Potager Progress Part 2

We've been busy about the garden trying to complete and plant up the potager  beds before winter sets in.  Autumn is one of the main growing seasons here but there has been disappointingly little rain this year; although that did buy us some more time to get going on the beds.

After digging the top main bed, we've noticed the feeder roots from the gumtrees have responded by coming up through the new topsoil and sucking away all the moisture.  Luckily we hadn't done the rest of the beds before finding this out, which means that we've gone with no dig beds layered with cardboard, sugarcane or soybean mulch and mushroom compost with composted cow poo for nutrients.  We had enough cardboard left from furniture packaging to complete three main beds and one of the side beds that will shortly be planted out with strawberry runners.

Here's the run down of the beds:

Bed 1: Legumes
- Peas "Greenfeast," Dwarf beans, Snowpeas, Broad beans, with succession Peas "Greenfeast," Climbing beans, Snowpeas
Bed 2: Brassicas
- Kale "Red Russian," Red Cabbage, Broccoli, Wombok
Bed 5: Cucurbits and Corn
- Yellow zucchini
Bed 6: Solanaceae
- Yellow Roma tomatoes, French Marigold, Eggplant, 2 transplanted volunteer tomatoes from around the rest of the garden

See here for more details on crop rotation.  Autumn seems the most appropriate time for rotation so far.

Over half way complete!

The seeds are starting to come up in all the beds and today marked the first succession sowing of peas and beans as the first lot of peas poke their heads above the soil.  Unfortunately some of the seeds haven't come up which is most likely due to a couple of reasons: 1st: they're old and 2nd: they've been stored in the shed which does get hot during the day (they've since been moved to the laundry).  Here's hoping they just need a bit more time.

We finally had some very decent rain last week with a couple of stormy days with heavy falls bringing back the Colliwat Cascades, filling the tanks and creating a few ruts in the driveway.  The cold snap has arrived this week with all the mornings since Sunday being 7 degrees.  Hopefully we're not too late getting things planted.

View from across the dam

New vegetable garden/potager design

It's been a bit gloomy and drizzly lately so I decided to spend some quality time indoors to plot my new veggie beds.  I borrowed a great book from the local library which has plenty of practical and easy to understand design tips so hopefully that has helped.  

I'm keeping the crop rotation system I devised last year to minimise the chance of disease.  It seemed to be working quite well at the old place although it wasn't in place for long.  The soil here is quite impoverished and water repellent so the green manures will be essential to keep the nutrition up.  I've also started up a couple of compost heaps to kick things along before I start planting.

I've discovered our property is a giant termite terminal so I need to be very careful about which mulches and edging materials I use.  The termite man informed us that sugar cane mulch is a big no-no.  Fortunately I hadn't yet ordered the two round bales I'd been planning on getting for the gardens. Instead, I'll have to do some research to find out what mulches termites aren't super-attracted to.  I was also planning to try no-dig garden beds but cardboard and newspaper is out of bounds now too so it's back to cultivating the soil with chicken feet and my hoe.  Fortunately there is plenty of rock around the place to use as garden edging.  The local landscaping supply lad informs me this is basalt from Beaudesert.  Hopefully that means a good source of minerals and iron.

Now to find some motivation to get of the couch and mark it out then lug edging rocks around.  Although the drizzle has just started up again so light it's like the sky has dandruff.  Just wet enough to dampen the washing on the line and the spirits...Perhaps I'll continue with planning the orchard instead.

Not quite according to plan

There have been a fair few hiccups in the crop rotation system.  Perhaps I should really be calling it the crop wonky or the crop wobble.  Either way we've had some ups and downs.  The Borlotti beans have shot up and are now flowering.  The dreaded bean fly has been spotted infesting the leaves with its destructive brood but with a much a healthier crop than previously (cow poo is amazing!) the plants have withstood the attack of this minute pest and are on their way to producing their delightful spotty and stripy seeds.  However, to counter this success, none of the chickpeas emerged and I'm trying to decide whether to bother trying to grow them again.  

The other major issue with the vegie patch and flower bed has been in the form of the wretched roving raker (aka Wheelie).  Chooks really aren't given enough credit for the cunning workings of their tiny brains.  They say they have the intelligence of a 3 year old.  Well, in my experience I've decided not only do they possess this intelligence but  also possessed of the mischievousness of a 3 year old and worse still is that they never grow out of it.  If I leave the cage door open for one night she's out of the pen in the morning raking up all my lovely seeds and seedlings.  When I wake in the morning and realise my error, hurriedly look out the window there she is with her head cocked to the side looking up at me with her comb wobbling.  There's been more than one occasion where we've very nearly been going to have roast chook for Christmas.

As a result there are only two broccolini seedlings, no flowers have been able to come up from seed and all but one corn plant have been scratched from the crop rotation board in bed 5.  Luckily I'm a determined creature and can match the pigheadedness of any 3 year old, ahem, I mean chicken.  So the planting has been redone with a vengeance for the third or possibly fourth time: the corn has been replanted along with its cucumber companion plus a choko to climb the fence and a zucchini; the flower seeds have been resown and the chooks are given extra food and shut in their cage at night.  Now so long as chooks can't figure out how to turn a handle the garden will be safe, at least until the cluck monster emerges anyhow (I'll tell you about that another time).

The other hiccup with the crop wobble has been the carrots.  The nice neat row has produced a few tiny carrot seedlings albeit not as many as I'd hoped.  Instead, Mother Nature has laughed at me again with this bed.  In previous years a watering or some rain would send up millions of cherry tomato seedlings despite me never having planted one.  This year it seems amaranth is the immaculate crop which has taken over the garden, although I do admit to having let one or two go to seed there in the past.  As experience gardeners are all too aware, once you've grown amaranth you've always got amaranth.  It's always safer to work with nature so I've thinned the amaranth around the carrots that came up and let the rest grow to shade them from the baking heat that we've been having.  They've cross pollinated with some wild varieties so now they have a beautiful candy-cane stripe to their stem when mature.  They also made a nice spinach substitute in dinner last night along with some of the last pumpkin that was also a gift from Mother Nature and a few cherry tomatoes that can be found loitering around the edges of the beds.  Maybe I should give up gardening all together - it seems that the vegie patch grows itself far better than I can.

Garden bed five is live

The rain clouds had quickly dissipated by late this morning leaving the soil in prime moistness for a little digging.  After a much overdue planting out of a blackcurrant, we set about clearing the grass for bed five in the crop rotation system.  Initially this was going to be a lasagna project (i.e. no dig garden bed) but with the recent rain the soil was so easy to dig and the sun was shining on our backs so instead we swung the trusty hoe.  Taking the hoe swinging in turns so that even the soil got a turn (over that is) the grass was banished surprisingly quickly.  We then chopped out a couple of recidivist weed bushes, raked out the debris from the soil and added a whole bag of composted cow manure.  To finish off I edged and mulched with sugar cane.

This bed will soon be home to corn and cucurbits and not letting anything go to waste, the new pile of grass will be turned into a wonderful compost concoction once the chooks have finished sorting through it.

Crop rotation

After a delayed start to getting the garden going after winter and an eight week stint living away from home, I've finally made the time to organise the vegie garden into a six bed crop rotation system.  Now that I've divided the beds up and have a written plan I'll have more idea of where I've planted things instead of the usual I think I put that there last year, and mayyybe over there the year before.  

Aside from organisation the other main reason for establishing the crop rotation was to help control pests and diseases.  Last year I had to lie two beds fallow for a few seasons due to nematode problems.  This really put a dent in my garden's productivity and left me with little space to use for vegies.  The rotation should see new insusceptible crops move into a bed that potentially has a build up of a disease or pest such as nematodes.  Another bonus of rotating crops is that the soil doesn't become depleted of a particular set of nutrients that the crop requires.  Heavy feeders can be rotated with light feeders and different nutrients are used by each crop successively.  The addition of a green manure crop in the rotation will ensure I have a bed resting and recharging its nutrients before a heavy feeding crop.  

The one downside I see to crop rotation is that it doesn't leave much room for companion planting, which is something I've been attempting previously.  To get around this I plan to find the companion plants that don't fit neatly into the rotation system and plant them at the end of rows and between plants where I've left too much spacing.

Here's a sketch of the rotation that I've planned based on the outline provided in Annette McFarlane's book Organic Vegetable Gardening:

The rotation beds aren't all the exactly the same size but they measure roughly 3x2m each.  Each large bed has been divided to accommodate two rotations (of 3x2 each) and the long garden bed down the side fence will have dimensions of 12m x1m which has again been divided into two sections 6m long.

The final bed sizes aren't complete as yet and most will need extending to some degree.  The corn and cucurbit bed will be the most work as it's an extension of the bed along the fence.  Although I've had a few compost piles on that spot over the years, I'm thinking of trying a no-dig bed for this one as we have hard clay soil which is very dry at the moment due the lack of rain and will be too hard to dig.

The beds have mostly already been used for a while so I've started planting them out with their respective crops and will extend the beds as needed.