Danielle – Page 31 – Gallifrey Forest Farm

Boabs and Baobabs

2012/05/16 Danielle 0

Most people have barely heard of baobabs, or boabs as they’re more commonly called in Australia. It’s odd, since we’re one of the few places in the world which has a native baobab species – the Australian Boab, Adansonia gregorii. There are only eight species of baobab. Of the other seven, one is native to Africa (Adansonia digitata, the African Baobab), and the other six (Adansonia grandidieri, Adansonia madagascariensis, Adansonia perrieri, Adansonia rubrostipa, Adansonia suarezensis, and Adansonia za) are endemic to Madagascar. All baobabs are extremely drought tolerant and hardy. Some are as little as 3m tall, while others are […]

Trees and Water

2012/05/15 Danielle 2

No scheme water, and no bore or rainwater tanks in place, made irrigation over the summer a very labour intensive task. So every weekend we filled up a couple’ve barrels with water and drove them up to Gallifrey, then manually transferred the water to the water tubes around each of the trees using watering cans. We tried a few water containers, and experiment showed that the recycled plastic olive barrels fitted with taps were the best. The flexible plastic water bladders that we tried first didn’t hold much water, and sprung leaks after two or three uses. The plastic slimline […]

Seed Balls

2012/05/09 Danielle 6

Seed balls are an ingenious idea, developed and pioneered by Masanobu Fukuoka. Fukuoka was a Japanese farmer and philosopher, and an early proponent of natural farming. He suggested that much of the effort that humans put into agriculture is wasted, and that we should instead be working with the natural environment. Seed balls are one way of doing that. Fukuoka wrote “If rice is sown in the autumn and left uncovered, the seeds are often eaten by mice and birds, or they sometimes rot on the ground, and so I enclose the rice seeds in little clay pellets before sowing. […]

Plant Profiles: Pineapple

2012/05/08 Danielle 0

When people think of good permaculture plants – or even good garden plants – for Perth’s Mediterranean climate, pineapples don’t generally leap to mind. At a guess, I would say that most people have never considered that they could grow pineapples. It’s a shame, because pineapples actually love the heat and the sun here, and will grow in marginal areas and thrive on very little water. Pineapples will also grow quite happily in pots, so they can be moved if necessary. The pineapple plant, Ananas comosus, is a tropical herbaceous perennial. It grows up to 1.5m tall, and the same […]

Swales

2012/05/08 Danielle 0

There are a million or more places to start any story – and a garden (or a forest) is just a story which is planted rather than told – but you have to pick one. So while I could start with the search for a location, or with the process of falling in love with this block of land and choosing it and buying it, or with the first trees we planted, I am instead going to start with the swales. Swales are a logical place to start. For those who don’t grok the concept, a “swale” in this context […]