What’s happening?

Well, not much, at the moment.

In the last 3 days we’ve had over 2 inches of rain and that has kept me out of the garden. The Girls were not amused and stood in a disgusted trio in the secure run, protected from the downpour, watching the holes in their playground fill with water. Luckily it’s sandy soil and it soon soaks away.

Only Molly is still moulting and looking a bit tattered; Cheeky and Lady have nice new feathers and perky new tails and look particularly chipper. They were even doing their egg-laying chortling yesterday, so I hope that means more eggs soon. I’ll be pretty peeved if I don’t get any now until the spring. That will mean only 3 months of egg-laying since I got them last September. It really hurts to have to buy eggs.

I was a bit disturbed to find something had tried to dig under their playground fence a couple of nights ago. Probably a fox. It was in a spot where I hadn’t put wire down under the ground, but had put a wooden bird-bath stand against the fence. It was easily kicked aside, so now I’ve put wire there. In the spots where I haven’t put wire, I’ve put 60 litre bins to collect rainwater and also wicking boxes; those without compost to fill them are full of water. I’d like to see Mr Fox push a 60 kg tub of water aside. I’ve replaced the bird netting over the playground with wire mesh now and it’s secure enough that I can leave the Girls in there when I go out and don’t have to lock them back in the secure run, which they hate. They get locked in the secure run at night and that’s completely surrounded with wire under the soil, so I have no worries about a fox getting in there.

Water-holding bins and a wicking box against the playground fence:

Wire mesh over the playground:

I planted another 3 dozen cloves of garlic, this time in a wicking box. I pushed them down into the compost with just their tips showing and a couple of days later, they were standing up right out of the soil:

Nothing could have pulled them up as I’d covered the box with wire. When I investigated, I found that roots had already grown and that’s what was pushing them up. So quick! Apparently root developement is triggered as soon as the base of the clove is in contact with moist soil:

And in another couple of days, green shoots:

The persimmon leaves are getting their autumn colours and I’ve put apple socks on those precious 12 fruits:

I bought the apple socks from Green Harvest. They call them apple pouches but they’re actually little nylon sockettes. They’re great to slip over fruit to keep birds and possums off. I wouldn’t want to do a whole tree with hundreds of fruit on it, but they’re OK to do enough of the best fruit to get a useful harvest:

In the brief intervals between showers, I managed to get the second planter box planted out:

There’s 2 varieties of kale—Lacinato and Red Russian, and 2 varieties of broccoli—Di Cicco and Italian Sprouting and 1 brussels sprout.

So really, quite a bit has been happening after all!