One of the key principles of both organic and permaculture farming is to minimise external inputs to your farming system. Given how important soil is to farming and gardening, growing your own soil is a great strategy. Autumn is an ideal time to get some compost put away for the coming Spring. Whether it’s to top up the garden, or to fill up new garden beds, there’s no such thing as having too much compost under construction. At its simplest, a compost pile uses the same processes as nature to break down organic matter; Bacteria and small critters digest the organic matter, leaving behind rich soil.
Almost any organic matter can be composted, but a few ingredients make the whole process of creating soil that much faster. You can get also get technical with the ratio of carbon to nitrogen in your compost, but experience (and your nose) are really all you need to perfect your technique.
Carbon sources are things like leaves, dried grass or hay, wood chips, or even paper. Nitrogen tends to come from fresh green matter like plants, or animal manures. My favourite ingredients (and what we have to hand) are horse manure from the paddock or stable, old hay, straw from the chicken house, and soil from the last batch of compost as a starter.
We spread the ingredients in fine layers, just like making a lasagne. In the early stages, most of the bacterial activity will happen at the edges of the layers, where the different ingredients meet, so lots of thin layers will compost quicker than a few thick ones. The layers of previous compost act as a starter – providing lots of bacteria to kick-start the composting process.
Here are our latest farm helpers Tanya and Andy, layering up the lasagne. It’s a pleasant morning’s work, building the pile. The individual ingredients don’t smell, and as long as there’s plenty of air getting to the pile, it won’t either.
You can use almost any system to contain the compost. We use some spare boards and some old bits of warratah to retain them. The pile can be open to the weather, but if you’re expecting torrential rain it might pay to cover it with some old carpet. You want the pile moist to do its job, but not soaked.
The chickens quite like helping and will gladly spread the new compost everywhere in search of tasty bugs. I don’t want to deprive them, but that’s why we use the boards – to keep everything in place long enough for it to compost.
After a few days, the pile will start to heat up. That’s a good sign that the compost heap is getting into action. You should be able to put your hand right into the centre without it getting burned (seriously, it can get that hot). If the pile is too hot you’ve probably got too much nitrogenous matter in there, so ease back on the animal manure next time, or add more carbon to the mix. Ideally the pile will get up to 65 degrees C to kill any pathogens or weed seeds in the mix.
In about a month we’ll turn the compost to help aerate it and by Spring there should be a few cubic metres of rich, dark soil to fill up new garden beds or spread on the pasture – all home grown.
We recently bought a bucket of mushroom starter from local outfit, Parkvale mushrooms. It’s currently living in our firewood box outside the back door in the relative cool and dark. We’ve harvested over a kilo of mushrooms from it so far, and more keep coming up. At the current price of mushrooms it’s already paid for itself! Aside from the economy, the taste of just-picked mushrooms in our salads and on pizzas can’t be beaten. They’re easy to look after, don’t take up much space, and start producing immediately – ideal for the kitchen gardener.
I was just up at the hay paddock and was struck by the loud buzzing coming from all around me. We’ve had a bumper season for clover this year and now it’s all coming into flower, the bees are making the most of it. Having bees definitely helps the clover grow. White clover propagates by seed or creeping stolons, so even if the flowers don’t get pollinated, it can still spread (although slowly). When you pollinate flowers and they drop viable seed, you get so much more growing, assuming the weather is clover-friendly.
More clover means more clover flowers, which makes the bees very happy – they help each other.
Back at the hives, on a hot, humid and very still day, the bees are going nuts. Here’s the traffic jam outside the larger of the two hives.
This is the third in what has turned into a three-part series on organic pest control (it’s just that time of year). The previous two posts were on organic wood lice control and white butterfly decoys.
Like most rural dwellers, we accept flies as part of life. Some years are worse than others but wet summers (like this one so far) seem to be very favourable to fly breeding.
We’ve had a few big fly traps over the years like the plastic lids you put on buckets and fill with bait. They work well, but can be a bit big and smelly to use too close to the house. I wanted to design a trap that was smaller, could be deployed nearer the house in larger numbers, and that used recycled materials if possible. It needed to be 3D printable and fit within the constraints of the build platform – 10x10x10cm.
After some messing about with various ideas, The bean can fly trap was born. In a nutshell, flies smell whatever bait and water you put in the can (a small piece of liver, or any offal works well), go in for a closer look, then find themselves trapped. They drown in the can and they in turn, become bait for more flies. The principle of fly behaviour the traps exploit is their drive to fly upwards to fresh air and light; they’ll just keep bumping up against the lid of the trap until they are exhausted and fall in the water.
The two parts of the trap are the lid that allows the flies to enter but not get out again, and a base that can be attached to the top of a fence post. Both parts friction-fit to the can. Most tin cans like this are the same dimensions the world over so it should work with almost any can.
Here are a few prototype traps in testing on top of one of our big traps. I played with various shapes and sizes of entry tunnels, and different vent slot sizes. Getting the flies into a trap was fairly easy if the bait was smelly enough. The harder part was keeping them in there. While we use wet bait to catch and kill the flies, I’ve heard from another user that they use dry bait to catch live flies to give to their pet frog. Either way, I’m happy with less flies in the world.
The plan now is to deploy these traps on fence posts all around the house to reduce the fly population through the Summer.
The previous post about organic woodlice control touched on a couple of elements of pest control: trapping and physical separation of pest and plant. Another strategy that can work quite well is using environmental elements to confuse or deter pests. You can apply the principle to planting technique, by mixing up your plants to confuse pests (they don’t have to be too smart to find an acre of one crop). In this case I wanted to deter white butterflies from laying their eggs on our brassicas.
It turns out, white butterflies are quite territorial (or at least smart enough to know when to cut their losses). If a white butterfly sees other butterflies hovering around a target plant, they will move on to somewhere else to lay their eggs. You can use this behaviour to make decoy butterflies repellent to the real ones. People have used egg shells, white pebbles and even bread tags as decoys with mixed success.
My friend Vik had already created a model of a white butterfly and put it up on Thingiverse. All I had to do was download it and print one out.
While it was still hot from the printer I bent the wings up at a more realistic angle. A spare bit of filament melted and stuck to the bottom made a handy stalk to poke into the garden bed.
I printed a bunch (flock?) of butterflies and gave them some anatomical detail with a vivid marker before deploying them to the garden.
The stalks are quite flexible so the butterflies bob about in the wind. They look pretty realistic to me, but more importantly I’ve seen white butterflies hovering around, then leaving without touching down, all this week. Time will tell if any have the courage to sneak in to lay eggs.
If you don’t have a 3D printer, you could probably cut the same shape out of white plastic containers for much the same effect.
For the most part, our small greenhouse has done a great job of keeping bugs off the veges (at least, the flying ones). Of all the plants you’d think bugs wouldn’t eat, chili peppers must be top of the list. Given we’ve just planted some Bhut Jolokia chili peppers, otherwise known as Ghost Chilis (the world’s hottest), we thought they would be pretty safe from predation.
The woodlice (or slaters as we call them in NZ) living in the greenhouse had other ideas. They had nibbled the leaves of the seedlings on the first night after we planted them. Organic growing is often just as easy as conventional with planning and time to prepare for setbacks, but in this case we didn’t have much time before the chili seedlings would be too far gone to save. To the internet for inspiration!
Plan A: Physical barrier
You can physically stop the woodlice getting to your plants by using almost anything as a collar around them. A few plastic bottles and jars cut up worked nicely. I removed the top layer of mulch and compost from around the plants first to remove most or all of the woodlice first (no point in trapping them in there with their dinner).
This has worked pretty well; after a few days, no new woodlice have gotten to the plants, and by the time they outgrow the collars (they can be cut off later), the leaves and stems should be tough enough that the woodlice no longer try to eat them. But we still wanted to reduce the numbers of woodlice in the greenhouse, to protect other plants. So on to;
Plan B: Traps
The most effective of the traps we tried was the half-citrus trap. It’s really simple, just put a half orange (or grapefruit in this case) face down on the soil. You can juice it first if you don’t want to waste it.
The next day, turn it over and scoop up all the little buggers. I call the chickens over (yes they know to come for food) and throw the handful of woodlice on the ground for them. I’d been getting a couple of hundred woodlice a day from two citrus traps this week, but the numbers are starting to drop off now – a good sign.
The other trap we tried was a plant pot filled with damp newspaper. The woodlice will nest in it overnight, but this didn’t work quite as well as the citrus trap, possibly because the grapefruit skin was too hard to resist. If you’re squeamish about touching the woodlice, this trap is good as you can just take out the paper in the morning and throw it away.
Plan C: Diatomaceous Earth
We didn’t go this far, but I’d read that diatomaceous earth is a good mechanical insecticide. From the WikiPedia article:
Diatomaceous earth consists of fossilized remains of diatoms, a type of hard-shelled algae. Diatomite is used as an insecticide, due to its physico-sorptive properties. The fine powder absorbs lipids from the waxy outer layer of insects’ exoskeletons, causing them to dehydrate. Arthropods die as a result of the water pressure deficiency, based on Fick’s law of diffusion. This also works against gastropods and is commonly employed in gardening to defeat slugs.
Presumably you could spread it around your plants to be picked up by the woodlice.
No doubt there are lots of other treatments, schemes and devices to thwart woodlice, but we seem to have a handle on the problem now with a few simple interventions.
Filed under: Garden
A few years back the plastic greenhouse got a mighty rip after I managed to drive the quad bike into it. We’ve put up with it for a while, but the Wairarapa winds kept threatening to make it much worse if we didn’t fix it.
I talked to the manufacturers and they sent me some lovely repair tape that lasted, on average, about three weeks each time we taped it up – so not a long term solution. Sewing a patch over the rip was going to be too difficult so I tried attaching a zip to the sides of the rip and zipping the panels back together.
Here’s the finished repair. It was something of a team effort. Our friends Daniel and Kelly provided moral, technical and sewing support to start, then helpers Raeph and Lisa finished the work today (well, mostly Lisa).
It looks sturdy and it should last longer than the previous tape repairs.
Our poor wee broccoli in the kitchen garden braved the snow, but still tasted fine after it had thawed out.
The grass around the big garden is getting a bit out of hand (you’d think it was Spring) so Bree and Cammi are getting a few hours of lawnmower duty each day. They don’t seem to be complaining and their “emissions” are good for the grass.
The first test crops in the greenhouse are doing well, possibly too well – we’re eating lettuce every day to keep up with production (not that it’s a bad thing). The spinach and broccoli are doing great too, and we’ve just planted out a bunch of tomato, eggplant and chilli plants.
In the middle row are some blueberry plants and a tray of rosemary cuttings from the last pruning.
Lifeboat Farm 