With only about 10 weeks to go it seems like a good time to mention that the permanent population of the Journey will be increasing by one.  While Rob has been busy growing the vegies in the garden, I’ve been working on growing him a little helper.

The little bump in my belly, which initially looked like a beer belly, has been steadily growing in size and now looks like I’ve stuffed a watermelon up my shirt.  Maverick/Willow (as we currently call it - we originally named the embryo Wolfgang/Fernando) is getting more and more active as the weeks have passed making the idea of a Mini-Mader a lot more real.

We decided not to find out if it’s a boy or a girl but decided to have a surprise - and it’s not like there is a room to paint a particular colour as it will only be having a section of the shed which is the lovely unisex shade of silver.

As in most things we are pretty clueless to what we need to do or have prepared but figure we will learn as things progress like in everything else we do.  Through reading books and talking to friends and family who have had babies we have learned to expect the unexpected because no two pregnancies or babies are the same.  So thanks everyone for this support and also for all the new and second hand bits and pieces that have been given to us.

I received a phone call out of the blue this morning with an offer of some more fish for our pond.

Whether it was meant to happen or not, I’d been thinking about getting some friends for “Guinea Pig” – the original and possibly very lonely gold fish.

“Guinea Pig” was so named after his or her status as the first experimental fish in the pond, and the experimental procedure stated that no fish food was to be supplied.

More than a year later, the big guy was getting bigger, so the experiment was deemed a success. Living on algae and bits of the pond plants and maybe the odd mosquito larvae worked and this phone call was just what was needed to enter phase two.

After collecting the three new fish, I returned home with the esky and plonked them into the pond. The fish were a little stunned and I stood quietly watching them for movement.

The movement came from behind me and I slowly turned to find a 1.5 metre long brown snake in the adjacent garden bed, spanning the width with head over one side and tail the other.

The snake sensed my movement and quickly slithered off, leaving me to contemplate a few things with fast beating heart.

The fish didn’t seem to notice and it was time to get some “real” work (read: paid work) done, so I headed to the car.

Heading away from the vegie patch down the drive, I spotted the snake about 30 metres away. I still can’t get over just how quickly they can cover ground when they want too…

With considerable rainfall in the last month or two, it seems that we have had a good winter in the mid-North this year. If the look of our cars are anything to go by, you’d have to agree that we’ve had some decent rainfall.

July was above average, making up a little for a poor June, while August saw the average fall – around 81mm. See more at the BOM site. 

Living out of town with only dirt roads connecting us is enough to keep cars dirty, but the council have decided to run some full scale repairs on a large section of one of these roads and have been interrupted many times by heavy rainfall. Therefore the road is regularly a quagmire with six inch deep slosh to wade through. Sometimes I think I should wear a Captain’s hat as the Patrol steers like a boat!

I’m glad that Meg has a 4WD now as she’s had to use it a number of times just heading to and from work. It would have been touch and go in her old car. 

My car has seen even more of this, due to my work with farmers around the district. Some of the roads to the farms can be very waterlogged after heavy rain and I feel that I am justified in running a “proper” 4WD. Its funny watching clods of mud fly out the front of the vehicle, only to land back on the windscreen as you drive through them and I’m now used to keeping a finger on the wipers to wash away the muddy water that seems to jump out in front of me whenever there is a puddle about.

In talking with locals, it seems that this year is a return to Clare winters of old, where it rains regularly from June through to August. Some have been saying that we haven’t had a winter like this for ten years. 

The garden has definitely taken a turn for the better with longer days and sunshine triggering lush vegetation. We’re eating broccoli every day and have an occasional feed of potatoes, leeks, English spinach, spring onions, bok choi, radishes, parsley, coriander and Chinese cabbages. The broad beans are coming along, as are the peas and garlic.I’m busy planting as many spuds as I can to try and keep up with strong demand! Each meal I try to cut at least one eye from each spud and have been storing them in egg cartons until I get a moment to plant. Hopefully this will result in at least two plants to harvest all year around when things really get going and that will make us self sufficient in potatoes.  

One of the chores that has come back with the end of winter is mowing the weeds and grass around our living areas in preparation for snake season. I’ve mowed the last couple of weekends and the grass seems to be taking this as a challenge, jumping back out of the ground.

In tight spaces where the ride on mower has a bit of trouble, I mowed with the standard garden mower and collected a trailer load of clippings that went straight to the open compost area. The differed aspects of the garden are slowly taking shape, with the compost and soil creation area (dirt, manure, organic matter) at the top of the hill above the vegie garden as most of the ingredients are delivered by trailer and it is easier to carry things downhill with a wheelbarrow. The other advantage is that any nutrients that wash away will wash towards the vegie garden and not away from it.

There are always things to do, but I feel that the vegie garden is now supporting us to a fair degree and I get a great sense of accomplishment from that.

View the photo gallery for more pics.

So much has been happening lately and we’ve been busy on weekends with trips to Adelaide, building the garden shed and concreting the floor, maintaining firewood supplies and just getting on with life.

But now a question that has been nagging me since summer has become more important. How do we expand the vegetable garden?

The vegetable garden started in March 2007 in the weeks following our move to Clare and into the caravan. As the soil was so hard and compacted, we started with the no dig garden idea with pea straw bales as the garden bed boundaries.

With bulk pea straw bales delivered to us at between $2.50 and $3 each, we’ve spent over $600 so far in garden bed surrounds, soil conditioning and mulch.

Luckily we’ve had a friendly dairy farmer that didn’t mind us collecting about ten trailer loads of cow manure which gave us a good start.

But we are at the crossroads; we have used all of the cow manure and need the dairy farmer to deliver a truckload, the pea straw bales are nearly finished and I find myself trying to conserve them rather than use them and then there is the time.

Creating the no dig garden beds takes time. With the layering, first of cardboard or newspaper and then combinations of manure and straw it takes more than an hour to make a four metre by one metre bed. This depends on temperature, your fitness and of course, the motivation.

Recently I have been thinking about growing more vegies so that we always have a meal in the garden. It tastes so much better, is much healthier, costs less and once established, doesn’t take that long to manage.

Various solutions have come to mind but last week I was sorting out a neighbour’s computer and thought to ask him for a hand. Everybody wins – he gets some IT work and I get a bit of dirt turned over…

Today he came over and brought his 12 foot cultivator behind his tractor – the perfect tool for the highly compacted soil.

I’d marked out an area with some pots, buckets and the watering can along the line of the water pipes that run on top of the ground from the tanks down to the shed. This would form one boundary with the road as another.

The cultivator quickly found the rocks that I’d warned would be there, but didn’t even flinch. What would have taken a lot of sweat and effort was rolled out the way in one pass.

He went over the ground a number of times, each digging deeper and creating bigger furrows, breaking up what looks to be a nice loam.

The area in which I can now plant is more than four times bigger than I had, but the soil won’t be anywhere near as good as in the no dig garden beds so I will continue to use both.

The idea is to plant broad beans over a large area of the freshly cultivated soil and plough them in after harvest in late September or early October. This will add nitrogen to the soil via the beans as well as plenty of organic matter when they are turned in with the disc plough. Some would call this a green mulch crop, but we should get kilos and kilos of broad beans to eat, give away and save for planting next year.

With the soil conditioned a little, we can start to produce much larger crops of the staples that we eat. I’m always reminded of last year when we had heaps and heaps of silverbeet, but didn’t eat that much – only grow what you like to eat!

So the major crops that will be grown in this newly turned soil will probably be corn, beans, zucchini, pumpkins and potatoes over summer, with other summer crops such as tomatoes, capsicum, and chillies grown in the no dig beds.

I know, I think too much about this but after digging some potatoes and carrots for lunch on Sunday I did a brief calculation of our potato requirements; one plant provides enough for about two meals for the two of us so I need about 150 plants per year. With this ballpark figure and the new area, it should just take some planting, watering and harvest time. Shouldn’t it?

Mmmm… A big bowl of freshly steamed potatoes and carrots with chopped mint, a little butter and sour cream for lunch on Sunday. It provided the motivation as well as the energy to get more things done in the afternoon.

So here we are with it all ahead of us and the plan in place. Now I just have to go through the steps of the plan and reap the rewards.

A week or so ago on a calm, dark night, I went outside for some reason and heard the rustle of leaves in the blue gums along the path between the shed and the toilet.

Being a curious bloke, I grabbed the torch and crept slowly to about where I’d heard the noise and pointed up to see a furry little fellow. It looked like we have Common Brushtail Possums on our property, which are listed as “rare” by the Department for Environment and Heritage.

Tonight I heard the distinctive rustle again and quietly returned to the shed to put the camera together.

Using the Canon 28-70mm f2.8L lens with the Speedlite 550EX flash for starters, I used the torch to identify the general area that the possums were in before clicking off a few shots. Shooting directly up into the branches was a bit of a stretch for me, and after using the torch I couldn’t see anything through the view finder as my eyes didn’t adjust in time to the pitch black, moonless sky.

It must have looked quite interesting from the neighbours place across the hillside, with the trees occasionally lighting up from the powerful flash!

I changed to the Canon 100-400mm f4.5-5.6L to try and get a bit closer and this greatly increased the level of difficulty of getting the possum in frame, but the shots that I did get were much better.

I think that it is interesting that the possums were eating the blue gum blossoms and not the box mistletoe that I’ve been told is their food source. There is plenty of mistletoe around, although we have been slowly reducing it by selectively pruning with both chainsaw and rope saw.

Possums are meant to be quite rare in the Clare Valley area. I’ve read that the average is down to one per hectare, the lowest in the area including the Yorke Peninsula and the Mid North and I’d wondered where and when we would see one – we should have more than 40 on our property.

While many people don’t like them, I haven’t seen evidence of them in the vegie garden yet, so as long as they stay in the trees then maybe we can just get along together.

Check more info with the Dept of Environment and Heritage Fact Sheet

A few weeks ago when we were away interstate, South Australia broke the Australian record for heatwaves in a capital city, with 14 days over 35 degrees.

Luckily Meg and I missed 12 days of this with pleasant mid-twenties days on the East coast.

So here we are at the end of March, two weeks after days of 35 and nights around 20 degrees and the temperature has plummeted. Last night was just 1.4 degrees and the night before was only 4.4 degrees.

We’ve had to push forward our ideas of heating and have had a fire for the last two nights.

It is hard to believe the contrast when you consider the garden and its requirements. Two weeks ago, plants were struggling to survive, despite daily watering from the folks. (Thanks guys!)

Now I have stopped a bit of watering, greatly reducing the amount that I put on as the soil is still showing signs of moisture.

Considering these fast changes, how do you plan for winter planting? If I’d had seedling in a couple of weeks ago, they would have lasted about half a day. Now, will they germinate? Luckily I have a few broccoli seedlings in the folks shade house to plant in a few weeks time.

This post is turning into a bit of a rant, but I should at least point out that it rained earlier this week. The 2.5mm that we received was small, but better than nothing and took our yearly total to around 16mm.

Just looking at the Bureau of Meteorology site, on average we should have had about 75mm this year by now and they record the rainfall so far this year for Clare as only 5.2mm.

Here is the mean rainfall for Clare for 133 years, ending in 1994 as a comparison.

So while the title of this post is “The seasons are changing – fast!”, I should explain that I mean that the change from hot to cold, or summer to winter has happened quickly and I’m not providing an opinion on climate change.

The climate in South Australia tends to hot, dry summers with daytime temperatures constantly over 30 degrees. The last week has been particularly hot with New Years Eve reaching 42 degrees.

Meg and I were in Adelaide, after catching up with Dave and Cindy and were checking out some used cars with an idea of replacing Meg’s trusty little Holden Nova with a small four wheel drive.

The combination of heat, traffic and dealing with used car salesmen had tensions raised and I’d noticed a slight vibration in the Patrol as we drove between lots. After a brief stop at Tea Tree Plaza I had even visually checked all of the tyres before heading off.

The vibration increased and I coasted to try to resolve the problem as potential causes ran through my head; wheel balance suddenly out, a blocked fuel injector, fuel pump problems, air conditioner – the list was beginning to mount when BANG! The right hand rear tyre blew!

So, in stifling dry 42 degree heat, I jacked up the car and changed the tyre.

All hope of looking at cars was gone as we drove on and out of Adelaide. I was hot, soaking wet and frustrated, worried that the cause of one blowout might also be the cause of another. We cruised slowly home and discussed potential cars for Meg.

The heat had also affected the vegie garden and my grand plan of irrigating a garden from our shower, sink and washing machine runoff seems to have hit a snag. The pumpkins that had been stretching out across the ground were crispy, the zucchini turned light brown and had a crinkly sound in the breeze and all of the young fruit was shrivelled.

Some of the fruit trees were withered and the grass was crunchy underfoot.

All of this happened in one day. I had watered the previous morning, knowing that I wouldn’t return until the following night and hoping that it would be enough, but dry winds and temperatures over 40 degrees are powerful.

It got me thinking again of our fire prevention and protection plans and I looked over the paddock that the cows have now reduced to stubble, glad that we’d worked hard to reduce this fire risk.

The next few months will be stressful as the temperatures continue to soar and we wait for rain in March or April.

Summer is upon us. The dry winter has led to an average spring and the fields have turned to straw.

Despite the recent inch of rain, the veggie patch still looks half done. Beds have patches of growth where rows of carrots should be, tomatoes are struggling to raise themselves up and the beans are gone.

But this is not just the action of a brilliant sun and harsh, dry winds. This is also the result of the first major attacks from predators.

The garden has evolved from the first trial beds ten months ago in February to what it is today through a process of trial and error. Initially I figured that I could attempt to grow some vegies and see what would attack them. Would it be bugs, mice, bunnies or kangaroos? Would the deer venture out of the trees to the pond to drink and have a nice succulent bite of something as well?

One of the major reasons for just having a go has been the fencing issue. If I am to keep pests away, what sort of fence is required and how big should it be? How big will the vegie garden get? Should I fence in part or do the lot and if I fence a little will I ever expand the garden and fence more? How will the chook run be set up and where will that go?

All of these questions led to indecision and a “suck it and see” approach.

But the first major attack has now happened.

A few months ago I scared a little bunny that was sheltering under the leaves of one of the last remaining broccoli. It darted off so fast that I was still trying to work out what it was as it zigged out of the bed and zagged passed the stack of pea straw bales.

Weeks later, I disturbed another in the shelter of a zucchini and felt that a trend was beginning to form. The soft piles of soil near the zucchini looked like the beginnings of a burrow and I was quick to water and mulch to discourage a repeat visit.

But after a night away in Adelaide, we returned to the carnage. Dozens of climbing beans that were just hitting their straps were gone. The carrots had been decimated and even the tomatoes had been nibbled. I knew that it was just something that was bound to happen in time, but the reality of summer without beans was deflating.

As the massacre sunk in, it was not just the loss of a crop but the potential loss of future crops. Was this just the beginning of the attacks? What if they returned night after night to reduce my hard earned crops to nothing? How could I stop them? What could I do?

I noticed that the corn was still going strong. Not even the kangaroos had been tempted by the towering corn, even though most of the beans planted within the same bed, around the stalks of the corn were just stumps.

The plan formed slowly in my mind. More corn! Raph and I had replenished some beds a few weeks ago with aged cow manure and pea straw mulch and now I saw that these would be planted with corn.

The half full vegie garden would be prosperous again within a month if I planted more beds and we would see some summer crops. Corn would be the summer saviour.

As the days grew warmer out of winter, I was looking forward to the new growth in the garden and explosion of vegies onto the table.

What I hadn’t counted on was the huge growth of grass around the place. It was starting to become a bit of a problem as high grass and snakes seem to go together.

The first sighting had been after our last party on the October long weekend. Raph had seen the brown snake as he walked back to the shed, prompting a frenzy of mowing and a clean up around the area.

Since then, I’d tried to keep on top of the mowing with the standard Victa mower, pushing up and down the hill and throughout the vegie garden and fruit trees. I’d had some success, but then a bit of extra IT work, the fencing project and some weekend trips to Adelaide mounted up and suddenly I hadn’t mown for a month!

During this time, the grass had taken off again and I’d had a few confrontations with various browns. Raph and I had successfully relocated one near the shed (relocated = relocating the snake’s head far away from the rest of the body) using a combination of long handled spade, rake and lightning fast ninja skills.

I’d seen a second hand ride on advertised at a reasonable price and so Pa and I went for a look and ended up bringing it home.

How much quicker is it to use a ride on mower to cut the grass? In a couple of hours I had not only mowed all of the grass that I normally would, but had extended the mown area significantly.

Meg approved and promptly named the mower “Penfold”. Apparently this was a reference to the lights on the front looking like glasses and the old “Dangermouse” cartoon that she watched as a kid.

So Penfold now sits patiently at the wood shed, waiting for the grass to grow and the opportunity to put around the hillside.

The major advantage I’ve seen so far is the increased visibility when you walk around. I used to hear the grass move and not know whether it was a snake, lizard or “other”. Now I can keep an eye on the ground around me as I walk and pick up movement quickly.

Raph and I used this increased visibility just last week when we were working on the new water tank. We’d both walked past the snake, but Raph saw it in the mown area and we relocated it easily.

Raph took a picture of this one on his phone and posted it at his site.

The grass is drying off a lot now and I’m glad that we kept on top of it. The fire season is well and truly here and reducing the fire fuel load is pretty important. The cows are eating steadily through their paddock and Penfold clears around the shed, toilet, vegies and fruit trees.

All we need now is to hook the fire pump up to the water tank and I’ll be a lot happier.

A few months ago we moved out of the caravan and into the shed. This major milestone also meant that the van had to be cleaned up before heading back to the folks place and somewhere in the weeks following the migration to the shed we discovered a couple of potatoes in a draw in the van, obviously forgotten and starting to sprout.

I’d heard about people growing potatoes and read up a bit on the way to grow them, but potatoes have been pretty cheap to buy and I’ve tended to grow other crops.

These sprouting tubers had given me the opportunity for an experiment, so I’d popped them into a garden bed and forgotten about them until the leaves started appearing through the mulch.

I’d read about mounding up around the stalk as it appears and used “slices” of pea straw for this. (As you use a bale of pea straw, the bale pulls apart in square “slices” which stick together unless you tease them apart. In this way, the “slice” is reusable for a number of purposes and lasts longer.)

Today we had lunch with the folks and took a wander in the garden afterwards to pick some vegies for Reen.

The potato leaves had curled so we dug them up and were surprised at the number – 21 small to medium potatoes! A ten fold increase on the two tubers that I’d planted.

Meg picked some mint and we had them steamed with some of our broccoli and carrots. They were so fresh, with crisp skin and great flavour. I don’t think that I’ve ever had better potatoes!

My mind is now changed. Growing potatoes is not only easy, but the results are great. Good quality and yield and I didn’t water them anywhere near as much as the rest of the garden. They were easy to harvest and had hardly any dirt on them when dug up. In fact, some had burrowed into the pea straw wall of the garden bed and these hardly needed any washing.

All in all it was a great experiment, turning waste into great tasting food. Now I think that I might have to start a production line for propagation – cutting the eyes from spuds and tempting them to sprout before planting them, rather than just adding them to the compost.

Mmmm… Potato!

 Check out the other photos in the gallery.