Callatya's Backyard Farm-thingy

Callatya · **Posted:** Tue Nov 06, 2012 11:07 pm

Well, I suppose we start at the beginning. I do hope you guys like photos.

When we moved in to this house, I fell in love with the garden. It isn't as large as I wanted, but for a suburban backyard in a sloped area, it is pretty fantastic. Food-wise, there was a good size plum tree, about 40 chilli plants, a lemon verbena, 2 beetroot, and a delightful flowering passionfruit (with pretty but inedible fruit). I thought it would be low maintenance. I thought I could ignore it. Alas, the moss and grass took advantage of my ignorance and claimed the yard as their own. Every so often I would ask for help to get it under control, but the effort of a full weekend wiped me out physically for several weeks or months and it just came back so quickly.

This year, I decided that slow and steady would be the way to go, as well as spending the money on the right tools and equipment to make maintenance easier. I gave myself 5 years to get the house & garden to the point where it was producing power, water, and food. I'm not looking for total sustainability, but I am wanting to get that little bit closer to it. All the good local farmland is being swallowed up by estates and the chances of me getting property within cooee of the city now is pretty slim. This is what I have and it needs to be everything I want it to be.

Hold your breath, this story starts out pretty bad.

Looking left:

Looking right:

Herb pots (very overgrown & straggly):

The shady garden bed full of ? mint

The back corner (those are 6' fences)

The shed & passionfruit vine

My biggest problem? Grass. Lots of grass. It seems easy enough, but I am also carrying a fair few injuries and health issues so ripping it all out is not that easy. Add to that, my partner is allergic to grass so this is all on me. *gulp*

These pics are from February 2012 (after a serious weekend blitz in November 2011 with friends and family), but it gives you an idea of where I started.

Faye · **Posted:** Wed Nov 07, 2012 12:23 am

Welcome to backyard farming Callatya. Hopefully you will stay inspired. Sounds like you have a good support network which always helps too.

gazza · **Posted:** Wed Nov 07, 2012 11:32 am

Hi Callatya, keep the photos coming! I'm sure ill be brutally shot down in flames for mentioning this around here, but my method of dealing with unwanted grass involves roundup :run:

Callatya · **Posted:** Wed Nov 07, 2012 6:57 pm

Shhh, mine too ;-) I like the idea of homemade concoctions and biological controls for maintenance and around leafy foods, but right now, for getting this sorted, I'm hitting the poison shelf ;-) Once it is less jungly, I'll move to a different solution for long term control.

OK, so still in Feb 2012, a few more areas with a little bit of work

Up the side of the house:

This area has thick black plastic and scoria, and heats up something terrible in summer. It houses the bedroom A/C unit, and windows for bathroom, bedroom, kitchen & laundry. In this picture you can see the kitchen window succulents, a white frangipani from my late Grandmother, and a pink frangipani I snaffled from the front yard of a house that was being demolished. Both grown from cuttings and in desperate need of repotting/planting out.

Down the side of the house:

From the other side. There you can see my red barrel that is/was used for aging water for my fish breeding (chronologically aging works much better than chemically aging for fancy, long fin types) and a bit of the jacaranda garden.

Now, I'm going to tell you guys a big secret. You know those water crystal things? Do not put then in dry. about 3 hours after I took this picture, several of my cacti and succulents self-ejected from their pots. It was like slow mo succulent suicide :-( I felt mighty stupid in hindsight, but there you go. Still not sure how I feel about those crystals, but I like them better than crispy plants so for the moment they are serving a purpose. I'm working on finding better solutions with coco-peat and reservoirs and whatnot, but for now it is a mix.

This side hasn't changed all that much in the last 8 months. The succulents are now in 3 large plastic troughs and they are much better for it. After a few major re-pottings that have left me with excess plants, I discovered that they adored being wet. Not a little bit wet, but A LOT. The ones that got left in buckets that filled with rainwater thrived. I had submerged succulents and they looked great. A lot of these I have had for years and they have just plodded along with the occasional flower, but now they are almost BH&G-worthy ;-) Well, not quite.

At present, I am thinking of making this my potted citrus/passionfruit/choko climber area. Do you think they would survive it if I set up a drip system and maybe added some shade from roof to fence top for the first summer? I don't want to lose any trees but I can't think of much else to do with the space given the proximity to the house & neighbours (council requires 90cm from fenceline for water tanks too, which bites as this would have been the idea hideaway) I can't plant too much into it as sewer and stormwater run down here.

Oh, almost forgot. I have a vertical hydro system that my Dad and I built when I was a kid that *might* go where the red barrel is, or it might end up on the other side of the house, or it might be on wheels. Leaving that one for a while until I sort out the soil things because I'll need more brainpower to sort out water chem and flow etc. One thing at a time ;-)

Jaymie · **Posted:** Wed Nov 07, 2012 8:02 pm

from a biodiversity perspective, from a landowners perspective, you are MUCH MUCH better off using a grass specific herbicide rather than glyphosate. Glyphosate will kill EVERYTHING and you are left with bare ground which is just what every weed seed in your local area is waiting for. Don't leave bare ground, weeds will beat everything else out of the ground.

(I do this for a living, believe me

)

Callatya · **Posted:** Thu Nov 08, 2012 12:22 am

Hmm, any particular type you'd recommend? I get a bit overwhelmed in the targeted herbicide department.

In most cases so far, the areas where I have used the glyphosate are either paved or getting covered in weed matting, mulched and rested for 6-12 months, so that probably isn't too bad from a competitive angle. We do have every type of weed you can imagine, however. Just before we purchased, the front yard gardens were "mulched" with what I think was just fresh horse manure. It was right up against the house and so we moved it away from the damp course before we realised how badly riddled with seeds it was. We have had fireweed and Patterson's curse, as well as clover burrs, farmers friends, and paspalum. The backyard isn't too bad, but the clover burrs jumped the gap (on my jeans, I expect) I also found a scotch thistle :/ Do I win points for the most paddock weeds on a suburban block?

More pics tomorrow (tonight I am excited about my first baby roma toms!)

Jaymie · **Posted:** Thu Nov 08, 2012 6:15 am

good try ;) my job is to id weeds on properties and to tell folks how to get rid of them, most properties here average about 30 species

Verdict is relatively good as a grass killer

use your DPI website, or the Qld one for info on how to kill particular weeds, the fact sheets will have rates of application etc

Callatya · **Posted:** Fri Nov 09, 2012 12:40 am

30? A challenge! Might be the best use of a photo mosaic around (though I have gotten shot of a lot of them recently so that might be a very challenging challenge ;-)

Right, today we are moving up to March and some actual improvements :-)

This is the Jacaranda veggie bed. It has plenty of compost and organic matter dig through, drains really well, and has a weeper hose snaking through under the soil. It was quite a reasonable little setup until I relised that it is my dog's preferred pee possie

I managed two edible tomatoes before his enthusiastic watering killed all 6 plants. For now, nothing much gets planted here.

The dog. Lovely, quiet, no-dig, loves to pee on things that shouldn't be peed on :bat:

That section up the back... I honestly have no idea what it is. I think it was a fernery as the people who were here before had a whopper of a shadehouse in the opposite corner that had remnants of orchids and ferns. The logs are nailed (!!) together with one angled nail per join and I don;t think the feet are concreted in. I am about 90% sure I could knock that down in half a day even with my weakling arms. The brick... things? They are solid as they come. The jacaranda is making a colossal mess of the paving. I honestly have no idea what to do with this corner. It is lovely and shady but also full of bugs and spiders. In summer it is too dark for anything to grow well. I'm currently tossing up between making a lock-together chicken house/run and trying to run climbers over it (choko? passionfruit? beans? something vaguely edible?) or re-laying the paving, and making deep garden beds between the brick things.

That same corner, with a bit more done to it. This was taking in March or April, but not much has changed other than a few hanging plants going up and a few rogue weeds coming through the paving. On the plus side, it hasn't gone backwards.

And now getting to the interesting stuff ;-)

Adda Garden. I picked them up on sale. I was going to do sleepers but this was so so much easier for me to wrangle by myself Also, it is a good 2" above dog leg-cocking height ;-) This is it filled with all of the decaying wood I had, and a few chunks of soil that had been left neglected so long that they dried out :blush:

The top half was filled with potting mix. I think possibly an expensive and impractical way to do it, next time I might get something delivered in bulk.

Same garden two weeks after planting. The komatsuna just took off. I barely got 3 meals before it bolted. Fortunately, a single meal paid for the seedling punnet so it was still OK

The Tom Thumb carrots are doing very poorly, but I'm not too worried. I go through carrots at speed so it would never be practical to grow as many as I eat. I just wanted to know what they really tasted like, and there are enough for that. Back right is cream ring beetroot which seems to be going great guns. The spinach is my favourite so far. I'm having to pick it so regularly I'm giving it away :-)

The unfortunate part of this garden bed is that it is right under my plum, so it is currently quite shady and in a few weeks it'll be pelted with quite a few kilos of fruit fly infested fruit. It is a great tree, but I have never managed to get anything much out of it. Never fast enough with the traps or the clean up. Also, Batford the Fruit Bat comes every year, without fail, and nibbles most of the fruit. I don't mind him, but the fruit flies are the pits :-( Anyway, the veggies are going to get a headache. I'm going to angle some old alsonite over it to stop the missiles completely crushing my crops, and I'm already thinning the fruit as best I can.

Callatya · **Posted:** Sun Nov 11, 2012 4:13 pm

A few from today, because I'm just a little excited about all the fruit popping up everywhere :-)

The bed from above. I cleaned my tank yesterday so it just got a rather nice feed which should hopefully perk it up. Corn was on sale for being overgrown (just a little!?) so I thought I would try that too. I think the beetroot will be coming out soon. Not really sure what to do with it, but I'm thinking a good old fashioned roast for this batch :-)

Our first ruby red grapefruit! Only one on the tree at the moment and I think I'll keep it to that for the time being, maybe a few more if they pop up at the right time.

The lemon is going a little crazy. I bought it at Aldi last year as it just looked a bit sad and I hadn't seen a meyer lemon around before. I am tempted to strip all the fruit off for the season as it looks like it could better use the energy, but at the same time I would like to know what it tastes like. Have not decided, but have already nipped about 12 little fruits off and am doing more each time I go past, so we'll see.

Little baby Romas! The tomatoes this year are an experiment which is going rather well so far. They are all in hanging pots to keep them away from pests and the dastardly dog. So far I have around 10 fruits maturing, which is more than I ever got in the ground. We'll see.

Peasants · **Posted:** Sun Nov 18, 2012 2:49 pm

It is looking great Callatya! :thumb:

Callatya · **Posted:** Tue Nov 20, 2012 1:10 pm

Cheers :-) Lost my place a little here so I'm just going to go with recent. Only small progress over the last week, but it should make my tomatoes happier :-)

Since tomato armageddon a few years ago, I've been looking at other ways to grow my plants. The main concern is that they stay out of the reach of the dog, so I decided that hanging baskets were the go. No staking, no pee, lots of tomatoes? It seems like it might be the case, at last count I had about 8 on these weedy plants.

These are my bargain heirloom ones. 4 Diggers and one something or other else. The poor things were marked down to $2 at B's, only because they desperately needed a drink. This is after a good soak and potting up.

I planted some in hanging bottles, but as you might imagine, this is not all that easy to maintain. They are in onion bags with moss and soil and water crystals, but of the 3 I did, one held water well, one let it trickle down the sides, and one would only take little sips. None have shown signs of fruit whereas the ones in the pots are doing well. I love the idea and it does "work" from a physical perspective, but I think perhaps it is more suited to herbs or ornamentals.

So, at last count I have 11 tomato plants. So far, no edible tomatoes. *sigh* Still, nothing has died, and there are little green fruits on about 6 plants. *crosses everything*

So I decided it was now or never. To re-pot or just hope that this works in the silly way I did it. I re-potted. Hopefully it won't be too stressful. *worries*

One of the Digger's pots. I popped a few small chilli plants on the top and will mulch the hell out of it in a few days.

Oh, and I don't have tomatoes yet, but I did do a small root veg harvest ;-) I seem to suck at making grown-up sized carrots, but the beets weren't bad :-)

Charlie · **Posted:** Wed Nov 21, 2012 1:13 am

Great photos and great ideas.

How do you cut the bottom of the bottles off?

Callatya · **Posted:** Wed Nov 21, 2012 10:27 am

I didn't actually do those. They were a gift from a friend for my fish tanks. I believe he used a glass cutter and a home made jig to fit the bottles in and turn them around, but there seem to be a bunch of methods online using flammable liquid and string. Not sure how to make the edges safe with either method, but I'll try and find out. :-)

samward · **Posted:** Wed Nov 21, 2012 5:44 pm

We used to just polish the edge of the cut glass under water (to avoid glass dust) with an oil stone (just like you used to use to sharpen knives).

Callatya · **Posted:** Thu Dec 27, 2012 6:16 pm

Things are trucking along rather well here. The tomatoes are having some issues due to being uprooted and overturned while fruiting, as well as changes in water retention due to new configuration. I'm working on it.

The first big tomato was wormy :-( but the little ones have been great! The spinach is by far my most cost-effective plant so far and we are eating plenty of it!

All the gardens and pots are now heavily mulched with pea straw and *cough* sprouting peas. The snow peas and beans are still going well, except for the trough where I failed to add drainage... they are drowning :-/ Not to matter though, I'll fix it as soon as this abysmally hot weather passes.

Grass has sprung up everywhere, so next cold rainy day I'm out there to rip it all up yet again.

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