PDC…..Week 12

Not much to report from the penultimate PDC class as we spent most of the day working on our final designs.

We did however, take a brief look at seed saving, propagation (sowing seed and taking cuttings) and an introduction to grafting.

During the week I found this great link at the Permaculture Research Institute site which features the permaculture garden at the property where we’ve been doing our PDC. Our teacher, Cam Wilson, has also started an informative blog which can be found here.

Meanwhile…….this is probably a good place to update what’s been happening around the home front while I’ve focussed on writing about the PDC.

I started planting out those tomatoes in the second week of September, because we’d had a few warm days and I thought, that’s it, spring’s here. But no, the weather turned cold again and the tomatoes began to look very sick. One died. I’d almost given up on them and was cursing my impatience, when finally, the weather began to turn around, and how! Ten days of over-30’s temperatures sure picked them up. They’ve been getting fortnightly doses of Seasol and potash (not tried the potash before, but doing so on Peter Cundall’s recommendation) and they’re now looking much better. I’ve put 4 varieties in wicking boxes to try—Roma, Black Russian, Green Grape and Green Zebra. I also bought 3 black recycled plastic tubs at Bunnings, billed as tomato tubs and have Black Zebra, Black Russian and Grosse Lisse in those, up on the deck, beside the house. So, after a bad start it might be a good tomato year after all.

The hot weather cured the first 2 batches of garlic so I picked those—60 nice bulbs in all—now hanging up under the house to dry. There’s still another 20 or so to pick, but they were planted later and haven’t started to cure yet.

A dozen capsicums have gone into 3 wicking boxes (4 to a box) and 3 more wicking boxes are planted up with butter beans. Another box was sown with golfball-sized carrots (Thumbelina variety from Edens) and they’re almost a pickable size. One day I’ll try long carrots in a wicking box.

I potted up 50 leek seedlings (this year I’ve tried the variety Blue Solaise from Phoenix Seeds in Tassie) and about a third have been planted out for next winter.

I’ve put out zucchini, cucumbers, button squash and pumpkins—2-3 varieties of each. Watermelons are still small; another couple of weeks till they’re ready.

Finally, I went to town with herbs and have dozens of seedlings still being planted out—sage, oregano, thyme, basil, tarragon.

I still need to get some shade structures in place in preparation for those 40 deg days we’re sure to be hit with later in the season. I’m copying Scarecrow’s poly pipe structures; they seem to work pretty well for her.

The unusually early hot weather we had has really coloured up the apricots. I’ve been watching to see if the rosellas find them. I don’t really want to go to all the trouble of netting the tree. So far, so good. I’ve picked a few to ripen inside, although I know tree-ripened is best.

Last day of November today and I picked the first zucchini of the season. It’s the Romanesco variety, one I haven’t grown before. Rather attractive—dark green skin with lighter green raised ribs (no photo, sorry—I cooked it for dinner!). As is usual with zucchinis, it grew from nothing to 20 cm long in (it seems) just a day.

November has been an odd month weatherwise. A week or two of 30-plus temperatures to begin with, then over 70 mm of rain at the end. Everything is lush and green. I wonder how long it’ll stay that way.

PDC…..Week 11

This week Cam was interstate, so his friend Dan Palmer took our class. Dan is the founder of Permablitz, runs Very Edible Gardens and has worked overseas with noted permaculture teacher Rosemary Morrow.

We started with a look at designing gardens in a couple of different climate types to the temperate climate we’re familiar with—the humid tropics and drylands (the way Melbourne’s rainfall is going, we may get to use dryland strategies yet!).

Soils in tropical regions are generally old and heavily leached. The nutrients are held predominately in the plants and animals, not in the soil as in temperate regions. A combination of warmth and soil fungi ensures that organic matter on the forest floor is broken down quickly and taken up by plants, before it can be washed away by heavy rains. Therefore soils should be covered at all times (mulch, mulch, mulch!) and tree systems are better than annual cropping systems.

The tree canopy in a tropical system may consist of avocado, mango or jack fruit. The understorey may have babaco, paw paw and dragon fruit. Coffee might occupy the shrub layer. Herbs such as comfrey and sweet potato are in the herb layer and clumping plants like ginger and arrowroot are scattered throughout. Vines climb everywhere. It’s a very productive system foodwise.

House design in the tropics concentrates on heat reduction—keeping things cool. The house is best oriented to the prevailing air movement. Breezeways to bring in cool air and white walls to reflect heat. Cooking areas are best kept separate from the house.

Growing food in dryland systems is a real challenge. Winds (rather than rain) are the predominant shapers of landscape. In the soil, termites and ants are more effective than worms as aerators and decomposers. Rainfall is episodic and every drop needs to be captured effectively.

There’s a very good short video of permaculture design in a desert situation. It’s called Greening the Desert and it features permaculture guru, Geoff Lawton. See it here. There’s now a longer follow-up version and it’s here.

Our final design project occupied most of the afternoon session. Only a week more to go on this and most of the final day of the course will be taken up with presenting our designs.

PDC…..Week 10

Getting even later with these updates, I know, but at least this time I have an excuse (other than sheer laziness). Earlier in the week I had an argument with a bullant about why I shouldn’t have been pulling up a weed growing on the top of its nest (which I didn’t know was there) and the bullant won! As a result I have a swollen and sore right hand and discovered that typing (normally not my thing) is definitely not my thing at the moment. So here we go, slowly, with one finger, left hand.

Community strategies was the PDC topic and the difference between self-sufficiency, self-reliance and re-localisation.

The self-sufficiency movement of the 70’s began with people heading off into the bush to escape from the machine and do their own thing. But it wasn’t really successful for most. It was hard work, they missed other people and soon burned out.

Then there was a shift to self-reliance within the broader community—finding a group of people with similar ideals and setting up an eco-village or intentional community. However many of these didn’t work either—problems with finding good land; problems with people; problems with land tenure and ownership.

The communities that were successful had to put a lot of work into creating structures that dealt with problems as they arose and so long as this is done, intentional communities can work.

But within the context of climate change and peak oil, there is an obvious and urgent need to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. So we need new ways of doing things and these need to be on a local scale, hence the move to re-localisation.

This is the basis of the Transition Movement which began in the UK and which seems to be spreading worldwide at a pleasing pace. There’s an excellent website here and Rob Hopkins (the founder of the movement) has a very good blog here. The important thing about Transition is that it’s a community-led process that aims to encourage people to build resilience in the face of change, into their everyday lives. As Rob says, if we wait for governments to take the initiative, we’ll wait forever. Amen to that.

We looked at strategies for providing food—including backyard gardens, community gardens, city farms, community-supported agriculture (CSA), farmer’s markets, school gardens and permablitz.

After lunch, we looked at money and finance and strategies for developing economic systems that serve local communities and not the global system.

LETS (Local Exchange Trading System) is a good example of such a system. As an introduction to it, Cam wrote all our names down on the board and we were asked to choose some service we could provide for the community.

Since I’m reasonably good at propagation and I’d already run a small backyard hobby plant nursery in the past, I chose ‘nursery’. There followed an entertaining ten minutes while we milled around buying and selling services to one another. We’d chosen ‘guineas’ as our local currency unit (short for guinea pigs and not to be confused with those gold coins of years past).

As we sold a service, we wrote the amount we’d earned in the credits column against our name, and the person we’d sold the service to wrote that amount in the debits column opposite their name. I managed to sell about 400 plants at a guinea apiece and bought some bread from the baker and some jam to go on it from the jam-maker. I decided against aikido lessons but did invest in a course of yoga. After five transactions each, we summed our debits and credits. Some were in the red, some in the black. The idea of a local currency is that it stays in the system; it can’t be used outside the system and therefore the local community benefits from all the transactions that take place within it. The Totnes Pound is a prime example.

Further reading: The Future of Money (Bernard Lietaer) A look at how money works and the many positive outcomes of creating local currencies

We spent the last hour or so of another interesting day working on our final design project—the community garden.

PDC…..Week 9

After a week’s break, we began week 9 with a look at energy-efficient housing. In a temperate climate (e.g. Melbourne), it’s cold in winter and hot in summer, therefore in winter we need to keep the cold out and the warmth in, and in summer we want the heat out and the ability to let the cool evening breezes in.

So, in the southern hemisphere, the house should face north and length should be about one & a half times width. Bedrooms and other little-used rooms are placed on the shade side while high activity areas face the sun. Materials with high thermal mass (slab floors, internal brick walls) store heat through the day and release it in the evening. Windows on the (hot) west side are minimised. Drapes are important; floor-to-ceiling, and with pelmits.

A glasshouse on the sun side can provide winter warmth and a shadehouse at the rear provides cooling breezes to enter in summer.

Insulation is important to keep heat in. Bulky stuff like wool, fibreglass and foam are ideal. Reflective insulation (sisalation) provides a radiant heat barrier and prevents heat radiating down from the roof.

Vegetation can also be used to good effect. Deciduous trees screen out the summer sun and allow the winter sun in.

We looked briefly at house design in the humid tropics and desert (I’m not likely to be shifting to either of those in the near or distant future) before moving on to alternative and appropriate technology, which generally means things that don’t use or need fossil fuels to run them.

Pumps for moving water around are many and varied; diesel, windmill, solar, and here’s a fascinating one—the ram pump. This little beauty can actually use gravity pressure to send water higher than its original source.

Electricity can be generated using micro-hydro, wind or solar. The latter two are expensive and need battery storage for night-time use or when the wind isn’t blowing. Micro-hydro is cost-effective where a constant flow of water is available.

Heating water can be done in a solar heater where water is heated in copper tubing and rises to a collector tank. Evacuated tube heaters are newer and more efficient, but also more expensive.  A wetback stove consists of special piping attached to the back of a wood heater or stove which heats water which can then be stored. A low-tech version is simply to install black tubing on a hot roof.

Cooking. An efficient wood-burning stove is the rocket stove. It burns small kindling and can be maintained on garden prunings. Solar cookers cook slowly, using the sun’s heat, which is reflected onto the cooking pot by a parabolic collector. A box lined with something reflective like aluminium foil does a good job, too. Insulated boxes cook slowly and are great for cooking grains, pulses and stews. Cooking is started on a conventional stove and the pot is placed in the box where the contents simmer slowly.

Preserving is a way of keeping food from glut times through to scarce times. Solar dehydration is the best low-tech option. A solar dryer can be as simple as a piece of flywire on a wooden frame, or as involved as a number of frames in a cabinet with a rising warm air current.

Low-energy refrigeration can be achieved with a cool cupboard. Air is drawn up through an underground pipe and through an insulated cupboard. Food is kept in a series of baskets so that cool air can circulate around the food. Not suitable for meat or dairy, though. The old coolgardie safe does a good job, too.

So, there are lots of ways in which we can still do things when fossil fuels run out. We might not like it, but we’re going to have to get used to living the way people did before the fossil fuel age, with all its associated problems, hit us. I think we just might be the better for it in the long run.

After lunch we spent a couple of hours coming to grips with our final design project. We’ll spend more and more time on it in the final few sessions. Into the home straight now!

PDC…..Week 8

This week we looked at trees and forests and the benefits they provide. Forest edge species buffer the wind, collect nutrients and support a greater diversity of wildlife than the forest itself; it’s important to retain those edges. Trees cool the air (by evaporation) and warm it (by condensation).  Of the rainfall that hits a forest, 25% is evaporated from leaf surfaces, 50% is returned to the atmosphere by transpiration and 25% leaves as groundwater runoff. That means 75% is returned to the air. Inland rain occurs primarily because of forest transpiration. Remove the trees and the rain goes too; something humans with chainsaws don’t seem to have woken up to yet.

We looked at windbreaks and shelterbelts and how to design them. We learned how to assess the wind strength and direction at a site simply by observing the shape of the trees.

We discussed agroforestry and began with a pertinent quote from David Holmgren: “In a low energy future, the wealth of nations will be measured by the quality and quantity of their forests”. Yes, well. I can see there will be a lot of poor nations in the future (think: Saudi Arabia; no more oil; no trees; lots of desert; not a good future for them).

Agroforestry isn’t about growing acres and acres of the same tree species. An agroforestry system should aim for a diversity of species and ages, so that a varied yield is obtained over time. Timber trees, fodder trees, honey production, wildlife habitat, fuel, fibre, nuts. These are some of the beneficial products of a diverse system.

Out into the garden and we learned how to coppice and pollard trees and how and when to prune for timber production; a nice straight  trunk being the desired, valuable  end product.

I learned quite a bit about firewood (important, as we have a slow combustion heater). You want trees that grow fast and burn hot when young. Black Wattle and Casuarina are excellent. Generally, the heavier it is the hotter it burns. If you have a larger property, with some native bush (as we have), then general thinnings and prunings will provide most of your needs without a specific woodlot required. (We’ve been on our bush block for 10 years now and have never needed to buy firewood).

Another tip: leave cut firewood in lengths of 1.5 metres and stand them upright against a tree trunk or fence for a couple of months. The sap drains out much faster and they dry quicker (I always wondered why people did that!). Coppiced trees are ideal because they produce many new branches from the stump and these can be cut at 150 cm diameter and don’t need to be split. If you do have to split wood, it’s much easier when it’s still green.

After lunch we visited the sites for our final design project for the course. There were two options—a 5 acre hobby farm and a local community garden. I opted for the garden, believing it would provide an opportunity to showcase permaculture, plus having the potential for some varied design concepts. Over the last 5 weeks of the course we’ll spend increasing amounts of time on completing our designs and finally presenting them.

So it’s on the downslope now. I’ll be sorry when the course ends. I’m enjoying it immensely.

PDC…..Week 7

Half-way there and still much learning taking place.

This week we looked at water—fresh water, greywater and blackwater. Strategies for re-using greywater: regulate what goes down the sink (“only put down the sink what you’d be willing to put on your skin” [Wendy van Dok]; don’t store greywater for more than 24 hours—this is required by law—pathogenic bacteria can breed up if it is left for longer; avoid contact—by law, greywater can only be applied by sub-surface irrigation; be aware of quantities—the most common problem in using greywater is waterlogging. Share it around, don’t leave it running on the same area for weeks. All common sense really.

Greywater treatment systems can be an expensive option. Far better is to create an artificial wetland—a reed bed system. Bacteria on the roots of the reeds filter the greywater and the reeds can be regularly cut for mulch or compost. Greywater mulch pits are even better—greywater is diverted into a slotted drainage pipe which is placed inside  a hole filled with mulch. The mulch eventually rots down and can be placed around fruit trees and the pit refilled with fresh mulch. The idea I liked was that a long narrow hole filled with mulch can double as a pathway.

Good link here.

The easiest way to deal with blackwater is to install a composting toilet. We discussed various types. The best resource for this is the Humanure Handbook, which is now online.

Finally we looked at collecting and storing fresh water; the 3 S’s: slow, store & soak. Don’t let good water run off a property; slow it down, store it and let it soak into the soil. We looked at tanks (make them multifunctional—use a tank to screen out neighbours, or grow a passionfruit over it). Swales—level trenches dug on contour—can intercept water running over the land and store it so it leaches slowly into the soil. We learned to mark out the contours using three pieces of equipment—an ‘A’ frame, a length of plastic tubing filled with water and attached to a couple of measuring posts (called a ‘bunyip’) and  (the most sophisticated of all) a laser level. This bit of practical work out in the property’s sloping driveway, caused much hilarity, not to mention enjoyment, as we checked our measurements with A frame and bunyip against the laser level and found them spot on.

We looked at building various types of dams—constructing, maintaining and fixing leaks. We went into (not literally) natural swimming pools and wetlands, french drains and rainwater gardens, basins and erosion prevention. There was just too much to go into here.

I had previously thought the day we spent on soil was the most fascinating, but this one on water just boggled the mind. All the way home in the car, my brain hummed with ideas.

PDC…..Week 6

This week’s PDC course focussed on preparing a design for a permaculture system on the property we had visited last week. This was to be our first serious attempt at design.

Our four groups settled themselves down in various parts of the house and with coloured pencils, rulers and rubbers (the latter, we discovered, a very important tool for beginners!), we set to work. The first thing to do was to draw a (reasonably) accurate scale plan of the property showing the location of the house and other important features. Our architect member, Paul (not in the sub-group I was in, unfortunately), had already produced a very professional computer-generated plan and had taken many photos on the day, so everyone was to-ing and fro-ing to his group to remind themselves of features they hadn’t taken note of. The forgetful ones, who had omitted to take proper measurements (or perhaps should I say, inspired ones—me included), had produced colour aerial shots of the property complete with measurements (thank you, Google Earth!).

After much discussion and many rough sketches we were ready to transfer our final design to the ‘best’ paper. I think our group did a pretty good job. We had ‘removed’ a huge evergreen tree in the back garden, which allowed more winter sun into the property. We kept another huge oak tree in the front garden because it was deciduous and let winter sun in anyway and also provided valuable oak leaves for composting and mulch. We’d established blueberries (which like an acid soil) under it, along with redcurrants, which will tolerate some shade. We’d put a grapevine over the patio and planted cut-and-come-again vegetable beds alongside the patio, so there was quick access to these from the nearby kitchen. As the overall garden area was small (large 2-storey house on an average-sized block), we made use of fences for fruiting vines and espaliered fruit trees.

We added a water tank in the back garden (the owners had just installed a 10,000 litre tank in the front garden) and covered it with a passionfruit vine. We built a greenhouse next to the tank and the run-off from its roof went into the tank.

Our ‘piece-de-resistance’ (so we thought) was the chookhouse and yard. We put this in a narrow section of garden between a covered side passageway and the side fence, such that the back of the nesting boxes opened onto the passageway, which was just outside the laundry door. So the owner could collect eggs from within the passageway, without going out into the weather. The chookyard run was extended right to the orchard in the front corner of the property, so that the chooks could forage under the fruit trees and fertilise them at the same time. Next to the chookhouse we placed the compost bin and worm farm, again accessible from under the cover of the walkway and close to the laundry door. After a slightly stressed period in which we thought we weren’t going to be ready in time, we finished our design and adjourned for another of Jessie’s super-tasty lunches.

After lunch, each group presented its design to the others. Cam (our teacher) made valuable comments and suggestions. All in all, I found it a very satisfying introduction to the ins and outs of permaculture design.

PDC…..Week 5

No doubt about it—this course gets better and better and more fascinating by the week.

We began with a short introduction to microclimates—how to manipulate factors on a site to create mini climate zones to better facilitate the growth of plants. Strategies such as white walls or light-foliaged plants to reflect light, dark surfaces (walls, rocks) to trap warmth, plus using evaporation, condensation and humidity; there seem to be endless possibilities to play with existing site conditions. A classic example is the north-facing suntrap, a semicircle of light-reflecting plants encircling the plants whose growth is to be enhanced. A water feature in front can further add to light reflection and store warmth. It was interesting to learn that this type of structure can allow plants to be grown from the next climate zone, e.g. subtropical plants could be grown in Victoria.

On to strategies for urban design and an opportunity to do our first real design. Cam had arranged for us to visit a neighbouring property where we were to actually do this. The owners were out for the day so Cam & Jessie became ‘pretend’ owners. They told us what they wanted to achieve for the garden and we learned the right questions to ask. We walked the property, taking measurements, noting features and coming up with ideas (“hey, this would be a great place for the chickens!”),  then returned to home base and began preparing sketch plans of the property with (hopefully) all the necessary elements beautifully integrated into a good permaculture design. We had split into four groups, so there will be four separate designs to consider when it’s all over. Should be interesting to see and compare the variations!

PDC…..Week 4

We started week 4 with a quick look at the hot compost heap we made last week. The volume was much reduced, indicating that decomposition was taking place. Cam had turned the pile once through the week and although it had smelled OK (no anaerobic breakdown was occurring, which is what causes it to smell), he considered that it was getting too hot and therefore had too much nitrogen, so needed more carbon to get the carbon/nitrogen ratio right. It should be about 25/1. With too hot a pile, some of the benefical micro-organisms would be killed. We re-layered the pile using a bit more straw to increase the carbon content.

Back inside, and as it was a cold day, we gratefully snuggled into the doonas that Jessie had thoughtfully spread over the couches. School was never like this!

We were to begin doing some design work (the core of permaculture) and started with another of the principles:

Principle 6.  Integrate rather than segregate.

In natural systems, the connections between things are as important as the things themselves. So in permaculture design, the purpose is to place the elements in the system in such a way that each serves the needs and accepts the products of other elements. In other words, the elements in the design are integrated rather than segregated; each thoughtfully placed, instead of being just dumped anywhere.

We did what’s called a Needs, Function, Products analysis of a typical permaculture system element, the humble chicken. Listing its needs (food, water, shelter, etc), functions (scratching, eating insects, etc) and products (eggs, fertiliser, meat, etc), gives an idea of how and where it can fit into a system.

We split into 4 groups and each group was allocated an element in a permaculture system and asked to design a system to integrate that element with the chicken system. Our group got greenhouse/chicken, so it was onto the floor with butcher’s paper and textas to draw up a system which integrated the two. Each group then took turns in displaying and explaining their system. It’s not as easy as you might think and it got worse, as we then had to design a system that integrated the sum of each group’s elements and the chicken. There was a lot of head-scratching and general hilarity while Cam interjected with hints and suggestions. The more elements you add into a system the harder it is to successfully integrate them, or at least, the more thought it requires.

It was wanting expertise in the design element of permaculture that prompted me to take this course and I’m starting to realise that a successful, working permaculture system doesn’t just happen in five minutes.

We moved on to zone and sector analysis. Sectors are about the outside energies that affect a site, such as sun, winds, shade, frost, etc. Zones relate to energy saving involved in visiting or working with each element in a design. The house is zone 0. Zone 1, close to the house, is the most frequented zone. Zones 2, 3, 4, and 5 are progressively further away, for elements less frequently visited. Sectors and zones  must be taken into account in a good design.

After a brief look at animals in a system (which are the best chook and duck breeds, etc), we finished with an introduction to the forest garden; a garden which mimics the elements of a natural forest, but one in which all the products are edible, or useful in some other way.

A good reference is Forest Gardening by Robert Hart. Here’s a link to some information about the garden he established in the UK (there are many links on the subject, just google).

PDC…..Week 3

Soils ain’t soils. And if you thought so, think again.

Needless to say, this week’s PDC topic was soil—its chemistry, its biology and its physical structure.  It’s pretty simple really. Healthy soil = healthy people. Which is why the industrial agriculture model is killing us with unhealthy food. It doesn’t consider, even remotely, the health of the soil in which the plants grow.

The three pillars of healthy soil are the physical, the biological and the chemical, and they are all held together by carbon.

Pillar 1. Physical.  If the structure (physical) is poor, then the soil life (biological) can’t thrive and the soil’s water and nutrient holding capacity (chemical) is reduced.

Pillar 2. Biological. If the soil life (biological) is damaged, their ability to build and maintain soil structure is lost (physical) and they stop recycling and storing nutrients (chemical).

Pillar 3. Chemical.  If the mineral balance or moisture (chemical) is absent, then the soil structure can collapse (physical), and soil life (biological) cannot thrive.

Carbon holds it all together by building an open structure (physical), food and homes for the life in the soil (biological), and sites for water and nutrients (chemical) to be stored.

An easy way to look at the physical components of your soil is to fill a jar to one-third with soil, top up with water, put the lid on and shake vigorously. Leave to stand and when the contents have settled, the heavy material—coarse sand and gravel—will be at the bottom, with (in order), fine sand, silt, clay, organic material and water at the top.

Humus is that beautiful, dark brown, fluffy stuff which results from the breakdown of organic materials in the soil. It has a spongelike consistency which maintains air pockets, holds moisture, binds soil particles together and holds minerals. More importantly, it stores carbon in the soil and this can remain stable for thousands of years. Adding lots of organic matter to the soil produces lots of humus.

The biological life in the soil is important because micro-organisms like bacteria and fungi break down organic matter and actually help plant roots to take up nutrients by exchanging them for sugars and proteins produced by the plants and excreted by the roots. The relationship is of mutual benefit to plants and soil micro-organisms, a nice example of symbiosis going on all the time under our feet. The chemical fertilisers of industrial agriculture gradually destroy all this beneficial soil life.

Existing minerals in the soil are determined by the underlying geology and past practices on the land. It’s important to know if the mineral balance is correct. We were referred to an independent soil-testing laboratory and I’m definitely going to have a soil test done. Once the mineral balance is correct, then recycling all organic materials (food waste, humanure, etc) should retain that balance.

There was a lot more, but here are some good links on the subject:

The Soil Food Web International

From the Soil Up

We also covered worm farms, making compost, nutrient teas and compost teas. There’s an important difference between these last two which I wasn’t aware of. A nutrient tea is produced by simply filling a bin with water,  adding fresh green material and letting the whole lot rot down. Nutrient accumulators like yarrow and comfrey are good plants to use. The resulting product is diluted to feed plants (warning: this brew can be pretty smelly as it breaks down. Use a container with a firm-fitting lid).

Compost teas are actually concentrated solutions of microbes and fungi which are bred up especially to increase their numbers in the soil. A couple of handfuls of good quality compost and worm castings are put into a mesh bag which is suspended in a 20 l bucket of water. The water must be aerated and a small fish tank aerator does the job pretty well. Also added to feed the microbes are seaweed (Seasol—2 capfuls) molasses (1/8 cup) and oatmeal (1 tbsp). The whole lot is aerated for 24 hours while the microbes breed up, then diluted for use and watered into the soil. It’s recommended that this be done four times a year.

In the afternoon’s prac session we made a hot compost heap, by layering straw, horse manure and green material till it reached a cubic metre in size. We’ll be turning that next week to see how the composting process is going. We also looked at the huge worm farm Cam has built on the property (he has access to horse poo by the trailer load) and finally we made a batch of aerated compost tea.

All in all, a very satisfying day, and one which has given me a greater appreciation of ‘dirt’ and an even greater desire to avoid the unhealthy food produced by industrial agriculture.