Mulch me! We grow and kill stuff only to learn.

Keen as I was to aggressively advance my gardening options I had to go interstate for a week and while away...

while away... [boo hoo]...my garden was devastated!

October 2014: 7th highest temperature and 9th lowest rainfall on record in conditions of already declared drought.

My labour intense garden suffered big time.

While we are STILL in drought  -- the dry conditions had destroyed my usual supply of mulch.No grass clippings have been dumped on my nature strip for months.If it wasn't for my large Silky Oak dropping its leaves on the garden beds during September, my soil would have been  naked and even more exposed.

In a twice it happened. I went from great garden to daggy garden in just one  week as all the nasty factors kicked in to sabotage my green thumb arrogance.

Fortunately, I had  asked that my seed trays be watered while I was away...so I had another generation to plant after the beds dried out and crisped up.

So with hindsight -- and 2 weeks on is hindsight enough -- let's explore the problem of my dead plants.

My major mistake was not to have mulched up.I knew I was running dangerously low on mulch  but I failed to seek other resources to carpet the beds. I do rely on a lot of cut grass -- if only to build up soil from sand -- but from June to November  the supply dries up -- coinciding with the driest period of each year. Reason: the grass does not grow.

My solution: I'll need to grow and harvest my own mulch supply  while sourcing other materials to supplement. In the two weeks since my return I've been  trimming bushes and trees, and mixing the cuttings with torn up soak newspapers/junk mail/cardboard to make my mulch go further. I had used lemongrass as mulch in the past but these have also suffered during the dought.

My shade failure: The early onset of hot weather also exposed my plants to a lot of unrelenting  sunshine. I do have a shade program based on the growing of Frangipanis...and tall sunflowers. But the Frangipanis aren't tall enough yet and have not as yet fully sprouted leaves. So they're useless this early in the heat. While I'm loving the 2.5 metre high sunflowers -- I didn't  grow enough of thse to really shade the area I needed to shade.

My solution: I need an ongoing  Sunflower program with plants ready to plant out as seedlings through most of the year. That  cut Sunflowers are so easy to grow and make great mulch is another plus. That they also serve as bean poles -- makes them even more useful...Then there are the flowers of course. (And yes I have planted Jerusalem artichokes as well --so I guess I need to think : sunflower and artichoke family.)

My seed and seedling mistakes: this year I had experimented more with direct sowing of seeds and my results have not been so good.My soil is still too sandy.I've also tended to plant my seedlings regardless of conditions pending.

My solution: I now prefer to sow seeds in flats and transplant. But even  there  I find I have a better chance of success if I pot up most of my seedlings and plant them out when they are more vigorous and the weather conditions are more opportune. This puts me in greater control. I just wait until  the situation is preferable, then I plant the  seedling in the garden bed. I can do this because I'm now using paper pots I roll myself and planting out is a simple business of burying the pot -- plant and all. Potting up like this also gives me greater control over my polycultural options. I can plant a thriving plant next to  another thriving plant I target with companionship in mind.Potting up also means I have an extended planting window. Given that I'm now resource chunkier mulches , my little buried paper pots seem to survive quite well in all the detritus.

My foolish watering habits:I survived the dry Winter by hand watering the garden. This works fine when its cool but when the temperatures rise it's an indulgence. 

My solution:  I think I wasted a lot water.Yes, despite my low use of it. Instead of far too frequently  hand watering the garden I should have filled up my terracotta irrigation pots more  often so that their water level staid high. As it was I was filling them up only when they emptied -- and in doing that I was undermining the gravity dynamic that irrigated  the garden beds. These pots really do work  but in our conditions they need a good mulch covering of surrounding soil and a better top-up regime.

So there: Mea culpa. We grow and kill stuff only to learn.

Sponge Hole Irrigation

I've been experimenting with the mulching technique I've previously called a Honey Hole or  Fertility Trench.

It is a very simple method that is a useful for  irrigating and introducing  fertility into the soil. I refer to these holes as 'worm takeaways' because they concentrate a lot of organic matter in the one spot, and once settled, garden worms will move in and feast up.

But these holes' primary function -- while their contents breaks down -- is as a water sponge.

So they serve two functions:

• a vertical fertility mulch
• a water reserve/irrigating sponge

The trick is in the mix that you fill the holes with.

The Sponge Mix

After some experimentation I'm currently working from this recipe:

1. Throw old newspapers, junk mail, old phone books, cardboard, etc into a large container -- I use a wheelbarrow -- and steep  them in water.
2. When thoroughly wet, shred the papers and cardboard by  tearing the pieces apart with your hands. You should end up with lots of shredded paper and cardboard strips, something like papier mache
3. Put on some rubber gloves and with a sieve or just your hands break up a quantity of manure and sprinkle it into the paper mix, tossing, stirring  and blending the manure in as if you were making a muffin mix. The paper strips should all be  well coated with the manure. Delicious-- but don't lick the spoon.
4. Depending on your soil, the nature of your manures and so forth a good rule of thumb is a mix of 30-40% manure to 60-70% wet paper.
5. If the mix is too dry -- add more water -- and let the manure/paper mix marinate for 5  to  7 days, stirring occasionally so that you brew a dense manure tea.

Once you have prepared your sponge mix, you can dig your holes.

The Hole

1. With a hand spade dig a hole roughly half the depth of your forearm. I dump the soil I dig up into a 3 litre plastic pot so that I can keep each hole I dig the same depth and volume. Using a pot also keeps the soil off the garden bed, and any plants,  nearby.
2. Fill the hole with a generous amount of sponge mix and ram the mix down into the hole with your (gloved) fist or/& a mallet. You want to really stuff the mix into the hole so that you end up with a convex depression on top with the mix rising up on the sides of the hole. That's your mini-billabong.
3. Now place a stick or rod in the centre of your hole  and tip your bucket of dug up soil on the top of the hole. Pat the soil down and wiggle the stick to create  a crater --something like a hole on a putting green.
4. Mark your crater with a stick or label rod so that its location is flagged in your garden bed.

When watering the garden, direct a spray at the flagged crater you have marked so that the the mix below engorges with water and pools on top, like a miniature pond. If you dug each hole approximately the same depth and diameter, you should be aware how large is your sponge bowl.

Location. Location.

I use these sponge holes as a supplement to my terracotta pot irrigation system.

I position them in sections of the garden bed where I think the water from the pots isn't reaching. Since water is its own conductor, these sponge holes can act as channeling stations for water across the distances between the pots.

The large paper content serves as a sponge that absorbs water when  wetted and, as the sponge mix breaks down, the elevated carbon in the soil increases its water holding capacity, protecting the soil from  future arid conditions.

Sponge holes are also very effective when dug next to newly planted trees and perennials. They are also much less disturbing to soil structure than the excavation required to  dig elongated mulch trenches. While the manured  'goodness' is concentrated in one spot, soil biota and worms will do all the work of distributing the sponge mix more widely in the bed neighbourhood.

As the sponge holes sweat moisture into the surrounding soil the water merges with the fluid content emanating from the terracotta pots, thus promoting greater holding capacity and broader spread per litre of irrigation. In my sandy soils both methods ensure I keep moisture in my top soil longer rather than have it quickly drain away.

You need to be aware that the hole's contents are initially manure 'hot' so you need to consider what you plant nearby. Heavy feeders should do alright.

I treat these holes as a shadow version of my terracotta pots. They are roughly the same volume and depth  while serving a similar function. So when I come to fill the pots every 3-4 days, all I need do is direct my hose spay at the marked sponge holes as well...at least for the following few months. Rather than hose the garden beds -- wasting water and encouraging weed growth -- I concentrate my water usage in spots that store it underground.

In my imagination I envisage these sponge holes as a key element in my worm neighbourhood. In hot weather I discovered that garden worms will gravitate around the terracotta pots because of the coolness and moisture in the soil. These properties are replicated by the sponge holes with the added feature that they are also serve as a restaurant and takeaway. 

Have garden will travel -- growing sweet spuds at home

Maori Sweet Potato Mounds

Now that I have a 'garden' -- in that my underneath is no longer sand and now passes muster as loam -- I get to ponder my horticultural efforts with more focus.

I have ambitions.  I resolve to grow a list of target vegetables  and fruits.

Top of my list: sweet potatoes.

I've grown them for years but not with much success.I've let them ramble and make what they could  of my sandy soil. I've used them to fill spaces and cover ground.

But now I'm serious about my harvest potential so I've been doing my homework.

My initial frustration was harvesting the things. Since I let them travel all over the place hunting tubers was very touchy feely business of inserting my mit in the dirt, fossicking. The truth is that I had too large a 'patch' and needed to focus my growing efforts along demarcation lines.

Most of the literature I've read on sweet spuds isn't very helpful given my conditions. Sweet Potatoes may do best in light sandy soils but that not a sure in from my experience as they also appreciate water and 'light sandy soils' aint water friendly.

But there's a solution in the mix: mounds.  The lit will tell you to raise up your sweet potato plants in order to facilitate drainage. But that's only part of the story.

The traditional method for growing sweet spuds is to cultivate them in mounds.Throughout Polynesia and Melanesia mounds are the means although ridges are sometimes deployed.

 Sweet Potato mounds:Wabag, Papua New Guinea,  1974

A mound is a set space that is easy to tend and harvest from. It can also be deployed to concentrate nutrients.  Research is very clear on the logic. In their study,  Sweet potato cultivation on composted mounds in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Issac T. Taraken and Rainer Ratsch write:

This paper explains the concept of composted mounding, which is used to cultivate sweetpotato/kaukau (Ipomoea batatas) in many locations in Enga province and parts of Southern Highlands and Western Highlands provinces of Papua New Guinea (PNG). It draws both from published literature and recent findings on sweetpotato cultivation in the PNG highlands. The practice of composted mounding allows permanent land use and intercropping, and facilitates successive multiple harvests of sweetpotato tubers and other vegetables. It counteracts the risks of frosts and soil-borne pests and diseases, and reduces soil erosion. It offsets the inherent soil-fertility problems associated with the dominant volcanic ash soils in the mounding zone of the PNG highlands. The method utilises locally available organic materials such as garden debris, weeds, grasses and farmyard manure as compost. 

They further argue:

Potential benefits of composted mounding

There are a number of possible benefits that composted mounds confer. They:

• improve soil texture and structure, thus increasing aeration and rainwater infiltration and drainage

• increase topsoil depth and improve water-holding capacity in shallow and sandy soils, and maintain soil moisture

• provide food and appropriate conditions for soil organisms, and improve soil fertility and crop yield through organic matter decomposition 

• improve soil structure and reduce soil cracking, and the resultant crumb structures probably prevent the entry of pests like sweetpotato weevil (Cylas formicarius)

• maintain soil bulk density in ranges favourable to root penetration regardless of permanent sweet potato cultivation on the same piece of land (Sillitoe 1996) 

• release heat through the decomposition process, which speeds up tuberisation 

• reduce the effects of frosts on crops

• reduce soil-borne pests and diseases, e.g. tuber rot in wet soils or caused by the fungus Ceratocystis fimbriata (Preston 1990; Sillitoe 1996)

• raise crops above water tables in swamps and flooded plains

• reduce soil erosion by run-off both on slopes and flat lands by channelling water between the mounds

• ease population pressure on land use by allowing shorter and even zero fallow periods, and hence permanent systems of land cultivation

• reduce the risk of spreading pests and diseases through the burial of affected crop residues within the mounds

• allow subsequent multiple harvests and the maintenance of planting materials

• enable farmers to use locally available organic residues for sustainable sweetpotato production rather than expensive inorganic fertilisers 

• enable more efficient land use as different crops can be intercropped with sweet potato for subsequent multiple harvests.

A farmer planting sweet potato vines
on a mound in Tambul, Western Highlands. 

While most commercial sweet potato production uses ridges -- this mound method for growing the spuds impressed me because it more or less utilised a moveable garden -- have garden will travel.

Indeed the protocol meshes with my own attempts to make the best of constructing soil on beach sand. It also deals with the challenge of  allowing for several seasons of fallow in the growing of sweet potatoes especially if your space is limited.

While I've relied on sheet mulching to build my garden I've tended to mulch to uniform thickness -- like a carpet. But mulch mounding is likely to suit some vegetables with potatoes being the best candidate. 

And the great thing is that after harvest you simply move your 'mound' contents elsewhere and grow the next crop in the same place with fresh material inputs collected from wherever.

In effect you get to tame this rambler, facilitating care and harvest. The mounds aren't ant hills -- akin to those you'd associate with normal gardening. These are serious structures. They are in effect garden beds that are not shaped as to our norm.

How about that for sweet logic?

This I gotta do. I'm not sure how I'll adapt the business but my next  crop of spuds will begin life in such a home --albeit my best attempt at making one.

Plant markers from ceramic tiles.

After considering my garden marker options in a recent post, we cut some ceramic tiles for use in the garden beds.  As far as I can tell so far ceramic tiles are an ideal medium with which to signpost your plantings.

You need the largest size rectangular tile you can get ...and a tile cutter large enough to accommodate the tile's length. Some skill is required to use the tool but if you can handle the slice-ing motion there's little waste.

All things considered these markers should last a very long time sitting in the dirt despite all weathers. If you accidentally bury them they are soon enough resurrected.

Mulching with lawn clippings: Oh the joy of dessicated grasses!

I love grass clippings! Can't get enough of 'em.

That's not just me being rhetorical but a statement of fact: I can never get enough grass clippings. Grass chopped up by mowers maketh up my garden. Year in  year out in all weathers I've collected and  distributed cut grasses atop my garden beds. 

This is mulching per the good graces of the local  lawn mowing industry. I have guys working for me gratis.

I save them tip fees and they deliver me mulch. All I have to do it barrow it from nature strip to garden bed.

I've been lawn clipping dependent for years. This is my second garden built from lawn detritus.

The sheer scale of the amount of cut green material I've thrown on my garden beds may have to be my little secret because dessicated grass quickly rots down to a shadow of its former self. 

It's a total Sisyphusian task. [See image] I'm always just one step ahead of exposed raw earth...which I just gotta cover with still more mulch material.

But after a few years and all those wheelbarrow loads ... my yellowish almost greyish sand has changed to dark grey and black loam while recruiting biota big time.

En route I've learnt a thing or two about mulching and mulching with grass clippings especially.

Lesson #1 : Plop Plop

When distributing grass clipping atop the garden beds throw it down in handfuls so that the surface of the mulch is undulated  and pitted. You don't want a flat surface or even a convex one. You want your mulch to break down unevenly so that any precipitation enters the mesh of  fibres and percolates through to the soil underneath. Undulation rules.

Lesson #2 : Tease it up

Depending on the weather and the condition of the grass on its arrival, the clippings may tend to lock together and create a sort of mat. This can cause the soil underneath to heat up and may prevent moisture seeping through. So you need to tease up the grass cover  as though you are brushing it. Separate the fibres, fluff  up the grass hairdo and aerate the mulch. I use my hands and pull any weeds  at the same time.

Lesson #3 : No dust

In dry weather conditions cut grass mulch will turn to dust. This is all part of the break down process. The solution is to cover the pulverised grasses with fresh mowings. But because the weather is indeed dry -- and we're talking June and July (here in South East Queensland)  for example -- your grass clipping supply may be very low indeed because grass doesn't grow without rain and if it don't grow it don't get mowed and your supply will also dry up.

So you need to plan ahead and as the dry conditions kick in you need to deepen your mulch layer: pile up the grass so that you have leeway in the break down. Watering the mulch will also keep down the penchant to dust and ironically slow down the process .

Lesson #4 : Fertilize

You can read the stuff on the N:P:K of grass clippings and angst over it if you like. Since I'm reliant on the green stuff I've experimented with many throw-on additives deployed to fertilise the garden beds. But I always suspect that I am being wasteful of my resources. It just sits there atop the beds like dollops on a carpet...and dries out to pith.

This is why I seriously explored trench/pit mulching in preference to demanding too much of my sheet mulching habits.Nonetheless, after some experimentation I prefer to 'top dress' my mulch with Blood and Bone (+potash). After sprinkling Blood and Bone over the mulch beds, a quick fluff up of the grass clippings will distribute the ground particles to the soil below. Preferable to 'hosing in'.

Lesson #5 : Weeds

If you are gonna use grass clippings as mulch you are sure to be importing weeds into your garden. 

Fact.

My experience has been that if you keep layering on the cut grass you are usually one step ahead of the weeds as you shade them out. But they occasionally will root and they will spread. 

Every now and then I pull them...but the norm is that one species is the  feral one so you get to know its habits. That's the irony you see: I may get grass clippings mowed from a wide local regional arc, but the weeds I get are usually just the one or two varieties.

Compared to what I got when I laid out locally collected manures -- especially horse -- give me the grass clipping weeds anyday. I got some real nasties from the manures taken from local farms.In comparison, my grass harvest was benign. 

This is one reason why I now prefer to bury my manures in pits rather than let them rest on the surface of the soil.

Lesson #6 : Seedlings

My mulch layer is preferably deep. So when it comes to planting I find that you need to create a pit in the mulch in order to plant your seedling or seed. Pull the mulch aside, embed your plant, and...this is where a problem may kick in. 

Ideally you'd flag your seed or seedling: but so far I've not found a foolproof method for doing this. I don't block plant, so the bigger the plant is/the more chance there is that I'll continue to know it's there. So planting in mulch has its drawbacks.

My garden beds are 'busy' ...and there isn't much order about them. So marking off what I do -- so that I continue to register the fact -- is still a problem. This is exacerbated by the thickness of the mulch layer. 

Nonetheless, a deep mulch layer will also serve as a wind break for your seedling., so with that in mind you could look at your plantings as taking place at the base of a pit  walls all around..

Trench Mulching, Pit Composting, Anaerobic Composting...Honey Holing: call it what you will -- it works

Trench Mulching, Pit Composting, Anaerobic Composting...Honey Holing: call it what you will -- it works.

Burying rubbish may be a crude way to garden but I find that it suits my lifestyle. It's simple. Little exertion is required. And it's all done UNDERGROUND -- so, in that sense, it's like an offering to the critters of the soil.

A sacrament.

Despite my many efforts at studying the manly art of composting -- that is the standard layer-it-and-turn-it aerobic mode of composting -- I  can't tune in. Rot is rot and while the route you choose will require different soil biota, in the end you are gonna arrive more or less with the same product.

You may arrive sooner if you toss and turn your rubbish to aerate it and heat it up -- but as I always say I generally prefer to pass my produce through the back end of the vertebrate before it touches the dirt.

I'm more of a manure man.

Of course manures can burn your plants so you need to dilute them. I also discovered that if I want my excrement supply to go a long way,  spreading it atop the soil is wasteful of good poo.

So I mix n'match and pit mulch my supplies. 

I was doing some research on this preference of mine and realised that I was inadvertently ticking a  few boxes en route. 

First of all, I'm gardening on sand so in trying to add a lot of carbon to my underground I'm doing so with the presumption that any pit or trench is sure to be porous. That allows me to explore recipes for concoctions that may be more intense than is the norm. I mean any pit is sure to be less self contained. 

It surely 'leaks'.

I'm also digging holes with worm numbers in mind. In my logic I'm building feeding stations -- sort of like neighborhood takeaways --  for earthworms. They're my mentors.

However, after reading up on compost tea and being a cook at heart I marinate my rubbish before burying it.

Practice makes perfect in this. Routine rules. 

I throw newspapers and other paper products into my wheelbarrow and drown them in water. I leave them to soak for a few hours or a day or so before pulling the pages apart. I then throw in some manure and grass clippings, twigs, and whatever other stuff  then mix all that up with the torn papers. I then immerse this medley in a water top up before leaving the brew stand for at least 5 days, wobbling the wheelbarrow every day to agitate the mix (as you do with compost tea). 

For me it's like making bread. It's all about 'feel'. Grass clippings are such a good blending medium that the analogy with baking is  useful. Just imagine you'll be creating loaves for burial.

After the marinade runs its course, I dig myself a few honey holes -- trenches-- no more than forearm deep, slip on a pair of latex gloves and stuff the mix into the holes. I then ram it down with a shovel, cover with a dressing of soil and mulch before marking the spot with a flagged stick.

Voila!

If I have old bones or shellfish shells or dead cane toads...they go into the bottom of the hole first. That way my dogs noses don't usually register the presence of the underground larder(esp with all that muck on top).

Anytime I hand water the garden I make sure I direct spray at these holes by squirting at the base of their markers. I give them a good soak not only in order to foster the composting process, but the carbon content is gonna be moisture retentive.

So far so good. I've been trench rotting like this for some time but have been fiddling with my methodology. Past experiments -- primarily of rolled up newspapers and twigs rammed vertically into the earth with a manure dressing -- have been successful exercise in creating sponge stations. All I've done since is integrate my primary mulch medium -- grass clippings -- into the process and explored marinades with compost tea in mind.

So it's more about  breeding bacteria. 

I'll review my practices after a few months of rot once I've had the opportunity to explore breakdown in situ and monitor neighborhood worm numbers. I'll also assess local plant growth. 

I'm digging holes where I can fit them in among already existing plantings. So I'm trying not to damage any root systems directly by my construction work or enriched stuffing. But already, as a focused use of manures, I'm way ahead.Previously spreading manures atop the soil was wasteful as even with the mulch covering break down was desultory. This way I'm getting the stuff underground  without turning over the whole bed.

After the rain + >3 years of effort making soil out of beach sand...Getting there.

Would you believe we are officially in Drought and our water usage is down 40% compared to last Summer -- a wet one -- but the plants live! That's the hobby, you see:Making the best of soil and climate...and scrounging mulch. 

But for me the key inspiration has been the Greek and Italian formatted veg backyards of Inner city Melbourne. 

You want to learn horticulture? Then go rent in Brunswick or Northcote or Preston or Thornbury or Clifton Hill in the seventies and take on the lessons of a gentrification occupancy . 

What's missing is cement, right? But hey, I got figs...you gotta have figs.

If you can garden in beach sand you can garden anywhere.

After three and a half years of seriously collecting mulch materials I suspect that I now have the beginnings of a garden.

This change has kicked in because I now have dirt where once sand ruled. 

At some time over the past 6-8 months this qualitative  metamorphosis kicked in. Now, at the end of a very dry Summer -- when we are still officially in  drought -- I can dig  my fingers into the dirt and grasp a rich loam.

And I got critters ++++ in my dirt. Worms especially -- when once upon a time there were none known to roam. 

I think  worm activity rules the quality of the underfoot establishment and I guess I can now call myself a vermiculturist.

Feeding my soil takes a lot of effort. How many times have I carted lawn clippings from my front nature strip to the outback patches? Layer upon layer -- a recipe  enriched by collected newspapers and manures, a bit of blood and bone, twigs and sweat. 

Constantly spreading the green stuff, hunting down any more carbon materials I could get my hands on, fretting over soil quality and irrigation options.

So I guess it took me 3 years to graduate.  

The disconcerting thing is that having spent so much of my energy focusing on creating soil from sand I only now begin to address the question of growing plants better in it.  Maybe now I can begin to look at pH  issues and some of the other horticultural parameters that make for  good cropping. 

But what a great adventure it has been.  (Read about it here.)  If you can garden in beach sand you can garden anywhere.

En route I have to say that the gardening literature was not all that helpful. So much of what I've done has been trial and error. Most of it presumes that you start with dirt and not sterile granules devoid of an active biology. And the irrigation handbooks simply have no concept of how porous my untreated sand is...still is. 

Now my garden is 'perched' atop of sand like a Fraser Island lake. The difference is that my 'garden' isn't impermeable. It just slows down the water as it diffuses through the soil long enough to foster the makings of a garden. I suspect that without the addition of clay  it will remain very permeable. So my interest is in seeing how much I can do in way of soil improvement with organic matter alone. My working hypothesis is that big bits of organic matter -- my favorite being rolled up newspapers -- act like sponges, holding onto more moisture than the surrounding soil. 

This is my number one principle -- a principle that underlies my use of clay pot irrigation. Indeed, I guess I  have added clay to my soil -- but in the form of  buried flower pots.

Sometime this year I'll write up my experience in as a sort of DIY manual for those who may be interested in  a few hints for gardening on sand.

But outside of all that I gotta say that my main inspiration--aside from local Wallum ecology --  has been the rain harvesting work of Brad Lancaster and the literature on vermiculture, especially David Murphy's wonderful book , Organic Growing With Worms.  As the irrepressible Peter Cundall writes in regard to it:

"This is an amazing, inspiring book..it should be on the bookshelf of every farmer, gardener, conservationist, scientist or anyone who comprehends the environmental dangers now threatening all life forms on earth."

How to honeyhole.

After exploring trench mulching a lot in  my garden I decided to adopt some of the principles that govern honeyholes and fertility trenches.

The main variation from my past practices are:

• tear up the newspaper and cardboard
• mix it with green mulch and manure 
• add water (even urine!) to the mix
• let it marinate
• ram the mix into the honeyhole

This is still an experiment.

1. Honeyholes should be standard depth and diameter. In my established garden I keep them to a forearm's depth. 
2. Honeyholes' location should always be marked.

When positioning your honeyhole remember that its contents may be a tad strong for some nearby plants. So remember: Location. Location. Location.

If creating new beds, long trenches would be more apt.

When watering the garden, be sure to always hose your honeyholes so that they absorb more water for slower local distribution. 

A honeyhole  is a pulpy version of a slow watering terracotta pot irrigator...and my presumption is that any fertilising is spread by the creatures of the soil especially worms. I'm thinking that juxtaposing terracotta pot irrigation with honeyholes makes a lot of gardening sense --esp on my sandy soils

Afterthoughts

I've found that my garden takes in moisture unevenly. This is a product of how much carbon matter is in my sandy soils...but other factors come into play.

Mulch can shield the underlying soil from getting wet...especially if precipitation is often light. While using terracotta pots for irrigation will get regular  moisture below that layer , the pots'  seepage envelope  can only reach so far.

The honeyholes serve as supplementary irrigators as their carbon/cellulose content hold moisture and their vertical alignment ferry moisture below the mulch layer. They are like so many wells. 

If I had planning options I'd alternate terracotta pots with honeyholes and let the worms work out their daily lifestyle. But as much vermiculture proves, a good worm colony will spread the fertility everywhere they go -- moving carbon about like dodgen cars. 

My other experiments with additions -- such as laying down rolled up newspaper and logs on top of my soil, in hugelkultur fashion -- have not been very successful. The cellulose needs to be buried, encased in soils and its biota. 

So these little mine shafts --adapted from my trench mulching experiments -- may suit my conditions. Filling them is like stuffing cannoli. 

 But a few question remain:

1. How many freshly made honeyholes/how far apart can I insert in the one garden bed?
2. How close can I locate a honeyhole to a growing plan or a freshly planted seedling?
3. What happens to the hole once its contents has rotted down? Do I refill the space with more 'honey' or with the soils I initially  set aside -- and dig a fresh hole elsewhere? 

•  Read more about terracotta pots for irrigation

The Honey Hole and the Fertility Trench

I've written before about my penchant to trench mulch by burying stuff.

Dig a narrow hole. Throw stuff in and scatter mulch over.

The 'stuff' can be anything from kitchen scraps, junk mail, manures..to  dead frozen Cane Toads.

My garden is a cemetery for the rotting dead.

So I was looking at my soil and was thinking I needed to manure this up. My habit had been manure teas and dispersal of mixes like Blood and Bone. Cow and horse manures always came with a weed tax.

But I suddenly thought. "What if I buried these manures deep, away from ready seeding?"

So I came back to the hole option. Did some homework and found I wasn't alone because the term for this is Honey Hole or Fertility Trenches.

"Before fertilizer became available for sale in bags, people came up with interesting ways to stash away nutrients in the soil. Some Native American tribes regarded the burying of a fish beneath each corn seed as a spiritual necessity, and early peach growers in Georgia are said to have buried an old leather boot at the bottom of planting holes. In both cases, these traditions created hidden caches of bioactive nutrients that were slowly released as the materials degraded, which is part of what happens when you make compost in a Honey Hole. We don’t recommend planting right on top of a Honey Hole, mostly because it’s filled with a more massive amount of active organic matter compared to a fish or a shoe. In addition, planting in a Honey Hole would compromise its secondary function as a reservoir for moisture when there is little water to be had." [The Complete Compost Gardening Guide by Barbara Pleasant and Deborah L. Martin ]

Honey Holing isn't rocket science. It works no matter what you throw down the hole because the gains are  not just about adding nutrients. Water entering these trenches slowly percolates an enriched brew into the nearby root zone.  But as  Pleasant and Martin warn,

"Do think things through before using a Honey Hole as a depository for a glut of high-nitrogen manure, and use restraint should you decide to activate the mix with a high-nitrogen meal. Plant roots that wander into a moist environment that’s rich in nutrients may suffer damage from chemical overload, or frenzied microorganisms may mistake them for dead and eat them for lunch."

Trench mulching like this has formatted much of my activity although I've often strayed from my focus. Become eclectic.  I guess I'm engaging in some renewal with re-commitment in mind.

Originally I relied on cardboard and newspapers -- I called them junk mail sponges -- because I was  engineering moisture reservoirs. Now I'm hoping to integrate more manures into the beds this way.  

Another approach, offered by  Owen Geiger,  is to  service the trenches with wood chips.

This ingenious system rapidly converts wood chips into large quantities of fertile topsoil filled with earthworms and beneficial fungi and microorganisms.

Indeed I use the paths  between the garden beds like this: as fertility trench gullies

En route I also laid both small logs  and rolled up newspapers directly onto the beds and green mulched over them. The problem I've found with this approach is that I lost the sponge water reservoir properties that vertical mulching offered me.

So I'm back Honey Holing...this time with manure at the bottom of the honey hole.

Dig a hole. Fill her up.

Frangipani vegetable gardening

It's night time -- around 1 am -- and I've been outback dipping my hands in soil.

I pull  back the lawn clipping mulch, move aside any crusty newspaper dregs or wood bits and grab the soil underneath, copping a feel.

Most handfuls were cool and slightly moist. Some were not: dry and pithy. Indeed they were warm to the touch. By torchlight I could see plenty of  critter activity in the dirt.Very pleasing it was that I now have dirt instead of sand --  sand spit sand. Hellalujah! Some of my worms are so big I could pass them off as eels.

Why some spots should be so dry is confusing. I suspect that not all parts of my beds have received the same attention...and not all my beds have joined the orchestra. 

The frustration of relying on lawn clippings as I do for my primary input  is that desiccated grass can be either matty and gluggy or act almost like a layer of dust. (self seeded weeds don't bother me).

Today it is dusty.

Given that we have not had a good drenching rain for some time and the winds have been relentless, all my grass mulch is pithy and dust like. Like dandruff. Obviously it allows breath to the underneath, but any light showering merely wets the mulch surface and there is little penetration.

So hand hosing is important: gardening on sand you need to frequently quench.

Rule of thumb for sSand gardening: water often. 

Unfortunately I can't see what else I can do to improve things. My garden suffered this Summer from lack of shade. This was partly due to the fact that I had to pull down my trellis with its choko overgrowths because of storm damage to its structure.

I was premature. I shoulda rebuilt.

I am now concentrating  my shade wishes on the frangipanis I've planted...but the aren't all that tall...yet.

Frangipani's you ask? Why frangipanis? You can't eat frangipanis! 

I grow em...

• because they grow very well here in sand.
• because they are easy to strike from cuttings
• because they're deciduous: summer shade/winter sunlight underneath
• because they are ridiculously easy to trim and shape, even espalier
• because their roots aren't 'invasive'
• because they  produce gorgeous flowers
• because they can be engineered for different shading effects
• because...all things considered, they are so darn obedient

A garden trimmed in frangipani! Delightful. A whiff of Bali.

But since planting the frangipanis -- I have at least 20 in situ-- I've realized my scheduling mistake and have planted pawpaws in the beds, and yesterday, some Katuk/Sweet Leaf bushes.

These other trees grow faster than frangipanis and I want to harness their shade.

I'm also planting my seedlings closer together  around my terracotta irrigation pots. I can now get away with the crowding as the pots deliver regular moisture .

Love them pots. Saved my bacon.

They function better when shaded by the growth they service.

But I'm thinking that I'll plant out even more aggressively around the perimeter of my vegetable beds by deploying drought tolerant species like sunjewels-- Portulaca grandiflora -- which happen to also be edible ; and Warragal/ New Zealand Spinach  which grows on the shoreline here. 

Both love these sandy soils. These sunjewels grow better than standard edible Portulaca so why not colour up my garden edges?

So I'm gonna aggressively plant out the beds. I had used sweet potato previously towards that end but harvesting the spuds disrupts the soil around the other plants I have growing, so my sweet potatoes now are exiled to their own sweet potato  grow zones.

Note to self: gotta work out how to give my sweet spuds more water.

Because my paths --such as they are -- act, with their plastic underlay, like gutters, the edges to the beds attract  growth. Wild Rocket esp loves that posey. 

I'm thinking that there's an irony that had not registered fully with me: the more stuff I plant the more I get a microclimate going, more things happening, more relationships.Even if I plant 'anything' I'm engineering the ecology. I can always replace it later if I need the space.

To begin with -- 3 + years ago -- I had such a infertile environment that growing anything was almost impossible. Now that I've got myself bona fide 'soil' ....well, I'm upping the anti.

I am also thinking through the fact that if I collect logs and lay them on top of the soil I got more vigorous growth nearby  because the logs supply both shade, are cooler and retain moisture -- esp in these sandy soils. I had been burying logs and branches in  Hugelkultur mode, but I'm really getting more out of my wood inputs by simply laying big bits on top of the soil. No doubt rocks would be better, but here there are none except for the pumicestone that flats onto the beaches. I've experimented with burying flat china soup  bowls in the soil so that they hold moisture at depth. Weird concept I know, but I'm monitor the impact on local growth.I happen to have the bowls -- and they're cheap enough, so I thought: why not? It's a crude variation on a wicking bed

I'm not into the Permaculture preference for fruits. My sand was so sterile that growing exotic fruits was difficult. Lemon and Mulberry does well but anything else  struggles: banana, fig, pawpaw, tamarillo... In the same mode are tubers: as yet there isn't the loam depth for the plants  to  dig themselves deeper into the soil. Theres' nothing down there worth feeding on.

So it still is experimental horticulture. Fiddling with the variables. 

I hope my next break through is with ground cover veges, like cucumbers. I'm not quite there but since I have been so successful with zucchini I reckon I'm on a roll. Slowly the capsicum family is settling in. Still a tad undernourished.  But the quality of each crop is improving. All over I'm now  growing non climbing snake beans...and I'm gonna try Winged Beans again some time as I love eating those.

I've also realized that my transition species may be ramblers and trailing plants because they travel across the beds looking for nutrients rather than dive deep.  Comfrey here soon dies away because it gets put off by the lack of stuff deep below.

What the garden needs is a heavy rain period which would push the activity in the soil along. A catalyst. Things are surviving but aren't really thriving because of the low moisture quotient. I'm getting a feed from this soil but the veg quality isn't good across all species I grow and harvest.

My patch only really thrives  when I see the toadstools shoot skyward...and I haven't seen such fungi for some time...except on shaded spots next to my pots, the toadstools raise their umbrella heads.

Carbon adventures by the sea : making soil and holding water

This last week I had to dig a hole in the backyard, under what passes as 'lawn'. The exercise proved a shock.

The slim layer of crisp grasses on top gave way to pure sand  all the way down. The colour was yellow with only a slight greying at the surface.

Such is the original 'soil' in my property. It's was never dirt, but sand. Rediscovering that fact was a shock. 

Coming up next month we will have been  here three years -- and in that period I've invested a lot of work making soil out of this sand. I've buried and laid down anything organic I could get my hands on. 

My primary offerings have been grass clippings and junk mail.  A little manure. Tree branches. Cuttings. Leaves.  A little seaweed. Blood and bone occasionally.

Over the past year the ridgy didge stuff  consolidated and I started getting a lot of loam underneath. Now, after  almost two months without good rain, I  still have thriving vegetables because I've got the soil to grow and moisturise them and have had plenty of grass clippings to blanket the beds and tuck them in.

The dirt and I have reached a qualitatively new threshold in our relationship which can only  deepen.

And I think that's my greatest discovery: I farm soil. I'm not so much gardening as celebrating and nurturing dirt. My great achievement aren't 'any' vegetables but that I started from scratch and DIY'ed the loam.

What I grow in this medium I've created  is  a secondary question.

The humbling thing is that while I know what I did, I really don't know how it all happened. My worm level is still pretty poor, but when I dig my hand into a bed there is  a lot of life there. ..and the darker this stuff -- the farther away from the sandy yellow -- the more water it holds. 

None of these beds have been turned over. It has all been a process of throwing stuff on top of other stuff. 

Lasagne -- but without a recipe.

How far I have come in this quest is clear from the shallow soil depths in those garden places where my impact & I still have  a long way to go. 

The irony may indeed be that as well as covering the soil -- sheet and trench mulching it with whatever organic matter I can collect -- maybe I should sow perennial and annual grasses  in it. I've found that lemongrass isn't always reliable in sand,  so maybe I should go looking for some native grasses to plant in those patches I have earmarked for ramblers,sweet potato,   pawpaw and bananas. 

I'm located on a sand spit by the sea and my inspiration has to be sourced in local ecology -- among the sand beds and swamps.  I've colonised with legumes -- Madagascar Bean -- and planted what may grow in these spots rather than get precious about them so that they demand too much of my collected mulches. 

I've found that gardens beds -- the way I make 'em anyway-- are mulch hungry --and always seem to be starving, so that it becomes a sort of 'take-from-Peter-to-pay-Paul' sort of thing.

There's never enough mulch to go around. 

Permacuture limits

I don't consider myself a permaculturalist although I've read the literature and have been  greatly influenced by that perspective. But what strikes me is that there is  not many references available for folk who garden on sand dunes like I do.

Dry land farming, yes.  Degraded soils.  But sand dune gardening...? 

In my township people deal with the issue by buying and shipping in topsoil and fill. My front garden soil was 'purchased' that way by a previous resident. The few in my neighborhood who did otherwise --DIY-- did it by collecting seaweed (before a government department cracked down on them). 

When I considered my options I decided I'd use whatever I could lay my hands on.

And that's the point: my primary focus wasn't any design fandango but soil creation. And I've done it. I am a Dirt Deity.

In getting here my major inspiration has been the work of Brad Lancaster because harvesting  water and holding onto it has been my main focus. That quest, rather than some other outlook, has forced me to focus on carbonising my sand  (which turned it into soil).

Sandy soils don't hold water. Dirt does.

I've had other gardens before and grown many a veg -- but always in rather benign conditions (and with clay!).

Here the cultivation may have been  a hard ask but it  taught me heaps about dirt such that I defer to the wonder and complexity of the earth at my feet. 

Gone potty: irrigating with terracotta pots and hand watering

My many experiments in irrigating my garden  are proving fruitful. 

When I say 'irrigating' I mean keeping the water up to vegetables so that they don't die.

I'm not asking much.

Pursuant of that I've engineered a lot of  creative use of mulch.  So now -- even though we have seen so little rain for the past two dry months -- I'm still harvesting vegetables.

This year I have been fortunate in that my supply of grass clippings has been good and the garden never ran out of a top blanket of the stuff.

The grass later breaks down and creates and enriches my soil...

Combine that with my heavy papering and burying of branches earlier in the year --mulching with anything I could get -- and I've been able to hold onto more H2O than in  past dry spells.

Nonetheless, the garden is still thirsty. 

I have a Leeaky hose system embedded as my primary irrigation network but after using it occasionally for the past two years  I'm finding that the method doesn't suit my sandy soil nor my erratic lifestyle.  I may be able to wet soil when the system is turned on and  'leaking' into the beds -- but when it's not -- and  my system isn't in routine use --  the beds dry out and the plants wilt.

So I've tended to rely on hand watering especially as by visiting each plant with a douse from the hose I get to assess its state of health.  

I like hand watering. It's my  commune-with-nature moment almost on a daily basis. 

Clay Pottery

For some of  those places I didn't have the Leeaky system installed I embedded terracotta pots ( I used wine coolers I bought cheap at Op shops). 

Then a few months back, as an experiment,  I moved my coolers/pots to four of  my primary beds, placed them closer together and made sure I kept them topped up with water. 

I also stopped using  the Leeaky system to irrigate these beds.I only hand watered them as required and topped up the pots.

The results were impressive. Plant growth   was better in these pot watered beds than in others.

If you do your homework, the stats for  Unglazed Pot Irrigation are impressive. Constant seepage with water savings of 50-70% is a feasible option.

So with that experience behind me, I've decided to convert my garden to clay pot irrigation.

Going Potty

From  one of the major hardware chains I purchased 19 cm terracotta pots for $2 each. I plugged the drainage holes by gluing tile offcuts   to the pot base. At the local tip I  got  white tiles to sit across the pot rim. (My wife does mosaics and there are always plenty of tiles to hand so we're a tile-acquisitive household).

The whiteness of the tile gloss reflects heat away from the pot surface and the slight over -hang shades the pot and soil underneath. Tiles are also heavier than plates and bigger tiles are more difficult for crows and other inquisitive or cumbersome critters to shift to the side or flip.

There are any number of online DIY methods to create these 'Ollas' but I've opted with  the simple + easy + cheap. 

Each pot holds 2.5 litres of water which is a generous aquatic reserve every few centimetres. While there is literature on how best to distance the pots from one another -- I've opted to position and bury by experimentation and impulse. The pots are so cheap to buy and adapt to irrigation purposes that I should be able to saturate my beds as I see fit. They're also  like caravans: you can move 'em about the countryside to different parks.

Remember I like hand watering so I don't mind the business of  having to top up 30, 40 or whatever number of  pots as a gardening task. And by hand watering I'm also very conscious of how much water I'm using to keep the garden productive.

Gardening essentials and adventures in shade

Now that the rains have come -- and decided to stay -- the garden that was suffering so much is now very much alive.

My windsocks, having been shredded  by the fury of the Summer storms, had to be replaced. But this time around I'm older and wiser in way of windsock management.

Here's a tip: fly your socks at the end of a detachable flexible rod -- like an old fishing pole and keep the tail free of any where it could  catch. If there's a snag, the sock will find it.  So fly em high with as much clearance you can engineer. And have it so you can detach the rod without having to mount a major limbing expedition. 

But underneath... ah, underneath... the joys of the wet!

The image above shows how my junk mailery is registering. These rolls of newspaper were laid to rest in the garden only a few months back and the rotting and rooting evident in the image tells us a lot about what newspaper logs  can do when you give them the mulching/ Hugelkultur  nod.

I am on a winner. There is  so much activity and biological excitement under foot that the garden  seems ready to wet itself despite the rain.

I found a worm today where a few months back, only sand ruled. That's one helluva a sign. Worms. They don't come easy on beach sand.

Adventures in shade I -- Frangipanis

The sharp turn to verdancy has encouraged my wandering mind. When part of my trellis  collapsed in the big blows in January I began to rethink my dependency on it as a shade and climber frame...

18 months ago I built a bamboo trellis to shade my vegetables during the Summer heat.

I grew Choko vines over it and it worked a treat as the veg underneath were protected from the worst of the sun's rays and heat.

But this year the Choko vines weren't vigorous because of the dry conditions and I didn't get much shade coverage at all.I'd entered a vicious circle...

Then Ex Cyc Oswald blew parts of my trellis  down....

The grape vine I planted under it is slow to grow ...and my beans have been tardy in climbing skyward.

But I'm wondering -- given that deciduous trees aren't common  in the sub tropics -- whether I can secure my shading needs by growing Frangipanis at intervals in my garden beds.

• Cut them back in the cooler months (Frangipanis are so easy to manage. Just break them to shape and height  with your hands or asharp knife.)
• Grow creepers over them
• Frangipanis are so easy to strike and any number could be cultivated. 
• Frangipanis grow really well here on the Moreton Bay coast because they'll thrive in the sandy conditions. Other local tree species that tolerate the sand -- eg: melaleucas and such -- put out their own toxins or grow too big.
• Frangipanis are drought resistant

I suspect that a Frangipani root system isn't invasive ..and a vegetable garden framed by frangipanis  in flower would be visually stunning.Imagine the play of colours. You'd be able to control shade levels by simply snapping off branches here and there.

The only drawback -- which may be a plus -- is that they are slow growing. But even when small they'll shade, and even when small I should be able to grow stuff on them especially during those months that the branches are leafless.

My partner came back from Bali recently singing the praises of the Frangipanis there and it got me thinking ....What else can you do with this tree besides look at it and smell it?

Is there a downside?

• More info on Plumeria

If I harvested  tall franchipani branches I could initially use them as garden stakes which may then root -- as happens with mulberry and bamboo cuttings.  Around here harvesting an array of frangipani colours and stems is as easy as visiting your neighbours and asking for a snip.Its' like going shopping for colour patterns and flower shapes.

Consequently I have bordered my vegetable garden -- my Summer 'Shade' garden -- with frangipanis and will use my trellis while I wait for them to grow.  The functional utility of these frangipanis may be still a question -- but hey! with an arbour of sweet smelling luscious flowering trees  to look forward to, spending time among the growing vegetables will be even more satisfying. 

Adventures in shade I I -- A Bush House.

I suspect that many may not know what a bush house is. It isn't 'a' house in 'the' bush. A bush house is a shade house/fernery that was very popular in Australia up until the Second World  War.

At their most popular between 1880s and the 1930s, towards the end of the 19th century, sawn timber structures of lattice or trellis work displaced more rudimentary rustic construction. As late as the 1950, R.G. Edwards considered the bush-house to be the only truly original Australian contribution to gardening.[Sim, Jean C. (2002)  Oxford Companion to Australian Gardens. ]

There is a handy gallery of shade house images from the Qld State library . The lattice work in most of the structures is very intricate but my  interest is  primarily on the "more rudimentary rustic construction" like this one below.

So I've collected a lot of odd timber and metal bits from around the yard and built myself the frame of a bush house. Supplemented with collected tree branches and trunks, my rustic version is now coming together as a centre piece among clambering vegetables.

It's floor will be loose stones -- blue metal in fact -- and I'm gonna rig up  the graden hose for cooling off outdoor showering on hot days.  A choko and other creepers will  soften its rudimentary construction and turn it rustic -- and I'll add a scented creeper for sensual effect. 

Underneath I'll sit myself down  in the shade to watch the garden grow -- for now, sweet potatoes, rambling zuchinis, pumpkins and cucumbers -- while I sip tea and contemplate existence.