How to build your own soils

An important step to becoming self-sufficient in producing your own food is having fabulous and healthy soils. Modern agriculture has all sorts of inputs that they pour into the soil to boost their productivity, but overtime the soils become depleted and require additional inputs and larger amounts. Such strategies are a long way from producing soils, are not self-sufficient and are generally very resource hungry, with many petro-chemical based inputs.

I went to a seminar today on Green Manures and Crop Rotation at my local library. This was presented by Sonya Wallace, a well known permaculture teacher here on the Sunshine Coast. This session was very informative and relieved some of my concerns about have green manure crops within my personal food production system. The concerns that I had previously about green manure crops was that I was loosing a good patch of soil which I could have been producing another viable vegetable crop.

For those that are unfamiliar with green manure crops, these are crops that assist in replenishing the soil with vital nutrients such as nitrogen as well as providing organic matter into the soil encouraging a good soil structure and a great diversity of life-forms within the soil (microbes, bacteria, fungi, invertebrates, etc). These crops are grown to rest your soils and also ensure that you have great soils to produce the food you want on your table.

Sonya presented information on types of green manure crops and the importance of rotating crops throughout your garden to ensure the soils can produce the best crops possible, with your rotation program to include green manure crops.

I now understand it is important to use such crops and strategies to ensure I will have long-term productive soils without having to utilise artificial sources of nutrients, in turn allowing for ongoing gardening success. Pin It

In Tune with Nature

To become more in tune with the land, seasons and opportunities for food growing, energy and water capture and the changes in wildlife and weeds in my life and the land I occupy, I am going to start an observation journal. 


What will this entail?


Recording:

• date
• season
• weather - temperature, rainfall, cloud cover, etc
• what is in flower/fruit - food, native and weed plants
• what is happening on the land

and anything else that takes my fancy. 


Overtime, I hope to collect a picture of the patterns in the landscape, what I will need to be doing on the land, what to expect from my food plants and identify things that are out of place or sorts.


I am looking forward to learning from this process.  Pin It

Reducing my carbon footprint

Ok, so I have this grand plan (well at least an idea of interest)! I am thinking that I will try this only eating from produce that comes from within 250km of my place! I'm sure you've all heard of the concept by now...if you buy produce from a limited radius from around your house the theory is that you will reduce your carbon footprint (less food kms/miles), support local producers, eat seasonally available food and if you're lucky might even be a little healthier. You will definitely know where your food comes from, you will know how is it produced and you can start to take control of what goes into your body. The concept sounds fantastic, it is the logistics that are the nightmare, particularly for those souls that live in Australia. Well, it seems that way to me anyway.

I have recently moved to the Sunshine Coast and now seemed to be exposed to a plethora of produce at weekend markets. I get the feeling though that a lot of it is still coming from the Brisbane fruit and vegetable markets rather than the producers themselves. Also there seems to be a significant lack of protein producers at these markets too, so unless you're totally vegetarian the markets don't seem to be meeting all of the requirements.

Hence, the logistical nightmare. If I go ahead with this plan it will be extensive question asking for a period to establish the locality of the production process for my food and perhaps some carbon footprint increase due to me driving around finding and sourcing the produce.

I am still keen for the plan, just have to start the process! Also the 250km radius is just an arbitrary distance around my house from which I thought I could obtain a fair variety of produce throughout the year. Pin It

Gourmet Farmer...great TV series

A little while ago the SBS aired a series called the "Gourmet Farmer", where food critic Matt Evans decided to leave his Sydney life and re-connect with the land and the origins of food. Basically, he decided he would become a farmer, aiming to provide for himself and sell some of his wares locally to get by. 


I love this series and the idea of it. I think the notion of growing your own food and being able to provide for yourself is very romantic and idyllic lifestyle. Obviously there is a lot of hard work, pain, suffering and a completely different lifestyle (than I am currently leading) if you get down to the practical side of this, but nevertheless the idea to me is infinitely attractive. 


I have borrowed the DVD of this series from my library and currently trolling my way through it. My daughter and I sit and watch the farmer and his progress together. I love the fact that my daughter is being exposed to food production in its truest form, along with me and realising how you can transform bare resources, to your own food and then turn the produce into something called "dinner" or a "treat". Fantastic. Enjoying journey this so much at present.   Pin It

Solar panels...shade is bad

I found something out today that I didn't previously know about solar panels....


If there is any portion of a solar panel shaded, then no energy is collected by that panel! How unbelievable is that? Apparently scientists are only currently looking at this issue, which is being done in collaboration with computer scientists who have worked on maintaining computer systems/servers, etc where one component can drop out and you don't loose full efficiency. 


Additional government support and investment in renewables will lead to the resolution of such issues sooner rather than later!


In the meantime, ensure your residential solar panels are not in the shade! Pin It

Permaculture

Recently I attended something along the lines of a gardening club meeting for permaculture enthusiasts or so I expected. Since I didn't even really have a concept of what the underlying principles of permaculture are I thought this could at least be a place where I could meet like-minded people in my new neighbourhood.

In my previous review of permaculture principles (just reading a basic library book many years ago) I really did think permaculture was some food-oriented gardening practice and at the time wasn't suited to me. However, just attending this meeting and then being linked with some useful websites I believe that I may have a greater understanding and appreciation for the principles of permaculture and certainly how it applies to your garden but further how many of the principles can be applied throughout your life if you're looking to create a lighter footprint.

Given this, I am going to review some more information to gain a better grasp of the concepts and determine its applicability to me and my life (and the garden which I am looking to create). Definitely looking forward to the journey! Nevertheless, I do believe, as with most things I look into, I will take and apply it to my life the way I see fit and not to the letter of some document or person's perspective and given this, anything that I post on this blog will be tainted with this view. Pin It

Requiem for a species

Great book...everyone should read it. A climate change book with a difference.

First chapter is a little heavy on the detail and even for the committed might you may feel like you're wading through mud because of the amount of facts that are jammed into the chapter about climate change. I do however believe that it provides a good summary of some of the facts relating to climate change and thought about distributing just this chapter to friends (those that don't understand climate change) to bring them up to speed. The rest is an interesting twist on why many people don't like to recognise the truth about climate change and why we persist the way we are going.

The one thing I found truly horrifying in the book (but on reflection think it is likely to be the planetary outcome) is that many people don't value the natural environment and recognise its intrinsic value.  Thus in the face of this dramatic challenge to the planet and many of its species the human race will be happy to sacrifice the natural environment to ensure they can maintain with their current lifestyles and ensure the persistence of the human species. In some minds we don't need the natural environment. Some of these people consider the human species the greatest species and we will "engineer" a fix to ensure our persistence but it may just be that we don't have any remnant of what we understand to be the natural environment.  

Borrow it from your library. Pin It