Andrew Treloar's personal website

My Garden

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Vegetables	Fruit and Berries	Nuts	Chooks

In our family, I am largely responsible for the back garden (which produces most of the fruit, berries and vegetables). Now that the boys have grown up the back garden has been reshaped from a productive+play area to just productivity (until Iris starts walking, at least - that is the only reason the plum tree hasn't been taken out). So, I'm progressively working through a plan to convert the back garden into more of a permaculture setup.

In addition to the back garden, Dawn has allowed me to sneak a few edibles into the front garden. This includes one of the pomegranates, two espaliered apples, the two cherries, a nectarine, the blueberry bushes, 15 asparagus plants and about 15 rhubarb. Hardly anything, really.

Vegetables

After a major rework over January and July of 2017, the vegetable garden is now made up of six raised beds, made out of redgum sleepers. Each bed has the external dimensions of 0.4m high, 1.20m wide and 4.8m long. As the sleepers are 75mm think, the internal area is 4.8 sq.m, and the total areable area is c. 29 sq.m. In summer this produces most of the vegetables we need. I'm still working on getting the succession planting right for winter (although the trick seems to be to plant brassicas much earlier than one can believe, in February!), and it still gets a bit too cold in Melbourne for things to do well in the main winter months. In addition, the sun drops down behind trees to the north so about half of the garden bed (which runs East-West) is in shadow for much of the winter.

Each zone of the vegetable garden is used for compatible plants for a single year. This plant group is then moved to the next bed along for the following year. This both reduces pest buildup (as part of our commitment to organic gardening), and enables plants to be matched with the right nutrient levels (which change over time - the acid levels build up and need to be reset with lime). In addition, as I am now introducing a potato bed into the rotation (and potatoes are Solanaceae as are tomatoes) I need to keep the gap between the potato bed and tomato bed as wide as possible. The resulting table below is based on the ideas of Peter Cundall, the now retired host of Gardening Australia on the ABC. The left-hand end of the table is the East end of the garden, the right-hand end of the table is the West.

	Bed 1	Bed 2	Bed 3	Bed 4	Bed 5	Bed 6
Current year	Early Spring: Dig in Green Manure Late Spring: Tomatoes, Capsicums, Basil Autumn: Add lime, Mulch	All Year: Alliums (Onions/Garlic/Leeks)	Spring: Plant Peas, Beans Summer/Autumn: Plant Brassicas (Cauliflower, Cabbage, Brussel Sprouts)	Spring: Potatoes	Spring: Sweetcorn, Cucurbits (cucumbers, squash, zuccini) Autumn: Salad vegetables	All year: Root Crops and Asian Vegetables Autumn: Green Manure
Next year	All year: Root Crops and Asian Vegetables Autumn: Green Manure	Early Spring: Dig in Green Manure Late Spring: Tomatoes, Capsicums, Basil Autumn: Add lime, Mulch	All Year: Alliums (Onions/Garlic/Leeks)	Spring: Plant Peas, Beans Summer/Autumn: Plant Brassicas (Cauliflower, Cabbage, Brussel Sprouts)	Spring: Potatoes	Spring: Sweetcorn, Cucurbits (cucumbers, squash, zuccini) Autumn: Salad vegetables

Fruit and berries

The current inventory of 18 fruit trees is as follows:

Apples

Triple graft - Jonathan/Golden Delicious/Granny Smith (have pruned hard this year, hoping to convert to espalier)

Duke of Clarence - dwarf rootstock, espaliered

Gala “Trixie” Miniature - dwarf rootstock, espaliered

Pink Lady “Trixie” Miniature - dwarf rootstock, espaliered

Apricot (Started out as triple graft - Moorpark/Moorpark Early/Trevatt, but the last two grafted branches have died, so it's now just a Moorpark. I'm waiting for that branch to also die before I pull it out and start again)
Cherry

Trixzie Cherree White
Trixzie Cherree Black

Lemon (Eureka)
Lime
Mandarine (Imperial)
Nectarines

Goldmine*2
Arctic Ice

Orange (unknown variety, but probably Poor Man's)
Peach (Anzac)
Plum (unknown variety)
Pomegranate (two, unknown varieties)

The berry inventory is:

14 linear metres of Raspberries
5 Blueberry bushes
A Boysenberry and a Youngberry
14 Strawberry plants (mix of Temptation and Red Gauntlet, to spread out the harvest)

Nuts

Recently, we've branched out into a small nuttery - three hazelnuts (needed because of the Byzantine complexities of hazelnut cross-pollination - A pollinates B, but B won't pollinate A, so you need C which might be pollinated by B and if you are really lucky will then pollinate A). We've gone for:

White American
Cosford
Red Avelline

and I have also just planted a self-pollinating Almond.

I'd love to have a walnut, but they get too big and I don't have space.

Chooks

The family poultry collective currently consists of six hens (or 'chooks' in Australian English):

We also normally have a Welsumer and sometimes an Ancona , but our flock is currently large enough. We won't add any more chooks until the numbers drop a bit lower. We can then introduce the new girls in one go. It only disrupts the pecking order once and makes it easier for the new arrivals.

Last modified:Thursday, 28-Sep-2017 14:56:46 AEST