The Earth Does Not Belong To Us - We Belong To The Earth

--My back is sore from hauling compost material.  Pulled a very important muscle.  Resting and reading up on companion planting and drawing mind maps to familiarise my self with the relationships between plants.  Horticulture is awesome.

Compost Vol. 2

NELSON MANDELA DAY. Beautiful sunny day.

Turning the material...

That's bloody hard work, right there

What We Did

A good cup of tea before we start ANYthing

Harvesting wood from pruning of coral trees.  Useful stuff!  Coral trees (erythrina lysistemon/caffra) are indigenous fast-growing and hardy leguminous (and therefore nitrogen fixing) trees.  Plant the stumps as a fence and they will start to root - a brilliant natural fence that you can easily maintain.  

The smaller branches we cut up to line our first pathways.  They break down pretty fast - see below

Using branches of coral tree to start terracing bottom of garden to ‘catch’ the soil

Pathways took a while to find.  Lots of looking and measuring to find gradient, and then slowly moving over the ground until gradually the beds showed their future selves

Walking-in of paths.  A good pair of Wellies after 2 day’s rain will do the trick

Using coral tree branches for pathways

Our muscle man Tim beginning with the first of the beds…

…using raw materials found on site - coral tree branches, rocks and stones dug up, cuttings and prunings as well as leaves raked up from main gardens above site

Taking shape!

Start Somewhere, Do Something

It's winter and there's not much rain.  The soil profile of this site is erratic - building rubble mixed with lovely soil, and in between there are large stones and even bigger rocks: the remains of the creation of the main gardens above the boundary wall that have gradually been dumped over into this, the fire-break zone.  Digging around to find out what's going on beneath the surface is time-consuming, but in some parts of the site quite necessary.  But we're trying to disturb the soil as little as possible in the effort to keep it from sliding off the very steep slope.  The 'weeds' tell us where the soil is good, so we've decided to start making beds in places where they occur.  We used the concept of a No-Dig Bed when making these beds, except we're not planting anything yet.  We're just adding to the ground to begin building raised beds and terraces, as well as to keep the weeds down and prevent moisture loss:

Newspaper in the creation of the shape of the beds, with a narrow pathway in between...

..topped with a mixture of green leaves from the main gardens and a bit of manure, and then dead, dry grass we've sourced from the surrounding neighbourhood.  People here just throw their garden refuse into the bushes...

..all topped off with more dead, dried leaves.  This we'll leave for a while to rot and break down on its own

Compost Vol. 1

The magic stuff - a bag of dry cow dung.  Thanks KFC!

A good anaerobic compost heap should be at least 1m long x 1m high...

...and covered properly

Earthworms - check!

The new Bin

A drill, an ice cream container and an old t-shirt

testing the water flow...

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Our mate Ang lying on the couch doing absolutely bloody nothing.  She did accompany us on our cow-dung scouting mission however.  I don’t think she really REALLY expected us to actually find anything.  We found a herd of 60 on a friend’s farm.  There was plenty of poo.  It was wonderful.  She probably still thinks we are out of our cotton-picking minds

Let's Start At The Very Beginning

The site…in the fire-break zone/wildlife corridor below the boundary wall of our property, on a steep gradient slanting down to the beautiful river