Growing Food - One of our aims in moving to the bush was to become proactively involved in feeding ourselves. Not content to sit back and purchase prepackaged, predigested foods from the supermarket any longer, we are working hard to propagate and plant out vegetables for the coming summer.
So far we've planted corn, potatoes, strawberries, capsicums, cucumbers, zucchini, pumpkin, squash, watermelon, rockmelon, onion, tomatoes and many others. Plus we've planted a swag of herbs and "companion plants" to ward of bugs - things like marigolds and wormwood.
The soil here is really weird. When I think of dirt, I think of black sandy stuff that you can pick up and almost run through your fingers. Here the dirt is black and claylike. It's really hard to dig. So we use tractors. In this picture you can see me, under the watchful eye of Sue's brother Matt, using a rotary how to break up the soil and mix in tea-tree mulch to add bulk to the soil, retain moisture - and most importantly - break up the soil a bit.
Using the tractors is fun. The painful part is trying to unhook and hookup the various implements. This tractor has a bucket on the front. This is really useful for picking up the mulch from the mulch pile and transporting it to the the garden [sometimes via a truck or trailor]. The rotary hoe gave us a little trouble in the hookup stage. If you don't reverse in "square" or at least as square as when you dropped off the implement, it can be a little tricky hooking up.
 But it's fun!
5:40:49 AM 
|
|
