Hold your breath

This week we welcome Jacopo to our team. He’s a first time WWOOFer from Italy, which makes me feel like something of an old hand. I do have three whole weeks of farm work under my belt after all. My grand discovery this week is that herbicide-free organic farming means there’s a lot of weeding to be done. A lot. The garlic beds have been looking pretty crowded, so Jacopo and I have been hard at work pulling up all of that unwelcome greenery to give our garlic crops a little breathing space. Several hours later and, while my hands feel like they’ve seen a lifetime’s worth of weed-pulling, the garlic’s looking happy, healthy and all set to be dug up by your good selves at the Imago Forest field day at the end of November.

Bag of Bones

By Robin:
It’s hard work this farming business. I’ve been here for two weeks and every muscle, bone and sinew in my body aches, a lot. But enough of my whingeing, the good news is that all the hard work we’ve been putting in preparing those beds with pitchfork, mattock, rake and trowel is already starting to bear fruit (well, vegetable to be precise). The Bok Choy’s already sprouting, the Silverbeet’s thriving, and it won’t be long before the rest of the crops start to show signs of life. In fact, the garden’s looking so tasty that the chooks have staged not one, but two, jailbreaks this week. Fortunately, with a little gentle persuasion, we convinced them that they’re better off with the chicken feed back in the chook domes than they are with the garden’s sprouting greens. All we need to do now is persuade those pesky wallabies that the veg in our garden isn’t for them either - with a little help from a new electric fence.

Robin's first week

Hi, Robin here. I’m a Pom (sorry), and I’m Julian’s latest Wwoofer. For those of you who don’t know what that means, Wwoof stands for Willing Workers on Organic Farms. It’s a scheme that allows travellers to volunteer at organic farms across Australia in return for bed, board and a few new experiences.
I’ll be here for the next three months, and will be sharing some of my experiences with you through this blog. I’m new to life on the farm, so you’ll be getting my insights as a complete newcomer.
As an urbanite, this week has been something of a baptism of fire for me. Imago Forest is pretty remote, we live in a solar powered yurt, sleep in tents and shower under a hose (we’re hoping to get the new solar hot water system up and running shortly).
My first week here has been a real lesson in sustainable living. Virtually nothing is wasted. Food waste is fed to the chickens, weeds are pulled up and used as mulch for the trees and egg shells are crunched up and fed back to the chooks to improve egg quality. Meanwhile, us humans live off the grid on solar power and rain water.
The week’s been pretty hectic, what with having to deal with rain damage, trespassing cows and a huge delivery of gravel, but yesterday I managed to spend my first full day in the garden. We dug up a few of the vegetable beds, which are looking really healthy, and have planted zucchini, squash, silverbeet, broccoli cabbage carrots and plenty of flowers. Now the hard bit is waiting to see how they grow…

Putting famine behind us

With the weather warming up and the spring flowers coming out, it's hard to believe that this was the time of year when famine would often strike home.
With modern expectations and busy lives, we often don't get to experience the seasonal cycles... and in many ways this is a good thing!
For those growing food, however, they'll know that early spring is probably one of the most difficult times of year. Vegetables that were planted in late autumn for winter harvesting have been collected. And the spring plantings are only just going in and will be a while yet before they can be harvested. Historically people relied on stored food to tide them through this gap.
Today, we can ship in food from other parts of the country or world. This can be a doubled-edged sword, but at least we won't be starving!

Bigger Better Pantry

The soil test results are back and the good news is that the soil acidity is decreasing and the organic matter in the soil remains at a very healthy level. Unfortunately the available nutrients has not increased which I was surprised about as the CEC has increased.
The CEC is a measure of the soil's ability to store and exchange nutrients with plants. What this suggests to me is that the biodynamic practices are improving the soil such that it has become a larger potential store and more freely accessible store of nutrients, but that the nutrients are not there.
Or to put it another way, I've been making a bigger and better pantry, but now I've got to stock it up!
This is a relatively good position to be in, so I was inspired this morning to go out and transplant many of the small silverbeets and cabbages into newer beds and give them a good feeding. Previously I haven't been keen to do this as I thought the chook manure would be sufficient, but the soil tests indicate that a bit of extra feeding wouldn't go astray.
As the weather warms up, I'm expecting to bring to town some Spring greens.
Of course I'll have to keep the wallabies out! It only took a week for the wallabies to realise that the pup was no longer in the garden.

Soil Goodies

This week we spent a bit of time focusing on the soil. We put out some of the special biodynamic preparations (horn manure and horn silica) which are stirred by hand for an hour and then put out over the whole paddock with a hand-made rye grass brush. It's a very pleasant job with plenty of time for contemplation, appreciating the progress so far and envisioning the changes to come.
At the other end of the scale, I took soil samples from the centre of each bed (that hasn't had the chooks on it within the last two months) and sent off an averaged sample to the laboratory for testing. I'll let you know of the results when they come back.

Skin Cream for Trees

This week I got inspired to put out some Biodynamic Tree Paste. It's made of cow manure, clay and crusher dust, and it is smeared onto the trunks and stems of the trees. Ideally I would have put it on before the trees had started sprouting again, but better late than never.
Practically speaking the paste is good because it fills in cracks that insects and fungus can hide in. It provides some nutrition to the plants. And gets you to pay some up-close attention to each plant which is easy to let slip! In particular I noticed that one of the trees had been damaged by the high winds a while ago and so i taped it up and smeared some paste over to let it heal.