On April 27th I was blessed by the team from the Permaculture Guild with another blitz. On the day a team of lovely folk descended on my property and undertook so many projects that I had wanted done, but needed help to achieve. The photos above and below show work in progress, building a wicking bed to grow more vegetables in. It is a modified design, that has the overflow pipe at the base of the reservoir on a spindle. If the bed needs to be completely drained, I can attach a grey water hose to the top of the overflow and simply turn the pipe to release water on the strawberry bed beside it, or into buckets to be used on other gardens. I will be most interested to see what the outcome will be.
The most important project on the day was building a double sand pad. This was planned so that the hothouse could be assembled on the smaller/inner sandpad, a small potting shed will be built just by the front entrance to that and the final installation will be a large water tank on the opposite end of the large/outer sandpad later this year. This will allow me to install a small aquaponic system in the hothouse, as well as a set of grow shelves for when I plant seeds into punnets at the beginning of each growing season. It will also mean that the 3 tie in together nicely and complete the picture in the first quarter acre I am working to establish. The hothouse is a simple kitform I purchased at a very good price on the internet and will be a tide over until I am more financial and can build a proper glass house on the same site.
During November last year I bought several loads of tree mulch from local arborists and had managed to spread the majority of that in the main garden patch to reduce the weed problem and cut out all mowing. I still had about 2/3 of a truck load to spread, so this task was also undertaken on the day and now the entire olive grove, orchard and garden patch are under mulch. Still a strip along the dividing fence and around the sandpad to do, will have to invest in yet another load of mulch soon to complete the task.
The end of the day saw us all around the trestle sharing a mixed meal and good conversation, lamenting over all we achieved during the day. Feeling quite pleased with ourselves, we later moved our chairs around the fire drum to relax and gaze at the wonderous colours and patterns forming around the full moon above.
