Eight Acres

I'm still here!  I just got distracted by making a new soap website and I couldn't decide where to post this.  But I'm not ready to move just yet.  I wanted to show you my pot garden as I've been pleasantly surprised by what I can grow (in winter anyway).  We are going to build a proper garden and set up the aquaponics, but other things need to be done first and meanwhile my pot collection keeps growing every time I go to our monthly share meeting and come home with another herb! Celery, peas, winter savory and parsley I have my collection of pots stacked on my potting table, which is the size of a sheet of mesh - I think its 2m by 3m or so.  And I have more pots underneath.  The worm farms are up top as well.  It seems to be good for the shade-loving plants, like mints, yarrow and strawberries to be down below in the partial shade.  I really like the location, it is between the house and the shed, so every time we go to the shed or to the ...

I’ve been wanting to try growing mushrooms for some time. I LOVE mushrooms and we buy them from the supermarket every week, so I was keen to find a way to produce them at home to reduce waste and potentially cost as well. A few years ago I found out that you could grow mushrooms from the spent mushroom compost from mushroom farms. So we dropped in to a farm on the Sunshine Coast and picked up a couple of boxes for $2 each. I diligently kept them dark and sprayed them with water, but in our climate, I just couldn’t keep them damp enough (and I had to keep them outside because our shed was too hot). I never managed to produce any mushrooms from those boxes, but when I gave up and tipped the compost out onto the garden, mushrooms sprang up everywhere. I wasn’t confident that they were the right mushrooms though, so I didn’t harvest any of those. As the proverb says, All mushrooms are edible, but some only once! I am generally a bit nervous about unidentified fungi. Since t...

Sometimes I write about the herbs I've been growing for a long time and use frequently, other time I use these posts as an opportunity to find out more about a new herb.  Feverfew ( Tanacetum parthenium ) is the latter!  I've had it in my garden for a couple of years after a friend gave me a seedling and it has self-seeded, but I haven't known how to use it., so its time to look up the herb books! How to grow feverfew Apparently it is a perennial, it must die back when its too cold or too hot and dry because it disappeared for a while.  It grows from seed or root division or cuttings.  If you let it flower and seed it will self-seed (that's my favourite type of plant!). How to use feverfew The flowers are pretty, however they repel insects including bees, so not one for the bee garden (although can be used as a companion plant around brasiccas to repel cabbage moth etc and the dried leaves can be used to keep moths out of your wardrobe...

I've never been a big fan of houseplants.  I had one on a dresser for a while and it leaked and cracked the veneer.  And I had another one that didn't get enough sun and it died.  Our new house is sunnier and less cluttered, it just felt like it needed some plants.  I've had others that I overwatered, or underwatered.  Its just seemed too hard to keep them alive. Mother-in-laws-tongue in the bathroom Benefits of houseplants You might be wondering why I would bother with houseplants, seeing as I just said I don't really like them.  I haven't actually read any scientific studies, but its does seem pretty obvious that plants are going to improve indoor air quality.  If you google it you will find lists of up to 15 benefits, I guess its just one of those topics that attracts fluff articles.  A basic knowledge of biology tells me that plants suck up carbon dioxide and convert it to oxygen.  This is probably more useful in the city, as w...

I miss my garden!  It was just starting to get very productive and self-sufficient - I mean, I had a lot of perennial plants growing and other things self-seeding, so I didn't have to do much to it, and now I have to start again *pout*, but my new garden will be even better, eventually.  For now I just have pots, and thanks to everyone who suggested what to plant in those pots.  This is what I have to far... 1) Celery in a self-watering pot from our Nanango produce share.  I wouldn't have thought to choose celery, but I'm pleased to have it as I like to use it to flavour casseroles and roasts, so it will get used. 2) Chard also from the produce share.  It was nice to get this as a seedling and have a headstart on some greens as I've been slow to get the rest of it going. 3) Peas and radishes - I wanted to plant things that you can keep harvesting, so as much as I love carrots and turnips, I thought they were best to wait for next year, and peas will ge...

Here's a post originally from 2012.  It is interesting to read this again now, as I've lately been finding that I can grow a productive and varied vege garden for most of the year, so a lot of the veges that I had preserved were not getting used up anyway.  I prefer to use things up while they are fresh, but there are advantages to fermenting food and few things that I do want to use year-round, such as herbs, chilli and garlic, are easily dried.   The first year in our new garden we had so many zucchinis and beans, we were giving them away to everyone.  But we hadn't got to know when we would have gluts and famines, so we didn't keep any for ourselves.  Of course through winter, we had to buy veges again as I hadn't kept any.  A few years on, now I'm starting to learn how to preserve some of our veges so that we will have a supply through winter.  I have been drying herbs and greens, freezing zucchinis and beans, fermenting pickling cucumbers and re...

One of the really fun things about our sub-tropical climate is the weird veges that we can grow.  I've written about a few them before ( rosella, warrigal greens and sweet potato ), and other posts about chokos and trombonchino .  Here's one more that I like to grow: the snake bean. Vigna unguiculata subsp. sesquipedalis  also known as yardlong bean,long-podded cowpea, asparagus bean, pea bean, or Chinese long bean.  You might have guessed from that, it is a LONG bean, up to 30cm in my experience.  Apparently sequipedalis means "one and a half feet", so it must get even longer in some conditions. It is a different genus to the common bean and more closely related to cow peas and mung beans. Snake beans grow on vines and seem to prefer hot and wet weather, but will tolerate dry better than common beans, and will certainly produce better in the heat.  Like common beans, they do not survive frost and start to die back when overnight temperat...

Here's an old post from July 2011 that I thought you might enjoy reading again :) Since we have started producing our own veges, eggs, beef and chicken meat I have noticed that we get used to making our own and have been reluctant to buy these items when our own production levels are low.  This means we usually have either too much or not enough of some things, but its just become a way of life for us.  Sometimes if we don't have any of a particular food, we just go without, but we don't even think about it now. When we are milking our cows, we usually have too much milk at first, which is lovely, because I get to try making cheese without worrying too much if the end result is a disaster!  The other week I made feta, too much feta, which neither of us particularly like (it was just an easy cheese to try) so I started looking for recipes to use it up.  I found this lovely recipe  for chicken meatballs with feta in the middle.  This would use up ...

I have three large chilli bushes in my garden.  I don't know exactly what kind they are, they sprouted in a pot of raspberry canes that I was given.  I thought they were capsicums, but they grew into the chilli bushes.  The raspberries didn't make it through our hot summers, but the chillies did great, they are taller than me and I always get a massive harvest. How to grow chillies According to Isabell Shipard's "How can I use herbs in my daily life?", there are two species of chilli bush - Capsicum annum (bushes 50-150cm tall, single fruit from each node) and Capsicum frutescens (tiny bushes to 2m tall, 2-4 fruit per node). I think I certainly have one of the second type, although I'm still not sure exactly which variety.  These are not hot at all, I can put several in a meal and I don't particularly like hot food. Both species are perennial in our sub-tropical climate, but will be annual if winters get too cold.  I find that these bu...

As we get closer to moving to our new/old house, I am starting to dread starting again with the garden.  I feel like the current garden is just starting to do well, after a lot of work building the soil with loads of manure, compost and mulch.  When I dig I find deep rich soil full of worms.  It certainly wasn't like that we we started, so I know I will have some work to do to get the new garden to the same standard.  I hope that we have learnt a few things though and will find it easier to get this garden started quickly.  Here's some thoughts about our current garden and what we want to do for the next one. 1) Integrate hydroponics and/or aquaponics At the moment I use a small hydroponics system to grow tomatoes as they just don't thrive in my garden.  We have an aquaponics system that we bought around the same time as the farm and have not had time to set up.  This will be an opportunity to try aquaponics/hydroponics on a larger scale and grow...

There are two types of savory - summer savory ( Satureja hortensis ) is an annual and winter savory ( Satureja montana ) is perennial.  Creeping and lemon, mint and thyme-scented species are also available.  I think I have plain old winter savory, although it came from a market simply labeled as "savory". How to grow winter savory Savory grows similar to thyme and rosemary, it grows well in full sun with well-drained soil.  It is propagated by root division or cuttings.   How to use winter savory To me it tastes similar to thyme, and I have been using it as I use thyme and rosemary - to flavour casseroles and roasts.  I have cut some to dry, and I also use it fresh.   Medicinally, I haven't found much information about winter savory.  It seems to be quite similar to thyme and rosemary - good for respiratory conditions, antiseptic and digestion.    Do you grow winter savory?  How do you use it? How I use herb...

This is a method that I use in hot weather so that I don't have to water every day.  With the holiday season coming up, the hardest thing about going on holiday is leaving my garden, particularly in hot weather, as I worry that it will dry out and all my hard work will whither and die.  We pay someone to come and check on the animals, but as we use grey water for the garden , if we're not home, there's no water to use on it (and we're not going to waste our good drinking water!). Some unusual plants popped up in our garden.... The solution came in a post from Emma at Craving Fresh .  She uses beer bottles full of water and pushed into the soil to keep it moist between watering.  I tried it the first time just before I knew I was going to be away for a few days.  Pete was going to be home, but not sure if he would get time to water, so I placed beer bottles full of water next to my favourite plants, just in case.  It was very hard to choose which ...