Winter Bliss

Winter is meant to be a time of slowing down, of hibernation, but we have been extra-busy because the weather has been sunny. And we hadn't had 'sunny' for many, many months it seemed!

So we finished all the jobs on our gardening list - weeding, mulching, creating paths, paving, and lots and lots of planting! The gardens look amazing. We have been harvesting pumpkins, lettuce, cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, silverbeet, rocket, herbs, eggplant, celery, macadamias, citron, chokos and lemons. And so much of the garden is still in the very early stages of growth.


We have had several frosts - night temperatures below zero with ice on the car and frost-burnt grass in the paddocks. A few plants in the gardens were affected, but not many. I think the shadecloth on the greenhouses, thick mulch and watering regularly have helped. There is often steam rising from the greenhouses on a very cold morning! The taro, sweet potato and basil are a little bit burned by cold, and the chickens have complained by reducing the number of eggs they're producing (and it had just picked up too)... Some of the youngest fruit trees and many of the banana trees have dead leaves on them, but we're hoping they will come back stronger in the spring.

We don't have much experience with very cold temperatures, but we really enjoy the contrast in seasons we enjoy here in the mountains. After living in the tropics for over 15 years, I love wearing jeans and boots with thick snuggly socks, the ambience of a wood fire, huge pots of soup with home made bread and air so cold it takes your breath away... I love growing cabbages, peas and broccoli too! Here we have the benefit of being able to grow a lot of tropical plants (not all fruits though, sadly), but with a temperate winter.

Last weekend we did some pruning of fruit trees, and put some cuttings into pots. Hopefully we will have some little trees to plant when Spring arrives.

We have reduced the number of chickens we keep and have been getting more eggs now. We have rounded up the 'wild' chickens and kept them in the pen for a couple of weeks now, feeding them grain and some garden waste and scraps. When everyone has settled in to calling the chook pen home, we will let them free range in the afternoons again. We added have six baby guinea fowl to the flock, and look forward to them growing and becoming part of the farm yard antics as they strut around in their amusing way.


It is almost time to dry Lucy off, she is in calf and due at the end of the year. Next, Poppy will be in calf and so next year we will have more babies to admire and lots of milk! Today I received a new cow, but she is just on loan so that we have milk for the next few months while Lucy is dry.

Lucy

It is a real pleasure to work on the farm in the sunshine, without slipping and squelching in the red mud and having our seedlings drown and die because of seemingly-endless rain. It's nice to do work other than mowing and weeding, and enjoy a wider variety of harvest too.

I hope your garden is full of blessings this winter!

The Food Forest

Two years ago we planted Stage Two of our orchard. Stage One being a year older and around 20 fruit trees near the chook run. We've removed half of Stage One by transplanting the stunted trees to other areas. For some reason they many not thrive in that location...

Stage Two was planted in a disused paddock area
previously filled with long grass and bracken fern like this one

Stage Two began as over 50 food-producing trees planted on a west-facing slope with deep, rich soil and good drainage. It was planted in typical grid formation to allow for the tractor to go between the trees and slash the grass which grows lush and tall through most of the year. The trees have thrived - with many well over head height already, and our first samples of the fruit to come ripening with the changing seasons. They have had less care and attention than most of our other tree plantings - a little feeding, some mulch (removed by helpful free-range chickens), removal of shoots below the graft point as required and grass and weeds pushed back, hoed or cut only around three times each year. In the beginning I had to spray with eco pest oil for what may have been red mite, but as the trees grew larger, signs of disease vanished. I do hope that they stay away!

After recently watching a fabulous Food Forest DVD we lamented not planning and planting this way from the start, but vowed to alter the orchard to mimic a forest over the coming wet seasons.

This week, we have planted out around one third of the trees required to fill the space between the rows. Varieties added included mulberries, pigeon pea, malabar chestnut, mandarin, wampu, loquat, miracle fruit, sweet leaf, a few different tropical stonefruit, cumquat, albizia, ice-cream bean and more.


We grow some of our trees from cuttings and seeds, are gifted or buy some through our local community groups like Seed Savers and LETS, buy some at the markets and a few at local nurseries.


We have only a few macadamia seedlings remaining in our tree box, so it's time to plant seeds and source more trees for the food forest project. If you have a favourite type of tree, please leave a comment and let me know about it.

Here are the trees on the hillside. A lot of them are 2m tall now and the bamboo on the edge is several metres tall and 1.5 metres diameter.