February 2022 Kitchen Garden Guide

 

Welcome to the southern Tasmanian kitchen garden guide for 2022, where I talk about growing food, all year round. To find all my previous 9 years or so of Kitchen Garden Guides head to my blog called Vegetable Vagabond and look for the Garden Guides link directly under the header. It’s a big job to upload them all there, so it is not finished yet! I want to add relevant photos and links, which I cannot include in this Classifieds paper version too.

Eating by the seasons brings health to mind, body and soul as well as real purpose to our lives, no matter our age or ability. The next level kitchen gardener does not attempt to grow everything themselves, but connects with neighbours, friends, farmers, local market gardeners, roadside stalls and old-fashioned green grocers to gather what they do not have in their home garden and to share what they do. Some call this food security, some call it community sufficiency, I call it common sense! See below for some stalls and farms and groups to connect with.

Tomatoes

Are they fruiting? If not, then maybe you are watering them too much. Once a week is more than enough for well mulched tomatoes in the ground. I water them about once a month! By now their roots are way down, seeking out the rain that drenched our gardens before Christmas. Seriously, water is great for seedlings, for pots, for greenhouses and small, raised beds but not for tomatoes in the ground. The microbes in the soil will work wonders for you but they do not enjoy swimming!

When you are biting or cutting into a delicious, ripe, magnificent tomato, before you eat it all, STOP! Pick out a few seeds, put them on a piece of paper towel and write the variety and some notes on it. Leave it on your kitchen bench and add more seeds of that variety to that same paper towel, through the season. Do that for each variety of tomato. Later, when all the pages are fully dry, pack them away, to sow from late July.

Greenhouses and shadehouses

During the years of my endless quest to find someone who will use my salvaged windows and timber to create a greenhouse for me, I have had to resort to other measures to provide shelter for seedlings etc. I do not want to grow things out of season; I have more than enough to eat that is in season, whatever time of the year. I do not want to grow crops in a greenhouse, I just want to protect trays of seeds and seedlings while they get big enough to plant outside as well as shelter some precious pot plants from the very toughest of winter frosts here in Cygnet. There is an excellent, in-depth article online which thinks through the construction, use and sanity of greenhouses through cultures, climate and ages. Search for: Reinventing the Greenhouse. Please, do read broadly and think carefully before constructing something that you may find you really don’t like or use.

You might actually find that a sturdy structure, covered with a dense, white shadecloth is more versatile. In summer, when the sun is overhead, this will provide good wind protection and white is an excellent choice for bright shade. In winter, when the sun is quite low here in southern Tasmania, if you have it positioned to fully open on the north side, you will get full sun.

Basil

Oh the joy of having abundant basil growing in your garden and filling your summer kitchen with its delicious scent! This is a good year for basil, so far. If you don’t have any, get some advanced plants and plant them out or, do as I did last year, and pot them up into nice, terracotta pots for ready access at the kitchen door or on a bright kitchen windowsill. In pots you can keep them going for months by bringing them in when the weather starts to cool. Basil is wonderful for pesto and in salads and but also goes remarkably well with strawberries or peaches or in a lemon cake!

Chooks in summer

Most of the year my large chook yard under some fruit trees provides my chooks with all sorts of greenery to pick at, insects to dig up and clean up, like codling moths. By February, if it has been dry for a while like this year, there’s not much except dust for bathing. I grow a lot of chard for them because it is my chooks’ favourite thing. Yours may prefer other greens! Whatever it is they like, always keep some growing in your garden or next to the chook yard fence (so they can peck their own).

Natural dyes

Did you know that many of the plants we grow for food also can be used as natural dyes? The ‘Natural Dyes Project’ was created by Sewing Café, Lancaster,UK, to develop skills and knowledge of natural dying and bring awareness to the harmful impacts of synthetic dyes. They have a fabulous website which showcases a garden full of plants that can be used for dying.

February Events

Woodbridge WaterFest: Sun.Feb 20^th

Koonya Garlic Festival: Sat. Feb 26^th

Seeds to sow in Feb. Broccoli raab Kale Beetroot Shungiku Lettuce Asian greens (late Feb.) Carrots Spinach & silver beet Spring onions Leeks Hakurei turnips Tas. swedes Parsnips Radishes Seeds to save in Feb Lettuce Shungiku Calendular marigolds Tomatoes Parsnips

Plant out /pot up now, yes now Brussel sprouts Cauliflower Broccoli – regular, sprouting and raab Salad vegetables Leeks   Jobs for February Plant, feed or move citrus Summer prune stone fruits Prepare beds for autumn plantings Save seeds for next spring Mulch deeply with wet straw/silage Give flowering veg a dose of potash Protect brassicas from moths   Roadside stalls & farms Ashcraig Farm stall (Nichols Rivulet Rd) Lenny’s stall (Jetty Road, Cygnet) Blueberry farm (Gospel Hall Rd) Canes Orchard (Franklin) Crop Swap Cygnet and Surrounds

November 2021 Kitchen Garden Guide

 It has been WET, very wet. November is likely to also be wet, and warm, because La Nina is almost certain. Weather patterns shift and move around the world so southern Tasmania is influenced by sea temperatures, ocean currents, volcanoes, earthquakes and climate change, every day and through every season. Our bodies and minds are too. We are living in and influenced by all that happens on our planet, near and far.

Little and Often

I listened to a podcast from the Gardeners World magazine, with Monty Don. Asked “what is the secret of successful vegetable gardening?” he said “Little and often.” I agree. A few minutes every day is going to help more than one full day per week. He said many things, another of which was in answer to the question “How can I get rid of weeds?”. He said “The weeds are not the problem. The problem is you…. The solution is for you to weed a little bit every day, then the weeds do not become a problem.” Well, I am not sure about that here in Tasmania, in spring, when the weeds grow faster than a speeding bullet, but certainly the more often you see to your garden, the better it will be.

Little and Often also applies to seed sowing. Don’t sow a whole packet of lettuce at once. Sow a few seeds, maybe 6 – 10. When they are ready to transplant to the garden, on the same day, sow another 6 – 10….. and so on. Of course, through the year the varieties will change as some prefer winter, some summer. Many, many vegetables can be easily grown this way, almost all year round, so you always have some but never have too many.

Little and Often can also be the motto for compost creation. Yes, you can gather materials and make cubic meter piles, but you can also or instead spread the daily weeds onto the path and let them rot away. Here one day, there the next, every day, for months. Or you can have worm stations dotted about your garden and feed your daily weeds and veg scraps into one or another of them. Small is manageable.

Search online for Gardeners World Magazine podcasts and you will find treasure!

Late November is beans time (earlier if frost free)

Add a handful of potash and a good spadeful of compost per square metre and fork them in lightly. Water well. Add wet mulch. Sow beans into the damp soil and water only when the first leaves appear. It is a good idea to soak the beans overnight before sowing, to hasten germination.

Climbing beans: If you are lucky enough to grow your own hazelnuts / dogwood / bamboo / suitable willow then you can easily (and for free) make use of them to erect a frame. (Search Google images for ‘bean poles’ and see how creative you can be). But beware!! We live in the roaring 40’s!! Pole beans WILL blow over unless the structure is secure. I tie one end of my frame to a sturdy fence post. I especially love flat beans and long, thin, round, green beans like Lazy Housewife.

Bush beans: These produce bucket loads of fabulous beans all summer without the need for a frame but therefore take up much more room. I love the thin, stringless, French beans as well as borlotti beans. It helps to mulch.

Bush beans are great for Tasmania as they produce faster than pole beans. There are hundreds of varieties to choose from and saving seed for next year is simply a matter of letting some of the pods mature fully and dry off before picking.

Tomatoes

My tip is to keep your tomatoes in pots until well after the Huon Show (13-11-21) if you live in a frosty area. I remember the year that many people woke to find a hard frost had burnt their entire tomato patch overnight in mid-November! I don’t plant them out until the first week in December. It is foolproof. I find that potting tomatoes up into slightly bigger pots at least twice, works really well as advanced plants suffer very little when planted out into warm soil, unlike the little ones planted out early into cold, wet soil.

Planting with tomato frames

·         One 30m roll of wire mesh will make 12 circles. Each roll is 1200mm high and the mesh is 100mm square. (I bought a 50m roll at Hollanders in Hobart, to make 20 circles).

·         Cut the roll into 2.5m lengths and join the ends to make 10 circles. Each circle will be 750mm across, suitable for 1 tomato plant. Do not skimp!!

·         Place all 10 circles, side by side, wherever your tomatoes will go. This way you can lay it all out and select one bed or several.

·         Move one of the circles aside. Plant your tomato. I push one tall, curly rod (from Shiploads) in the hole with the tomato but a long bamboo stick would do. In France they are called tomato stakes.

·         Replace the wire circle. Bang a wooden stake inside the windward side of the circle (or preferably 2, for those unexpected gales from another direction!) Staple the name tag to the top of one stake. Move to the next circle and repeat until all 10 tomatoes are planted.

·         Next, tie all adjacent circles together, to give strength from the wind.

·         Water in your tomatoes.

·         Get a coffee and your camera and share your amazing tomato planting photos!

·         When your tomatoes finish, use the circles for all sorts of other things in the garden. I used all mine up last year so had to go and buy another roll this year!

November Event

Cygnet Spring Garden Market: Saturday Nov. 13^th, 12noon – 4pm @ The Cannery. Fundraiser for the Huon Refugee Support Group Inc. There will be 23 stalls, live music, gorgeous food and coffee, open bar and an area for perpetual, 30 minute gardening presentations. Find all the details on Facebook and Instagram! Covid compliant.

Jobs for November
Sow indoors to plant out later: Cucumbers (Lebanese or Dragon’s Egg), zucchinis (Romanesco), tromboncino, corn, pumpkins. Almost anything! Sow in the garden: Beans (after frosts), salad leaves (not just lettuce!), brassicas (cover with moth netting), most herbs, salad and spring onions, beetroot, fennel, carrots, celery, parsnip, sunflowers and lots of other flowers.	Plant out frost tender seedlings, including tomatoes, late Nov. Check your hose fittings, watering cans and irrigation equipment. Share excess seedlings with friends. Most of all, enjoy the garden😊 Keep grass under control (good luck!) Remember Little and Often 😊

October 2021 Kitchen Garden Guide

 I have spent hours weeding today and other days recently too. All this rain means I have also spent some frustrating days inside, watching the weeds grow! However, weeds can be your friend too, in several ways. Looking at a graph of this year’s September temperatures is enough to make me seasick! Don’t be fooled by any of the weather, there are nearly always beautiful warm, summery days, driving rain and snow and lots of wind, all the way up to Christmas!!

What to do about weeds

1.   If it is a whole bed that you want to clear, don’t bother pulling the weeds up, just chop them down with a sharp spade then cover with wet cardboard or newspaper and top with wet mulch. Soil life much prefers dampness so don’t use dry material when you want microbial activity, which is what will break down the weeds under the newspaper and mulch.

2.   Any weeds, including onion grass, weeds carrying seeds, couch/twitch – pack densely into a bin. Fill with water. You can also hang a kg or so of old manure in it in a hessian bag and add some wood ash and comfrey leaves if you want to. Cover well. Wait 2 weeks or so. Scoop a litre into a watering can, fill up with water and use as a light liquid feed.

3.   If there are no seeds or runners, feed weeds to your worms, your chooks or lay them on your paths. Even if your chooks don’t eat them, they will scratch them up, turn them over, poo on them and turn them into compost for you. Worm juice is simply made by watering the worm farm, collecting the liquid, diluting it to a very weak tea look and watering the foliage and soil of your plants. One of my worm juice making devices is a terracotta water filter from the tip shop. It lives in my little greenhouse. The worms are fed in the top section, with weeds and trimmings from the hothouse. I water it from time to time and this collects in the bottom. I use the tap to drain some into a small watering can, dilute it, then water my seedlings in the hot house. No fuss. No carrying of heavy buckets. The job takes 2 minutes. A big, worm-farm bath is outside for bigger jobs as are several worm towers. More about worms next time.

4.   In future, let your vegetables go to seed. Then some of your weeds will be vegetables that you didn’t even have to sow! Good seeds for that are lettuce, parsnips, chicory, frilly mustard, miners lettuce, corn mache, parsley, endive.

Creating a garden that provides you with seasonal food, all year round, with (eventually) very little work, is like growing a family where you spend a lot of time tending and nurturing and feeding for a couple of years then the jobs change to encouraging and managing and letting things go a little bit wild. Eventually, if all goes according to plan, you have created a beautiful base for life to grow on its own. By then you will have learnt a lot too, allowing the next child / patch of earth to evolve more easily. My motto is: start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.

Codling moth

The larvae that turn into the codling moths that lay eggs in our apples overwinter amongst the bark of your trees and the debris near the base of the trunk. Chooks are the best line of defence as they eat them for you before the larvae even get to adulthood. If possible, give your chooks free reign of your fruit trees or design your chook yard to include access to your fruit trees. My chooks even like to hop up onto the low branches of various of my fruit trees in winter, when there aren’t any leaves.

Now is the time to set codling moth traps for apples, pears and nashis to catch the adult moths before they lay eggs in your fruit. You can buy sticky, pheromone traps that lure the males in, then they get stuck to the sides and can’t escape. The girls get to remain free but unfertilised so do not produce fertile eggs (like chooks without a rooster).

My mother had a different way which almost totally removed codling moths from her garden in a few years. She lured the males with port. She hung one or 2 empty tins (tinned tomatoes, for example) in each apple and pear tree, by drilling holes and threading string through the tins so they could be hooked over branches that she could reach. Into each tin went a good dash of port and the same amount of water. Codling moth males (and many human males!) love port and died every night in those tins. After a few days she would sieve or scoop out the moths, top up the port and re-set the tins into the trees. There are usually 2 hatchings of codling moth eggs, one in mid spring and another in late spring or early summer, so the clever little things can get to the early and late flowering trees! So, don’t give up too early and the moths are not fussy, so get the cheapest port you can find!

Local Events

Cygnet Seed Library – at Oura Oura House, Cygnet: fortnightly, Sunday afternoon pack n chat sessions and monthly gardening workshops. See our website and facebook page for dates, details and fact sheets.

Cygnet Spring Garden Market – at The Cannery, 12 – 4pm Sat. Nov. 13^th: All things gardening! Stalls, 30 minute presentations, food, coffee, open bar and live music. See our facebook page and local flyers for details.

Sow in October
For transplanting later, especially in frost prone areas Any vegetable that fruits or has edible seeds: (Tomatoes – a bit late), zucchinis, corn, melons, pumpkins, cucumbers, capsicums, eggplants   In fact sow almost anything you have seeds of including flowers and herbs galore.	Outside: Leaves, legumes and roots Lettuce and other salad greens, beetroot, parsnips, carrots, peas, radish, celery, summer spinach and brassicas….. and of course lots of herbs; all of them.   Tip: If you have grass problems in your beds, sow everything in trays.

July 2021 Kitchen garden Guide

 

Whether or not we realise it in our heads, our bodies respond to the seasons. The best thing we can do for our health is to eat what grows in the season and in the ground where we are. In my garden, ready to eat right now are some brassicas, leeks, parsley, coriander, daikon radish, baby parsnips and a variety of magnificent leafy greens for eating raw and cooked. I have pumpkins on the shelf, garlic in a basket, potatoes in a box, pickles in jars, dried beans in the pantry, daily eggs from the chooks, apples in the fridge plus local celeriac and carrots in the fridge too. It is a rhythm that brings not just food but also security, in these times of uncertainty and change.

Tomatoes

It is time to get yourself ready to sow tomatoes. Sow later in July or into early August.

1.   Check your seeds and buy more if needs be. My favourites for Cygnet are: Black from Tula (big, black, solid, luscious, delicious and surprisingly reliable), Rouge de Marmande (medium, reliable, long season), Jaune Flammé (orange, medium to smallish, delicious, very prolific, long season).

2.   I use hiko seed trays because they are deep and solid so the seedlings are happy in them for quite  while.

3.   Tomatoes really do need bottom heat for good germination. Use a brewer’s mat or terrarium mat or silicone terrarium tube or lash out on a heated seed raising kit.

4.   Covering the seed tray with a sheet of glass or perspex before germination keeps moisture in and rodents out.

5.   Once germinated, they need LOTS of sun plus the heat mat. Water sparingly. Use warm water. Water with a weak liquid feed every couple of weeks.

6.   Pay attention to how they look. Spindly = need more sun. Yellow = too much water. Not growing = need more warmth or food.

7.   For more details check out “Dave’s Seed” website.

Wildlife

The joy we all find when we see wallabies, pademelons, bandicoots, quolls and friendly possums whilst bushwalking soon turns to despair when everything we plant in our gardens ends up in their stomachs and not ours!

Vertical Corrugated iron: possums cannot climb it, wallabies do not jump it, rabbits seem not to burrow under it, if it goes down below soil level. It can be painted and decorated or left plain. The heat reflected by it will warm your plants.

Floppy, arched wire: Having a top to the fence, of arched chicken wire, will keep out the wildlife, if you are diligent about securing gaps around the corners and the gate and the bottom!

Wire mesh (not for possums): I buy 900mm high x 50mm wire mesh in a roll and run this around areas I want to protect, using droppers (star pickets) and adding tent pegs between the droppers so the wallabies cannot get under. Plants with tendrils, like cucumbers, can also make use of this and I successfully trained one pumpkin leader along a rung about halfway up the fence last year.

Electric netting: A fool proof but more expensive option, which is available with a solar power and battery option. You need to keep the bottom free from grass and weeds which may short circuit the wiring.

Free events and groups

The next Cygnet Garden Market will be on Saturday November 13th at The Cannery. Again, it will be a community fundraiser for refugees. I am looking for enthusiasts (rather than experts) who would share their passion for 20 minutes, on any topic related to gardening, for our rolling demonstrations on the day. You may promote your stall or business too. Please contact me at katevag@gmail.com

The Cygnet Seed Library meets every second Sunday at 2pm at Oura Oura House. Please do join us and enjoy our monthly gardening workshops. The dates and details are on our website and facebook page. We provide free seeds to any locals, grown and saved by locals. You can find the seed box at Oura Oura House.

Crop Swap Cygnet and Surrounds can be found on facebook and at our monthly gatherings. All the details are on facebook and everyone is welcome to join in. We give/swap/share anything to do with food, not just garden produce! To be on our email list, contact me at katevag@gmail.com if you don’t do facebook.

The Nature Journal Club an amazing facebook group for people wanting to learn how to capture the world around us, in art.

 

Winter reading

Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard

Milkwood: Real skills for down-to-earth living by Kirsten Bradley and Nick Ritar

Japanese Farm Food by Nancy Singleton Hachisu

Eat Wild Tasmanian by Rees Campbell

 

Sow in July

Sow now in the frosty garden: Onions (Creamgold, Domenica Sweet), leeks, broad beans, tic bean green manure

Sow now in the hothouse in trays to plant out asap or outside in frost free areas: Coriander, miners’ lettuce, spring onions, Asian veg, lettuce, bok choy, sugar snap peas, lettuce,

Sow now to transplant in spring: Broccoli varieties such as summer purple- sprouting and raab, red cabbage, kales, tomatoes (later in July).

July jobs

·         Get started on making fermented compost or bokashi compost.

·         Plant asparagus crowns, cut off old asparagus stalks and add seaweed and compost

·         Divide and replant clumps of chives and other perennial onions, rhubarb, strawberries, sunchokes and mint

·         Plant out deciduous trees and shrubs, bare-rooted fruit trees, cane fruits and grape vines.

·         Sort your seeds for the coming season

·         Get your favourite tomato seeds before they are sold out. Sow later in July.

Collect black olives and pickle as below......

Seeds that made me smile

Today was one of our regular Southern Food Gardeners get togethers. I was determined to put my best foot forward and take some things to showcase my garden, which I could also share with others.

My garden is a rabble of nationalities combining anything that will grow at 43 degrees south, with Japanese mizuna alongside Italian parsley edged with a border of young Tasmanian pepperberries and Chilean guavas. As I wandered around during the previous week, standing and watering or weeding, I noticed that several of the vegetables that I had let go to seed months ago in fact had seeds approaching dry enough to collect. So, that was it, I would take a fine collection of seeds from the edible world, to share.

This morning, as I clipped twigs of kale pods, strings of rainbow chard clusters, umbels of parsnip seeds and literally tree branches of purple sprouting broccoli pods I was in heaven. The basket I took out to put them in was not big enough and soon I had 2 boxes and a huge plastic bag full of future food for all who wanted them.

I had intended to shake off all the seeds, winnow them and put them into lots of little, labeled bags but, for one thing, I am far too lazy and secondly I had an idea! These days everyone buys seeds in fancy packets with photos but many people have no idea what the seeds look like on the plants so I would take them unshelled; in the raw, so to speak.

When it was my turn to say my piece at the meeting, I told them that this seed experience was like the difference between buying salad greens in a plastic bag from a supermarket, compared to picking it leaf by leaf from your garden. Then I let them at it and I watched on, answering questions along the way.

The first person approached the sharing table with a coffee in one hand and attempted to wrestle a kale pod off a stem with one hand. Of course this did not work and the seeds spilled out of the pod as it sprung open. I wanted to help but another person went over and called out to me that this method did not work and that next time I should put them in bags for them.

Luckily all the naysayers soon dispersed, leaving my seed experience for others. Someone asked if I could come and help as they were new to seeds and were not sure what to do. It was then that we had a wonderful time, me snipping pods and twigs and umbels with my secateurs and placing them into paper bags that the members were busy writing on. We were really focused on the job and talked about sowing methods, varieties and recipes. We all had a ball.

For the first time in absolute years I felt I was connecting people to seeds and bringing a sense of understanding of the importance and relevance of seed saving to people, some of whom have never grown anything from seed before.

Hopefully, when we meet next, some will have these vegetables growing from the seeds from my garden, in their gardens…..

5 organic bananas or a piece of cake

There are 3 busy cafes in Cygnet. All have lots of beautiful cakes which are hungrily eaten every day, sometimes by me. One piece of cake is around $5. No-one bats an eye lid at the price.

There is 1 organic fruit and veg shop, Cygnet Garden Larder, which is equally busy. I bought 5 organic bananas for $5. The lovely girl serving looked shocked when she told me the price.

The people eating cakes in the cafes are the same people who tell me they cannot afford organic fruit and vegetables.

These people drive 20kms to a supermarket which has chemically grown fruit and veg.

What has happened to the world?

On Cygnet Market days I like to buy organic fruit and veg from the local market gardeners who have stalls outside on the street. One of them is Alex from Golden Valley Farm. The queue for his vegetables, picked that morning at dawn, stretches down the street if I don’t get out there early enough. His produce is priced to make a living for him and his family and so it should be.

I don’t have much money but I don’t even look at his prices. I grow what I can in my garden and the community garden and buy what I need from Alex. I would much rather have the best, organic vegetables I have ever seen, from a man I know, than drive to a big supermarket and stand in a check-out queue with stuff my mother would not even call food.

It used to bother me that I was preaching to the converted when I talked about such things with my friends and could not seem to reach those that would benefit most from conversion. Now I have stopped beating my head against the wall…. or at least maybe I will soon!

Life is good. Join Alex’s queue.

Integration brings integrity; making it work for Tasmania

Tasmania is a magnet for rural tourism. Why? Is it because of the scenery? It certainly isn’t because of the facilities or large resorts. Is it because of the non-existent raging, city night life or sprawling shopping malls?

I rent out a room in my house on Airbnb and I meet the tourists who read my profile on the website and choose to come and stay in my old cottage on an organic, rural 1 acre in the town of Cygnet. I hear what they say when asked why they come to Tasmania. I see the streets of Cygnet literally full of tourist vehicles all year round and I have a stall at the Cygnet Market which provides most of my income because, even for a town of 1,000 locals, this market is what people want to experience.

Everyone with excess produce in their gardens offers it to the girls at The Lotus Eaters cafe who cook the most amazing stuff, using food grown within a very small circle of the cafe. It is always full of people, all year round. In winter you see people in their coats and scarves at the outdoor tables, hands around hot cups of coffee and their famous chai, because this is what they come here for, not to sit in the air conditioned environment of a shopping centre or resort. There is no view from this main street cafe, but there is more atmosphere and warmth and genuine soul than any view can give.

Then on the other side, I listen to the radio and hear how “experts” say that Tasmania needs to catch up with the mainland of Australia and provide more facilities and exciting things for tourists to do and it makes me want to scream! They say we need to build more roads, big hotels and a cable car to the top of Mt. Wellington. This is segregation; dividing tourism off from the everyday life of ordinary people and is expensive and unsustainable in a tiny, cash-strapped state.

I hear about Tasmanian agriculture and how so many fruit orchards have been ripped out or fruit left to rot because of cheap imports. I see that the major supermarkets sell apples from China, when not that long ago, Tasmania was called the Apple Isle and exported all over the world. And yet, local fruit growers have set up roadside stalls and they are patronised by locals and tourists in huge numbers as are all farmgate operations. Every road around here has properties with small groves of  mixed orchards, wood lots, a few animals and a vegetable garden. Many are new or have new owners who can see the wood and the trees! And this week has been Agfest, a rural show of mammoth proportions, visited by anyone and everyone who can get to it, from all over Australia.

The experts are segregating, not integrating. They look at figures for tourist spending in other places and think that this is relevant to Tasmania. They don’t spend a couple of weeks as a tourist in Tasmania and actually see for themselves. Tasmania is unlike most of the rest of Australia in that it is decentralised and people live in nooks and crannies all over it. The “cities” are small; the capital and biggest, Hobart, is only 250,000. It is more like south west France, with very rural villages every few kilometres. And, like rural France, that is exactly what people come to see; rural, everyday life supplying excellent quality, local goods and services in rustic villages and markets.

Everyone wants to go France; where every facet if life is integrated; ancient buildings are not museums, they are loved and lived in. Markets abound with local food and the French people themselves would not buy food grown elsewhere if it was grown locally. Rooms on farms and in rural homes are on every visitor’s list of accommodation. Every tourist to France goes to the markets and villages to see the real French way of life; and so it could be in Tasmania.

Integration means business is life; farmland has tourism in its agenda; farmers integrate ideas with neighbours, instead of competing, to provide diversification; people live and work in their own town, using the shops and services; cafes cook and shops sell what is grown locally; artists use local materials; nothing is dependent on one big industry. Using very little from outside means a low earth footprint which, in itself, is worth advertising for tourism and makes for a sustainable future. I think this is how Cygnet is developing, almost accidentally, and I look forward to the blinkered government and local authorities staying right out of it’s fabulous future!

Sydney is buying and shipping thousands of tons of sand per month from northern Tasmania for making concrete for developments. Is this how Tasmania should be making money?

Integrate not segregate is permaculture principle 8

                   Many hands make light work

Farmers as energy producers: World Bioenergy 2014 conference

An email I just received has highlighted the dichotomy of 20th century progress vs  21st century progress. Australia has sadly just voted in the former, while many European countries, including Sweden, are leading the way in the latter. The information below shows just what can be done and is worth reading. I did not know any of this before. We are very lucky that one of the 4 Australians going to this conference lives in Cygnet!

While we should be hearing from government and media the good facts on development elsewhere of renewable energy, energy efficiency, and the jobs and benefits that can come from this, it is unfortunately rarely the case.  Granted ABC radio carries the occasional story, and the regional press, but by comparison with coverage of football, movies, fashion, or pop celebrities, it is as nothing.

Consequently, Sweden is not a country we hear a lot about in regard to its achievements in reducing national and per-capita greenhouse gas emissions by development of renewable energy, public transport and energy efficiency. We don’t hear about the simple and effective carbon tax implemented in 1991, we don’t hear about the 2003 legislation banning landfilling of municipal waste, and we don’t hear that now biomass is the greatest source of the country’s final energy (the combined total of energy utilised across electricity, heat energy and transport fuels), significantly exceeding either fossil or nuclear energy.

We don’t hear that in this country, that is double the population and the size of Victoria, that the per-capita GHG emissions are only about 6 tonne CO2-e, about half that of Europe (11 tonne) and a quarter that of Australia (about 28 tonne). We don’t hear that almost half of all new cars sold in Sweden are able to run on the low emission fuels of ethanol, bio-methane or biodiesel. We don’t hear that of Sweden’s final energy (energy actually utilised), renewable energy currently makes up over 46%, with 34% of this from biomass, 10% from hydro and only 2% from wind.

And we don’t hear of Sweden’s target for cessation of imports of fossil fuels of any type by 2030. This includes coal, fuel oils and fossil-sourced transport fuels. Already in Sweden’s largest cities of Stockholm, Goteborg, Malmö and Uppsala, municipal fleets run on upgraded biogas, and city buses are running on either 100% ethanol, or biomethane, or in some cases, a methane-natural gas mix.

In early July the World Bioenergy 2014 conference takes place in Sweden. No Australians from state or federal government departments are likely to be there (none have attended this biennial conference since the first in 2004), or from conservation groups, energy companies, consultancies, universities or manufacturing industry. However this year Australia will be represented by three or four people. These are the writer of this piece (who has got to the last four), a local government councillor from Tasmania, and a person involved with community, farm forestry and landcare in northern Victoria.

The most energy-efficient way to access the conference city of Jönköping (pronounced Yernsherping) is by train from Stockholm. The first part of this four-hour journey is in an electric intercity train cruising smoothly at about 160 km/hr and tilting on the curves. If you don’t know when to look you would miss seeing the new biomass and waste-fuelled combined-heat-and-power (CHP) plant just south of Stockholm at Södertailje. One of many in planning or being constructed, this is fuelled by chipped forestry thinnings and residues and municipal solid waste. As well as putting 88 megawatts (MW) of electricity into the national grid it provides up to 200 MW of district heating into southern Stockholm’s apartment buildings and industry.

The train passes through a number of cities of under 100,00 population, each of which has power and heat coming from woody biomass, or from combustible non-recyclable municipal wastes, or with separate furnaces designed to be fuelled by each but supplying a common turbine-generator setup.

The oldest of these CHP plants is where you change trains at Nassjö to the train on the spur line to the conference city of Jönköping. This small CHP plant built in 1984 was Sweden’s first purpose-designed woodchip-fuelled plant. It supplies this small city of 20,000 with all its electricity and heat needs, and the ash from the furnaces is spread back in the forests where the fuel of woody residues came from. In smaller and larger cities, the putrescible (wet organic) wastes including sewage go into anaerobic digestors, which might produce only upgraded biogas for transport fuel or to go into the natural gas grid, or only heat and electricity, or both. At Linköping, one of the cities we pass, upgraded biogas fuels a regular freight train service.

The 3-day conference at Jönköping is widely known as possibly the best of its type in the world, attracting up to 1100 people from up to 60 countries. Presentations cover the full array of bioenergy technologies at all scales, that utilise one of the many feedstocks to produce electricity, heat and transport fuels, and other products, and cover all aspects of economics, environmental benefit, policy and sustainability. This year there is a parallel conference on bio-refineries, and so the products being talked about will include industrial chemicals, including substitutes for most petrochemicals.

Jönköping is a great place to have this conference for other reasons. Conference participants can visit the modernistic Torsvik waste-to-energy plant located 13 km outside the city. This annually turns 160,000 tonnes of sorted combustible municipal waste into 30% of the city’s electricity and 50% of its peak winter heat needs. Within the city they can visit the anerobic digestor that converts the population’s putrescibles wastes into upgraded biogas for the municipal fleet and private vehicles. Or they can take an afternoon bus tour to the nearby city of Växjö, rated as ‘Europe’s greenest city’, with its per-capita GHG emissions of under 3.5 tonne. Here over 80% of the municipal population’s domestic, commercial and industrial energy needs, including transport fuel and cooling, are sourced from biomass and waste streams produced in the municipality. Other afternoon excursions go to other bioenergy plants of all types, from small pellet producers to anaerobic digestors converting cow manure to biogas.

While I realise that not all of this biomass in Sweden is coming from farmers (much is coming from urban housholds), in Australia farmers would be a major source for much of this, just as they are in Germany and many other regions (i.e., China and India).
So to help fund the people going to the conference I have entered a project called ‘Farmers as energy producers’ into a competition to win $10,000. I ask all who have read this to go to the website http://www.greatstateofag.com.au/coles-seed-fund/farmers-becoming-energy-producers and vote for this entry. While three of us are presently going I hope it becomes more, and I am looking for others from among renewable energy groups, the Greens, EPA, Sustainability Vic, or local government.

Day 2: A new way of thinking about community gardens

Community gardening is changing. Young, creative, energetic people from all walks of life are taking the bull by the horns and bringing outside the square thinking to the whole idea of what a community garden is and whose it is.

In Australia, people have seen grants from all kinds of government, local, state and/or federal, as the way to get a community garden going and keep it funded. The recently elected Liberal Government  has closed this option and many at the Food 4 Thought conference are now without any funding.

Our Cygnet community garden does not work this way, although someone in its history did get a grant to build a green house and 2 rain water tanks for which we are very grateful. We rely on our own initiative, fund raising in small amounts such as selling to the local grocer when we have excess, having a pancake stall at the Folk Festival and selling plants at the Cygnet Market from time to time. We use water for some of the garden from an adjoining house for a small fee (water is cheap in Tasmania!). The local hardware shop gives us a 10% discount when we shop there, which we often do as it is just across the road. Although this is working well for us, we have not gone any further, unlike a small group in Darwin.

The Darwin Garden Education Network has evolved under the outstanding and creative leadership of Lachlan McKenzie and Emily Gray, both of whom look to be in their 20’s. In essence what they have done is simply link all interested parties. So, local businesses, chefs, schools, councils, health departments and commercial kitchens have been linked with community gardens, sharing events and facilities to promote one another.

For example, in order to teach people how to use a particular seasonal vegetable growing in the community garden, they invited a local chef to run an after school workshop for anyone interested. The chef promoted his restaurant, the community garden provided the vegetables and promoted their garden and the school made use of their facility and encouraged students and parents to join in.

At their annual fair, community gardeners from all over Darwin collaborated in running a pop-up cafe, with all food cooked beforehand by the gardeners, tables and chairs provided by a local business, straw bales by a garden supplier, all of whom could have their own stalls. The profits were shared by all participating community gardens. Schools were given the job of decorating a combined zone with anything they chose to promote their schools in exchange for each running a 1/2 hour workshop on something garden related. Businesses were encouraged to have a stall, the payment being simply a gift voucher which was then given as payment to anyone who ran a workshop, thus reducing the need for book keeping on the day.

On Friday afternoons, a local seedling nursery gives all its leftover punnets of seedlings to any group that shows up at the gate and also offers work experience to local schools. People talking and connecting really make things happen.

By being in touch with local health authorities and councils who are keen to promote such self-motivated and healthy events, compliance fees and rentals could be waived. And so the linkages have extended until now there are about a dozen community gardens, some in very close proximity to each other, where only a couple of years ago there was only one. Working together to achieve common aims is far easier than everyone re-inventing the wheel and competing for limited funding.

These are real community gardens, linking every level of the community with every other under the umbrella of encouraging local, organic, affordable, home grown food with associated education and workshops; using common land to connect people of all cultures, ages and abilities with nature, each other and their food, in a full circle.

Interestingly they don’t have a website!

I am REALLY excited to say that Emily was voted in as the new president of the Australian City Farms and Community Gardens Network, the body that gave us this fabulous Food 4 Thought conference. I can’t wait to see what she and Lachlan come up with!!

Breath-taking Tasmania… 5 days by kayak and on foot

It was like paddling a kayak through a mirror reflecting a rain forest so dense and so full of diversity that we felt the silence fill our senses and it was hard to tell where the surface of the water was….

Nothing between me and South Africa… paddling to Ocean Beach, down the Henty River in the unusual and glorious, summer sunshine where 3 days without rain is a very rare treat!

And paddling on Lake St. Clair, where wilderness meets hydro- electricity…. see the pumping station, built in the days when beautiful architecture ruled.

Shadow Lake…. a full day’s walk up to a hanging lake through another magical forest…

where I had never seen so many fallen trees, many from the storm I wrote about recently but many more from the long life of this forest…. this one had had a slice cut out to make way for walkers.

You can see more photos here.

The Singing Swans are born!

Cygnet Sailing Club’s 150th Regatta…. Everything, from the tiniest rowing and sailing boats, through every shape, size and age boats to these gorgeous ships will be in Cygnet this week!

This morning the autumn mist sat on the hills, the sea was glassy calm and the weather mild as we set off rowing our skiff, 6 women, some who built her too. We started to sing! Our ideas and courage grew as we rowed…. we formed The Singing Swans… one of the group is going to teach us sea shanties and we will sing our way up and down the Tasmanian waterways, every Monday morning!!

Life is good. Again. At last.

Pulp the Mill….. again

 

The best 3 minutes of my day… or maybe even my week!

Enjoy and share!

Seed Freedom Fortnight

October 2nd – 16th is when the world of thinking eaters join forces to proclaim their right to grow and eat food from seeds that have been saved and sown by farmers and gardeners for thousands of years, not from seeds that are genetically manufactured by large petrochemical companies and must be bought annually by farmers.

You can read about Seed Freedom here. And you can see on this map the actions being taken all over the world for this incredibly important issue. This link will take you to the online map where you will find all the details of these actions by hovering your mouse over the pin. If you know of others, you can add them to the map.

Currently Tasmania is GM free and profits from this in its sales of clean, green foods to countries in Europe and Asia. Let’s keep it that way!

Seed Freedom Fortnight

I cannot understand people who are not interested in where their food comes from and swap stories on Facebook about where you can get really cheap ‘food’. We live in different worlds, them and me, but are neighbours. They would rather drive half an hour through rural Tasmania to a cheap shop, than spend half an hour in the garden, sowing a whole season’s food or shopping at the market on a Sunday.

This video says it better than I can…. join with Vandana Shiva and take up one of the actions she mentions, to save your freedom to choose what you eat, now and forever.

 

Gardening Australia gets to the core and soars to the stars….

"Meet Joost Bakker - artist, florist, inventor, architect, builder, landscape designer, restaurateur and eco-entrepreneur. He's a big ideas man."

 

I have been getting a little tired of Gardening Australia but this week hit the spot for me, with some amazing innovations that really are world firsts. Honestly, each segment was not just interesting but so inspiring and creative that I wanted to jump up out of my chair and go and join in. If you can, watch it on iview.

 

It started with this wonderful man…. Joost Bakker…. who has ideas and just gets them done…. "I just believe that we don't need to generate any waste in any of the things that we do in everyday life," says Joost. "We can live in a world that is sustainable and doesn't need to have an impact and we don't need to put anything in landfill. Everything endlessly reusable and recyclable - that's my philosophy."

Sure we’ve heard that all before but Joost is a BIG ideas man…..he designs recyclable houses, he recycles buildings, he turns 100% of his cafe waste into compost on site. He is just simply wonderful!!

"In this cafe, we don't have any rubbish bins," says Joost. "We don't accept anything in cardboard, we don't accept anything in glass - so our milk comes in stainless steel vats, our whiskey comes in wooden barrels, all the produce comes in black returnable plastic crates.

And there’s so much more!

"Well, if you look at Sweden, they've decided that by 2020 they're going to be totally self-sufficient in fertiliser. So every new house that gets built there has a urine-harvesting toilet with a tank and the government comes and empties the tank once a year. Urine is sterile*, so you can store it for a long time and they have equipment that injects it into the soil," says Joost. "So, rather than using chemical-based fertilisers they want to use natural fertilisers."

And I bet he gets this one done….

"I'd love to put a farm on top of an office tower in Melbourne. That's my goal. I actually want to show how much food we can grow with the waste that the restaurant generates. I want to have a restaurant, a farm, a composter and use things like olive pips to generate energy and have a completely enclosed loop of a supermarket at the base, where people can buy the produce that we've grown. Anyway, I'm working on it. It's a big dream. It'll happen. I'll make it happen!"

Suddenly the rest of the world seems so small.

Seed Freedom Fortnight is coming

Go to Vandana Shiva’s Seed Freedom website and facebook to see how you can join forces with your neighbours…..

Food…. its the future….yours and your children’s!

 

Polytunnel Workshop 10-08-13

I don’t like them and I don’t want one. I don’t want to be responsible for adding to the world’s plastic…. but I do want a glass one though, made from tip-shop, second hand glass windows…. in my mind there is a fabulous plan. I am loathe to promote this workshop but I do think a movable cloche might be handy to shelter young seedlings, like Alex has at Golden Valley Farm.

Visit SPROUT Tasmania for bookings

Description

Attendees: Maximum 30
Cost: $50 per person
Location: Cygnet
Time: 9.30am – 1pm, Saturday August 10, 2013
Lunch included: Yes, gourmet lunch provided

Sprout Tasmania is presenting its Polytunnel Workshop in Cygnet. Learn about constructing, maintaining and profiting from Polytunnels, as well as extending your growing season. We’ll also discuss techniques to avoid weeding.

You can book your spot for this workshop by adding the item above to your shopping cart, then checking out. You’ll receive an email with your receipt and directions on how to pay via direct deposit, and then closer to the date you’ll receive another email with directions.

This workshop will go ahead, rain or shine, so bring your cold weather gear and your wellies!

March, wherever you are, today!