Vegetable Garden – Gallifrey Forest Farm

Seed Season

2016/04/10 Danielle 1

A week ago, I planted a selection of tree seeds – five different species of wattle (Acacia spp.), poinciana (Delonix regia), jacaranda (Jacaranda mimosifolia) and honey locust (Gleditsia triacanthos). Today I noticed that some of them (notably the wattles and poinciana) are germinating already. In spite of torrential rain, the tiny, delicate seedling heads are poking up through the soil, seed cases still covering their baby seed leaves. I’m so pleased 🙂 I know it’s silly, but I love seeing baby plants emerge, especially baby trees. It also means I did pick the right time of year to plant them, […]

Abundance

2015/03/14 Danielle 0

Abundance is such a lovely word. It brings to mind the idea of an elegant sufficiency, of warmth and safety, of sharing. In the garden the other day, I stopped for a moment and I thought: this is abundance. The sun was shining, the air smelled of green, growing things, and there were bees and paper wasps buzzing around the flowers collecting nectar and, at least int he case of the wasps, (hopefully) killing the various insects which eat my vegetables. I had just picked a bowl full of cherry tomatoes from the vine, and collected a couple’ve warm, fresh-laid […]

lucky tomatoes

2013/05/21 Danielle 0

There are a multitude of tomato varieties, ranging from black and purple through every shade of red, pink, orange and yellow to the ones which are green when ripe. Most of them taste better than the standard supermarket tomato varieties available in Australia. Diggers Seeds holds annual taste tests of a selection of varieties, and the supermarket variety they scored for comparison got only 42.46% approval, while the heritage varieties ranged from 60% to 77%. Not all good tomato varieties are heirloom or heritage varieties, though. There are still plant breeders out there working on annual vegetables like the tomato, […]

earthbags, potatoes & bees

2012/11/07 Danielle 0

Our mandala vegetable garden, with its earthbag & hessiancrete raised beds, has been in the works for some time. We laid out the locations of the beds back in August, and built the first raised bed (of a total of 6) as a demonstration model. On Sunday, we ran a workshop/permablitz to build the rest of the earthbag garden beds. In spite of weather reports predicting “scattered thunderstorms” (weird weather in November) we headed up armed with polypropylene bags, shovels, barbed wire, and enthusiasm. We did get rained on, twice torrentially and a few times lightly, but there was […]

I can see my house from here.

2012/11/05 kai 0

When we first thought about buying our property we did a lot of research into the area. We looked at the soil type, the lay of the land, types of native vegetation and generally wandered around to get the “feel” of the property before buying. As part of this one of the things we did was check out the property on Nearmaps. Nearmaps is a little like google maps with a couple of important differences. It’s much higher resolution, so you can zoom in closer and see more detail. In our local apartment complex you can actually see someone sitting […]