A little incentive...

It's not a big area but using permaculture an awful lot can be crammed into a fairly small area ~ as Dino knows. After my little excursion he decided I really needed to do the thing properly & had me back down the nursery this morning picking through the punnets.
To what I've already planted he added coriander (because I said he had to; I like to cook with it), tomatoes, silverbeet, zucchini, capsicum, climbing beans & celery. Six weeks & we should be starting to pick the first fruits. I adore my silverbeet small & sweet & lashed with lemon & cracked black pepper. Actually I'll eat pretty much anything that way bar anything that comes out of the ocean. That stuff is totally inedible no matter what you do to it.


This is pretty much Ditz's first excursion into a home veggie garden as when we had free ranging chooks they pretty much put an end to the vegetables. Nothing could get above 2'' above the ground. I miss running chooks & Ditz totally adored them but I have never met a doey~er animal than a chook & ours were particularly idiotic. They'd been battery hens & came 'pre~plucked'. While waiting on their feathers growing back they would flop all over the brick walkway, basking in the sun & moving for nothing & no~one. Issi spent ages trying to work out how to stalk & catch one but they were considerably bigger than he was & he never did manage to work it out.


We began with a half dozen fruit trees as well but the mulberry & peach developed rot & keeled over, the bananas didn't do well in the drought & the lemonade & orange trees took a battering one cyclone season & never recovered. That leaves us with a monged mandarin (it was grafted onto a bush lemon & now 1/2 the tree produces mandarins & the other 1/2 produces 2'' long spikes & huge lemons), a tropical nectarine that is prone to fruit fly, bush apples (yuck!) & a bush plum that neither flowers nor fruits. No~one in their right senses eats lilly~pillies though I'm told they make nice jam.

We do really well given that our ground was solid clay when we moved here & set like cement. I brought some soil in & mulched like crazy & now we can grow pretty much anything we like ~ except those things that prefer a cold climate.