, having missed the spring flush it went into a right sulk, but with autumn here, not even the shyest runner bean has been able to resist unfurling for a sun bake. We have been in a mad flurry trying to get the garden into order for our open day in April. Through January and February beach weather demanded a lot of our attention, but now with the threat of judgmental strangers raising a questioning eyebrow at wilting vines and sorry spring remnants we have to get to the business of patching up the render and getting onto that damn earth oven!

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A GARDEN COMES TO LIFE

 

Raised earthbag garden beds with scratch coat of render

Little next door neighbour chatting with the chooks

Raised earthbag garden beds with first coat of earthen plaster

Beginnings of an earth oven

Legume crop rotation garden bed

Raised garden beds planted out

 

Our raised earth bag garden beds are rendered like a patchwork quilt, marked by dozens of helpful hands. Little details are cheeky and drag on for months and months and what began as a fun excuse to revert back to early mud pie days took gritted teeth to finish (let’s not talk about the fact that this is only the scratch coat).  It was such a relief to get some green back in the garden, bare earth is something I hope has been banished from our garden for good. Luckily we have agreed to show our garden as part of a permaculture open garden scheme for our local council in April, nothing lights a fire under you quite like the fear of public humiliation!

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