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This post is extremely overdue! The last article I put up was in regards to starting the garden and than suddenly everything has grown. If this were a documentary about growing plants it wouldn't be a very entertaining one or a very educational one. But this article is better late than never, right? So after having set up the gardens and after raising the seedlings to maturity the time has already come to harvest. One, two, miss a few, ninety nine, one hundred? Sounds familiar, well unfortunately growing vegetables is time exhaustive and while I tend to my garden every day actually getting around to writing about it is another task that I am apparently yet to master. But anyways, heres an update!
Over the past few weeks I have been gradually harvesting sections of my garden. My heads of broccoli are ready to be picked and I have been doing so as I need to. Having the ability to harvest your vegetables when it suits you is one of the simple beauties of having your own food garden. During certain periods of the season you can pick what you want, when you want it. But if I’m being honest, the real truth is that this fact only applies the majority of the time. Because, there are those other times where there is a real need to harvest. For example, at this very moment I have six Chinese cabbages that are all ready to be harvested and yet I can’t and don’t want to actually eat all six cabbages in one week. I mean cabbages are great but they’re not that great. In fact I have eaten two of these cabbages already and I am feeling little cabbaged out. The plants have already been in the ground for too long and now the season is beginning to change which of course encourages the cabbages to start flowering. So not only do I have six unpicked cabbages I actually have six unpicked flowering cabbages! Its a freaking cabbage disaster! However, there are some real advantages to flowering cabbages. After all, it is best to take advantage of all circumstances, no matter how bleak the situation may be. What in the world could be positive about flowering cabbages you may ask? It is as follows... Having this sudden excess of vegetables inevitably lead me down previously unexplored avenues. Many of these avenues are the last place I thought I would find myself. I have heard a saying “Necessity is the mother of invention”, well this saying can be applied when you have an excess of vegetables as well. The reason for this is simple. Having too many of one type of vegetable encourages you to become more creative in order to not allow the food to go to waste. During every vegetable garden season there is at times a real sense urgency in the air. This sense of urgency is in part generated from the hard work you have put into the garden. The last thing any aspiring farmer wants to see is waste. This fear of wasting leads you into the wonderful art of pickling foods which in turn than leads you into the European world of sauerkraut, both are fantastic ways of storing excess vegetables! Put simply, having a garden in some ways forces you to explore new food processing skills. And these skills are vitally important skills that need to be mastered in order to become more self sustainable, which in the end is what growing your own food is all about. So, it is at this point that I must say, the title to this article is a little misleading. It is true that there is a simple joy to the harvest, there is no denying that. But there is also hard work involved in any harvest. It takes hard work to grow the vegetables, hard work in maintaining the self discipline in tending to the gardens every day and finally hard work in consuming the harvest without the food going to waste. But it’s from this hard work that the simple joy is generated. You reap what you sow, you get out what you put in, but for me the real joy of the harvest is what it can teach you. One interesting piece of insight I have learnt from my garden is just how much work is really involved in growing my own food. People from the past should to be applauded for getting us to the future. I mean, without them none of us would be here. It is the farmer who turned the soil and picked the harvest. It is the farmer who is responsible for keeping the human race going. It's not the bankers or stock brokers, its not the politicians who sit behind their desks throwing orders, its the farmer who grew the food! He's the real king. In having said that even the farmer has a hidden motivation for his heroic deeds of growing food. Put simply, growing food wasn't something farmers did just for fun, it was motivated by an unseen hand. What is this hidden motivation I hear you ask? Well, that’s simple, starvation was the farmers real motivation. With the threat of unrelenting hunger ever present starvation had always been the primitive motivation for growing food. The reverse pecking order was as follows. Hunger leads to starvation, the threat of starvation leads to growing food, growing food led to the ever present threat of wasting produce due to bad food management. This led the farmer to the undeniable fact that waste was simply not an option because time was the monkey on the farmers back. Because growing food was time exhaustive and farmers only had one shot at it, anything that was grown was considered precious. Waste was simply not an option and this lead some ingenious farmers to become more inventive with how they stored their foods. To every action there is a reaction and the original farmers were as, if not more susceptible to this as we are today. I like to imagine all the ingenious ways the original farmers came up with to store their foods and how this information was passed down from individual to individual. In past ages this unbroken chain of information was all people had when it came to knowing and not knowing. It wasn’t a world like we have today. In today’s world we can simply google “How to store excess cabbage“ and you will get a variety of answers. In the past this information was not a convenience as it is in today’s world. In the past if something was forgotten than I imagine that there was rarely an opportunity in every day life to reinvent something as apparently trivial as making sauerkraut. This thought lead me to more thoughts. In the past, if the commodity known as information was as rare as I have heard its was than the luxury of having easy information in todays world should be cause for concern. If humanity comes to rely on the internet for all its information what happens when the internet is switched off? This thought shows that there is a real vulnerability in having easy information. Because information has become so easy to obtain the thought of teaching this information to others in person as was done in the past rarely passes anyone’s mind. Easy information has caused us in many ways to become incredibly complacent. We have been disconnected from the real world by layers of comforts and these comforts have become, I believe, cages. We are now, in many ways, prisoners of our consumerist lifestyles and sadly some of us are yet to fully realise this. Reader beware, for we are in deep and we cannot easily break away from this lifestyle because we simply do not know how. Humanity has always been apart of the natural world and to think that we are above it is simply ignorant. Starvation at any given moment in your life is two to four weeks away and yet we have forgotten this because for the moment food is readily available at any corner store. Hopefully it remains this way.
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This years vegetable garden would prove to be a little more challenging than previous years. I had recently moved to a new property that had no established vegetable gardens. As such I have had to turn the earth myself and start some gardens from scratch. This would prove to have its challenges immediately.
The available space for the garden was tucked away behind the shed in the backyard. This would prove to give me limited sunlight to grow with, this was my first problem. The second and more pressing issue was the quality of the soil. The owners of the property had recently levelled the area, building it up by using a granite gravel/granite sand mixture. I instantly recognised the gravel type, I had seen it before, it was quarried from a hillside near Texas Queensland. The quarry itself was situated at the beginning of the granite belt region that stretches back towards Stanthorpe. The gravel type was unusual in quality. It looked nice when spread out on the ground as it was white in appearance but it was not the best soil to be growing vegetables in. It is as I have stated a mixture of sand and gravel. A closer inspection of the quarry site would reveal that the sand / gravel mixture was actually the result of an eroding granite block that was protruding from the hillside. The granite was breaking down into a bread crumb mixture that glinted in the sunlight, this was because granite is renowned for having pyrite in it. Pyrite is also known as fools gold and my prospective garden soil was full of it, both literally and figuratively! I was going to have to dig deep to resolve this issue. I first cleaned out the entire area of some old dog kennels and a small forest of hardy weeds. This process was a workout! It didn't help that I had decided to start this project late in March when the days temperatures were still reaching well into the late thirties. As this was the case the project became an early morning/late afternoon affair. When I did dig it was deep. I needed to get below the granite gravel and into the original alluvial river soil beneath, this proved to be at about a depth of 20 centimetres. Once I was at depth I simply turned the clay soil into the granite gravel and mixed thoroughly. It wasn't the best soil, but it was better than paying $300 - $400 for a load of premixed soil from the local nursery. Once the area was cleaned out completely I drew up a design for my garden layout. I was planning on using the space to its full potential, as such I ended up with seven oddly shaped beds. The next step would be to start a compost heap in my chook pen. I decided I would be able to use this mixture a couple of months down the track to enrich the soil quality as I needed. I decided to go with a hot compost design for this. I had read stories about people having real success within a short amount of time and since I was planning on using the compost within a couple of months it was decided that this would be the best technique to go with. Hot composting is awesome technique. It involves using a mixture of green and brown plant matter and it will be the feature of my next post! Cheers! |
Micheal FarmerThe sky is falling, some days it's not. I have many interests. Correction, I have too many interests. Jack of some trades, master of none. ArchivesCategories |