Companion planting

Zeph and I got up early this morning and hit the garden. There was the promise of large amounts of rain on the horizon and we still had loads of soil to move in order to finish the new beds and plant them out. We worked for an hour in the balmy morning before our companion Meg put the porridge on. After breakfast we sorted seeds into companion groups, planted them in a random dispersal method about 30cm apart, and put a plank path up the middle of the larger of the two beds before adding a thin layer of pea straw.

In the large bed we planted the following companions: cucumbers (Mexican Sour Gherkin), sweet corn (Golden Bantam), sunflowers, beans (Lazy Housewife, Snake Yard Long, Borlotti, Kidney, Yin Yang, Cherokee, Flageolot), pea (Greenfast), borage, eggplant, watermelon, pumpkin (Delicata), and zucchini.

In the smaller bed we planted: dill, corriander (Delfino), carrots (Nantes, Chantenay), onions, and leek (King Richard).

And next to this bed, potatoes, corn and broccoli are already booming in the horse manure and composted soil we built over winter.

I gave Zeph the option of staying home from school until morning tea if he wanted to keep working in the garden. He accepted and we did some more mulching and pulled up green manure to lay beside the raspberries.

Strawberries, raspberries and then fruit trees line the swales to ensure they get a steady supply of water passively throughout the summer. They fill up with rain and our bath water.

I took Zeph to school and picked up some new garden stakes and chicken wire to fence off the new beds from chooks, dog and straying soccer balls.

Foraging for winter meals

We have been eating a considerable amount of wild food that we have foraged close to home. I don't think there is a more pleasurable way to gather food than to slowly walk through the bush, arriving at the lake, throwing in a fishing line, collecting edible weeds and walking back through the town, scouring the ground, returning home with bags of greens and other gems.

Here's a dish we put together for tonight's dinner consisting of double boiled wild radish leaves blended with our potatoes, parsley, spring onion, eggs and garlic to make beautiful vegetarian patties which I served up with my green tomato chutney.


Apart from the salt, pepper and olive oil everything was either foraged or grown at home. The salt comes from desalination processes near the Murray River and the oil comes from an organic farm 10 minutes from here. The pepper is the only ingredient we don't know the origins of.

New Plantings

I planted a Mulberry tree (Morus Nigra) today on the 'nature strip' among the Banksias and Poa Tussocks. I dug through layers of decomposing wood-chips full of rich microbial biology through to the thin layer of top soil, worms and fine gravel until I hit clay. After two and a half years of heavy mulching, composting and broadcasting biodiversity (gleaned in small quantities on forest walks), the hard compacted and heavily disturbed soils that we inherited are starting to become dynamic.

I also borrowed our neighbour Andrew's lawnmower, mowed the areas we haven't mulched as yet and broadcast the clippings onto our very large potato patch to add nitrogen to the carbon rich wood-chips. As I threw a fine layer of clippings I noticed to my surprise that the seed potatoes that I planted only 5 days ago have already begun to pop up through heavy newspaper, horse shit and newish wood-chips comprising mainly native wattles and gums that were thinned out down the road. Folk are busy around here preparing for the fire season. The local arborists sell a truck load (18 cubic meters) of chips for $150. That's $8.35 per meter. In the past two years we've been buying it at the local garden supplies for $33 per meter plus a delivery cost, which has made mulching large areas very expensive.

With all the compost we've been making from ours and a local cafe's green scraps (free), chook poo (free), collecting horse shit from the local horse riding school (free) and wood-chips (now only $8.35 a cubic meter), we have a pretty phenomenal programme of soil building for very little expense. The banner image above shows my boots atop the horse shit pile at Boomerang Ranch.

Also this week I planted an excess of white and red onions among indigenous Lomandras and Poas. I also planted some Calendula Meg and Zeph bought at the Sunday market. They flower year round, provide edible petals which are best in salads and tea can be made with them which helps boost the immune system.