Movement in the garden

Another great day off, and in the garden. It's been a long week and today was time for action, plus a little time off. During the week Hubby picked up a dozen bales of sugar cane mulch. Not the fine stuff you buy hygenically packed in plastic, but real, off the farm stuff. No plastic waste, and a lot cheaper too. So first task to do today was to empty the bales of sugar can mulch from the back of the ute. These will be used around the garden beds to minimise the weeds, both sides of the fences to minimise the grass and around the little murrayas that will eventually (fingers crossed here) become a hedge. For those not in the know, the mulch is used to help hold moisture & warmth, and again control the weeds. Ran out of time to get to that part today, but they are now stacked up with a tarp covering (wet, mouldy sugar cane bales are heavy & not so much fun to play with).

Todays big job was to move the chook pen. I guess at this point I should explain our system. Hubby built a chook pen based on an idea from a permaculture book, except rather than the usual dome design, ours is an 'A' frame made just slightly larger than our gardens. It's made from PVC piping covered with wire fencing, and then a tarp thrown over for a little shelter from the elements. It's been made light enough that I can move it on my own pretty easily. Todays move however was back to the first garden bed, involving trudging it across the yard & removing/moving fences as well. I'll post some details and picks at a later time on how I use the chickens to do the hard work for me in the garden.

I also needed to remove the couple of capsicum and eggplants that were in this bed to a more permanent site. I found that the eggplants & capsicums I put in last season, were duds then, but produced better this time around. They have gotten stronger & bigger which obviously must help. The ones in this garden (see image above) only went in this season, and again were hopeless, (it looks alright, but that eggplant is only about the size of my little finger) so lets hope the next season theory works for these ones too. Below is a 'second' season eggplant, these were massive when they finished growing. I then ripped the remaining heads of basil off the bushes left. Ideally I'd like to turn this into my own home made pesto, but we'll see what time & my energy allows.

During the process of moving the chook pen I tripped over a sweet potato vine & ripped the poor thing right out of the ground. This meant I needed to dig up any sweet potatoes that might be ready (its a little early, I would have liked to have waited a few more weeks). I got a crop of about 4 decent sized sweet potatoes, and a few small undersized ones. This current crop of sweet potatoes came from last year's undersized ones, so I'll keep these to one side & wait for them to sprout.