From grass to bulging veggie garden in under six months

  I’ve been reading tutorial posts elsewhere about starting veggie gardens, and no wonder people give up on the idea before they start. Why do people have to complicate things which are actually quite simple? Or turn it into a mammoth shopping list that makes buying vegies for the rest of your life seem like the cheap deal?

  We are experts at starting veggie gardens. Before you pass me off as an up-myself snob, remember that the husband and I have lived in well over 20 houses in our 13-odd years together. Starting them, we excel at. Learning to keep them going well for years………..well, maybe one day we’ll get the chance. Our way involves using your muscles for the initial start-up, but not your wallet. Most people could do with using their muscles more, so don’t be shy-get out there, toughen up, and do some work you can be proud of and reap the benefits from for years.

    200sq/m, less than six months

Here’s our well-honed method.

  Pick a sunny spot. Here in Australia, with our intense sun, you can get away with some shade. But try to minimise it. If you have lots of shade everywhere, go ahead and do it anyway, but resign yourself to leafy veg. Under trees is also not so good-they’ll steal from your vegies. Start with a manageable size-you can always expand later once your original area is set-up, but beginning with a huge area can be discouraging.

  Peel off the grass. All of the grass. A mattock is the best for this. You may think you want lovely grassy paths, with rocks/sleepers for edging, but you don’t. Well, you won’t once the reality of them sinks in. Grassy paths suck the nutrients and water from your garden, and the grass invades through your pretty edging. Without herbicide, you’ll have a grassy garden fairly quickly. As you’re not a ruminant, and cannot digest the grass, that is bad. Make a compost pile with the sod.

  Dig over the dirt. It doesn’t need to be deeply dug, just rough it up a little. A fork is good for this-sink in the tines, wiggle it around and lever it part of the way up. Repeat. Throw on as much manure as you can get-fresh, old, from any farm animal will do. Manure is plentiful, and there’s always people around wanting to get rid of it-find people who keep animals and don’t garden, try stables, ask any farmers you know. Ask on local online groups if anyone wants you to come around and clean up their mess. You’ll meet some interesting people. We’ve spent a lot of time wandering in paddocks picking up muck-but we most definitely don’t go to Bunnings and buy bagged manure. Actually, we don’t go to Bunnings ever, but that’s another story.  Spread the lovely muck over your dirt, and inhale the beautiful stink-that stink is the smell of fertility, and future food for you.

Cover the lot with mulch. Sugar cane, lucerne, pea straw, whatever’s available in your area. Again, if you look you can usually pick up bales of straw fairly cheaply from the side of the road. Or, you can rake up the council mowings from the side of the road in the country. Water it well, then rest your aching muscles for a week or so.

  Now, it’s time to plan. Decide where you want your beds to be, and tramp paths around them. Stomp down hard and you should soon be able to see them clearly. Your paths will be manured and mulched just as heavily as your beds-and why not? Your plants can spread their roots out there, so lets make it tasty for them. (Admittedly, we currently have bare paths, but we have an unfair amount of local red-bellied black snakes). Make sure your paths and beds are a decent width, but that you can reach the centre of the beds. Water it again.

  Plant seeds, according to season. Scrape the mulch back, make sure the soil is damp, break up any clods if needed, and plant away. Seedlings are too much bother-home-started seedlings have their place, but for now it’s an unnecessary complication. Keep it simple. Plant your plants at random, forget about neat beds of one type of plant. Lettuces grow well in the shade of other plants, radishes grow so fast you pull them before the tomatoes next to them are big enough to be bothered, and so on. In the beginning your germination will be poor, so plant thickly. You can always thin, and eat the thinnings. But you want success, so go crazy. Seeds are cheap. My favourite supplier is Rangeview Seeds.

  Keep in watered, and watch it grow. Attention is the key-go for a walk around it every day. Get down low, and really look. Learn what your plants, and your weeds, look like when they come up. Keep an eye on the bugs and work out which ones are helpful, and which you should feed to the chooks. Learn what grows well together, and what doesn’t. Work out what grows really well in your area and gather lots of recipes containing it. Conversely, learn what you shouldn’t bother with, as it gets struck down with pests/disease, or hates the weather. This step is not optional if you want garden success-it doesn’t take much time, but attention is the difference between success and failure.

  A visitor in the corn patch

  There you go. You’re a gardener. That wasn’t so hard, was it?

Travels, part 2-the Fleurieu and back again, via the Red Centre

September-November now!  After spending a few weeks north of Adelaide, where we got hailed on and frosted up, we had a hissy fit and true to our style decided to go somewhere warmer. Like Alice Springs. I bought myself a digital SLR in Port Augusta as a birthday present, but didn’t realise i’d need a different card, so was unable to use it until we got to Alice Springs (you’ve only missed Coober Pedy, which didn’t grab me at all). As it worked out, I finally got to use it on my birthday, heading out to the West MacDonnell ranges. And what a landscape to practice on. Alice Springs was so much more beautiful than I expected, in a rugged, sun-bleached, ancient sort of way. I can see how people travel to the outback and end up living there, it’s spectacular in a whole different, much more peaceful way than the coast.

  Ellery Big Hole was gorgeous, and we stopped and ate cake. Note how tiny the kids are in the lower right? It was discarded as a possible camping area because there was no shade, and it was very hot. We had to go out and buy summer clothes when we got to Alice because we had nothing suitable-my morning there in jeans was almost intolerable.

  We carried on to Ormiston Gorge which was even more beautiful, dumped the camping gear to set up later, and went swimming for the rest of the day. Happy 28th birthday to me!

 

That evening we had the whole gorge to ourselves and stayed there until dusk. Then we went back, the kids went to bed and the husband and I sat up spotlighting dingoes prowling around. Absolutely perfect. A dingo stole the full wetbag on our last night, and I found it 50m off the track in the morning. We then got to say ‘A dingo stole my wetbag!’ in bad Australian accents.

  After a few days, however, the heat was getting to us in a big way, and we ran out of sunscreen, which was an absolute necessity when you could get burnt in under 10 minutes. So back to Alice, the caravan park, and the pool! Where we spent most of the rest of our time.

  The view from Anzac Hill

At sunset.

Dirty desert feet-honestly, the dust got smeared on everything, especially being hot and sweaty. It was impossible to keep clean. We were scrubbing all feet before bed to try to preserve our bedding somewhat.

While the husband kept spotting jobs advertised and trying to convince me to stay there, I was more realistic. The cost of living is astronomical-and to tell the truth, I felt uneasy being somewhere that is so unsustainable. All the food is trucked in, the water is pumped from the Great Artesian Bore-it all felt a bit like a house of cards to me. While were were keen to go to Darwin everyone heading south discouraged us-it was late October and the build up to the wet, and having lived in Cairns for four years we knew what that was like. Bearable in a well ventilated house with fans, but in a plastic tent it wouldn’t be so fun. So we decided to go south-west and check out the big rocks. Originally we planned to go west again through the MacDonnells via the Menindee loop through Aboriginal land and onto Kings Canyon, but apparently the road was terrible-30km/h, flat tyres sort of terrible. As we weren’t particularly equipped for serious 4WD conditions we wussed out and took the main roads to Yulara. It’s about 450km from Alice, and 250km off the Sturt Hwy-much further than I would have guessed before going!

Uluru (well, duh). My advice? Skip the sunset viewing, it’s crowded and not very impressive. Instead, spend dusk at Mutijulu waterhole, and watch the animals appearing to drink. Much better.

 

Kata Tjuta, which is about 50kms away.

    

I was surprise by how much there was to see around Uluru, the general media view is of a big featureless rock. But there’s lots of trees, waterholes, caves, sacred sites and historical sites around the base. There’s also an awesome mudbrick visitor centre which cannot be photographed. I was not happy, as I wanted a house like it so needed photos as a reference. It was insanely touristy of course (and we were there at the quiet time) and Yulara, being basically a resort for tourists, was sterile and unremarkable. But there was a free air-conditioned bus that we did many laps on around the complex. We did a bushfood session which was wonderful-the indigenous woman who ran it was lovely, she ran to no-one’s schedule and showed all the kids one by one how to use quandongs for sunscreen and make a honey drink from grevilleas.

We had lots of Steve Parrish moments up there-I do like reptiles so the desert was fun. Seeing a big goanna near the kitchen and alerting the Japanese tourists was hilarious-they were scared but intrigued, with lots of squealing. Not so fun was finding a centipede in the tent under my pillow, and hacking it up with a spoon.

 

This snake was the funniest. We were walking back from the Mutijulu waterhole at Uluru at dusk, and spotted this snake crossing the path. We yelled ‘SNAKE!’ and all started running towards it to get a better look. It was hell-bent on reaching cover away from the seven giants thundering towards it, and we didn’t get any closer than about 20m away before it was gone for good. The international tourists behind us were horrified though. We must have confirmed all of their stereotypes about Australians all being lunatics like Steve Irwin, leaping on poisonous reptiles. They stayed very close behind us while the kids checked out the tracks, and didn’t leave us until the carpark was in view.

Then began the looong trek south again, with the vague view of settling down somewhere there, overtaking cattle-filled road trains….

…..past the opal diggings at Coober Pedy….

….and the last desert sunset for a while.

Travels, part 1-Melbourne to the Fleurieu, with a side trip to Queensland.

  I’ve realised I haven’t shared any pictures of our travels at all. Some people must suspect we never actually went anywhere. So here’s the gist of it, as quickly as possible. This covers last July-September

First up, Melbourne to the in-laws, and a trip up Mt Donna Buang for the ‘snow’. We timed it badly, but our Queenslander children were still quite impressed.

After watching her nanna and I start a granny squares rug (my long, ongoing travel project) Oods mastered it and began her own. Not bad for a seven year old!

Most of our time was spent inside-it was July, and cold, and the husband worked for much of the time. Then our property SOLD (I still can’t quite believe it), we bought an awesome car and drove back up to the property to finish it all up.

 

With no gas, a solar system that didn’t work, and a snake skin hanging from the ceiling things were even more primitive than when we lived there. But we tidied it up, fixed a few things and packed what remained. When it got too much, a few days at the beach sorted us out.

Then with all done, we went to Lismore (just to check it out) with our very……….us load on the back of the mung bean (as we christened the green, rounded car). Yes that is a chook house, with a chook dome on the roof. The nesting boxes made excellent food storage for the trip.

We decided Lismore was OK but had to give the job offer in Melbourne serious consideration. So off down the gorgeous but frosty New England highway we went to Melbourne again.

The husband began working, I began looking for a rental (no-one rang us back for an inspection. Not one.) and the kids slowly started to fall apart. When Frosty started to wet himself regularly and ignore his daddy (formerly light of his life, to be barnacled onto at every opportunity) we decided a qualification isn’t worth that right now. We have plenty of time, it’s not like we’re approaching middle age or anything, so family can take priority now.

Plus, the husband was having kittens at the thought of having to face this every day. My poor bumpkin isn’t cut out for inner-city life (and neither am I).

So we went on Puffing Billy.

And to Sovereign Hill. Below is lolly making.

We liked the gardens and housing. (Jealous! JEALOUS!)

While the girls made moony eyes at the horses. They were extremely impressed with their carriage ride.

My workers got into gold panning with gusto, convinced they were going to strike it rich-unfortunately not. As an aside, does every former Victorian schoolkid remember doing this on camp?!?!?!

This is about the time we decided to go travelling, as we couldn’t work out what else to do or where else to move to, so in between getting attacked by too-tame cockatoos at Kallista and doing the family rounds, the husband welded up a big cage and turned our trailer into a box trailer, we packed what we needed and hid the rest in the in-laws shed, and took off along the south-west coast. Mostly because we hadn’t been that way, and because we had no interest in moving there there was no ulterior motive!

First stop, Kennett river. Lovely beach, pity about the exorbitant caravan park.

Then the fantastic Blanket Bay, on Cape Otway. Which is FREE! As we subscribe the the ‘buy it when we need it’ philosophy we had no chairs, or lighting, but we got by pretty easily. We did, however, have shovels, and managed to re-route the creek flowing across the beach.

 

The leeches decided Shorty was extremely tasty…………

 

……..but the kids weren’t so impressed with my first attempt at camp oven damper. The inside was good!

      

There were koalas everywhere-seriously, by the time we left they were a bit ho-hum. Yawn, another koala? We also spotted rufous wallabies and an echidna.

Then time to leave Blanket Bay and head along the coast. There’s something called the Twelve Apostles there. Seriously, it’s magnificent along that stretch. The reality makes the photos look like nothing (especially my crappy pics ). And the formations go for miles…….definitely somewhere i’d like to explore more, in better weather.

 

A stop at Dartmoor amid the carved trees for lunch.

Ogling wind turbines!

  Then it was across the SA border……..and quarantine. Silly us thought that if our plants could have been sent to SA we could take them there, but no. I couldn’t bear to throw them in the pit so labelled them, begging someone to take them back to Victoria and plant them. Other travellers said they weren’t there a few hours later, so here’s hoping someone was happy to find $150 worth of berries, potatoes and crowns. Sob.

   

Mount Gambier, and the Umpherston sinkhole by day…………..

  And night, feeding the possums that live in the sinkhole.

 

And the Blue Lake-would you believe we knew absolutely nothing about this area before we reached it? I’d never heard of any Blue Lake.

Then onto Naracoorte to check out the World Heritage caves and megafauna remains-this was where our first wind troubles appeared, and we had to pack up and fork out for a cabin rather than sleep in this.

The caves were truly spectacular, and I look forward to going back and doing ALL of them soon!

Then a rather too-big driving day to Normanville, on the Fleurieu Peninsula, south of Adelaide. Picked completely at random from an accommodation directory. We camped just behind the dunes, and bonus! Another creek to dam! Out came the shovels again.

And we found the eggs of an endangered plover.

 

  We also checked out the whaling museum at Victor Harbour, among other things, and that is where the camera finally decided to die, after months of not zooming and having to be smacked to turn on (let no-one say we are wasteful).

  We were getting heartily sick of the cold by now-we were in bed by seven each night because it was simply too cold to do anything else. September in a tent in the south is not exactly comfortable. So we decided to head generally north and see where that took us.