Murray Neill: Permaculture

New Neighbors

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 02:16:35 GMT

Spotted for the first time this morning, I got to snap a picture of two of the three new kids on the block. Their parents moved into the little pond behind my house a few weeks ago.

The Old Orchard

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 00:00:06 GMT

This morning...

...and exactly seven weeks ago.

Making Kiwifruit Jam

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 00:40:11 GMT

Moon the Goat

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 22:33:01 GMT

Moon is my neighbour's goat. She regularly breaks her chain and comes to visit me. She showed up late last night but then disappeared into the darkness determined to spend the night free. This morning she was right where I last saw her, on my front doorstep nibbling at my grapevine. Shortly after this photo she invited herself inside and strolled right through my front door, to see if there was anything edible on my couch. Understandably Kaycee did not approve and a stand-off ensued, between my little, heroic dog and a horned goat, about ten times her size. I decided it was time Moon was escorted home, but once she realised what I was trying to do, she took off and stayed at arms length, baaaing at me gently as if to say "please don't send me home".

I've just got her back onto her chain after about an hour of regaining her confidence with a cabbage.

Real food doesn't require labels

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 06:41:27 GMT

Tonights selection from the garden on its way to the kitchen for dinner.

Jammin

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 09:09:23 GMT

Covering the blackcurrant bushes in the garden to protect them from the birds has paid off. I picked 1.8kg of ripe blackcurrants yesterday. Today I made jam for the first time.

I'm ready. 1.8kg of home grown blackcurrants. 2kg of sugar and 900ml of water on the boil. Jars warming on top of the toast 'n grill. Time to jam.

Add the fruit. I've just poured the blackcurrants into the boiling sugar and water. Doesn't look much like jam yet.

After 4 minutes on the boil and now it's looking like blackcurrant jam (only a couple of minutes to go). Next step is to cool quickly by sitting the pan in a sink full of cold water.

Now I know why Mum's so-called jam-pan had a spout. Blackcurrant jam doesn't pour every well. I made a nice mess but got most of the jam in the jars. You spell ~~blackcurrent~~ blackcurrant with an 'A' by the way.

6 litres of home-grown blackcurrant jam cooling on the porch. One top didn't quite seal right. Dam. I'll have to eat that jar right away.

The first raspberry

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 08:03:03 GMT

Zucchini on their way

Sat, 15 Dec 2007 23:59:59 GMT

Late Spring Garden Tour

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 07:12:40 GMT

The garlic I planted in late winter is coming along nicely. I've planted it closer together than recommended just to see if it makes any real difference to the harvest.

These are Kamokamo, or Maori Squash. They are like a zuchini but rounder. My neighbour gave me these plants so I thought I'd give them a go on the spot of ground where my compost bin stood last season. They seem to like it so far.

I have around 45 sweetcorn plants growing in both the front and the back gardens this year. I love fresh sweetcorn!

A 'little beaut' lettuce plant. This variety is one you can pick the outer leaves anytime, but it also produces a small heart.

This year the black currents are all mine. I've constructed this bird-proof enclosure around them to ensure I'm first to the bounty. Sorry birds but I am making a bird feeder by the back door to make up for it. I need to make another such enclosure for the raspberries which look like they will be doing very this year.

The potatoes-in-tires idea worked well last season. This year I'm experimenting to see if the third tire is worth the effort. The plants begin flowering just as the second tire is being topped off, so my bet is it's not worth filling the third/top tire after that point. The harvest will tell.

One of about 12 tomatoe plants I've planted here and there.

Beans. A long-keeping heritage variety the name of which escapes me for the moment.

Two generations of lettuce. The ones in the foreground should be ready in a few weeks, while the seedlings in the background (under the bird-proof enclosure) have just been planted out.

Polecam backyard fun.

Sat, 01 Dec 2007 08:00:14 GMT

This shot was taken with a pole cam. I duct-taped the top of a lightweight tripod onto a 10 foot tuna pole. I then attached a little digital camera, set the timer for a 15 second delay and swung it out over my garden while standing on my roof. Click-through to the photo on flickr to see all the notes showing all the things I have planted.

I have I few more shots I took while playing around the house with this idea this afternoon. It makes for some fun photos.I'll upload more soon.

Bottle Gourds

Sat, 17 Nov 2007 08:55:52 GMT

Some of last years gourd growing efforts...

Rowdy Bastard

Sat, 17 Nov 2007 00:04:45 GMT

Slug Patrol

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 07:00:15 GMT

Gardening time

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 21:14:28 GMT

This is the year. When I began gardening here a few years back there were no established vegetable plots to speak of. None of the ground was really ready for any kind of intensive food growing. The area in the back yard where I started out used to be used for car parking (I only found this out later) so the ground was very hard packed and mostly clay. For several seasons now I have been adding organic matter like pea-straw, shredded paper, wood and bark chips, worm-castings, and home-brewed compost to try and build it up (rather than dig-down and adding chemicals). The area now has about a foot of very good rich topsoil and it is crawling with helpful worms and other critters. With the addition of blood & bone at the start of this season I think it is set to go off this summer.

The organic approach certainly takes a little more patience and time than the popular alternative of using chemicals, but it just feels right to me. The soil is where it all begins and the whole idea is to promote as much life and diversity in your soil as possible. The more popular industrial approach is the opposite. Pour on the poisons to kill of everything except the one crop you are growing. It reduces the soil to little more than a sponge to hold the fossil fuel based food we pour on. Take away the fossil fuel and you have a desert. A pest (as they are called in the chemical approach) is not something to wage a chemical war with. If you have a slug problem, instead of looking at it as too many slugs, maybe it is not enough ducks (they love eating slugs, as do some frogs). Or maybe it's a problem with aphids. instead of spraying a poison on the very plants you are planning to eat, you could plant marigolds which will attract ladybirds, which love eating black-fly aphids. Nature has the solutions and it is all about achieving a balance; something that happens naturally given enough time.

I already have a well established crop of garlic and silver-beet (they don't mind the frosts up here), and in the last few weeks I have planted potatoes, beans, hearting-cabbage, Chinese cabbage, bottle gourds, grey pumpkins, hearting-lettuce, beef-steak tomatoes, and sweet-corn (lots and lots of sweetcorn; I love the stuff). My black currents and raspberries are getting completely covered in with bird netting this year. Last year they produced but the birds got the goodness first. This year they are mine. I want to make jam.

One last thing before I get back out in the sunshine to do more planting... There is a Blackbird hanging around my garden this year. Nothing unusual, they are around every year and they love digging for worms in the top soil. This Blackbird is different though. I've seen him every day for the last few months and have been trying to get a photo, but with no luck so far. How do I know its the same bird? He has one pure white tail feather. I'm taking this as a good omen...

Kereru Feeding

Sat, 01 Sep 2007 22:17:30 GMT

I've been pottering around the garden this morning. Not really doing much in the way of planting or anything (to early here, we're still getting frosts), but rather planning what I'll plant, when, and where. My garlic crop is well under way, the raspberrys and black current are starting to bud, and last years rhubarb has just poked it's head up through the pea-straw again.

The tree lucerne on the river bank is covered with lost of fresh young shoots the the native pigeons are enjoying.

Bright Lights Silverbeet

Sat, 23 Jun 2007 20:37:35 GMT

We can't buy our way out of global warming

Fri, 04 May 2007 06:36:19 GMT

Don't buy a smaller car. I know that sounds like something I wouldn't normally say. A greenie like me should be all for selling those SUV's and buying up electric hybrids as quick as they can build them, right? well. no.

I overhead a conversation today between a group of people admiring a shiny new car one of them had just bought. I was a nice compact, economical looking thing. The part of the conversation I overheard went something like this.

Admirer 1: "So you've traded down then?"
New car owner: "Oh no. I'm reducing my enviromental footprint."

I bit my lip and kept walking. Why didn't a shake their hand and say good on you? Well, because what they did probably had little or no effect on their "environmental footprint" at all. You've got to do the math. The whole equation from start to finish...

By the time a new SUV reaches it's proud new owner, it has already cost the planet about as much fossil fuels in the materials and manufacturing as it will consume in it's lifetime. The materials, the power for the assembly factory, the shipping of the parts and finished product, etc etc. Everything must be included in the equation. And here's the bad news. The enviromental cost of a brand new hybrid is not far removed from that of the SUV. Think about it; they are still made of the same materials, using the same manufacturing process, and they are still delivered on a truck.

So what has the person that sells their old SUV to by a nice new hybrid actually achieved for the planet? In reality they might as well just keep driving the SUV for the rest of it's life. Their "enviromental footprint" (I just love this feel-good buzzword) would remain the about the same.

If you want to make a difference by changing your mode of transport try a bicycle, public transport, or walk. Better yet, work on reducing your need to travel and stay at home. Buying a feel-good, technofix, economical, CAR is not part of the solution.

Hero

Mon, 15 Jan 2007 09:07:54 GMT

"I want to show the world that if I can make it around the Earth without any emissions, then surely almost anyone can make it to work or school." - Tim Harvey

My Garden

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 03:31:16 GMT

Stoat (Mustela erminea)

Sat, 23 Dec 2006 00:39:50 GMT

(click for 1024x768 or 1280x1024 desktop wallpaper)

This little fellow visited my garden this afternoon, just to have his portrait taken. He sat and waited paitently while I changed to my 300mm lens to get some nice closeups. Stoats are a real problem for New Zealands delicate eco-system. Our birds, particularly the flightless ones, have developed no defense to predators like this one, having evolved in an environment without them. They and their eggs are easy prey for the highly evolved stoat. Now that I know this one is hanging around the area, I should set a trap for him, for the sake of the local birds. I hate having to do that to any creature, especailly one so handsome. I wish I could just rehabilitate him or something.
Can you spot the little guy in the picture below?

Greenery

Fri, 01 Dec 2006 23:24:20 GMT

It was offically the first day of summer yesterday. My garden is coming along nicely this year. I'm already eating fresh beans, lettuce, brocoli, strawberries, and silverbeet.

Soon I'll have fresh zuchini. They are just beginning to develop now.

This is a non-hearting variety of lettuce. I can just pick leaves as I need them leaving the rest of the plant to keep producing. I have hearting varieties growning too.

Meanwhile in the worm farm my minions continue to toil away creating heaps of organic fertilisers for me. Aren't they adorable?

Strawcycle

Thu, 23 Nov 2006 06:19:54 GMT

I absolutely love doing this sort of thing with my xtracycle. Why? Because it messes with peoples heads. Forces them to think outside the square their petrol driven minds are stuck inside. I needed some straw for mulch on my garden. It keeps the moisture in, stops the blackbirds from digging to deep and uprooting plants, breaks down to 'feed' the soil for next season, keeps the strawberries of the ground, and it just looks good too. Ted had some organic barley straw at his house which was on the way home, and I just happened to have my wideloader bars with me today. So we traded two bales of straw for twenty litres of worm juice (compost tea) from my worm farm, which I will be riding in with tomorrow morning. Boy, did I see some rubberneckers on the way home! Some did a double take as I rode by, others looked at me like cows in headlights, and a few were belly laughing.

Ted had a wee test ride around Neale Park before I left.

Stopped at the Hira store. Now where am I gonna put the milk and bread!?

(ps. I apoligise for the quality of the pictures. They were taken on my phone since my dead camera has not been replaced yet.)

Nothing is Coming!

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 08:37:13 GMT

About a year ago I was musing that if I cycled to work twice a week, and stayed in town, near to work, in my campervan one day a week, saving a trip home, I could almost half the amount of driving I do. Thinking back today I realised that setting that goal, and acting on it, has taken me much further... and quite naturally so. Since then, and especailly over the last 3 or 4 months (since I got my Xtracycle) I have virtually eliminated driving altogether. I used to make the 50km drive to work and back every weekday. Thats 250km a week, or about 1000km a month. Since August I have averaged about 2 drives a month; about 100km worth. A 90% reduction! And without being to smug about it... it was no great sacrifice, in fact it was almost easy. Not to mention the other positive spinoffs, like way better health and fitness, less stress, lots of money saved (I think I'm addicted to endorfins though). And thats just the benefits for me. However marginal, there are benefits for our planet too.

Speaking of benefits for the planet... try this for one day, you never know where it might lead you.

Buy nothing day is this Friday.

http://adbusters.org/metas/eco/bnd/

This year's Buy Nothing Day has a special poignancy. Never before have our emerging environmental crises been planted so firmly on the lips of the policymakers and the general public. Rather than screaming from the fringes, high-profile economists and scientists are sounding the warnings in respected journals and the halls of parliament -- warnings that our oceans are dying, that the ice shelves are melting, and that we are setting ourselves up for the most massive and widest-ranging market failure the world has ever seen.

All of this points to a profound need for a shift in the way we see things. Recycling, protecting our waterways, driving hybrid cars -- all the old environmental imperatives -- are great, but it's becoming obvious that they don't address the core problem: we have to change our lifestyles, we have to change our culture, and we have to consume smarter and consume less.

This is the message of this year's Buy Nothing Day, and there are only a few days left to get that message out onto the streets. From the quietly sublime to the crazily anarchic, the ways in which you can mark BND are only limited by the imperative not to spend. Strut your stuff as if the fate of whole planet is resting in your hands, because even if each of us only does one small things to contribute, 96,847 small things sure add up!

At the BND campaign headquarters - that's http://www.adbusters.org/bnd - we've already featured upcoming actions in Japan, the UK, Canada, and the USA, with more to come from all over the world, including Brazil, Colombia, Denmark, Hungary, Spain and Sweden. You can also download posters and other resources, as well as connect with activists in your own little corner of the globe.

Remember: Make a scene. Make people laugh. Make them think. If you have to, make them angry. Just get out there.

Cheers,
THE BUY NOTHING DAY TEAM

I'm planning on a Buy Nothing Christmas too (and that's not as grouchy as it sounds).

Teal bug

Sun, 12 Nov 2006 08:12:26 GMT

Have your fish, and veges, and eat them too

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 07:56:21 GMT

You've heard of aquaculture (or fish farming) and you've heard of hydroponics (growing plants in liquid instead of soil). If you marry the two, you get aquaponics; an intergrated system that reuses water in a continuous cycle to produce an abundance of food. Some claim it is possible with this system to produce food for up to 300 families on an average urban lot.

The idea involves using nutrient rich efffluent from a fish tank to feed hydroponics plants which in turn clean the water to be returned to the tank. There is almost no water loss during the whole cycle making the system virtually drought proof.

I read about this type of system for the first time last week when I found this document on my web travels. Although fascinating, a picture is worth a thousand words, and today I found a short video of an aquaponics system up and running (very succesfully). It is of the Ecocity farm. Could this be the way of the future for our presently fossil fuel dependant food supply? I think it shows very strong promise for the cities of the future.