gardening Archives - Page 2 of 15

food forest stages

April 2, 2017 4 Comments

Sharing perfect red apples, sweet and crisp. The littlest apple tree repaid us this year for building a food forest around it. The runt of the litter, this little guy secretly had the tastiest fruit of all our trees with mysterious ancestry. It is amazing how quickly everything has shot up this year with drip irrigation on the dry edges and the understorey established. Nurturing these stunted little trees was the original goal of developing the Food Forest, but it’s not time to hang up our gardening gloves, it’s time for the real work to begin! This year we had the most bountiful harvest from the smallest tree in the forest, but how could that be? Simple, the smallest tree was the only one we could net with a donated mesh curtain. Now that the trees are happier than ever and have never had more fruit, we have competition for the spoils! No time for complacency, we’re moving from STAGE 1 SAVE THE TREES to STAGE 2 SAVE THE FRUIT! It’s quite an education. This Food Forest business might be low physical maintenance, but it a constant work out for the brain.

After a brilliant harvest year last year, this year the apricot was heavy with fruit fly infested fruit. It is truly heartbreaking to have to fill two garbage bags full of fruit to be solarised and discarded. The Granny Smith Apples too have befriended a flock of Lorikeets which look darling bobbing on the trees tops , but leave a real mess. So what do we do? It’s time to make a plan. Do you have any tips?

When I started blogging about my ramble into permaculture it was tempting just to post the Instagramable photos and hide the ‘challenges’, but I have tried to keep everything transparent. I believe sharing mishaps can be as valuable as triumphs, let’s not call them failures, they are sour lessons, but a lessons none the less. We can look to nature, we can look to human agriculture and we’re falling somewhere in between, so looking back at our own experiences is our best guide forwards. If you’re ever feeling discouraged, just read the One Straw Revolution and you’ll see that even the great Masanobu Fukuoka killed two acres of mandarin trees when he started out and a further 400 trees before he discovered the “natural pattern”. Those 400+ trees were his gift to us, because by sharing his mistakes we don’t need to make the same. His “do nothing farming” is not about actually doing no work at all, but not doing “unnecessary work”. The further you diverge from the natural way the more work you have to do. When I discovered these apple and apricot trees they were already over 5 years old although you wouldn’t have known it from their stature and barren branches, they were planted very closely together, were grafted , roughly pruned, swamped by grass and nearly ring barked by whipper snippers. They will always need more maintenance than the new trees I plant with low initial interference resulting in less maintenance in the long run, or as Fukuoka put it “meddling”. If I left them to themselves their branches would tangle and they would be attacked by insects just like Fukuoka’s mandarins. I have even learned that I had to pull the bushy underplanting of the apricot tree right back to almost the drip line as any fallen fruit left to rot would perpetuate the cycle of pest and bushes made this anti-treasure hunt too difficult. The olives have been by far the easiest trees to deal with only requiring harvesting and the occasional heavy prune just to keep its prodigious growth at bay. Nasturtiums and “prostrate” salt bush squirreling around their trunks and blossoming in their canopy have not bothered them one bit. STAGE 3 will be more about exploring the best low maintenance edible trees and companions for the marginal edges of the park with no irrigation and minimal “meddling”. It will be interesting to see how Fukuoka’s principles for natural farming work in a small scale urban setting.

Stage 1

Save the trees

Challenge

- Trees being damaged by lawn maintenance
- Trees stunted by stress – insufficient water + food, injury
- Trees planted close together
- Trees roughly pruned

Plan

- Create paths by digging out 20cm of soil, lining edges with cardboard and filling with free woodchip mulch
- Sheet mulch running grass around trees with free cardboard and hessian sacks
- Lay drip irrigation around trees connected to water tank
- Add 10cm mushroom compost over sheet mulch, mound 20cm deep around new seedlings only (cost saving), protect soil with straw or other light weight mulch
- Plant strong understorey of woody perennials around path edges
- Plant perennial ground covers and self-seeding annuals
- Mulch initially, then chop and drop

Lessons

- Sheet mulching was surprisingly successful. The only problem areas are near the chainlink fence where grass grows under from the communiuty garden. Need to sheet mulch this edge and add woodchip path as this barrier has been successful on oval edge. Any grass that grows into path is easy to pull out due to the air pockets and the high density woodchips suppresses plant growth.
- The woodchips and mulch were not clear enough for some people, some plants were trampled, adjusting paths to desire lines rather than being uncompromising
- Reduced tripping hazards – removed brick edging and ensured garden stakes had tennis balls on end or were lower than tree guards
- Originally tried just hand watering but in summer many small plants on the edges got burnt and some died so a couple of lines of drip irrigation on an automatic timer saved a lot of time/money for the long term. Wished we installed at the beginning.
- Many small plants from tubes got trampled or burnt, tree guards are essential around path edges or growing plants to a 20cm-30cm pot size would have saved losses. An adopt a cutting/seedling scheme would be helpful to share the maintenance of looking after the plants too small to planted out can be shared.
- Fruiting plants are much more high maintenance and nutrient hungry than those grown for their leaves, waiting until the garden is really established and protected until planting these has been vital for their survival – will concentrate more on this for stage 2, keeping these plants in pots at home and planting out when they are more established and ready to fruit.
- Mulch with fallen street tree leaves and chop and drop to recycle nutrients as plants grows
- Now ground covers are established a new plants can be planted by clearing a patch of ground cover and planting in the now rich soil, have had some problems with planting fruiting annuals in damper areas due to snails. Seeds sown direct early in drier edges has surprisingly been more successful or plants grown on in milk cartons until stems are thicker then transplanted with a tree guard and a few pet friendly snail pellets.
- Aphids attached the wattle plants when they were first planted due to stress, but as the plants were nourished and lady birds came to clear the aphids the plants have thrived without intervention
- Chop and drop and only minimal harvesting have meant that no soil amendments have been thus required, except a handful of compost when a new plant is added, as harvesting increases this may change, looking at growth and leaves for signs of deficiency
- Sunflowers don’t self seed because birds eat all the seeds, but kids love them so worth planting every year – seeds easy to save it orange net bag put over finished flower head
- Involving community in harvesting and preserving olives was a lot of fun, hope to have more of these days as the trees mature
- Shallow rooted bunching bulbs like garlic chives thrive around the bases of fruit trees without disturbing their roots

Thriving starter plants

Tough shurbs such rosemary, sage, curry plant, wormwood, lavender, feverfew, lemon verbena, mugwort, wattle have been the most success shrubs and have been easily propagated
Ground covers such as yarrow, pigface, mint, warrigal greens, saltbush
Self seeding annuals such as nasturtiums, parsley, calendula, wild rocket, chard, radishes
Fruiting shurbs – native raspberries, elderbery, pepino, caperbush, alpine strawberries, cape gooseberry,
Herbaceous plants – jerusalem artichokes, tansy, pineapple sage, yacon, lemon balm, catmint, sorrel

Stage 2

Save the fruit

Challenge

- Fruit being eaten by birds
- Pepinos eaten by rats or mice?
- Fruitfly in apricot
- Curly leaf on nectarines and peach
- Apricot has a lot of suckers from the plum root stock, either from damage by digging to close to the tree or from stress
- Plant more fruiting understorey plants

Plan

Create exclusions bags for bunches of fruit
Sew curtains from the op shop into exclusion nets for whole trees, net after petals fall – new nets are $55 so will try and make where possible
Cut trees right back in summer to fit into nets
Keep picking up all dropped fruit to avoid spreading pests
Spray nectarine and peach with lime sulfur at early bud swell, pick off all infected leaves and bury in deep hole far from trees to prevent reinfection. Feed infected trees with nitrogen to encourage new leaves.
Remove suckers at their base as soon as they appear, don’t plant near apricot base to reduce stress
Last year I rooted some of the plum suckers and this winter I will graft the apricot on to these root stocks as back up plants
Now the garden in more established I can plant some more delicate, but more delicious understorey plants – currants, raspberries, strawberries, chilean guava, feijoa, strawberry guava, globe artichoke
Take more cutting of the hardy plants to fill in the gaps
Add more mulches as harvesting increases – seaweed, leaves, grass clippings
Plant more dynamic accumulators, nitrogen fixers and green manures

Garden, Travel

Simon Rickard’s Garden

May 7, 2016 No Comments

On a sun soaked autumn day we visited Simon Rickard’s Open Garden.

The thrill of inspiration is always on my radar, whether it be a self-sown masterpiece or a lovely cultivated combination. Nature and man both have enough lessons to pack my head full to buzzing and I forgot how great it is to blog it out. Recording and unraveling my thoughts and sharing these beautiful places with you.

So there is nowhere better to start than a quiet little street in Trentham, bursting with produce and an ornamental walk that would have impressionists reaching for their brushes. Simon Rickard, (ex-Digger’s Club head gardener, author of Heirloom Vegetables and modern bassoonist), with his curled mustache and suspenders could have stepped straight out of Portlandia’s song Dream of the 1890s. It takes panache and swagger to carry of a Mo that ornate and I think Simon just made gardening a little bit cooler.

The arbitrary nature of what humans deem beautiful or not must somehow connect back to our primitive brain and its associations with nature. Is this curving walk through soft swaying stems in mauves, greens and pinks an echo of a safe meadow where we could lay down a head for a nap?

Simon certainly has perfected the art of the cultivated wild. No doubt each plant has been carefully selected and situated but the overall appearance is effortless.

Pruning timed expertly before each plant burst into autumn colour so they are compact but not topiaries. When I started the Flemington Food Forest I thought I could just let things take their natural form, but found in the limited space some plants were too unruly and I had to rescue their neighbours from imminent smothering. He also allows big blocks of colour and plant. It’s hard when you begin gardening not to plant things to close together, after all they are tiny when they go in. Careful construction of a perennial armature filled in with mulch, annuals and groundcovers seems like it would save time in plant wrangling in the future.

Simon’s garden plot is surrounded by a post and wire fence which is a direction we are trying to head in at the Norfolk Terrace Rehabilitation garden. It’s so lovely to see that vertical space protecting as well as delineating the vegetable plot. The evergreen edible hedge to the west with a row of sunflowers behind is where we got our first glimpse of Simon, a hipster cowboy with bewitched older ladies in tow. To the north thornless cane berries reached taller than I had ever seen before and the other compass points espaliered deciduous fruit trees.

What’s your favourite part of Simon’s garden? Which private or public gardens inspire you?

The veggie beds themselves were overflowing with produce, laid out in more of the European style rows than the riot of companion planting I’m use to. He does mix onions and carrots, but even those are in neat little groves. There is something nice about a lovely straight row of lettuces, but with chicken’s like mine scattering the tastier leafies is the only way they can survive hiding behind spring onions and lavender. A fence of juicy red apples, pumpkin’s as big as your head and teepees of beans… what an eden! It’s a lovely reminder, nay reinforcement that edible gardens can have a lush sort of beauty that can hold its own against any ornamental.

Garden

Little Desert Permaculture

July 25, 2015 No Comments

A family’s passion to bring permaculture to the harshest of Victorian landscapes.
A guest post by Dieter and Ilse from the Little Desert.

On the edge of the Wimmera region of Western Victoria in the heart of wheat and sheep country a family is going against the status quo to create a permaculture Eden.

Ilse and I originally had a laugh over email about how my list of plants that can survive utter neglect in Melbourne wouldn’t have a fighting chance where she lives on the edge of the Little Desert National Park. In her words the only survivors without water in their “hot, sunny, parch summers and frosty winters” would be “wormwood, maybe dandelion and nettle if we have a little rain!”. Now that would make a tasty salad!! Ha!

So I invited her to write a guest post about the unique challenges she faces in her extreme climate and how she has overcome them. I was excited to find out more and I knew you would be too. Her son Dieter wrote the following post and I hope his beautiful account of their journey inspires you all as much as it did me. We’re not alone in our struggles against man and bug and the hard work pays off! We look forward to a sequel in a few months!

Permaculture in practice, practice, practice…
And, patience.
Our garden on it’s way to eden is in a hot, dry, but also frosty small town surrounded by conventional grain growing farmers, where starting a permaculture garden can definitely be demanding. Especially when there’s not too many others who share the same inspiration and can lend a hand in sharing their ‘what works’ and ‘what dries up before you can plant em’ tips and tricks. So without too much experience, much of what we do is trial and error, with more often sometimes error in the beginning phases of setting things up.

In a way, however, this is something you can enjoy. Kind of like deriving a sense of importance because you’re about the only ones who are making an effort in this line of work (apart from a few local inspirations), whilst everyone else around you is carelessly spraying, consuming, or not having the slightest interest in the stuff around them which they would really actually LOVE if they even perhaps knew it was there.

Sometimes, it is a bit disheartening. When you see greens of greens of gardens in other climates with fruit trees, and even just weeds would be kind of good, perhaps, if they grew. Winter is our wet season, but summer can be long, hot and dry without much going on unless you’ve got some good irrigation systems, or established trees.

But, with much excitement, some things do work.

This first one is the vegie patch under shade cloth, including a few wicking beds. Goji berry growing on the south end, beans on the far end (north) Frames up for cucumbers to climb to save space. Not enough morning sun in this patch though, as our double storey dwelling over shadows it. I am thinking of putting in more fruit trees and shifting the vegie patch out the back further under shade cloth that allows the morning sun and covers north and west. Even though that would be like in zone 2. Not much choice though.

Arrowroot loving the heat, but growing in a wicking bed. Have just made another round wicking bed on the hot north side of the garden and are transferring the arrowroot over there to act as a wind break.

Desperately trying to get grapes growing everywhere for summer shade.

Have lost quite a few thyme plants despite that they are meant to like the heat. So this time the thyme went in a bucket of water!

And our little success story. Our "hugel nests" of fruit tree pruning (thanks to locals not knowing what to do with them) left over after the hugel bed had been topped up with them, and grass clippings. The idea of was to keep the summer blazing sun off around the roots of the trees, the side effect was not curly leaf that year :) — And our little success story. Our “hugel nests” of fruit tree pruning (thanks to locals not knowing what to do with them) left over after the hugel bed had been topped up with them, and grass clippings. The idea of was to keep the summer blazing sun off around the roots of the trees, the side effect was not curly leaf that year 🙂

french-millet-buckwheat-mallow2 — This second one is french millet growing, with a bit of buckwheat, rocket and the forever opportunistic mallow. I’d sown the french millet as a green manure. It was watered to get it started but then no more and was lush green all through summer. The rocket and the mallow had a sprinkler over it on a timer, so some may have sprayed over at times. However, note the amaranth struggling behind the millet. Will be guerilla gardening some of our millet seed on the roadsides next summer…. maybe some farmers may take note and use it as a green manure instead of spraying weeds out in summer.

The first thing that works is definitely taking the right mindset. It seems that in permaculture many people take things very seriously. Like the world is going to fall apart if we don’t work day and night trying to save it. Save what exactly is probably the largest misunderstanding, because all things that need to be saved have a mind of their own, and DO have the ability to contribute to their own salvation, or destruction. So not getting too tied up with overt responsibilities in a demanding environment is probably a good mindset to have, and especially if you have other needs and responsibilities.

Our garden is a part time effort, and in a way, it makes it easier to see what works, and what doesn’t. If something gets neglected, and it survives, it stands out pretty clear. A few good things like that amongst a few likeminded people and you already have the potential to create some permanent sustainable systems.

Wicking beds work great… when they have water. A local showed us his wicking beds on an automatic irrigation system. They looked fantastic!
Hugelbeds…. still in experimentation but they certainly do hold moisture even at the end of the long hot summer, and mulch, mulch, mulch obviously makes such a difference to trees, and the soil.

Setting up your garden to receive the right amount of light is important too. Even though our climate is somewhat semi arid, we don’t want too much shade but even some small exposure to our hot sun can fry things up. We have a very hot west sun and some dry hot winds, but the right plant in the right spot with adequate water will do wonderful.

We have found that growing trees from seed do very well. We have some peaches that come up here and there and they go full bore for their first year without hardly any irrigation. The hotter it gets the more arrowroot seems to grow, and the winter is a great time for getting things started, indoors.

Our irrigation system made a huge difference to our trees, which would be too demanding on us otherwise.

And aquaponics works well too in full sun.

Probably the most interesting thing about our place is that our efforts, and those of a few, do become noticed, and gradually work their way into the minds of locals. To see a system which is so ‘advanced’, that is the current way of life that most people around here live, to make some subtle changes, to turn a few heads and pause for a moment. That really is something.

Of course it would be easy to inspire the ones who are on the edge of their seats already, but those who lay in the gutters wondering how they arrived in their misery, it is something special to watch them see the light, even if it only comes from the corner of their eye.

I know a man who is also doing some great things with his family in our area in permaculture. He has poly tunnels and aquaponics which both apparently work well. So there is lots of sun, and lots of opportunity for things to grow here. There are watercourses and swamps not too far from our area which shows excellent opportunity.

But apart from all that, working in the garden in peace, away from the busyness of the world can feel like a small reach from Heaven, sometimes.

Digging deep, 1 meter deep for our sunken hugel bed. Didn't want to go high in this hot climate. Local pine trees that had been felled at the footy oval, saved from being burnt by the council and put to better use! ( they still burnt a heap). — Digging deep, 1 meter deep for our sunken hugel bed. Didn’t want to go high in this hot climate. Local pine trees that had been felled at the footy oval, saved from being burnt by the council and put to better use! ( they still burnt a heap).

Followed by local horse poo and duck poo ( duck farms around here)

and more grass. Notice the green grass behind, this is winter here.

Finally the hugelbed with sleepers around its edge and flattened on top. The soil is very sandy here, water runs of and doesn't soak in too well. Everything in it struggled this year once the summer really hit, just tried to get it covered a bit with vines. (sweet potato and mung beans) Next summer it will be shade clothed and hopefully the blueberries now planted will kick off :) — Finally the hugelbed with sleepers around its edge and flattened on top. The soil is very sandy here, water runs of and doesn’t soak in too well. Everything in it struggled this year once the summer really hit, just tried to get it covered a bit with vines. (sweet potato and mung beans) Next summer it will be shade clothed and hopefully the blueberries now planted will kick off 🙂

Looking north west towards the back of our yard. Another bit of shade cloth for shade refuge. Behind the rusty water tank is our happy little fig tree on the edge of the hugel bed. To the right a young mulberry with a pile of grass at its feet, compliments of the local cemetery. Waiting for the junk to leave the old timber shed to convert it into a glasshouse hopefully. In the background the local reserve and dry grass vacant land next door, where we have planted a few nectarine and peach trees from seed which are growing, albeit slowly, with very little water.

Garden

how to improve poor soils for free

July 12, 2015 2 Comments

Forget the expensive wetting agents and don’t just chuck that poor soil out, even the driest, nutrient devoid soil is worth saving. Improve poor soils for free!

This is exciting – a new backyard with a blank canvas of dry, lifeless, hydrophobic soil. You might think that sounds like a nightmare for a gardener, but this as opportunity for me to see permaculture work to fix this soil and share it with you (and I’m trying to have more of a can do attitude so glass half full mode switched ON). Soil is precious and unless it is highly contaminated no soil is too far gone to throw away and replaced with bought soil. Just look at this video about greening the desert if you don’t believe me!

You don’t need to do a large area at once, in fact I advise against it! Start small and stagger your plantings. This keeps it manageable and allows you to use your household waste as you make it.

Now that’s not to say I wouldn’t buy a little compost to get my annual wicking beds started, I’m not perfect permaculture princess. I’ve just moved so my compost bin is going to take a year to mature and hot composts can be full on when you’ve got a full time job, plus so cold outside + lazy! I want to encourage people to just start growing, so if like me you end up growing and eating some home-grown food whilst holding down a 9-5 job then I consider the embodied energy in that bag of compost well and truly offset. But improving the soil in a perennial garden bed doesn’t have to be time consuming, back breaking or expensive. In fact it can be free! I did the following for a few minutes every other day whilst having a cold! You need look no further than your own home & garden to make that dead soil rich with humus and teaming with life. I’m doing all this with items scavenged from around the house and garden, but if you want to speed things up or don’t have chickens or rabbits for manure nothing I suggest is expensive.

So let’s get started! Let’s make this a well-structured earth worm mansion! I’ll update you in a few months to see how it’s going and with my trusty (or maybe a bit unreliable) soil testing kit I’ll compare the results.

Ingredients

When soil is right it is like a rich chocolate cake: moist, dark brown, slightly crumbly, with just the right amount of air and of course teaming with worms, haha just kidding!

So here are my ingredients for chocolate cake soil, like all recipes if you know what each ingredient does you can adjust them to you (or your soil’s) tastes.

Organic Matter, Mini Swales, Water & Clay, Pioneer plants, Green Manure, Mulch, Chop & Drop, Perennials

green-perennial-plant-leaves-tree-nutrient-accumulators

dried-leaves

green-grass-clippings

wood-ash-charcoal-soil-conditioner

torn-up-newspaper-shredded-high-carbon-content

Organic matter – a little bit of give and take

In nature plants drop their leaves to the forest floor, animals eat fruit, nuts and leaves and drop manure, little is wasted, it’s a closed loop. In the veggie patch we pull out dead plants and toss them in the green bin, we don’t have animals roaming dropping free manure and we harvest fruit, leaves and roots taking away all those mined and stored nutrients. We need to give something back or the soil will become more and more depleted.

My soil is just fill dumped by the council when they fixed the sewer line. Grey, devoid of earthworms, dry and fine as ash. It needs organic matter to provide food and habitat for beneficial microorganisms which make their stored nutrients available to growing plants. The term “acts like a sponge” is thrown around a lot in permaculture, but there is no better way of describing how organic matter helps to hold moisture in the soil.

Organic matter comes from the remains of organisms such as plants and animals and their waste products (not human waste products like old TVs, we’re talking manure, but don’t go using human manure either as like dogs and cats they contain way too many nasty bacteria.) I have a bucket in my kitchen where I put any household organic matter that won’t attract rats. So no fruit or cereals which go in the compost, but yes to: torn up paper and cardboard, leaves, flowers, coffee, tea, hair.
This is the lasagne or bolognese method for creating a no-dig garden with an optimum carbon to nitrogen ratio. I’m pretty casual about it (no calorie counting here), I just make sure I don’t put too much chunky carbon dense material in the garden beds I want to plant straightaway as this would bind up nitrogen as microbes try to break it down.

In the urban jungle there is quite a high risk of soil being contaminated whether it be from lead paint flaking off old weatherboards or the dodgy guy who used to strip car bodies in the backyard (no kidding this was what Dylan’s neighbour did along with other unsavoury activities). This is more of a problem for your leafy annuals and root crop where the soil might linger on the vegetable. Fruits have low levels of lead intake so this is what I’m mainly going to grow in this garden bed (fruit trees, tomatoes, eggplant, capsicum, beans, peas). Adding organic matter has also been shown to reduce the lead contamination in plants.

Step 1

So I empty my household organic matter in a bucket, mix in some chicken manure and steep in water for three days, stirring every day to keep it aerobic. If I have excess micronutrient accumulating herbs / compost activators growing I throw some leaves in too. Some examples of these are comfrey, yarrow and tansy. This soaking is like a lazy man’s liquid fertiliser and soften and saturate the dry high carbon materials like cardboard so they breakdown easier, moisten the soil and don’t fly all over the garden (learnt this lesson the hard way when a wind tossed shredded paper all over the garden so it looked like the Merri Creek after a storm). I empty my organic matter brew into rows about 60cm apart on top of the soil where I will plant my first plants.

mini-swales – water retention on a small scale

Like straight lines, perfectly flat surfaces are more of a human thing, and I can attest to the fact that a flat raised garden bed of hydrophobic soil + water is like watching oil rolling off glass! So we need to mould the soil to slow down, capture and direct water where it is needed so it is absorbed not lost whether from the hose or the sky.

Swales are often associated with large scale sloping sites to harvest run-off but can also be excavated hollows in flat lands and right down to the scale of an urban garden.

Step 2

So I added some “mini swales” to capture and slow down water to store it in the soil. I dug trenches between by rows of organic matter and mound the soil on top of them. The roots of the plants I grow on these mounds will not reach the organic matter until they need it and it has had some time to decompose so the nutrients are available. I make these trenches much larger than they need to be to capture water because I plan to build soil up in them to plant perennials in a year’s time, but we’ll get to that later.

Pioneer plants – weeds and succession

So let’s look to nature again, it’s not such a bad mantra. Bare earth doesn’t stay bare for long, where humans have interfered, along roads, eroded river banks and piles of dirt on building sites weeds set up camp and flourish. Living things want to survive and multiply so even under the harshest conditions some plants have learned to adapt so they can colonise even the most unappealing patch of earth. You can actually work out what kind of soil you have and its deficiencies by what weeds self-seed there.

So the tough “weeds” grow first, they mine deeper into the soil getting nutrients which they return to the surface when they die and drop their leaves. Their roots also make pathways for water and air whilst protecting the soil from erosion; in doing so make it habitable for a plethora of microbes, fungi, earthworms and other life which improve the soil further.

Once the soil has been improved other plants will start growing there and eventually these “weeds” will be shaded out as a forest grows.
Deep green permaculture has a great article explaining succession. As well as using this as a tool for preparing the soil for trees, it can also be used as a way of controlling weeds. Here David Holmgren discusses usingshade to control blackberries.

Step 3

So I have transplanted some dandelions, nettles, clover, yarrow and globe artichokes in the mounds. I will let the leaves from these plants fall as they would in the wild to return the mined nutrients to the topsoil. I’ll slash them before they set seed as I have no shortage of these pioneers.

For heavy clay soil:
If you have the opposite problem to mine, heavy clay soil, spike rooted plants such as globe artichokes (cousin of the thistle) and comfrey are good at creating air and water pathways through soil.

Clay

For dry, hydrophobic, sandy soil adding organic matter may not be enough. In fact some decaying plant material such as that of pulses (grain legumes) create waxy, water repellent residues that can coat coarse sand particles.

So what is the opposite of sandy soil? Think about clay soils, they are nutrient dense, sticky and store water. The negatives of clay is that it can hold too much water and drown plant, it swells and contracts which can damage fine roots and can be hard for roots to penetrate at stunting growth. Combining the two creates a friable soil type that is ideal drainage, trapping nutrients and deep straight plant roots, this is called a “sandy loam”.

So how do you add clay to sandy soil? The answer may already be under your feet.

Step 4

I used clay / water mixture to line the bottom of the swale trench to further slow down water drainage and improve water holding capacity of the soil. Below is the process, it’s very simple.

For heavy clay soil:
Organic matter and deep rooted perennials are very important for improving clay soil, but some times you have to resort to gypsum, but beware it can cause more problems if you don’t use it correctly.

First – source it

Luckily where I am the subsoil is clay so if I dig down far enough I can easily get 1kg of clay. It’s pretty obvious when the soil changes to clay, it sticks together more, is often yellower and when you hit it with a trowel it comes off in chunks rather than crumbs. If you want to test though, mix the soil with a little water than roll it in a ball, you should be able to toss if from hand to hand even if it is sandy so don’t be fooled. The next step is to roll it into a sausage like dough, it should hold together well if it is clay and get a smooth quality to it. If you are then able to loop this sausage into a ring then it has a high clay content. Sandy soil will just break apart.

If you don’t have a clay subsoil, ask your friends for a spade full. You can find out the location of Austalian soil types at ASRIS website.

second – soak it

For 1m2 soak about 1kg of in a bucket of water for 24 hours to absorb water and break up large globs. It is easier if you dig it up dry as it sticks to your spade wet, then with a trowel, then gloves break it into crumbs. Once under water mix it so nothing sticks to the bottom. Any rocks will sink, organic matter will float. Skim the organic matter off as this will clog your watering can.

third – mix it and decant

Mix it so that the fine clay particles are suspended in the water (looks like chocolate milk shake) and decant into a watering can. Leave any solid muck that isn’t suspended at the bottom and fill with water again and give it another mix.

fourth – water sandy soil

All you need to do is increase the clay content of the sandy soil by 5% for it to improve water holding capacity so no need to over do it. I filled the trench with a watering cans worth of clay solution mixing in the soil removed from the trench. I refilled the watering can and repeated until only rocky dregs remained in the bottom of the clay bucket and all the displaced sandy soil was mixed in. You could also just pour the water out of the bucket for less even, but faster method.

The soil should no longer be hydrophobic and be able to retain nutrients from organic matter.

And as an added bonus the left over sand you have can be used in homemade potting mix!

mulch

In the bottom of the trench I am going to place more organic matter as a deep mulch. This won’t be planted out for a year when the soil is more stable for perennial fruit trees and shrubs. While the organic matter is being decomposed the soil is going to settle a lot which can damage delicate roots and I plan on adding more dense carbon matter in the trench which is good for drainage but may decrease the available nitrogen while microbes break it down.

Charcoal from wood burned in our outdoor stove is one of the things I will be adding the trench. In his book Woodsman, Ben Law says the benefits of Biochar include: improving water holding capacity, allowing microbes and fungi to colonise, porous structure traps nutrients, helps prevent greenhouse gases escaping the soil.
Here are two interesting articles about Biochar, one questions the benefits of Biochar suggesting it might actually reduce nutrients in the soil and that on an industrial scale could be as harmful as biofuels. The other suggests that combining it with high nitrogen/liquid will help unlock the nutrients sooner. As we just burn prunings rather than deforesting forests a little bit of charcoal should be fine, better in the soil with a chance of improving it than in landfill.

If you make a trip to the beach, seaweed would also be a welcome addition to the mix to up the micro-nutrients.

Step 5

For the trench mulch I fill a bucket with more of the household organic matter and chicken manure to balance out to the high carbon charcoal, of which I add sparingly. I then fill the bucket with water as before, stirring daily. After three days the charcoal should be “charged up” with nutrients and saturated with water, ready to add to the bottom of the trench. I suppose if I soaked the charcoal in urine it would be even better, but for now I won’t offend the delicate sensibilities of my neighbours.

green manure & chop & drop

I’m sure by now you know the benefits of green manure, but if you need a refresher here is a great link to one of my favourite seed companies Green Harvest.

As you would find on the forest floor a mulch of fallen leaves helps keep moisture in the soil and provides habitat for top dwelling organisms. Here is a little bit about the chop and drop method of mulching.

step 6

I sow green manure on the top of the mound to act as a further living mulch to protect the soil from nutrient loss and stop erosion. Once the green manure has grown tall and before it sets seeds I slash it and the other “weeds” and use the leaves to mulch the soil whilst leaving the roots in the soil so as not to disturb it. As these are annuals they won’t continually resprout, the stems and roots will decompose and add nutrients back into the soil.

perennials

I’ve already touched on how perennial plant root systems mine deep to bring nutrients from the subsoil and hold the soil together. They are generally more resilient than most annuals to extremes and fluctuations and most importantly low maintenance and once established high yielding.

step 7

Once the green manure is cut back I will plant perennial herbs and small fruiting shrubs and berries on the top of the mound. When I transplant them I add some worm castings and/or mature compost to the hole to give the plants a little boost. Worm castings are also meant to “act like a sponge” to improve water holding capacity.

Next autumn when deciduous leaves drop I will plant some bare rooted fruit trees in the swale trenches. I will continue to mulch with household organic matter and chicken manure, but the ultimate goal is to have a food forest system where understory plants are a living mulch and companions to the fruit trees.

Other amendments

As I wanted to provide you with a free method of improving your soil without having to buy anything I didn’t include the following, but by all means go for it if you feel your soils needs that extra helping hand.

Mycorrhizal fungi – the symbiotic relationship between mycorrhizal fungi and their host plans is really fascinating and I invite you to read more about it in these article. These fungi occur naturally in healthy soil and form a kind of extension to plants roots.
You can buy packets of this at nurseries, all you have to do is dig the roots of plants you are transplanting in the powder.

Rock dust
Ground up rocks to add to depleted soil which normally could only be accessed by deep rooted trees mining deep into the soil. Aside from adding these essential minerals it is also purported to help retain water.