Garlic

I've always grown garlic.  I love garlic and eat quite a bit of it.  I also love having garlic tied in plaits hanging somewhere in my kitchen.

My results in the past have been inconsistent though and it was only in the past year that I learned why.

I usually plant a few cloves of garlic around my roses.  It helps keep some of the bugs off them.  While they've always grown, looking back, there was a large proportion that didn't grow very big or were single bulbs.  Those single bulbs were a good size for a clove of garlic, but they hadn't separated into more usable garlic as we usually know it.

I grew some in it's own bed and they tended to stay small.  That was in town and our soil was mostly sand though.  I also put it down to having used garlic from the supermarket as my seed.

Last year, I was leafing through a gardening magazine at a friend's place and there was an article about growing better garlic.  It said there was a lot of urban 'wisdom' about garlic that was just incorrect and that people wanting to grow garlic more successfully should discard it and start treating garlic with more respect.

Firstly, garlic prefers to have it's own bed and be fairly well spaced - at least 30cm (12 inches) apart.  That was a new one for me, having always been told to plant it closer than that and around my roses.  Perhaps that idea was more for the roses' benefit than for the garlic?

Secondly, that garlic likes a heavily manured and very rich soil.  I had been told garlic would grow anywhere, in any conditions, and thrived like most herbs, in poor soil.

The last thing I remember from this article was that your garlic beds needed to be kept well-weeded.  Garlic in it's own bed doesn't like competition and a weed-free bed will grow better garlic.

Looking back at all of this, it does seem rather obvious from a gardening point of view.  Most plants I grow do better without competition from weeds and good soil always makes a difference.  I don't usually do a single crop in a bed or garden because companion planting has produced better results for me, but maybe, as I said earlier, garlic being a companion for something else is not an equal exchange where the garlic is concerned.

When we lived in town, we built some large planter boxes to grow veges in.  It was rather a necessity as any good soil that was added to the sand we had would lose all nutrients rather quickly and sink into the sandy soil and become sour within a season.  A built up and lined bed, filled with good quality bio-blend soil from a garden centre was a necessity for growing any veges (other than beans - they seemed to love the crappy soil and grew like triffids).

We took the boxes with us when we moved.  We never quite knew what we were going to do with them and they were moved several times before they found their current spot.  I think we've had too many choices and between everything else that has needed doing and water issues, they just sat there.

About a year ago, I laid a thick layer of pine needles in each of them to keep weeds down and covered that with flattened cardboard boxes.   Then the planter boxes became a default compost heap or more correctly, a dumping ground for organic stuff that we didn't really know where to put. They became filled with straw, sawdust and chook poo from cleaning out the chookhouses.  They got ash from the fireplace.  They got lawn clippings and some smaller tree branches.

I used some of the badly composted results last year when I was filling up the tyres that I grew potatoes in.  Otherwise, they just sat there like an accusation of laziness and grand ideas that hadn't been followed through.

After reading a fiction book that had a stables as part of the setting, there was a scene where one of the characters had to go and dig over what they called "shite mountain".  The manure from the stable was heaped into a big pile, covered with feed sacks and once a week, someone had to turn it over, poke a few holes in it, water it thoroughly and cover it up again.  The process was explained - the watering and covering killed off any grass seeds that may be in it, as well as created a humid environment that broke it all down.

This caught my imagination as I looked out over the paddock where my cow has been staying.  I'd been constantly raking up the old hay and her manure to try and keep her paddock fairly clean.  I'd had a few ideas about what I was going to do with it all, but nothing that had stood out.  While I wasn't planning to build a Shite mountain, I thought a planter box could work.

I filled one planter box with hay and cow poo.  As I went, I soaked it and covered it with feedsacks held down by tyres.  By the time I was about halfway, Hubby noticed and joined in.  We turned it over probably once a month and celebrated the big worms that were starting to appear.  The last time we turned it over, Hubby suggested adding chook poo and sawdust to lighten it up.

By this time, we'd filled the second planter box with old hay and manure.  We've left this one open.  No sacks on top.  Partly this was a case of we hadn't gotten around to it, partly running low on feed sacks and partly to see if the difference was noticeable.

This is the box that was left uncovered.

We couldn't decide whether to dig the chookhouse sweepings through, or leave it as a mulch layer on top.  The mulch layer has worked extremely well another vege garden.  So in the spirit of experimentation, we divided the box in half lengthways.  Half was dug through and half was left on top.  Widthways, half was covered again and half was left exposed.

The mulch side is at the bottom, dug through at the top.

This morning I planted garlic in this bed.  The mulch side had fewer weeds and was easier to plant in.  The other side seemed richer and more composted.

Left end was uncovered for the last few months and right covered.  Mulch bottom and dug through top.

I guess the proof will be in the garlic harvest.

Perseverance and Spinning Madly

I think I mentioned it elsewhere, I have been given a lot of unwashed fleeces from both sheep and alpacas.  When I started working on the alpaca fleece, I didn't realise it hadn't been washed until I'd carded the lot and then started spinning.  It was when my fingers turned black from working with it that I realised.

I still haven't gotten very far through the alpaca fleece. And I've only washed two or maybe three of the sheep fleeces I was given before the weather and drying conditions turned against me.  Meanwhile, I have a small mountain of washed fleece waiting to be spun, so I've been trying to get through it.

Washed sheep's fleeces waiting for carding and spinning.

One of the alpaca fleeces though caused a rather rare (for me) ragequit.  I actually took the bobbin off the spinning wheel and threw it.  The wool is short and soft, rather like persian cat hair.  It doesn't spin up nicely at all, regardless of how short my draft is and the thread breaks constantly.

Bloody awful alpaca fleece

This is how it spun up.

It sat in time out in my spare room while I rather resentfully pretended to ignore it and treated it as a betrayal of my trust, while I hoped it learned it's lesson.

I hate waste though.  I hate giving up on something.  I hate finding out I can't do something.  So it sat in the back of my mind while I tried to figure out how to win this battle.

Then it occurred to me to blend it with the much longer and sturdier texel fleece.  Slap forehead, D'oh.

It's terribly obvious as a solution really, but I hadn't been thinking like that. 

It also meant that Hubby could get his socks that aren't creamy white and stop being so obnoxious about the colour of his socks.  It's not like he wears shorts often enough that woolen socks would be visible anyway.

Blending it is fairly simple, I start with some of the texel fleece on my carding comb and add a rough layer of the alpaca fleece and card back and forth until there are no big obvious blobs of brown.  Once it's spun, the colour is uneven, but I think this is a funky feature and we all like it.

Texel fleece on carding comb.

Add some alpaca fleece.

Start carding back and forth to mix up the colours and fleeces.

Sufficiently blended for me.

A rolag ready to spin.

This is how it spins up - this is still a single and not plyed.

So far I've made three pairs of socks with this.  The alpaca fleece makes them warmer and snugglier.  I've had to start adding special stripes so we know whose is whose.

Same yarn knitted into a sock.

Two stripes is Miss Nine's sock.

Winter as a Time of Abundance?

Normally, I would think of Winter as being a time of scarcity.  The grass doesn't grow, the veges (mostly) don't grow and feed for ourselves and our animals is difficult.

While the grass is a fairly large problem this year because we're still in drought, it seems to be the only thing that is scarce for us.

We left our cull later than we should have - partly due to not having the funds to have the homekill man out and pay for the butchering of the cattlebeasts.  But suddenly, we seemed to have money thrown at us from all directions, so we got two steers, three pigs and three hoggets slaughtered.  I still did the butchering of the pigs and sheep and I'm still grateful that there was a two week gap between them as that was a lot of work to do on my own.  By the last sheep I was so over it that it got the barest minimum cuts made to still have meals worth having.

We bought a new chest freezer.  We dithered about it, we went back and forth between chest freezer and upright.  I know that while an upright freezer might officially be a certain size, you lose a fair bit of that in the shelves and drawers, but they are more user friendly.  We decided on the chest freezer in the end for it's capacity and it's now filled to that capacity.

I was a little disturbed by my hoggets.  They looked quite fat and healthy until their skins were off.  There was almost no fat on them at all.  All three were extremely lean.  It showed me that they were not eating as well as they seemed to have been.  Worms and parasites were not an issue on inspection.

I've been feeding out to my remaining sheep, especially as that's (hopefully) all pregnant ewes, but they don't seem to be interested in hay or balage.  They'll have a nibble at it and then go back to sticking their heads through fences to eat the shelter belts.  They all genuinely seem fat though and the neighbour thinks they're in good health.  There are just a few piles of hay still sitting in their paddock to be nibbled at now and then.

So we have meat in abundance because of the cull.  I will probably not need to buy meat for the next year at least and this time, there is variety.

Brownie my housecow seems to have ramped up production of milk.  Where I was getting two litres a day from her which was ample for our needs, I'm now getting between three and six litres.  The calf is still with her and she hasn't weaned him.  I'm also getting more cream from it.  I'm currently out of cheese cultures and the place I usually get them from is out of stock on my cultures, so I've got every possible jug and bottle filled with milk and it's still not enough.  I'm freezing milk as often as I have plastic bottles and freezer space to put it in and I'm still worrying about wasting milk.

So I have milk in abundance.

For some reason, my chickens have also ramped up their laying.  My youngest hens would be coming up to three years old, well past their prime laying days and it's been a cold winter, but lately, the eggs have quadrupled.  At this time of year, I expect maybe four eggs on an average day, I'm currently getting an average of 16 eggs a day.  I still have all the different types of preserved eggs I did a while ago so there's not much point in adding more.  I've been giving eggs to anyone who stops in.

And I have eggs in abundance.

Putting the bird-netting around the vege gardens has worked to keep the chooks out of my garden so that plants can actually grow.  We planted some winter greens that are doing very well.  In one of them, we mulched quite heavily with chook poo and sawdust from cleaning out the henhouses and some torn up egg trays.  Those plants are about four times the size of others in another garden that were planted only two weeks later - and that was a couple of months ago.  This garden is doing so well that plants I'd thought the hens had destroyed have come back and are growing well.  Plants that aren't supposed to live during winter, but they've had hard frosts that didn't thaw for a week and a couple of dumpings of snow and they're still thriving.

Soon it seems we'll have those veges in abundance.

Don't get me wrong, I'm loving it, but I can't quite figure out what I've done right to get so much abundance in Winter.