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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 […]

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Permie Porn!

2012/06/18 kai 0

It’s finally the rainy season here in Perth! We’ve been waiting for this for a while now and the first serious rains started up about a month ago. I meant to post this earlier but life has conspired to keep me busy. We were eagerly waiting the first big rains as it would be the first big test of the swales we spent so much time working on over the last few months. Our first visit up after the major storm was actually for our house warming night up on the land with the bonfire (We made up for the […]

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Our First Winter

2012/05/23 Danielle 0

Winter is here, and the rains have started. Or at least – we had two weeks of rainy weather, and now we have Melbourne winter weather. Cold and dry. It’s lovely for going out in, but my poor baby trees need the wet. K commented the other day that being a permahippy has the unexpected consequence of making you respond to a rainy day with excitement and happiness. So much precious water, so many things that can grow as a result. The current objective is to extend the tree cover as much as we can before next summer, to provide […]

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glass gem corn

2012/05/18 Danielle 0

The internet – or at least the organic / heirloom gardening, plant-nerd and permaculturish back alleys of it that I frequent – have been buzzing for the last week or so about a newly discovered variety of corn. It’s called glass gem corn, although it could as easily be called rainbow corn or even omgponies corn. Whatever the name, it’s beautiful. Glass gem is a flint corn variety, also sometimes called Indian corn (as opposed to dent, or field corn, sweetcorn, and popcorn) which means that it’s used for grinding into cornmeal or cornflour rather than as a fresh vegetable. […]

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Trees and Water

2012/05/15 Danielle 2

No scheme water, and no bore or rainwater tanks in place, made irrigation over the summer a very labour intensive task. So every weekend we filled up a couple’ve barrels with water and drove them up to Gallifrey, then manually transferred the water to the water tubes around each of the trees using watering cans. We tried a few water containers, and experiment showed that the recycled plastic olive barrels fitted with taps were the best. The flexible plastic water bladders that we tried first didn’t hold much water, and sprung leaks after two or three uses. The plastic slimline […]