The last couple of weeks have been a frenzy of activity - moving out of our Farrer rental property and into our new house in Waramanga.

Projects completed this week:

1. Built a wicking bed from the old bookcase I was using in Farrer to grow some radishes and cabbages. See Scarecrow’s Garden for more info on constructing wicking beds, because I couldn’t find my camera while constructing it.
2. Planted in the wicking bed approximately one dozen Purple King climbing bean seedlings that I had previously sowed in toilet rolls, and one dozen seeds of Tongue of Fire, (a red-specked bush bean variety), three small tomatoes on the corners (so that I can stake them if they grow), one Black Russian tomato that I bought as a healthy plant from Woden trash and treasure on another corner, and some rows of watermelon radishes and black spanish radishes.
3. I ran out of space in the wicking bed, but planted three zucchini plants (if they all survive I’ll be eating a lot of zucchini!) in some beds that didn’t have very nice soil, so we’ll see how they go.
4. We added a cat flap for Tabatha to the back door (she approves)
5. In my roaming around the property I have found an almond tree stuck between an overgrown shrub and the back fence receiving no water and little sunshine, but still forming some nuts. There is also a developing tree that looks like maybe a plum next to the water meter and it looks like its survived there without any water or care for a little while. Unfortunately though both the almond and the tree next to the water meter have some kind of leaf curl - maybe a fungus? Out the front I also found a Meyer lemon tree and another tree that looks like it could possibly be a fruit tree, but I’m not sure yet as it has only started budding. I also found a twiggy-looking annual in the back yard which turned out to be a rocket that had gone to seed. Got plenty of seed pods from him!

Tomorrow is a public holiday so I’ll see if I can find my camera and add some photos.

PS. Didn’t have too much luck with the lettuces in the move. Two that I potted in ordinary pots keeled over and died. To be honest I didn’t have much faith in them because they were limping even when I was watering them once or twice a day. The lettuce in one of my three polystyrene wicking boxes is is going gangbusters, but recently I started noticing a lot of ants hanging about, and lo and behold I have aphids living on them. I thought that aphids only lived on unhealthy lettuce but apparently not. I’ll try again with some heirloom cos variety that I bought. Time to make a second wicking bed! (aargh, digging up the back lawn in clay soil is like digging up concrete).

I currently have six little cabbages growing from when I planted them last May. They all look like pretty healthy, happy cabbages (I presume anyway since I have never grown them before). But I got a preview of the Cabbage Leaf Butterfly already; once a day for the last week, I have found a fat green caterpillar munching away at my cabbage leaves.

So for now I have resigned myself to picking off caterpillars until they run out of eggs, but this puts me in the mood for an experiment. Only three of my cabbages seem to be affected, and the other three untouched. Also, I have eight very small cabbages that have popped up from seed planted into toilet rolls. This gives me 11 little cabbages to play with. I read about a couple of ways to stop butterflies from laying eggs in cabbages and I’m going to try out the suggestions on my own cabbages:

1. Use decoy butterflies to trick the real butterflies into thinking their nesting place is already being guarded. Apparently butterflies are quite aggressive and will defend a cabbage patch from intruders. Butterflies seeking to lay their eggs in some cabbage see the decoy and fly off to find a new spot.
2. Create a butterfly-proof barrier by covering a cabbage with part of an old nylon stocking and letting the cabbage grow within the stocking until it is ready to eat

I am a bit wary of the stocking idea, a) because I don’t have many old stockings, and b) because slugs might happily live under the stocking. On the other hand, the decoy idea might not work at all if we have particularly smart butterflies in our area! So I’ll try both at the same time with an unprotected control group and see what happens!

The backyard in the new house is going to need a lot of work to make it a productive vegetable garden.

This is how the back of the house looks before we move in...

The glass doors on the right hand side were put there by the previous owners in anticipation of building a deck. I don’t particularly want a deck however, so I was thinking that the doors were more useful for just increasing the sunshine coming into the house (the backyard faces north). After reading Permaculture by Bill Mollison however, I have learned that the best place to put a greenhouse is against the north wall of the house. So now I am thinking of extending from the laundry door (the middle one) to the living room french doors by adding a glasshouse. I have no idea how much that will cost, but its probably not an ‘immediate’ project!! In fact, I already know what the immediate project is - removing two trees from the block. We have three huge eucalypt trees on our 650 sqm block and they cast a lot of shade. The picture in my post on the 6th of October shows the one in the front yard, and this picture shows the shade case from the one in the back yard. In both cases the trees are on the northern side of the area, and the one in the front yard is simply too close to the house for my liking. It looks to me like a good way to damage our gutters and could be a fire hazard having a big tree that close. Plus, I want to control the shade over my vegetables so that I don’t end up with frost pockets in Winter. The third tree is an absolutely massive eucalypt, but that one is on the south-most side of the house, near the road. I’ll keep that one and attach a number of small bird houses to make use of it. Its a bit sad to cut down such large trees, but we are on a small block in the suburbs - not on a bush farm!

We need to speak to an arborist once we move in, because in ACT they have a regulated tree scheme, where if a tree is regulated the owner of the property needs to apply for permission to cut down a tree. From reading the tree regulation webpage, it sounded like all trees are regulated!! What a pain! I originally thought that would dry up demand for tree-professionals, but from what I’ve been told by my work colleagues, they’ve been getting a lot of business because it takes an expert to be able to read through the lines as to what is and is not a regulated tree. With the hefty fines, people are less included to do the work themselves.

Assuming we can remove these trees, I’d like to get them cut sometime over or just after summer, and the glasshouse is a project that I will plan for the winter after next.

Some of my beans had roots hanging out of the bottom of their toilet roll so I potted them up since we’re not moving for another week, and even when we do I won’t be able to plant them on the first day! I’m trying to recycle, so for pots I used old plastic containers that we don’t need and some UHT soymilk cartons with the pour hole used for drainage.

This bean is a Purple King climbing variety:

I’ve also had two zucchini plants pop up, and my cabbages and marigolds that popped up earlier have all survived the cooler evenings so far. I have no idea how many plants to grow yet since I have never grown my own vegetables, but I’ve heard that zucchinis are quite prolific so I can probably stick with the two if they both survive the move. I’m not sure how many beans so I’ll likely grow some more of those and see how many I end up with. My snow peas grew excellently and have been producing plenty of pods. The new tenants here will get to enjoy plenty of peas!

We had over 10mm of rain already today! I got home and it was all dark and wet (so was my cat)…. and what do you know, a whole bunch of seeds have suddenly popped up out of nowhere! Yesterday there was not a seedling to be seen. I guess once they make their mind up they’re pretty eager. Now lets hope it doesn’t drop down to 0 again and wipe them all out like the last batch I germinated. The plants that just popped up are marigolds, cabbages and beans.

This weekend I did a bit more research into starting plants from seeds. I really want to do it that way for two reasons:

1. I think it will be fun to grow heirloom veggies that you can’t buy in the shops, for a bit of added motivation
2. I want to save seeds from the plants I grow so that I can best follow the suggestions offered by permaculture

Originally I tried sowing outdoors but in a protective broccoli box to keep them warm. Nothing has germinated in 3 weeks though so this weekend I bought an espresso thermometer with a probe to check the temperature of the soil in the modules in the box. The temperature was only 2 degrees warmer than the outside temperature! Not so useful when it is 0 degrees outside overnight in October.


My research suggests there are a few different things that can be done though:

1. build a greenhouse or cold frame (not happy with that suggestion straight away due to money considerations and lack of building talent!)
2. sow outdoors when fear of frost is gone (locals rule of thumb is that frost-free zone is between Melbourne Cup day in November and Anzac day in April)
3. sow indoors at the right temperature and with plenty of light and then gradually harden off and transplant outdoors

So, given that #1 is out for now, I’ll have to experiment with #2 and #3.

#2: Melbourne cup day is not for another 3.5 weeks, but conveniently I am moving house in 2 weeks anyway. I was hoping to grow some seedlings in modules to move with me and then plant them out when I have created some garden beds, but I guess with my first seed sowing attempt failing this can’t be helped. I will definitely try sowing in situ after we have moved.

#3: Other people on the internet who live in cold zones (Canberra is in cold zone 9a - average absolute minimum temperature of -7 degrees according to diggers website) say that their germination rates have improved considerably by germinating indoors on a heat mat, preferably with a thermostat so that you don’t accidentally cook your plants on warmer days.

To get enough light, either put the plants in a sunny windowsill or set up some fluorescent lights directly above. The windowsill is the easiest, but is likely to cause tall leggy seedlings due to not enough light.

I went to Plants Plus nursery at Pialligo to enquire about heat mats and they had never heard of such a thing! Feeling disappointed, I called a hydroponics shop, and the person who answered the phone knew exactly what I was talking about, but his prices were double what I have seen on the internet. No point in buying on the net when I’m about to move anyway and its already the middle of Spring! I’ve scrapped the heat mat idea for now given how late in Spring it already is, and I’m not going to invest in any fluorescent lights before I move house. (reminder to self - price the reptile/pet mats with thermostat - maybe I can pick one of these up for a better deal)

So waiting and sowing in warm temperatures it will have to be. On the plus side, a number of sellers were out with their seedlings at Woden trash and treasure today, so I can always pick up a few seedlings there while I learn how to germinate the seeds properly.

Useful info about temperature zones:

Diggers heat zone diagram
Diggers cold zone diagram

I have a bit of work to do learning how to germinate seeds - my attempts have been a real flop. If I try germinating them indoors they grow almost horizontally trying to find some sunshine because the kitchen window is on the south side of the house. If I put them on the north side they have a balcony shading them, plus all the rooms on the north side have carpet and I don’t have suitable trays for water to drain away. If I put them outside, they either don’t grow at all, or they grow a bit and then keel over and die overnight due to the cold (I have some of them under a plastic box and some of them in a polystyrene box). I wonder what the trick is to get both warmth and sunshine in Canberra Spring if I don’t have a greenhouse?

In our current rental house we have only a tiny paved courtyard - not so useful for learning how to grow vegetables. So to solve this I found two pallets, drilled some holes in the back of an unused bookcase and then put that on the pallet.

It’s been working quite effectively actually - I grew a whole crop of radishes in there quite successfully and in the spring sunshine some lettuces and cabbages have been coming up. But the setup is far too heavy to move so I have started potting up all of my little plants.

I noticed that when I potted my lettuces one of them started turning a bit yellow on the outer leaves. Otherwise it looks quite springy and lively so I’m hoping it will return to the usual green shade. I sprayed some seaweed liquid on it yesterday so now I’ll just leave it alone. I might have to eat him soon anyway because this is the first time I’ve grown a vegetable and I accidentally planted two of them very close to each other.

Hello! My husband (Michael) and I (Petra) recently moved to Canberra and we have just bought our first home here. I plan to set up a productive garden and decorate our new home - without spending much money! Hopefully along the way I’ll learn a thing or two that I can share with other people.

Here’s a picture of our new home in Waramanga: