how to guide Archives - The Desert Echo

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

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.

Continue Reading

Garden, Permaculture design

How to build good habits

April 8, 2015 No Comments

how to build good habits … instead of making then breaking new year’s resolutions.

RRecently we had some shocking heath news in our family and like an icy bucket of water to the head I was reminded that life is too precious to waste. Don’t we all have dreams, a desire to give our life some purpose and worth? Stagnating in an office cubical of status quos is probably not anyone’s life’s goal, and yet here the majority of us are rusting away. We try to shake things up every New Year, but isn’t it just like running on an unhappy hamster wheel of deny, binge, guilt of broken resolutions. Can you even remember what they were by April? Take this as a cyber slap in the face to get it together, if we have each other we can do it! *insert inspirational quote of your choice here*

Health, family, community and happiness are the big ones, right? So let’s help each other build good habits for life. That’s good habits forever that make our life better. I know, I know puns are the worst. Bad habits are hard to kick, but so are good ones so to achieve our goals let’s start scratching away at them, because our goals should be our life’s work not the work of a year and then as quickly forgotten.

Dream big then break it down!

So let’s come up with the big dream, don’t rush it, this is the fun part. We’ll work out how we’ll get there later, for now just get a nice blank piece of paper and some coloured pens for an old fashioned brain storming of all the things you ever wanted to achieve. Don’t rate them, let them flow, even the little ideas might help you work out the bigger picture.

Let’s make it worth it, what’s one thing that will make life better for you? Not make people envy you or make you the cardboard cutout of success, no no no, white picket fence and a sports car in the driveway is so last century. What will make you happier and healthier and more fulfilled? It doesn’t have to be grand, but a worthwhile aspiration will probably tick off a number of smaller dreams on your list as well.

The New Year’s Resolution Approach would be to select one (or even more disastrous, all), clink a glass of Champagne and stumble into January with blind resolve. Feeling inspired for a new you, working hard, getting bored, tired and frustrated (a merry cocktail indeed) and giving up or just getting distracted. So to win at life we might actually need a game plan.

So the best goal will have links to other things in your list and not be too whimsical. So ‘learn French’ isn’t really up there, if I had move to France with handsome French husband then it would definitely be part of it, but that’s not something I’m interested in (so don’t worry Dylan). Same with learn an instrument, unless one of my dreams is seriously to be in a band.

The why motivation

If you really want to reach your goal, and sooner rather than later, you better have some pretty good reasons to get you excited. It’s not just the getting started, it’s the not giving up. If you ask yourself “why the hell am I doing this for?” a week, month or year in and don’t have a good answer you’ll give up and maybe it wasn’t worth it after all. “Because it makes me seem more interesting and cool” just won’t cut it.

You need weapons to defeat the “cant be bothered” monster!

Here are some question to get you going, can you think of any more good ones to ask? Don’t limit your self think emotional as well as pragmatic, mental as well as physical.

What will it help you achieve? Why is this important? Will it give you better quality of life?
Will it mean doing more of what you love? (This one is important, if you don’t choose something that involves something you already like and will enjoy doing a lot of the time it just won’t be worth it.)
And less of what you hate? What are you unhappy about in your current situation?
And more of what you’re neglecting?
And will it support causes you admire rather than deplore?
Who else will it help?

This is the list you stick in your wallet, on your fridge or have tattooed on your arm because it’s important to never loose track of why you are doing something, the how and when can evolve but the why should be your solid foundation.

As you can see I have chosen “build a local sustainable community”, originally I chose be self-sufficient, but after our rocky start to this year it became clear that whilst being self-sufficient is an honourable ideal what I really need and the sustainability movement too is COMMUNITY. It’s just no fun if you do things alone, and I might just get a bit closer to my self-sufficiency goal if I work, learn, teach, share and have fun with a group of like minded individuals at my own back door. The only way to convince people to be more sustainable is to show that at its heart it is just more fun and fulfilling. I haven’t had a lot of fun lately so perhaps it’s time to start.

No your enemy!

It’s that little wheedling voice making excuses when your at your weakest, say when a task coincides with a rerun of Mad Men on a rainy day.

So why you haven’t been able to organically and easily achieve your goal yet. What internally and externally has made it hard? Once you work this out you can figure out how to overcome those obstacles. This is a great way to exorcise all those little demons of self-doubt, laziness and plain whininess. It’s not always easy to creak into gear, floating can be so much more fun, but you’re just drifting to a big fat boring nowhere.

The following might be issues:
Convenience of bad, inconvenience of the good
Addictions, whether they be too sugar, watching TV, facebook, or something harder
Social pleasures or pressures
Imbalance, exhaustion and over work
Money, generally the lack of it
Bad habits and routine
Lack of knowledge and confidence
Difficulty
Time poor
Fear of change
Boredom

So let’s work out your excuses while your feeling strong and motivated so you can pound that wheedling guy into dust.

Keeping it bite sized

So now we can finally start working out some good habits, a salve to those bad ones. So let’s break your dream up into mini goals, we’re short term thinkers for the most part, that is why our world’s going to hell in a handbasket as our adorable grannies would say, so let’s make it work for us. So short term goals for long term benefit. One of mine is to start up a Flemington Food Swap, perhaps I’ll see you there. It’s a way to connect to the community, find passionate people to help me and most important of all it will be fun! It’s one step, but when it gains momentum I will feel a sense of achievement. It’s important to be kind to yourself, you won’t always succeed, sometimes you’ll falter and give in to your excuses, but instead of beating yourself up, thing about what you have achieved no matter how small and get back on the horse.

Getting in the habit

So we’ve got our dream and we’ve got our goals but how do we achieve them?
Have you ever woken up exhausted, and some how you ate your breakfast, got your teeth brushed, dressed and out the door, you can hardly remember doing them, but you almost literally sleepwalked through them. That’s because they are habits, you do them everyday, they are routine. That’s what we have do to achieve our goals as painlessly as possible. Steps so tiny they seem ridiculous but the beauty is you hardly notice them and you can build them up slowly like dunes being formed by grains of sand.

I read one example of a guy who was told by his doctor to floss his teeth every night. He would always starts enthusiastically, but come his next appointment it might have been months since the last time he flossed. So he said he would floss one tooth every night, just one. It took only a second, so he could never justify not doing it and more often than not once he got started he would end up flossing his whole mouth. Sometimes it’s just the getting started that’s hard, then your body takes over from your mind.

So make a list of all those little things you do everyday, or every week. Then work out new little “habits” you can tag on to them to help you reach your goal.

A goal might be to eat healthier. An obstacle might be that you are so tired after work that getting take away is what you end up guiltily doing. You might then have a mini goal of preparing meals and freezing them so all you have to do is heat them up after work. Habits you might start to achieve this are: every Sunday morning go to the farmer’s market for breakfast; when you make a meal double it and freeze half; when you get up Saturday morning soak some beans, etc.

Or if you want to produce no waste, instead of starting cold turkey you might still go to the supermarket but a habit might be: when you buy packaged food only buy it in glass jars you can reuse for preserves or after you have filled your basket put two packaged items back.

It could even just be after you brush your teeth spend 5 minutes cleaning or blogging or practicing. You’ll do more than 5 when you feel like it, but even when you don’t 5 minutes is so little it’s not hard to smash through it. Don’t give yourself room to procrastinate by making it too formidable.

When you’ve locked in one small habit add another.

Review and rework

This is the final step. Don’t just slavishly follow your plan into the ground, if things aren’t working they need a tweak. Start small, but don’t be afraid to reassess your goals, after all we change, sometimes we don’t realise something is not what we really want until we almost achieve it. Only you and perhaps the ones you love who have the benefit of perspective can know what’s right, dreams evolve.

But at the micro level if you’re struggling to make a habit stick ask yourself:

Why am I struggling to change?
Can I make it easier for myself?
Can I remove temptation?
What can I replace it with?
Now this is not replacing one evil with another, it’s figuring out what positive aspects a former negative habit had that you have lost. Things aren’t black and white. Perhaps giving up coffee or cigarettes meant also giving up a 10 minute break from staring at a computer screen, a chance to chat to co-workers, stretch your legs. My co-worker and I have come up with the idea of a “pause pomme” (an apple break) where we each eat and apple and walk around the block.

Could eating out be replaced with rotating dinner parties with friends or potluck suppers?

Is keeping your room neat as simple as having a drawer you can dump your clean laundry in until you have time to sort it rather than what happens to us, a vicious cycle of clothesline, hamper, bed, floor.

But most important of all, don’t lose sight of your ultimate goal.

Well I hope you’ve gotten something out of this. Let me know if you have any tips!

I’ll share my progress with my goals as I go. Honestly finishing this post feels like aback patting moment for me, it’s been sitting in my drafts for so long!

So wishing you all happiness and inspiration for every day and every tooth flossed! Good night.

Continue Reading

Garden

moving garden

November 22, 2014 2 Comments

say goodbye to the old life, losing something but gaining more

A clunking trailer bouncing: chicken coop, couches and a mobile garden over speed humps. There was something delightfully outlandish about our arrival at our new home, chook in the boot, we were the Beverly Hill Billies of Flemington (alas no rocking chair grandma on the roof). Books and plants and tools, that is what our worldly possessions amounted to, but after months on the road even those few items chaffed a little, there was no carrying them on bike and back.

Downsizing in house size and housemates was a huge relief after months self-indulgently alone. Even now, months after touching down, my brain fills with static when the emotions and drama of others grow too intense. A rising desire to flee to the quiet recesses of my own brain. Time to slip into my most fluid friendships, easy-going and nurturing they’ll help build back my tolerance to the world we live in.

Here are my top 5 tips for a mobile garden:

Deciduous trees

Cut a circle around deciduous trees a few weeks before you move them, prune braches so root loss to branch loss is about even. An arborist friend says this gives them a chance to regrow their feeder roots before being transplanted.

Evergreens

Grow dwarf evergreens in barrels/planters with wheels. We have all our citrus in barrels as well as a devil plant so when moving garden they can just be wheeled to the trailer. Make sure wheels you buy are strong, we’ve had one collapse before and it’s no fun.

Infrastructure

Make things dismantleable. Our chicken coop can be dismantled into three pieces which I can carry by myself although I prefer not to. This is also good if you want to rotate your chickens every few months for hygiene and to make use of the super rich soil under their coop.

Cuttings

Before perennials get to the point where they can no longer be moved without risking death take cuttings as a back up and pot them up. Take cuttings of deciduous plants while they are dormant. You are more likely to have more success if you catch them before they have expended all that stored energy.

The Everyday

As a renter you never know when your lease might be suddenly broken, keep a copy of all your most useful herbs and vegetables in a window sill planter so you at least have your salad, oregano, chives etc flourishing while you go about trying to get to know and establish your new garden.

What are your tricks? Let me know it the comments section!

The fantastic view from our deck. It’s like being in the bush! We will not miss the three storey apartments that looked into the backyard of our old place.

This sleeper planter full of succulents was my house warming present to myself, 50% off though!

This is going to need some work!

I just threw my lettuce seed heads in pots so they’d sprout as cut and come again salad so I wouldn’t have to mess around with punnets. Just snip the tops off and they will regrow 3-4 times!

First cup of tea at the new place! We have a chest fridge/freezer, a “Ghillie Kettle” and a biomass stove that we fuel with dropped gum tree twigs, it’s a bit like camping! So much fun!

Gracie the old Border Collie is very sceptical of the whole arrangement, and Clem the pup is so stick obsessed we had to stop her retrieving the twigs from the fire! never a dull moment!

Nosey neighbour! My parents live behind us now and their dogs are very curious about the goings on over the fence!

Continue Reading

1 2 3 … 8 Next »