Thursday 13 October 2011

October and outdoors

What bliss to be on "holiday".  Of course, for me that means to be at home, sans time constraints, left alone to get on with house and garden chores, at my leisure!  We have had 3 days of rain, some soft, some hard, some oblique and some like mist, but mostly rain!  Day 4 of my holidays and it seems overcast but at least the water is not falling freely from the sky!  I am 2 days late feeding manure "tea" to my garden due to all that H2O.  Today, I might just don my boots and do the job.  My manure tea consists of a half bucketful of horse poops (Mike buys a big bag from the Waikato for just $2.50 every second week) into a big drum which I fill with water, add another quarter bucket of compost, then I set up a pond aerator into the mix, to aerate it all.  Bacteria are aerobic, so the reasoning behind this, is to increase the effectiveness of the bacteria.  I have been doing this for 3 months now, after watching a video link on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKxDOZ7ctMs&feature=related, so time will tell if this increases the soil fertility.................  I love experiments!


My October stash of seedlings include cauliflower, runner beans,
 okra, cucumber, marigolds, German chamomile and beetroot.
Most of these seedlings I managed to get in over the weekend, during the "dry spell" - actually, we had wonderful weather for the job, preceding the Great Rain.  We also had an American Helpxchange arrive on Monday, in the rain, who was set to task oiling all our wooden doorways and windowsills indoors, after helping me set up a blueberry enclosure outside, in misty rain.  Aotearoa, the land of the Long White Cloud.  Hope the sun breaks through that great big cloud today.


My new addition - an old second hand galvanized watering can
from a garage sale for $3, just like my grandmother used to have!

One of the many bird feeders made from scraps - this one has
2 sharp nails sticking up to impale fruit on for fruit-loving birds.


Piece d' Resistance - heritage tomato seedlings and passion fruit
seedlings awaiting their new resting place...........
I thought I might pay a little homage to the humble compost bin.  We have a two bin system, one is actively being added to while the second is "sleeping".  Mike is the Compost King, turning the compost at best, every weekend, or at worst case scenario, once or twice a month, depending on Time.  All our kitchen scraps (excepting those ear-marked for the worm  farm, or the chooks) end up here, as do any weeds, garden cuttings and vacuum cleaner dust (it pays to have a bag-free vacuum cleaner).  Into that, Mike throws a bag or two of coffee grounds he collects from a local coffee shop, a bag of horse poop every two weeks, and a bucket full of sawdust every now and then.  A handful of lime when he remembers and we end up with glorious black, friable (not clumpy or gluggy) compost FULL of worms, slaters, and hopefully, millions of microscopic beneficial bacteria!  If you think about it, Life, as we know it, depends on the SOIL.  Fertility of soil supports the growth of all plant material, which is turn supports all animals and humans, whether vegetarian or omnivorous.  So in other words, our soil supports us all.  It is at the very bottom of the food pyramid!  Love your soil!

From this............ 


to this!
On a more somber note, we watched Zeitgeist The Addendum movie 2 nights ago.  I have been meaning to for about 2 years now.  And after the fact, I'm still reeling!  I thought it was a movie about Climate Change - Hoo Boy! It was about the American Monetary System - the corruption and farce of it all, of course, a model on which we are fashioned after, all around the world.  Our poor helpxchange fella - hope he didn't take offense to the America-bashing it turned out to be!  It makes the whole barter/swop system of living so much more attractive.  I've got the eggs............... anyone out there got spare chocolate??