Permaculture Living

I appear to have won the ongoing battle with the possums. The answer, which was kindly provided in the comments earlier in January, is mosquito netting.

Enclosing the whole garden in a double-bed size net has kept the possums from climbing the fence and from eating any of the vines that are growing along it. It also filters the hot Queensland summer sun a little.

The one caveat to covering your garden in netting - remember to open it up during the day, otherwise the pollinators aren’t able to get in and the harvest may suffer.

I just love how fruits and curcurbits look when really young.

If it looks like Permaculture Living has gone back in time, that’s because the server the site lives on died a couple of days ago.

Most things were able to be recovered, but I lost a week’s worth of posts and comments. I’ll try to restore them soon.

The rockmelons were slow to fruit, running all over the garden festooned with flowers, but now that they have set fruit they are doing it with a vengeance.

And the biggest one so far…

There are about four capsicum plants in my vegie garden, all from the same punnet of seedlings. One has only flowers, two are throwing fruit that all look like chillis (without the heat), and one is producing standard capsicums like you’d see in the shops.

I was keeping a close eye on the first watermelon on the vines, which was growing nicely, from this…

To this…

Then the day I hoped would never come arrived. The possums have figured out how to collapse the top of the fence and get to the fruit growing on the wire.

Sigh. I guess more fortifications are in order.

The first edibles from the no-dig garden, not much more than two months after planting. Basil, two cherry tomatoes, a capsicum and a cucumber.

The cucumber just before it was picked.

Another customer question from my time working in the nursery.

Question: The top layer of my worm farm is full of food scraps and won’t fit any more in. What do I do now?

Answer: The short answer is that you need to wait until the worms have eaten all the existing food scraps before you can add more.

The longer answer: you can also increase the rate at which the worms eat your scraps. The slower way is to increase the number of worms. They will breed and grow more numerous the longer you have the farm - they might only eat a small amount when it’s brand new, but as the population grows they will eat more and more.

The second way is to blend the scraps in a food processor or blender before you put them in the farm. The worms are tiny and seem to prefer slightly rotted food, so if you blend it into into a vegie smoothie it breaks down faster and they eat it much faster than if you were to throw in entire potato peelings or fruit rinds.