Fire Site Design article

I wrote an article for the permaculturewest enews recently about how to improve the safety of a home on a rural site by thoughtful placement of where to place the home and infrastructure so it is less prone to fire incursion.
Here is the link to it.. Property fire safety design

Slug and snail control- the easy hands-on method.

The designated slug collecting spoon.

Snails and slugs can easily build up in winter where there is lot of vegetation, mulch and manures lying around. They congregate beneath pots and pavers or rock edges. When the first rains come suddenly the snails are out, marauding and chomping the little seedlings we waited so long to plant after the heat of summer.

Lots of different remedies are suggested by organic gardeners and I have tried many but really, the best way to get rid of them is to collect them. I don't squash them. I scoop them up and drop them into a small container of water with a few drops of washing detergent in it. This breaks the surface tension and the snail or slug drops straight to the bottom. I have a special, easily identified teaspoon that is used to scoop slugs up, too. Oh and a headlamp is handy, too so you can collect the slimy little beasts with two hands.

A few nights of obsessive snail collecting can make a huge difference to the numbers of hungry mouths out there, including the people who get to eat the vegies that the snails would have eaten!

Drizabone

The soil is dry .. dry.. all the way down. Several drops of rain fell last night. A tease.

This is the time of year I always feel so disheartened by how the garden looks, but it is a good time to see what survived. We have been plagued by pests of all kinds this past summer as well as spending a lot of extra time tending our old dog instead of tending the garden. Time to get some soil building going on again.

There have been quite a few baby frogs this year though and quite a few tadpoles we gave away have become frogs in their new homes.

Sad times. RIP Gruntle Bucket.

Gruntle Bucket 1999-2014

We were recently devastated to have to put our old boy Gruntle to sleep. He'd had a long life and we did all we could to keep him happy and well to his very last hours. We had him from a puppy and was the son of my previous dog, Rusty Bucket. Gruntle never ate any dog food from a can and was pretty much a raw bones and human leftovers fed animal witha few good quality dog biscuits here n there. When he was younger we would make a blended mash of raw vegies with maybe some canned sardines and/or yoghurt and/or an egg and/or crushed up liver treats.  He must have eaten a mountain of frozen chicken necks, frames and wings in his lifetime and plenty of raw meaty beefbones until we realised that as those big beef bones dry that dogs can actually wear their teeth down a bit on them. We would clean those bones up quickly so they didn't get too dry and overchewed. 

I personally spent more time with him than I have any other beastie, human or otherwise, so it is quite a loss and our house feels weird without him.

Whilst not strictly a permaculture post I would just like to mention a few things that I think dogs are good for in gardens.

-Fur provides bird nesting material, holds soil together and provides nitrogen as it breaks down. 

-Food scraps can be eaten by dogs as part of their feed to reduce the need to buy food for them. Human food in most instances will be better for them than any dog food out of  can. Gruntle ate all kinds of fruit, too so he was good for eating slightly over ripe fruits. 

-Protection from cats for the many frogs that live here. The smell of a dog reduces incursion by the neighbours pesky cats and possibly also helps keep rats at bay a little. As Gruntle got older and ranged around the yard less,  we noticed there were more rats in the garden.

The garden had become a series of small barricades so he could walk around so it is a relief to finally be able to rearrange certain areas of the garden which had become static so the blind old dog could get around without falling over things. It is good to be able to walk around the garden without stepping over things and not having to help the old boy up. I miss him and I will forever but I was glad I got to hang out with him for 14 and a half years. Thanks, Gruntle. You were beautiful.

Welcome to the new year.

Yeah, yeah, a bit late, I know. I blame summer. This summer has seemed fierce. No moisture in the air, not even enough cloud for people to get  grumpy about how muggy it is.. just the heat and the feeble see breeze on some evenings, that only us lucky Freo folk get coz I reckon it must peter out by the bottom of the next dune.

The garden is just hanging in, we probably water too often but the garden is our haven and we don't need much more than a happy garden. Dripper line has given us 20 odd minutes reprieve each morning from having to hand water and the "potted orchard" is all still looking pretty happy.
The pests have changed since putting the drip line in. Slaters are much reduced, possibly also because we have changed our mulch this year. Mites seemed to enjoy the dry out there, though. They like dry situations so, with the lack of spray, they had attacked a lot of plants. Too much shade from the much-too-large powton didn't help, nor did us not being very good at feeding things. Summer is a hard time to do anything out there, really.

If we ate rats and tomato borer grubs we would have had a good summer's feast, sadly it was mostly herbs and the odd dragon fruit, along with three pumpkins which grew themselves. Basil always does well here and that New Zealand spinach stuff that no one actually eats.

In a moment of autumn hope two weeks ago vegetable and herbs seeds were sown across the Perth suburbs as a cloud drifted across the sky and made us think it would rain soon! It'll be interesting to see how long into March this late summer persists. I'll be glad not to need to water so much though, whenever that is. Maybe when it goes down to only a maximum of 32C, maybe then I can plant those seedlings.