Month: November 2010
Visit our house (and others) on the next Marrickville Council WSUD tour
Marrickville Council has organised another Water Sustainability Urban Design (WSUD) tour in the local area, and we’re one of the stops.
The purpose of these tours is to show local residents some of the many ways of saving water. In our case, it’s our water tank, irrigation system, and permaculture garden sufficient to meet our vegetable needs.
To book, download the poster, ring Marrickville Council on 9335 2222, or email water@marrickville.nsw.gov.au.
See you on the day!
Enjoying some variety
Some weeks, it seems like the garden has a one track mind: all cabbage all the time, all silverbeet, all snowpeas.
So it’s nice to be able to pull a mix of things out of the garden, and to cook them all for dinner an hour later. In this case, we harvested three stalks of rhubarb, a white beetroot and handful of new potatoes (ranging from tiny to full-sized).
From these, I cooked:
- chicken baked with rhubarb (a Scandinavian recipe, odd but good!)
- grated beetroot cooked with butter (a Stephanie Alexander recipe)
- baked potatoes
New potatoes
As per our post on this year’s potato strategies, we’ve tried a few different things. The potatoes were “bandicooted” out of the potato bags, and were delicious steamed. An encouraging first sign that maybe we’ll have better potato luck this year…
The benefits of umbrelliferous plants
The garden used to be overrun with aphids, sometimes to the extent that it was hard to find some plants under the seething mass of bugs (eww!).
One thing I learnt at my permaculture course was that umbrelliferous plants (plants with umbrella-shaped collections of tiny flowers) attract beneficial wasps into the garden. The wasps then inject their eggs into aphids, which hatch and eat the aphids from the inside out.
This all sounded good in theory, but I was doubtful. Nonetheless, I tried a different tack this year, and let many more plants to go seed. This included parsley, dill and fennel (all umbrelliferous plants). Much to my surprise, it worked! Narry an aphid to be seen anywhere since.
(We’ve also had good success with companion planting, such as garlic chives next to our climbing rose.)
Good scores for natural pest control…
Lewisham House and Farm 