When gardening began for me and how it ended as a money making option.

When I finished high school , I wasn't the ideal daughter. After hitch-hiking around Australia with an unsavoury boyfriend I came back to Perth and once I had sorted myself a bit decided to go to TAFE.
It started as a Wildlife worker course, but that disappeared so I moved into horticulture.
One of they units was Introduction to Permaculture, being taught by the wonderful Miles Durand, sometimes nicknamed Miles Away as he would drift off into other ideas of how to practice permaculture everywhere.

I learned a lot there and I always felt to glad that I had discovered what i wanted to do while I was young.

Skip a bunch of years, the learning and sharing of lots of info on how to grow things, months of propagating natives and lugging too much soil around awkwardly at a native plant nursery with poor occ health and saftey, and the onset of tendonitis in both shoulders.

Then add Perth summer and sand, too many yearly cycles of repeating the same info to nursery customers and I am now not all that interested in gardening any more. The idea I might end up with aching shoulders takes away some of the gung-ho joy I had of being strong and able to lift heavy things.

ADHD discovery and moving house

 At the start of this year in the hottest part of summer we had to move house. We’d been there for 25 years and grew a lot of biomass and food in that time.

Life had changed a lot in that time. Getting older meant we had less energy to look after the garden and we were both busy running two small businesses we have so it wasn’t a bad time to have to leave the garden behind but it was very sad in some ways. 

The road had become much noisier outside and there were lots more diesel fumes and loud vehicles going past 

A friend took some of the fruit trees and we had a lot of help from other friends taking the shed contents away to their places or the tip. 

So now we move in a more southern suburb in a house we were very lucky to find via a mutual friend with the house owner. Very lucky. 

Just before moving I had been diagnosed with adhd so when we moved in I had just started my meds so I got a lot of work done in the garden here. Lots of pruning and cleaning up needed doing. 

My partner had to learn how to clean the pool so it was useable and not very green. It’s been fun to have a swim and I’m able to do a few laps now. 

Being diagnosed has been really great. I’ve always been a bit of a kook so it’s good to know why. 

One thing has been wanting to write about my experience growing up. I’m not doing much gardening and am distancing myself from the word permaculture as it seems to have become a hokey bunch of ppl who are into conspiracy theories these days. These days regenerative farming is better and there’s also a lot of rewilding going in around the world. 

It’s good to be back. I’ll add some pics  when I get on the computer and off my phone.thanks for reading. 

Diesel Fumes are Killing People

 Diesel Fumes are Killing People

https://thedriven.io/2023/02/24/new-study-reveals-catastrophic-health-impacts-of-petrol-and-diesel-cars/

https://www.epa.gov/dera/learn-about-impacts-diesel-exhaust-and-diesel-emissions-reduction-act-dera

https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2023-01-30/stuck-in-traffic-diesel-fumes-may-be-harming-your-brain 

 

 

https://www.cancer.org.au/cancer-information/causes-and-prevention/workplace-cancer/diesel

Reducing Single Use Plastic is More than Just Straws.

People are more likely to change a behaviour if they see something graphic to demonstrate how bad something is.
A turtle with a straw up its nose is a horrifying sight. They are not the only species affected by plastic however.

Sea life of all sizes is hugely affected by plastic debris; among that debris is 1000's of straws and bottle lids, cigarette butt ends and billions of other tiny pieces of plastic from all around the world, all mashed together so much that is has become habitat for tiny ocean flora and fauna and at the same time, food for the ocean animals that end up in the stomach of the fish that humans love to eat.

Every single day people with money are buying items that are single use plastics. Bags, packaging, take-away cups, cutlery and plates, sauce packets, cosmetics.. a myriad things I don't even realise exist since I have long been aware of reducing my use of resources and live fairly simply.

Plastic items that are going to be reused many times or will have a long useful life are better. If you don't like the idea of leachates in plastic containers there are many glass  or stainless steel options around these days too.

Less is More
My dad was young during WW2 so he was always frugal and I grew up with the habits of using soap for my hair (thereby avoiding many shampoo bottles) and not buying sugar water drinks (no single use plastic bottles). I'm not really boasting, more saying how easy it is to not make rubbish. I've never been into cosmetics either, so that's a whole lot of stuff I never bought or bought into.

It's really easy to get yourself a set of reusables of whatever you think you need. Good water is available for refilling bottles and there's no reason not to have a reusable bag by now, surely! In parts of Australia, boomerang bags are being made by communities so the public can get the idea and the habit of bringing bags when they go shopping.

And of course, if we all do good things and keep on lobbying governments and corporations we really can make some difference.
Eventually the coal barons will have to die off, surely.

Worm composting and all those tiny bits of plastic that get in there.

These are a couple of our worm bins that we use to dispose of our compostable household waste. This is mostly fruit and vegetable scraps, tissues, other paper plus some weeds and lots of dry stuff from the bannah grass we have growing to protect us from the south west wind and afternoon sun.

We prefer this style of worm farming as they can escape the heat or cold if they need to, which they're unable to do in the high rise type set-ups. We're lucky to have somewhere to do this.

The first one is a stack of tyres, piled so they don't have gaps for rodents to enter. It is next to a dwarf almond, which should benefit from it's wormy friends.

Even though I forgot to start this pile with worms, they have managed to get in there and I saw a couple of them near the surface. The yellow stuff is corn meal. We weren't going to eat it and it is a bit alkaline, I think, so the worms like it. Sometimes I throw some garden lime in to balance the pH if it gets too soggy and damp. Finely ground eggshell is also good to add for calcium.
The bannah grass and Acacia leaves make great compost (but we just killed the Acacia, oh well).

This Dalek looking Gedye bin was found somewhere with no lid. This lid is from a Webber cooker, which there are often many of at verge side collections.. It works well as a worm cover as the moisture falls back in. The worms get up around the edge of the bin and lurk about.

 Worms. This is under the Webber lid from the Dalek bin above. We've stopped adding foodscraps to it now, just manky water once in a while, so they can finish it off and then we can empty that one.

Pulling apart the bin is a bit of a progression in that it takes a few goes to get there. If you don't mind cockroaches you can maybe go quicker.
The top layers tend to harbour cockroaches. I let them escape and leave the lid off so that the worms can retreat into the dark. That's when I take a few bucketfuls of the worm goodies and spread them around or put them somewhere out of the sun and rain. Once you expose worms, leave it again for a few hours/days. Then you can collect some more. It gives a few things a chance to move out before you take their home away.
As I rolled the tyres around big clods of worm poo was falling out.. fertilising on the go!! The tyres are going to be moved to a new spot in our front garden to help the hedge grow faster.
This one has lots of roots in it. I'm guessing asparagus, but not sure yet. Have to keep digging.

This is the lower part of the worm bin, it is drier and a bit more aged. Even if the nutrients are gone, this adds humus and structure to the soil when it is added. As you can also see, we eat a bit of chicken. One weird phenomena with these loooong time composts is that as you get closer to the bottom, more and more concentrated layers appear.. eggshells, bits of plastic, some still totally readable and brightly coloured. And allllll the bones.. I did put a dead raven in here at one point.. didn't manage to come across it's skull though in my unruly vermicompost digging.

Now This is the point of my post. All the bits of plastic. Some of these things are obviously plastic but some of the labels are a bit of a surprise. Still shiny and readable. 

Good to see no teabags or the crinkly plastic bags that we were buying salad leaves in for a while. 

This is maybe 5-7 years worth of stuff we have added in to this pile. It's still a bit of a shock though, some of the things that went in there. Only one teaspoon though and no other cutlery, so that's good.
It adds a fair bit of time to having to sort it out though and these little bits of plastic and bones are fiddly to have to pick out. We have a sieve (plastic plant tray with big holes) to help get some of the bones out.

This is not a worm egg. It's a worm poo egg. This shows why it is good to crush eggshells before putting them in. If you rinse the shells when you use them they crush easier when dry and can be pulverised in a blender. 

 

 Look at that lovely texture.. waters in beautifully and is readily used by the soil critters and plants.