The answer lies in the soil

Perhaps some readers will recognise the title as being the catchphrase of Arthur Fallowfield the famous West Country character from Beyond Our Ken.  I was thinking of this today as I prepared a new bed for some gladioli we have acquired for Summer colour


My blogging friend Denis has commented  a few times about the rocky nature of Carwoola.  This  proves he is familiar with the area.  His observations form the basis of my classification of the soils of our garden.  This has three elements, based on the tool one uses first when starting to garden in an area.
  1. Crowbar country: this is most of the area.  Once the inch of grass and topsoil has been penetrated the next step is to get the 2m long crowbar into the revealed shale.  Some clay is also evident and that, together with compost and what soil is able to be gathered from the surface becomes the basis of the bed.  No worms or other life visible until they come in with the compost.
  2. Mattock Meadows: Probably this stuff has been 'disturbed' by building work or earlier attempts to form a garden.There is some possibility of getting the blade of a mattock between the stones and the biggest ones are a bit bigger than fist sized.  A few worms (possibly Lumbricoides ferrocaput) are encountered.  After a first go with the mattock a fork can generally be used to sort out something that with a little compost becomes a suitable habitat for vegetation other than cactus or spinifex. 
  3. Fork farming: This is pretty much restricted to the vegetable garden. Nice friable soil, at least 15cm deep.  While it is in a gully and may thus reflect water run off, we suspect that it arrived in several trucks several years ago.  Lots of worms!
My efforts today were in section 2.  I worked out that I removed 30 litres of rocks from the 4 square metres that I worked over.  We then added about 60 litres of compost which should assist the 4 worms I came across to get happy.  (The rocks will not be wasted: we gather them together
 and use them to fill in potholes in the drive!)

On a more relaxed note here are a couple of images from the vegetable garden (on type 3 soil).  We have enough asparagus to share with friends.
Our broad beans are also doing well, with many flowers.
I was interested to see that as well as the expected bees some ants and a couple of 'blue' butterflies appeared to be participating in the pollination frolics.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Insects from pine trees

Image
This afternoon (13/1/2015) we were looking out of our sunroom and noticed a strange bit of mist.  On getting my binoculars on the case I found it to be a cloud of tens of thousand of insects.  They appeared with naked eye to be flying away, but with binoculars I thought they were circling. Here are some images In the second one it may be possible to see there are two streams coming from the top of each tree. There was a loud buzzing noise but that could just be several thousand wings. Earlier in the day Frances had been to some nearby willows and they were infested with many little black soft bodied insects.  Perhaps they shifted to the pines and were swarming? Help!! Any information welcome. A colleague, from Wamboin, had noticed a similat phenomenon, but involvng eucalypts rather than pines!  Here are the photos he took with his phone. I have consulted some expert friends.   Their responses were: I would have gone for chironomids. I rec...
Read more

A tour of the West (part 1)

Image
A friend from my time in the UN sent me some photos of her family trip along Route 66.  They did this is a large camperwagon rather than a Chevy Corvette (apparently the kids jacked up about being offered a trip in the trunk).  It seems to have been a very good trip for them and most interesting to see their photos.  It was also educational for me, as I found out the German for rocking chair (schaukelstuhl, since you ask). They did 7200 miles in 30 days - a pretty serious bit of distance. This made me think of the trips we did in 1981 when living in Denver.  Frances initiated that idea by getting a book about the National Parks of the West  and marking interesting places.  I then worked out a route on a Rand-McNally Road Atlas (GPS was unknown then  - as were iPhones, personal computers and the internet).  From memory, taking nearly the whole Summer school holidays we covered about 10,000 miles in 70 days.  Here, approximately,  are ...
Read more

Maslins beach rules

Image
Anyone who was in Adelaide in the 1970s will be having a good nudge nudge at that title.  However the beach is really nice even though it is the haunt (in Summer ) of naked people.  (As an aside one of the 'van park staff was talking to some other guests and commented that the sights on the beach in Summer were not at all exciting.)  In April it is the haunt of seniors, many of them exercising their dogs, and thus a far more attractive place. Getting to the beach was a walk of about 1km along roads, from our van.  The second half of this went past a rather daggy looking paddock with many formed ridges in it, as though it was irrigated, although a water sources wasn't evident.  The paddock got interesting towards the end as some green parrots appeared.  Thanks to Frances eye for detail we have subsequently identified these as Elegant Parrots: my first lifer for 2014.    The locale is indicated by the red lines in this mudmap: Here are the bird...
Read more