This is the year. When I began gardening here a few years back there were no established vegetable plots to speak of. None of the ground was really ready for any kind of intensive food growing. The area in the back yard where I started out used to be used for car parking (I only found this out later) so the ground was very hard packed and mostly clay. For several seasons now I have been adding organic matter like pea-straw, shredded paper, wood and bark chips, worm-castings, and home-brewed compost to try and build it up (rather than dig-down and adding chemicals). The area now has about a foot of very good rich topsoil and it is crawling with helpful worms and other critters. With the addition of blood & bone at the start of this season I think it is set to go off this summer. The organic approach certainly takes a little more patience and time than the popular alternative of using chemicals, but it just feels right to me. The soil is where it all begins and the whole idea is to promote as much life and diversity in your soil as possible. The more popular industrial approach is the opposite. Pour on the poisons to kill of everything except the one crop you are growing. It reduces the soil to little more than a sponge to hold the fossil fuel based food we pour on. Take away the fossil fuel and you have a desert. A pest (as they are called in the chemical approach) is not something to wage a chemical war with. If you have a slug problem, instead of looking at it as too many slugs, maybe it is not enough ducks (they love eating slugs, as do some frogs). Or maybe it's a problem with aphids. instead of spraying a poison on the very plants you are planning to eat, you could plant marigolds which will attract ladybirds, which love eating black-fly aphids. Nature has the solutions and it is all about achieving a balance; something that happens naturally given enough time. I already have a well established crop of garlic and silver-beet (they don't mind the frosts up here), and in the last few weeks I have planted potatoes, beans, hearting-cabbage, Chinese cabbage, bottle gourds, grey pumpkins, hearting-lettuce, beef-steak tomatoes, and sweet-corn (lots and lots of sweetcorn; I love the stuff). My black currents and raspberries are getting completely covered in with bird netting this year. Last year they produced but the birds got the goodness first. This year they are mine. I want to make jam. One last thing before I get back out in the sunshine to do more planting... There is a Blackbird hanging around my garden this year. Nothing unusual, they are around every year and they love digging for worms in the top soil. This Blackbird is different though. I've seen him every day for the last few months and have been trying to get a photo, but with no luck so far. How do I know its the same bird? He has one pure white tail feather. I'm taking this as a good omen...
10:14:28 AM 
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