Everything's Springing

A Spring Update

Some weeks ago, I suddenly woke up to the fact that it's Spring planting time, and I'd already missed my first-planting window by a week. Time to get busy!

Seed benches in their new home in the old Banana circle.
Closer to hand means better managed.

Much sowing of seed in seed-trays ensued. Honesty compels me to confess that I think this is the best Spring germination I've seen – at least in many years! Perhaps being a week late wasn't such a bad thing, after all. Tomatoes and Chiles are mostly up, and some of them – notably Brandywine, Purple Russian and Black Cherry – are almost ready for transplanting into their permanent homes already. Purple Russian and Black Cherry were substantially drought-hardy and very prolific for me on their first trial-run last year, so I'm looking forward to them. Lime Green Salad were doing well until a snail got into the seed-tray, so I've replanted them. I ran some germination tests on my Lettuce seed collection, and, sadly, most varieties are toast. I'm down to about 6 or 8 varieties which I've made sowings of and will grow up for seed.

This tray's for Dan, to wish him strength in his time of trial.
All varieties in the tray were sent to me by Dan and Val.

The major challenge has been getting beds prepared in time. With 3 seasons of drought behind us, the veggie garden has been sorely neglected. Last year, particularly, I found it just too depressing to even venture out into the wasteland that was supposed to be a good part of our food supply. That means that the weeds and Kikuyu had just about taken over completely, and clearing beds has been quite a Herculean task. Then, too, the lack of water until May means that I have almost no compost prepared. Luckily, our good neighbour D'vorah came to the rescue with half a dozen bags of horse-shit (in varying stages of decomposition and quality.) I've reserved the manure for those beds that needed it most – mainly the Tomato, Chile and Cabbage beds. The legumes can get by with just the bit of very old compost I did have - clearly not much in the way of nutrients, but still useful for the organic content.

Despite a few months of good rains, September has been even drier than usual, though it is, by my records, our lowest-rainfall month through the year. The few miserable dribbles of rain were little showers of 1 and 2 millimetres that really do more harm than good. At least we go into the season with full dams, so, even if the usual October/November deluges fail to materialise, we should still be OK for water until about Jan/Feb.

We have several new Tomato varieties to trial this year - varieties that have not survived the trials of years past. Along with them are several new Bean varieties:

Greek "Big Beans" (brought back from Greece by my parents from their trip there last year) I don't know anything about them - not even their growth habit, though I've guessed they're a bush variety. They're a lovely tasting, large, white bean. Excellent eating! (And I eat a hell of a lot of beans!)

Purple Podded Pole Bean (from Baker Creek seeds.) In general I am finding that pole beans are so much more productive per unit-area than bush types, that, if I can spare the poles and the energy to attend to them, I prefer them.

Papa de Rola (also from Baker Creek.) Their picture just looks so awesome I had to try them!

Cannelini Beans acquired from the local Fruit & Veg store, so I'm just trusting and hoping that they haven't been irradiated or anything stupid like that. Still to be planted, since I must get off by duff and clear another couple of beds.

But that doesn't mean I neglect some of my old, bulk-quantity standbys...

A prettier sight you've seldom seen...
Hopi Black beans emerging just 5 days after sowing.

Hopi Black Beans are my main staple bean crop. They are tasty, fast cooking, prolific and trouble-free, producing a good crop even in total drought. I basically stick the seed into the ground – usually the poorest bed I have, perhaps with a dusting of lime and bonemeal, trusting them to just get on with things – and then neglect them completely until they've dried out and are ready to be threshed. And they always do just Get On With It! Even last year, when they received not a single drop of irrigation water – not even after sowing – they produced a reasonable crop. This year I watered them exactly once, a couple of days after sowing, and they were showing their heads after less than a week. The only bare patches in the bed are two spots where the Chickens decided to make dust baths.

Rattlesnake are a fine, dual-purpose, pole bean, given to me by my good friend Franz. They're a brilliantly prolific and flavoursome green-bean, quite stringless when young, and make a fine dried bean if they get too big.

If there's time I'll also have to make space for Dragon's Lingerie - another of my staples, but, to be honest, I'm not sure where I'll find space, since I do like to grow at least a whole bed-full.

I didn't have time to prepare a bed specially for Squashes, but Inspiration struck! I had a good pile of garden-slash that needed burning - dead Banana leaves, rotten support sticks, old bits of wooden ladder long since fallen into ruin, tree prunings from the fruit trees... so I piled it all up amidst the worst of the Kikuyu and set it all alight. A roaring great bonfire, and I was left with a well-ashed, clear patch of Kikuyu-free ground. Dug it up, turned the ash in along with several shovels-full of composted manure, and made a nice Squashie mound. In the middle I've put some Lemon Cucumber together with Sunflowers (labelled "Parrot Food" at the local agri) in the hopes that the Sunflowers will provide good-enough stakes for the Cucumbers to climb. Around the edges of the mound I've put Table Queen (a favourite of mine) squash, a couple of Japanese pumpkin varieties that I found at the local Fruit & Veg store some years back (I'm hoping, possibly in vain, that the seed is still viable, since it's pretty old by now), and Waltham – a Butternut variety. I know it sounds like a lot, but it's quite a big mound, and I'll thin the plants to one or two of each in the unlikely event that too many of them germinate. Though the way this Spring is going so far, they will all come up!

I'm also planning another Squashie/Pumpkin mound. Maybe this afternoon, since there's rain forecast for tonight and tomorrow.

And I haven't even mentioned the Beets, saladings, Snow Peas, Endives, Swiss Chard, Giant Garlic, Golden Beet seed setup, Dill, Fennels,...


It's been a really busy Spring, and I'm really happy to be back in the garden.

What is Self-Sufficiency

Self-sufficiency turns out to be a profoundly political choice.

What is self-sufficiency?

Nailing down a coherent answer to this question is proving much more difficult than I anticipated. In some ways it is easier to describe some things that self-sufficiency is not. It is not, really, truly, the arduous work of keeping yourself fed, watered and shod all by yourself. The term is loaded and deceptive.

A Tale of Hoe

Several and a half years ago, we had an old man come to work for us once a week as a "gardener." In most developing countries this means "day labourer with few particular skills." Pieter is an old local who grew up in the area, and told us many interesting tales of years gone by. He attended school in the building that is now Kate's house; Archie and Veronica's house was a small shop in his youth. Pieter is now in his mid-60's and foreman of an alien-clearance team. Very tough manual work, and I know that I wouldn't stand a chance of keeping up with the sheer physicality of it.

Pieter stands all of about 5ft tall. At one time, when he was still working for us, he took to bringing his own Hoe to work. He explained to me that he was used to working with it, a push-Hoe, rather than the rather heavy draw-Hoe I had supplied. After a while he left it here permanently, and asked me to accept it as a gift. And what a gift it was! Ignoramus that I am, I had never worked with a push-hoe before, but it quickly became one of my Indispensables – a tool I simply won't be without. I took to using it for all sorts of tasks beyond its intended design. It is one of my Vital Implements for drawing drills for direct sowing. An essential necessity when cleaning out the Chicken House, and a staunch ally when ring-barking young Blackwoods. Not to mention its design purpose – chopping weeds off from their roots.

Its antique, hand-crafted charm was a seduction in its own right. The hoe head itself is nothing special – a bit of sharp, steel blade fastened to a tapering hollow receptacle for the shaft. The shaft, however, was something special. A gnarly, uneven piece of some local wood – I suspect Iron Wood – cracked in places along its length, worn smooth by decades of hands and seasoned against all decay by the salty sweat of those hands. I love that Hoe.

The other day the handle broke.

Right down inside the metal bit, where a screw keeps the head from parting ways with the staff. I've been expecting this for some time, really, but still, it was quite a blow when it came!

So, off to the co-op for a new staff. An ordinary rake- or broom-handle won't do. Too skinny to take the tough work of hacking through weed roots. A new Hoe is not to be thought of. The only ones available have a heavy, clunky steel blade welded to a thin, cold steel shaft that sits uncharitable and sullen in the hand. I found a suitable staff, advertised as a "Haying Fork Handle". About 3cm in diameter, and 1.8m long, made of some very dense, heavy wood, probably Kari Gum. Well, OK, then! A bit of grinding work to taper the end of the shaft, and it fitted beautifully into the business-end of my Hoe.

What a Joy!

Little had I suspected how hard Pieter's Hoe was working me! Having been crafted for a man much shorter than I, the handle of the Hoe was correspondingly too short for me, though I hadn't realised this previously.

There's a lesson in here about making sure that tools are properly adjusted and sized for your physique. I know that the Scythe people recommend that you make your own snath (the "handle") for just this reason. So why don't people tell you that this is important for tools like Hoes and Spades, too?

Not only, that, but the new handle is heavy. And this makes hoeing pathways clear of weeds and absolute doddle! You get the thing moving, and it sheers its way through the most tenacious roots and stems without pause or strain. With Pieter's original handle I was pushing and shoving like mad, ending up with blisters on the palm of my pushing-hand from shoving the end of that pole. No more! 

Then too, the generous diameter of the new shaft means that hands never tire from trying to keep a firm grip on a too-thin handle. Just this morning I cleared two pathways in half the time it would previously have taken me to do just one!

Moral of the story? Make sure your tools are properly sized to your own dimensions and physique.

Early Planning for Summer

Time for me to get busy preparing for the coming Summer. Yes, I do know that it's still the middle of Winter.

I have some contract (software) architecture & design work over the next few months which will see me spending quite a bit of time in Cape Town, starting in mid-August, so if I don't get off my duff and start preparing veggie beds now, I'm going to be hopelessly behind schedule by the time October comes around. The only real problem I face is a huge shortage of compost! There simply hasn't been the water for making compost from the stable-sweepings I usually use.

As it is I'm going to run a week or so late with seed-sowing, but it shouldn't do any real harm. As ever we'll be optimistic over rain this coming Summer, but I really must try and concentrate my efforts on fewer varieties of Chillis and Tomatoes, and on increasing the sheer volumes. Still, it's so great to be getting my hands back into the ground! I can't believe how much I've been missing the dirt under my nails.

Need I say that the veggie garden has been badly neglected, so it is a jungle of weeds. I wish the rotovator was working, then I'd make short work of clearing the beds. Perhaps we'll be able to spare enough money for a new rotovator motor if things go well. The old one bent something vital in the engine, and, given that the motor is a foreign make with no local agents, the cost of repair is up there in the same region as an entirely new motor. When we visited the Barley Breeding Institute, I noticed that they use the same make of rotovator as I have (BCS), and asked them where they source parts. The chap there laughed and said, "Oh no! We replace the motors as soon as we get the machine. The motors they come with are useless. Fine machines otherwise, though!" I can't help but agree.

We're also planning on acquiring a couple of Piggies. Brother-in-law has a mild-tempered boar who has been quite (cough) busy... and they receive a piglet from each litter he's responsible for. They've offered to let us have some, and I am very keen. I just don't know that keeping only two sows justifies the keeping of a boar of our own...

Busy times!

New writeups: Bread Self-Sufficiency and Starting a Sourdough Starter

Taking a short break from hacking a software project, I've managed to produce two new articles for the Farm Website:

How to get Self-Sufficient in Bread. Not "How to Bake Bread", but an attempt to tackle all the steps necessary to become truly self-sufficient in providing your own bread - that staple pillar of our diet. Really, without self-sufficiency in bread, one cannot be much self-sufficient at all.

Care and Feeding a Sourdough Starter. How to get started developing your own sourdough starter, and how to keep it.

In truth the latter article is a light edit of a blog-post from October 2006. But having it on the wiki will make it much more searchable and accessible. Sadly this blog software and its crappy templates make it difficult verging on impossible for y'all to retrieve earlier articles; one of the prime reasons for wanting to move onto a better blogging platform. Right now I just don't have enough hours in the day. (In a good way!)

The Bread Self Sufficiency article is a bit ironic, since I'm currently on a weight-loss diet that means I've been eating no bread for the past month...

And here I was planning to focus more on the "Why To..." of self-sufficiency, and ended-up writing a couple of "How To"s... Oh well, more will come in time.

If there's anything in particular that you'd like me to write about, please drop me a line. (Contact details on the farm site.)

Long Blog, No Time

It's true. Really, really true. The Earth does go around the Sun! Night falls noticeably earlier. By 7 of an evening we want lights to read by, and suddenly we know it's Autumn. And suddenly we realise that the Summer past has been a complete disaster for our self-sufficiency efforts.


February was shaping up to be a particularly bad month. What the drought had not yet killed, the Bushbuck came and ate. And what little they left was pulled out by Baboons.

And then the rains came. Not enough to believe that the drought is over yet, but enough to bring this February's rainfall up to the average I've recorded over the past 8-or-so years. The average, mind! And we're ecstatic to have it. The Tomatoes - all 34-odd varieties - are gone. I think I've lost the last of the OSU Blue. Fortunately I still have some seed of all the wonderful new varieties sent by kind people all over the world, but now I'm going to have to wait until next year to discover what they look like, taste like,... their preferences and peculiarities. Gone, too, the 2-dozen or so Chile varieties... A small handful - perhaps 8 plants in total - have survived the drought only to get munched by the Bushbuck. At this stage, if I still had a doggie to feed (I don't eat red meat, myself) I'd be sorely tempted to fill the freezer with Fillet of Bushbuck!


Despite the reasonably good rains, dams are still pretty-much empty. The soil was so dry that every drop was absorbed and very little runoff water made it into the dams. Pictures here are of the bottom dam; on the left is the dam before the rains, on the right is after. As you can see, very little change in the water level. The only change is a mysterious Red Tide floating on the water's surface. No doubt it'll be gone quite quickly. If you click through to the full-size image on the right, you'll see J standing at the water's edge, and Myah the Bumpy Dog swimming; at the point J is standing, she would be up to her armpits in the water if the dam was full!


At least the Forest gets to breathe again! And, as though they've been waiting forever for the rains, mushrooms have burst out of... everywhere! The lawn is a mass of yummy Agaricus campestris. We found a well distributed cache of Boletus aestivalis - a close relative of the well-known Porcini (B. edulis), just smaller and with a thin stem - a short way away in the Pine Plantation Down The Road. So, in some fashion, life goes on. I do think a lot, though, about how our Winter prospects would look if we were truly dependent on only our own produce. It's a frightening picture, because we would certainly be facing severe hunger, if not outright starvation. As it is we're near the end of our money reserves, and having to buy in dreadful bought lettuce... We haven't had to buy veggies for probably 8 or 10 years, now... It's a blow, I can tell you!



But life goes on...

Malting: First Attempt

A few days ago, I decided to try my hand at malting barley. Why not jump in at the deep end? I'll go straight for a Crystal Malt. After all, Pale Malt is easy enough to obtain; it's the specialised malts that are more difficult to get hold of.

I bought a 5kg bag of Barley from the local farm-supply store, and put 1kg into a bucket, covered with water, and soaked overnight.

Mistake 1: I should have pre-screened the grain first. There was a fair quantity of undersized grains, chaff and bits of stalk. I doubt that this grain would have been allowed into the silos at Caledon, but, after all, it is being sold as bird-food, not as malting-quality Barley.

After soaking, I kept the grain moist by wetting it twice a day, just as I would do for any salad-sprouts. After 24 hours most of the grains were putting out little rootlets, and after 36 hours I could see the acrospire growing by dismantling individual grains. On average grains were about 30% converted at around 48 hours -- that is: the acrospire was about 30% of the length of the kernel.

By this morning -- 3½ days -- quite a number of the grains were "overconverted" -- thay had already started sprouting. Ideally I wanted to catch them when they were 75 to 100% converted. Actually, I probably did get close to that for the majority of the grains, and, no doubt, some are still a little under my target.

Learning 2: The vertical turning of the grain is extremely important. Happily I figured this one out quite early in the soaking, so not too much harm done. The grains at the bottom of the bucket stay wetter, but get less air; the grains at the top tend to dry out, but end-up growing more quickly. So the vertical turning is important to try and even-out the germination rate of the grain population. I think that 3 turnings a day would be optimal. More than than would only increase the risk of damaging the tender growing grains.

Now, since I want to make a Crystal Malt, then next step is to wet-roast the grain, and hold it at a saccharification rest (69 or 70°C) for (I guessed!) about 50 minutes. Essentially we want to conduct a normal mashing process -- turning starches into sugars -- but keep the sugars inside each little kernel instead of dissolving the sugars out into wort.I just plonked the malted barley into a big pot and put it on the stove at a very low heat with a bit of hot water in the bottom of the pot to keep things steamy and moist. This gave me a bit of trouble in maintaining the correct temperature. Were I to try malting on a regular basis, this is one of the steps I would bear down on to get better; I think that a steam-driven warming might be more controllable, or perhaps a simple double-boiler setup. 30 Minutes into the mashing/roasting step I could clearly (though not strongly) taste the sweetness developing, so I couldn't have missed the temperature window too badly.

Learning 3: Even using the biggest cooking-pot we have I don't think we could comfortably roast more than about 1½kg of malt at a time. One would certainly need/want to handle larger volumes than that, and even more so if I want to produce a Pale Malt.

The final step -- kilning -- was done in the oven. I spread the malt out on a couple of baking trays so that the grain-bed is not too thick, and stuck them in the oven at about 130°C -- or as close to that as the oven thermostat will manage. The grain was turned and mixed roughly every 30 minutes to try and ensure even toasting. After 30 minutes the grain bed was starting to dry out, and a delicious, honey-ish, caramel aroma started wafting through the house. At 60 minutes, there is still some moisture in the individual grains, but the kernels have developed distinctly tough skins. Rootlets have mostly dried out. 90 minutes: Grains are developing a crunchy outer coat. Some are getting distinctly chewey inside, and the roasting pans are gaining a small amount of caramelly deposit on them. I see some challenging washing-up in my future! I originally -- based on reading and thumbsuck -- planned to kiln the grain for 2 hours, but at that stage the grain still didn't get that really Crystal crunchy texture, so I kilned for an additional ½hour, and then left the trays in the oven while it cooled. Turns out to have (maybe!) been a mistake to add the extra ½hour.

After cooling, the malt is dentalwork endangeringly crunchy. Flavour is really good, tending almost to the Dark Side (burnt sugar flavour), but strongly well of Caramel. Colour: I would guess at a 60 to 80L range somewhere. 1kg of Barley resulted in 690g Crystal Malt, though I certainly lost a bit during a accident whilst rinsing the sprouts, and a bit more to tasting at every stage of the process.

I have subsequently tripped across another homebrewer's account of trying to malt barley at home. Sadly the blog lacks an account of how it turned out. That process mentions a couple of air-drying steps between soaking and mashing, and after mashing, but before roasting. I think this would probably be a good idea, and might help to reduce the kilning time.

Lessons for next time: Better temperature control at the mashing/roasting stage! And perhaps mashing for longer.

All-in-all I would call it a success, but the final test awaits: Trying it out in a brew!

Brewery Part 2

Good progress yesterday and today. Having cleared the shed and built a sturdy bench for the pots to stand on, today was about testing and refining that design. The pots are now insulated with pink-stuff, and I have some old aluminium printers' plates that I'll use to encase them in Full Metal Jackets. (Duct tape doesn't work in the heat! ;-)

I've assembled the main plumbing bits and pump, and added supports to the bench for mounting all that plumbing machinery. I would have like to get stainless steel pipe-connectors, but sourcing it in a small town has proved too challenging. Instead I've gone with galvanised steel. Yes! It'll rust in time, but I should get a good bit of use out of it first, and -- who knows! -- by then the brewery might be able to pay its own way for new parts...

I've also added mounting structs and steel shields for supporting the burner, and more-or-less decided that I need a second burner. As much as I want to keep the whole setup as simple as possible, initially, I can see that shunting the one burner back and forth between the Hot Liquid Tank and the Boiler is

1. way too much hassle, and
2. a recipe for a disaster involving very hot liquids!

So a second burner and the various bits of gas piping, T-pieces, etc. are on the shopping list (subject to price.)

I also built a support frame for the counterflow chiller I built yesterday. Just a simple, lightweight wooden frame so that I can hang the whole affair up and out of the way while it is not in use. The only real cock-up so far is the connector for hooking the chiller onto the boiler: The guy at the hardware shop gave me the wrong size. :-( Not serious -- I'll just exchange it -- but it set me back from testing the boiler/chiller system today or tomorrow, as they won't be open again until Monday.

The major Outstanding Obstacle at this stage: The Crushinator.

I have a couple of designs in mind for a crusher, but none of it is simple, despite the simplicity of the concept. As with anything, the devil is in the details, and the details ramify out fractally.

Update: I forgot to mention -- I'd post some pix, but I seem to have mislaid the connector lead for the camera. Oh the joys of aging memory...

Outcast, Desert Island

Old Rocky Rooster, once Leader of the Pack, King of the Heap is now merely Rooster Emeritus. He's been cast out by one young lad who is now the Royal Highness. Not to mention Twice the Wideness. In plain English, Rocky has been ousted by one of the younger roosters -- one of the Giants that Jayne has bred over the years. (It's reached the point where we think we've bred them just a bit too large, as the Hens definitely take some strain from the Giants, and we'll be backing off to something a bit more reasonable in size. Some of them are larger than shop-bought Turkeys!)

Rocky's has a good innings, though. He's been Leader of the Flock for about 7 years, now. Who knew that chickens could live so long! Now he spends his days all alone, far from the flock, with not a single Hen for companionship or comfort.

I wonder, though, whether he would have lived so long had we not interfered... As the years have gone by we've always culled the younger roosters. The theory goes that, once they're past their fast-growth stage, they're just eating a lot of food, so unless we particularly want to keep them for breeding, or for the sake of Flock Dynamics, into the pot with them! And, because Rocky has been such a good Marshal Of The Hens, we've always hung on to him. Is it our interference that's kept him on for so long? By removing the younger (and larger) roosters, we've been removing his competitors. Perhaps he would have been cast out much earlier in his life, but for our meddling.

And that thought leads me to another: I wonder how much is known about Chicken Flock Dynamics in nature? After all, the chicken factories have no interest in such knowledge, and how many All Natural Chicken Flocks are there left in the world?

Who says you can't teach an Old Chook new tricks, though? At about 5 every afternoon I go to the feed bin to collect chookfood for the evening and morning feeds. Rocky has learned to hang around there at the right time, and persuades me to give him a private feed, away from the beedy eye of the new Flock Leader who would otherwise chase him off.

The real reason I see that he gets a good feeding is that I don't want him totally shrunken and starving when it comes time to put him in the pot; something I must attend to very soon.

Update: Forgot to mention: The "Desert Island" reference is to the ongoing rain shortage. After a decent amount of rain in April, May looks like the drought is not quite ready to let go of us yet... :-(

Update 2:Jayne believes that Rocky is more like 9 or 10 years old, rather than the 7 (or 8) that I thumb-sucked in the post above. Most likely she's right!

Running on Empty

 Not much to write, here. Nothing's going on. Still no water/rain. Forecasts for the next week still say "dry".

I should be planting Winter crops -- grains, (hi Patrick! ;-) Brassicas, Chickpeas (hi Telsing! ;-) and Broad Beans, Buckwheat to crowd out some Kikuyu grass, Onions and Leeks... but there's no point. Not until we start getting something resembling regular rain again.

It's got so bad that I went and bought a watering can for watering the seed trays. I keep planting trays of seedlings, and then ditching them when they get past their Plant By Dates, in the hope that rain will come again in time for them. Up to now I;ve been watering seed-trays from the Dam, but there is now so little water left that evaporation might yet kill of the remaining tadpoles! If I try to pump water from it, all I get is mud. So, for now, seed-tray water has to come  from the house drinking-water tanks. It's little enough that we can manage it. Our roof is super-efficient at catching rainwater (and even heavy dews make their contribution to the house-water supply) so we have no problem for drinking/washing water, and can easily last out another 6 months or so without a drop of rain. But the soil is like iron: dry, dusty, hard as concrete. Mature trees wilting. I'm afraid to go into the forest for fear of what I might encounter.

If we don't get rain within then next 2 or 3 weeks we'll have no Winter crops to harvest next Spring. Difficult to be even slightly self-sufficient, then...

The spiritual and emotional impacts are the hard ones to write about. I rarely venture into the veggie garden any more, except to fetch herbs for my First Thing In The Morning Herb Tea each day, and to water the futile, doomed seed-trays. And to bucket washing-machine water to the handful of remaining Tomatoes and Chillis. The spirit -- the enthusiasm -- for tending the plants is suppressed by the knowledge that all that effort would be futile. So I focus on some software projects instead.

Local farmers have organised a couple of "Prayer Meeting for Rain" events. I guess that, in the long run, they're assured of success. Sooner or later the rain has to return, and then their efforts will be rewarded. Of course the rain will return anyway... ;-)

More Drought

Despite a brief respite in February, the drought continues in full force. Total rainfall for Feb was 63.5mm -- just about bang on average for February (as if the weather takes any notice of our arbitrary calendrical fantasies!) But this doesn't tell the full story...

Most of that most-welcome rain fell in a single week-long wet, with a few additional useless dots of rain spread through the remainder of the month; rainfalls of 2, 3 and 4mm, which simply cause more harm than good.

None of the rain was sufficient to begin recharging the dams or the soil in any meaningful way, but it does mean that the house-water tanks got topped-up, so we're quite relaxed about our domestic water. Even so, we're very conservative in our water use... baths are ankle-deep, and we all bath in the same water, and then use that water to fill the toilet. (I keep flirting with the idea of a composting toilet setup a la the Humanure Book, but haven't quite got there yet.)

To compound the problems, we're in the middle of the hottest days we've experienced in a very long time: Temperatures up into the high 30's, and even into the 40's in some places. (That's Celsius degrees for the unmetricated.) The Brandywines don't like it and are dying. Some Rattlesnake Bean plants simply burned to a crisp the other day, as if they'd been blasted by a blowtorch.

It is interesting to see, though, which plants show greater drought-resistance. All of the Tomato varieties we're growing have cracking fruits due the irregular and inadequate water supply, and in the excessive heat I'm losing a wholte lot of Tomato fruits to sun-scald. And there are not a whole lot to begine with, since they were so short of water during their flowering that many of the flowers aborted. I just noticed this morning, as I was watering them by hand, that the Tomato varieties that seem to be fairing best are the dark ones -- Russian Purple, Black Cherry, and Cherokee Purple. Very interesting! It would seem that the genes that impart the dark colour may also be tangled-up in imparting some degree of water-stress resistance. More thinking on this needed...

Ruminating on this for a bit led me to the stray thought: I wonder if I could breed/select/test for some varieties that would perform better for me into Winter, since we don't have to worry about frost in Winter, but we do have to worry about the very fierce UV conditions we experience in mid- to late-Summer (i.e. Right Now.)

For example, I seldom get a really good performance from Tigerella (which I love for their prettiness and flavour.) If it comes to harvest early -- say late-Jan or Feb -- it tends to get attacked by blight, since that is usually a very humid and hot time of year. March harvest sees the fruit blasted by the Sun, as the foliage is not very lush and shade-making. Perhaps if I could get it fruiting in May or June I might get luckier. Maybe it's not too late to give it a try this year, already.

Assuming the water situation improves and I can keep enough water to get seedlings established!

'Tis the Season to be Hoeing

Actually everything is pretty-much all hoed at the moment. I confess that I've seldom had the veggie garden so well organised at this point in the year. I even have the "leisure" to break new ground!

It's almost time for the Hopi Black beans to get harvested. They're looking pretty good, despite not having had water in over 6 weeks, now. I always treat drying-beans as a dryland crop, and we've not had decent rain since mid-November. Curses! The total rainfall for December was a mere 25mm (1 inch) and this month doesn't look like being much better... no reasonable probability of rain in the next two weeks. The dam is looking pretty empty right now, and I don't suppose I have enough water left for more than another 10 days or so, and, at that, I'm reserving the water for the highest-value crops -- the Tomatoes, Chillis and Squashes. After that I'll have to look into hiring a pump to move water from the Bottom Dam up to the Garden Dam. And buy 150m of pipe... :-(
The Squashes -- baby marrows and baby Yellow Crooknecks -- are producing nicely, as are Kohlrabi and the first of the Tomatillo. We're eager for the first Tomatoes, though.

The season's Mystery Tomato (in the 2nd pic down)... who knows? I'm very happy, though, since I've been longing for a larger-than-cherry-sized salad tomato, and this looks like fitting the bill nicely. The bush pictured here is a volunteer in amongst the beans, so my best guess is either Black Cherry (though I got none of them last year) or some random cross between something like Gold Nugget and maybe Tigerella -- based in the stripes. Or Red Cherry and Tigerella. Trouble is, there's another bush not far away, so that argues against a cross. Time may tell...

At least the Brandywines are looking good (pic 3.) and flowering nicely, if a little later than usual.

At the opposite end of the garden, we have OSU Blue Tomatoes (pic 4) -- seed kindly sent by a fellow denizen of Alan Bishop's Homegrown Goodness board. The seed arrived just yesterday, so I've banged a few seeds (3 to be exact) directly into the ground. It might be too late in the season for any good to come of it, but... nothing ventured, nothing gained!

The season has been so strange to date that there's no predicting what may happen with the weather, come May. November was quite "normal" with good rains, as should be! December has been very weird. Tiny, useless driblets of rain causing more harm than good, pretty high humidity (which usually doesn't hit us until at least mid-Jan) and lots of cloudy, overcast days. The result is that everything is growing quite slowly -- especially the Chillis. Thankfully no signs of Blight (yet!) Everything gets a good watering twice a week. As long as the water holds out.

At least the dry conditions mean that the lawn has stopped growing. No mowing! Yay!

Thinking Ahead: Seed Wanted!

So here it is, not yet full-Summer, and I'm thinking ahead to my Winter garden. The Tomatoes are still (mostly) under 30cm tall. The Chillis -- the few, pathetic survivors of the season's Great Chilli Holocaust -- barely past the seedling stage.

This year -- in contrast to my usual habit -- I decided to Buy In seedling mix. Usually I just use my own compost, and it works reasonably well, up to a point. My compost is made from stable-muck where they use wood-shavings for the bedding instead of straw. It's great for compost, and means that I get lots of odd fungi in the garden, but its a little heavy for seed-mix. The bottom parts of the seed-trays tends to stay waterlogged, and the roots of all the tiny plants don't get enough Oxygen. So the seeds germinate well, grow fantastically to a point... and then come to a complete halt! Hence my (reluctant) decision to buy in a "professional" seed mix.

Turned out to be a disaster. The stuff is like cement. Maybe harder. The seedlings get even less Oxygen to their roots, if that's possible. As a result I'm having a terrible Chilli year. My third Disastrous Chilli Year in a row! I've lost a number of Chilli varieties that I've been saving seed from for years, including Serrano, Jalapeno (can you fucking believe it?) Bolivian Rainbow, and New Mex #6-4. Only two plants of Cherry Pepper -- I'm guarding them like a Hawk.

So: I'm going to have to buy in a whole lot of Chilli seed for next year to rebuild my seed-stocks. Here's a list of what I'm looking for -- if you have any of these and are open to swaps (or whatever -- I'm happy to pay a reasonably price...) please drop me a line:

• Pasilla
• Rocotto (sp?)
• Jalapeno (none of that Jalapeno-M stuff, thanks -- if it's not hot, what's the point?)
• Serrano
• Poblano
• Nu-Mex #6-4
• Mira del Sol
• Cherry Peppers
• Aji

That's just the absolutely essential ones. Offers of any others will be most welcome!

In exchange I can (probably -- depending on how the season progresses) offer Bishop's Hat (we tend to call it Red Hat around here, being a bunch of open-source software geeks) plus whatever's on my seed list (not currently up-to-date; I promise I'll fix it in a day or three!)

The thing with Chillis is that I can mostly overwinter them quite successfully. We don't get any frost. So my idea is to plant NOW with the idea that I'll only harvest seed somewhere around Jan 2010. (How's that for Long Range Planning?)

And. Whilst I'm Thinking Ahead, I began to contemplate the Winter To Come. See, with such a mild climate, we have (at least) two growing seasons. And, having learned that Chickpeas ("Garbanzo Beans" to some...) are essentially a cool-season crop, I can tell that they'll never do well through a Summer here! So, I'm looking for 2 or 3 varieties of Chickpeas to plant this comning Winter. While I'm at it, I am keenly interested in increasing the number of Bean varieties we grow. At the ver minimum, I want a good Pinto bean, and a variety of large-white bean. (Locally we know them as "Butter Beans". But do you think you can find anyin the seed racks? Or even in the supermarkets as dried beans?? No!They're all in cans!!)

More Beans Welcomed! Currently we are very successful and happy with Dragon's Lingerie and Hopi Black for dried beans, but I'd very much like to expand the range a bit!

If you have seed to swap/sell/give away along these lines, please contact me!

A Bee, See?

Third time's the charm. (We hope, after the last swarm of Bees buggered offabsconded in the cold weather whilst I was away in Cape Town.)

Last Thursday evening our neighbour Tziporah (not her real name -- but my private nickname for her) called us up. "There's a swarm of Bees hanging under the eaves outside my bedroom. Do you want to come and get them?"

Being a total n00b at this bee business, I was not at all sure how I was going to "get them". I just took a catch-box -- a half-sized hive that takes only five frames -- and placed it a couple of metres away from the swarm at about chest-height. And hoped for the best. Tziporah and I called up a local beekeeper friend who advised us that "the best swarms are those that just move into the box by themselves. Failing that you can try sweeping them into the box with a soft brush."

The "normal" technique when a swarm lands in a tree is to shake the branch suddenly, and the swarm usually drops off -- plop -- into a strategically-placed box. Or you can cut the branch off. Having imbibed of a wee Golden Beverage prior to Tziporah's call, I was a bit apprehensive... So we just left the nucleus-hive conveniently located and hoped for the best.

Day 2, Friday: The weather turned out miserable. Pissing with rain (welcome), Windy (not) and Cold (ugh! It's supposed to be  Spring!) Not a good day for Bees to move about, nor a good day to try sweeping them about. We're informed (with the emotional emphasis of One Who Has Been There) that trying to brush them into a box rainy weather is definitely A Bad Idea. Their wings get wet, and you just end-up killing a whole lot. And this is not a very large swarm to start with!

So now what? We don't want them to get too well oriented to where they are; our houses are about 500 metres apart -- not really far enough for a serious Bee move. If you're moving bees (according to the Slightly Odd Belgian gent in Cape Town who advised me) you should either move them quite slowly -- about a metre a day -- or more than 2 km all at once. Less than 2km and they're likely to make their way back to their previous home. What to do, what to do?  I opted to leave them be for the day.

Day 3, Saturday: A morning call from T... "They've moved in." Hooray!

We left them alone for the day to settle into their new house. Presumably they get the furniture arranges just where they want it, make sure that no Peas have been hidden under Her Highness's Bed,... whatever it is that Bees do when moving house. At dusk I popped over with Ye Rusty Bucket1, taped a cover over the hive entrance, looped a bungge-cord around the box and lid, and drove the hive home where we had prepared an old drum as a hive stand. You must, please, remember that we're in the Land of the Honey Badger, here, and hives cannot be left near the ground lest they get destroyed in short order. The drum is filled with water so that it can't (we hope) be pushed over, either.

Happily we had very fine Spring weather on Sunday, allowing the swarm to really settle in, forage for nectar, and really settle in and get their bearings. Certainly I noticed a lot of Bees in the veggie garden, especially on the Borage and Lavender.

Today (Monday) the Bees are still around, though the weather has turned cooler (and the forecast for the remainder of the week looks like More Of The Same.) But the Bees seem to be quite happy. Soooooo.... hold thumbs that they stick around this time!

Feeding the Dinosaurs

Hedgewizard speaks to a very important problem in "The Second Famine Year" -- the price of animal feed, and Chicken feed in particular.

Locally prices have gone up by over 50% in the past 6 or 8 months, so I've been focussing on growing lots more greens specifically for the chickens. They love Endive, which is great, since it is so quick and easy to grow, and equally easy to produce masses of seed. The Ladies also get all the older lettuces as they come out of the ground, and I've just sowed a row of grain-sorghum to give that a try as another feed source.

Another plan I must soon get around to implementing1 is to build a Kale-Ark in the chicken-run. The idea is to plant a bed of Kale (and the Chooks love all of the Cabbage tribe!) and protect it with a wire-mesh tent. Then, as the plants grown bigger, the Chooks will be able to peck at the leaves that poke through the mesh without destroying the plants. At least that's the Theory2...

At least Hedgewizard has the option of buying organic feed!  No such luck around here, so our chooks are fed on non-organic crushed maize for their staple diet.  I've checked and the supplier assures me that it is GM-free, thankfully, since so many SA farmers have swallowed the GM hype, as have the geniuses in the Dept. of Agriculture. :-(

Interestingly, there seem to be a strong correlation between the amount of greens they get and the number of eggs we get, so the sooner we can ween ourselves off bought-in Chicken food, the better!

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[1] As soon as I finish painting the house, digging new beds, fixing the chainsaw, making more compost, port the blog to a new platform, cut firewood for Summer, deconstruct the broken shade-house, construct a greenhouse in its place,...


[2] "In theory, theory and practise are the same, but in practise they never are."

Sproing

Spring seems to be springing up on us again. Comfrey is making new leaves, Apple trees are blossoming, and various birds are growing their mating plumage.

Time to get a-planting! Sowed trays of Tomatoes -- 14 varieties, despite my solemn promise to myself to focus on fewer varieties this year -- and Chillis -- 10 varieties so far, but I still have to sow the "large quantities wanted" varieties: Jalapeño, Serrano, Cherry and Habanero.

Also managed to get some Squashes into the ground, in a bed close-by where I can cage and guard them closely against the dread Pumpkin Flies -- If I can just get 2-dozen undamaged squashies off that lot we'll be set for a year's supply. Black Futsu and some anonymous Japanese-origin winter squash already planted; must still get come Butternuts and Gems (Acorn Squash) into the ground. According to local weatherlore, I'm 10 days late with Squash sowing! Summer Squashes will come and go as space and fancy permits. Cucumbers will have to share space with the Grapevines and Granadillas -- I don't have the time to give them their own dedicated space.

I'm also way behind on compost making, so its going to be a chaotic and challenging season this year. Mostly due to my being chained to a desk this year. Though its been good for the bank-balance, I'm very glad relieved beyond belief that my contract comes to an end on Monday and I can gleefully fire the bunch of halfwits I've been working for, and get back some balance and garden time.

Sorted out the Lettuce seed stock, so now I have a clear idea of which Lettuce varieties need propagating-up to get the volumes healthy. It's pretty challenging keeping 16 varieties of Lettuce all going at once.

Sadly the Mangels I was growing for seed (they're biennial, so need two years to produce seed) were taken out by Rats during the Winter. Fortunately I still have enough seed to start again.

Mustn't forget to sow Basil, Lemon Basil, Parsley, Coriander, Bok Choi, Tatsoi (sp?), sundry Cabbage Tribe, get some Sweet Potato runners,... oh! and beans for drying are wanted in Significant Measure this year. It is not very difficult to get self-sufficient in Beans for a year, even though I like Beans (A Lot!) as they're such a trouble-free crop. Not to mention that, last time I checked, prices for dried Beans and Lentils were over 150% higher (globally!) than last year. Then, too, I'm keen to try my hand at growing Sorghum for feeding to the chooks.

Lots of work ahead to get beds prepared... that old Spring Panic again!

The Duty

The Chicken population has got out of hand. Nine Eight Seven roosters and nine hens. No wonder the poor Ladies have taken to hiding inside the Chook House all day!

Terry Pratchett got it all wrong. The Death of Rats should be personifiedperratified not as a Rat, but as a Cat. (Or small, frantically yapping Dog.) I, in turn, should be dressed up as the Death of Chickens. Or a Death of Chickens, anyway, if Death is going to franchise out his operation, as seems increasingly popular. Clearly not a very active or diligent Death of Chickens, otherwise we would not have this Chicken Overpopulation Problem.

Every time I go out to give the Chooks their evening feed, I curse myself for not having got around to offing a few of the roosters. Most of the younger roosters have grown as big as they're ever going to get, and have reached that stage where they'll bonk anything and everything in sight. About 18 or 20, in other words. Finally I got determined and caught three of them last night. Evenings are really the only time we stand a chance of catching them -- once they're roosting for the night, safe (or so they think) in the Chook House¹.

I thought I had the "right" three... A number of the younger roosters Must Go, along with the Rocky Rooster -- the Grandfather of the flock. He must be about 6 or 7 years old by now, and has been a fantastice Head Honcho, but he's definitely showing his age lately, and we have another youngster who is an exact clone and who we'll keep as his replacement. Needless to say the moon was not up yet when I went out to catch them, so I ended up catching the youngster instead of the Old Fart. So: 2 out of a desired 3 is not too bad.

Started getting the Terrible Two out this morning for Choppie Choppie... the smaller of them put up such a squawkin' and a flappin' and a kickin' and scratchin' that he managed to escape me. Bugger!

Oh well. The best laid plans... At least there's a (very large!) chicken in the freezer right now. With just J & I at home it should make at least three meals. We'll try again tonight.

[1] For readers of Afrikaans, it's really called Die Hoendervleis Paleis. But how the hell do I translate that to English and still make it rhyme?

Bee Gone

Our Bee adventure didn't last long. The very next day the swarm was off.

We saw the swarm milling about, on the verge of absconding, and managed to bring them down again by spraying water into the air with a hose. This time they settled on a downright upright branch in the Very Thorny Lemon Tree, so it wasn't easy to shake them off into a box this time. After clearing away some interfering branches, and with the help of a soft brush, We managed to get them back into the nuc-hive -- a small hive that only carries five frames.

Clearly something was wrong, because the next day they escaped yet again, this time for good.

On my trip to Cape Town last week I made time to stop in at the Honey Bee Foundation -- a slightly nutty Belgian gentleman who has made it his mission to teach The Art to new Beekeepers, and incidentally runs a Bee Supply shop. He was most helpful!

Evidently my mistake was in using all fully-waxed frames in the nuc-box. I should have left a couple of empty frames in the middle to give the Bees space to cluster and keep warm. Actually the middle frames should not be totally empty, but need a small strip of wax along the top of the frame to guide the Bees into building mostly worker-bee cells and not too many drone cells.

In retrospect I also strongly suspect that the swarm was too small -- it really was a tiny swarm. Reading Adrian's Bee catching adventure has made me realise just how small our swarm was!

Having now been bitten (stung?) by the bug, I now very badly want to get a couple of swarms! So: catch-boxes are out, well beyond reach of the Honey Badgers, correctly framed, cleaned of all wax-moth, ants, spiders and dead leaves, sterilised with a blast from the trusty blowtorch.

Everything I Learned About Tethering Goats I Got From A Blog Comment

Stuart and Gabrielle write a lovely post on their blog about their beginning adventures with goats.  I was particularly interested as we've also been thinking about acquiring a couple of goats, and I know too little about them.  I left a small comment on their blog, asking them to follow-up, and mentioning some of my own musings on Matters Goaty.

With no warning, all of my questions were answered¹ in depth, breadth and heighth, to a degree unexpected on a blog's comments, by Val Grainger (who has immediately been added to my reading-list!)  Stuff worthy of an entire article in its own right.

If there's anything you want to know about keeping goats on a tether, go and read it there -- there's no point in me regurgitating it here; I could only detract from Val's exposition.

But, to (briefly) address some of the gotchas mention by Val, in thinking about tethering, I have only ever considered a running tether to make sure that the animal have a sufficiently large area to roam.  The other possible solution for confining them is an electric fence --  a solution that has worked well for me with horses and cows.  For goats, though, I will have to get better poles for supporting the electric fence...
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[1] Well... all my questions about Goat Tethering, anyway.

Animal Farm

Small apology to the shade of George Orwell

Stonehead hits the nail on the head with his characteristic pragmatism, asking "Should you keep chickens?" and trying to inject a note of realism into what look set to become a new fashion wave in the UK.

We've seen too many people, over the years, acquiring various animals simply as Wandering Lawn Ornaments.  Sometimes in appalling ignorance of the animals' needs, and with predictably disastrous consequences.

One neighbour acquired a small calf:  The idea of a cow wandering about the place, peacefully mowing the lawn, painted a pastoral watercolour in his city-habituated imagination... The calf was very young, and still needed milk supplements.  A few days later it was dead from starvation.

Another neighbour has a partner who "loves animals" and can't help herself acquiring ever more.  Fortunately she is quite clued-up on their care and keeping, but cannot bring herself to control the inevitable population-bomb, nor will she allow anyone else to do it for her, being too distressed by the thoughts of somebody eating her beloved animals.  So they have several-dozen Guinea Fowl (which happily escape into the wild when their numbers become too great,) 3 or 4 horses, unknown numbers of ducks, geese and chickens, two goats, a couple of dogs, and one vastly-overweight Pig.  All simply as "pets".  The feed bill each month is staggering.  And he is kept pretty busy building and maintaining animal housing and enclosures.  Oh! In fairness, they do milk the goats and eat some eggs.

All this is apropos, as I am thinking of acquiring some more animals to help around here.

I have in mind a couple of goats to help manage the rank, weedy grass-bramble-and-alien-tree infestations in various parts of the farm, to be followed by a couple of pigs to clean the soil of roots and weed tubers as a prelude to a planting of grains or beans, then following-up with fodder crops again to close the circle and bring the animals round again for the next cycle.  Fortunately a neighbourhood friend (as opposed to a mere "neighbour") has great experience with goats, and has been considering getting a small herd for herself again, so we'll probably try and find some way to work together on that, pooling our knowledge, resources and energy.  Another local farmer keeps a herd of pigs as part of his (commercial) farming, so I have a local source of expertise (and animals.)  I freely confess my ignorance of both goats' and pigs' habits and needs, but will make sure I cure that deficiency before taking any concrete steps in this.

Then, too, I'm thinking about adding a couple of sheep to keep the grass around the houses under control...

One of the catches in this Grand Scheme is that we are "mostly-vegetarians".  We still eat some poultry and seafood, but not Pork/Beef/Mutton -- mainly because we feel physically better than if we ate as much meat as most people.  So what to do with a healthy, growing population of various animals?  I could just sell them on to a local butcher, but frankly I don't trust the man's methods, animal-handling practices nor hygiene.  This is probably the single biggest problem for me to solve before acquiring more animals.  I will not abdicate the responsibility for closing the circle.

A local friend, Don, made the comment (having kept goats himself) that animals tie you down a lot.  You can't just pack up, lock the door and go on holiday -- or even out for an evening -- without making provision for the animals to be fed, watered, shut-in at night, checked for accidents,... But then that's true already with our Chickens and Dogs.  Not to mention the delights of cleaning the Chook House in the pissing rain.

I do have one nit to pick with Stoney's post, though: "Chickens are not dumb"?  What other animal, upon laying an egg, spends the next half-hour announcing the availability of fresh food to every predator in the neighbourhood?  I'm often led to wonder how the hell the species has survived this long!