Gallifrey Forest Farm

A failure of marketing

2012/10/05 Danielle 0

In a dry(ish) climate like ours, water is life. Where there is water, plants grow and animals (and people) thrive. This is fairly obvious to anyone who’s experienced our baking hot summers. Gallifrey isn’t on mains water, so even if we wanted to use the output of the dams and the desalination plants, we can’t. The water in the deep aquifer is fully allocated for agriculture in the area, so we aren’t allowed to sink a deep bore or well. We are allowed to sink a shallow bore, and according to our neighbours the water isn’t saline, but drinking water […]

Tick season and the bee enclosure

2012/10/05 Danielle 0

The bee people at Bees Neez Apiary near Chidlow have said that the breeding program for the year is underway, and we should be able to get our baby hive by the end of October. We’ve laid a small concrete slab for the hive to sit on (it will also have cinderblocks or similar under it to keep the wooden hive boxes well away from the termite infested ground). The hive will be surrounded by a hedgerow, which will form a bee enclosure. I’m thinking roses, bottlebrush, lavender, rosemary, apple and possibly hazelnut trees. You see, Gallifrey has ticks. It’s […]

What is burlapcrete?

2012/09/20 Danielle 1

One of the joys of setting up Gallifrey is getting to try a lot of the things I’ve been interested in for a long time but haven’t had the opportunity to implement. Things like putting in swales and designing a food forest, like large scale outdoor sculptures (I haven’t done any of that yet, but I’m thinking about it), like building a straw bale house, and putting in a big vegetable garden in a good location where I can grow tasty things. Gardens give me so much joy, I’ve wanted to build one of my own for as long as […]

Updates

2012/09/19 Danielle 0

All the slackness, it has been ours. Or we have been in it, or something. Which is to say, it has been many many many lots of days without an update. So. We bought and erected a small storage shed to keep tools in. Also, spare furniture and house-things, since moving two people into one house (as we did in Jan last year) means combining two people’s worth of stuff into less space. I mean, we have 3 beds between the two of us, and loads of kitchen things and linen. I don’t want to do a purge until we […]

Planning and planting

2012/08/12 Danielle 0

We have four new additions to the food forest on Gallifrey: two carob trees, and two icecream beans. The icecream beans will need a bit of nurturing through the summer, but I believe that they’re fairly drought tolerant once they’re established. Icecream beans are fairly unusual here. They’re nitrogen fixers, like honey locusts and wattles, and reasonably fast growing. Apparently, the sweet pulp inside the seed pod, between the seeds, tastes a lot like vanilla icecream. I’m not sure how similar to icecream they will actually taste – after all, carob is meant to taste like chocolate, and it sort […]