Member's Gardens > Stories from the One Acre Plot > Part 4 July 2006
by Phil Ryan

One of my most used and favourite garden items was salvaged and recycled from a Council footpath clean-up collection. It’s a light-weight aluminium garden table – nothing flash – but it is just the best thing to use for all sorts of gardening jobs. Planting out seedlings is a breeze as you just set yourself up with everything you need to do the job and lay it all on the table. A top surgeon performing an operation couldn’t have a more practical and useful table than my 60 x 60 x 75 cm workstation and, best of all, its so light you can carry it in one hand.

Last month I wrote about growing Rosellas. After harvesting I use a wonderful little hand tool to remove the seed pod from the Rosella fruit which makes the job so much quicker and easier than peeling the fruit by hand. Vic Calthorpe made it for me and he will have some of these for sale at the Bogi Fair, so make a note on your calendar to meet this colourful and creative character at the Fair.

With the water restrictions now in place for using buckets and watering cans only, I have a tip to share – fit a padding over the wire bucket handles, which makes carrying a couple of buckets of water so much easier and your hands don’t get so sore from the wire handle. I used a strip of carpet underlay, taping it over the wire handle with some sticky electrical tape. Also, don’t forget to bend your knees and keep your shoulders well back when you pick up your load. For beginners, only half fill the big buckets.

If you’re thinking of buying a watering can, give the light plastic ones a “miss”. They can’t handle the constant work load and become brittle. Mine disintegrated in next to no time. Go for a lasting metal watering can, where your first cost is your last cost. They’re a little heavier, but just don’t fill them so full.
I bought another load of water last week and, like all of us, I really treat it like liquid gold. However, soon I will have to make some hard decisions as to what plants will get water on this one acre plot. Plants that are coping particularly successfully at The Plot are the carob trees, the coffee trees (all loaded with ripening beans), the curry trees, the pigeon pea, the wattles, the grevilleas, the tamarillos, the Bambino bougainvillea and, of great surprise, the pineapples, which are all doing remarkably well. None of the above has been watered more than once by me in the last year, so it has to be the compost and the mulch that has supported them, plus several foliar feeds of seaweed. The bananas are doing it tough without any watering. They were planted in swale trenches where their roots get water and moisture that has been diverted to them there. The lay-out of The Plot has been designed to trap as much rain water and seepage as possible and to re-use it through a series of swales and deep trenches that keep the water in the sub soil and seeping from swale to swale. Water is used six or seven times as it flows down the slope towards the dry creek bed at the other end of The Plot. The system has proved itself and has been a great success in these years of severe drought. The idea for this concept came from the book “Water for Every Farm: the Keyline Principle” by Yeoman and I believe is still in print. Good libraries should have a copy.

The pintos peanut ground cover is a bit browned off in places at present, but I know it will bounce back into a lush green carpet cover after the first rain. A wonderful plant, it fixes nitrogen back into the soil; is a great feed for the chooks; great to harvest some when building a batch of compost; its tough and hard wearing, and, best of all, is a great green mulch and smothers most weeds.

My wife and I were some of the lucky ones to visit the home of Jerry Coleby-Williams. It is (one of) the first sustainable house and garden in Brisbane. It was fantastic, a “must” for all our members who missed out on this visit. A few things among the many that impressed me on the day were Jerry’s sincerity and commitment to both gardening and the environment. You came away feeling uplifted and enlightened and I also felt I could and should do more. Jerry has developed an excellent and informative web site.

Jerry, like most of we gardeners, is having a hard time of it with this drought and what it is doing to his gardens. It was most interesting to see the plants that are simply thriving without water in his ornamental garden, while Jerry expressed disappointment with the slow growth performance of some of his vegetable seedlings. He then invited us to come over to his back fence to look at his neighbour’s vegetable patch, whose seedlings had gone in only a few days earlier than his. The difference was incredible. The plants were all big, healthy and all bursting with lush growth. Jerry’s neighbour’s secret was compost. His garden beds were built up above the unforgiving clay and over a lot more years (15) than Jerry had been building his gardens. Jerry said he would see his neighbour forever wheeling a barrow load of compost onto his garden, and the results are certainly there to see. I also suspect the angle of the sun and subsequent shading currently is having an effect on Jerry’s garden. Vic Calthorpe told me from his experience in organic gardening that it takes a good five years or more for a good organic garden to really produce top quality vegetables.

Jerry has some strong arguments about the use of water crystals and wetting agents. He doesn’t use them and gave some good reasons why he doesn’t. Another of Jerry’s tips was that every month WITHOUT FAIL he sprays EVERYTHING in his gardens with a foliar feed of seaweed. Like our John Box, Jerry is a true believer in the benefits of spraying with seaweed. It not only saves on watering the plant, but keeps it strong and healthy.

Happy organic gardening and thanks to the Bogi Field Trip Co-ordinators, Brian and Margaret Bielby.