Summer is Here

Before and after the trampoline being put into place

As summer is here and it’s such a beautiful sunny day, I have decided to write this week’s article in the garden. As I sit on the chair, all I can see on the laptop screen is dust and a rather unnerving reflection of me squinting in the glorious sunshine. I don’t like wearing sunglasses so I only have myself to blame. I also don’t like wearing headphones but I do occasionally if I want to be ignored on public transport. They are never plugged in but who’s to know that.

We have a perfect place to sit in the new garden. It’s actually the base of a removed greenhouse with an old 18” block wall surrounding it that most probably supported the glass frame before it was removed. The dividing fence put up to the rear of the greenhouse was a bit shabby so I have splashed wood stain all over it. I bought a big gallon container from one of those budget shops and only paid 2 euro for it so I wasn’t expecting it to be much good. It was though and it went on like treacle and covered well in just one coat. You can sometimes, very occasionally get more that you pay for in these shops, as it was the same quality as a named product costing 10 times more. It was worth the gamble.

Early summer
We have managed to clear the shrubs at the top of the garden this week. The cut wood was good and dry so I combined lopping, chopping , burning and shredding to avoid having to hire a skip to take everything away. Not only have we saved 120 euro on a skip and got lots of chippings to mulch the poor soil, we also have enough wood kindling to get the water hot in the back boiler for a few weeks so we will save on energy bills too. The really fiddly bits were burned when the neighbours were out at work so they probably wondered why their washing smelled of charcoal as they took it indoors in the evening.

The space made from removing the shrubs is going to be mainly for vegetables, I say eventually as half of it has just been covered up by the trampoline only moments after clearing the space. The bouncy plaything fitted well in our old acre garden, but finding somewhere out of the way it a small town garden is proving to be a bit of a challenge. It has been taking up most of the lawn up until now, so at least it is out of the way. I’ll have to find vegetables that’ll grow well underneath the black mesh for at least another two years until it drops to bits.

Moving the compost bin
We have moved the compost bin closer to the house. It’s not something you think about in good weather much but in winter the last thing you want to do is traipse through the mud to empty the peelings. I have also reclaimed some old paving slabs and made a bit of a path to it too. The bin was never very far away but it looked a bit lost in the corner of the lawn area when we moved the trampoline. Our lawn measures 8 metres by 8 metres so a quick strim in summer will keep it tidy. The same can’t be said for the few people who contacted me regarding the robot mowers that are on the market.

Robot mower review
Here are two comments from people who don’t have one of the tekky machines:
“If it rains a lot the mower doesn’t come out of its charging kennel. That means if it rains for a long time the grass will be uncuttable.”
“The robot mower could be stolen from the garden. After saying that it would be useless without the docking station but young kids who just want to mess with it wouldn’t care about that.”

And from someone who has one:
“I have had one of these mowers for two years now and think it’s fantastic. It works effortlessly and silently cutting and mulching the grass in the summer and it is really reliable. I pondered long and hard about buying either one of these or a ride on mower. The costs were about the same but this method frees up my time when I want to relax. You just don’t notice it at all.”

If ever I get a large garden I might consider one, in the mean time I can cut our grass with a pair of scissors. Not just now though, I’m far too hot sitting in the sunshine. I’m off indoors.

Garden Gadgets

 

 Weeding the easy way wit Wundaweeder. Now all we have to do is wait for some sunshine.

Can you remember those heady days of old when gardening was the ‘in thing’? Every other programme on the telly had someone showing you how to grow the biggest petunias or how to make decking the size of an ocean liner. How things have changed over the last four years with the recession. In their place TV moguls now bombard us with food programmes with members of the public putting themselves under immense pressure to make sure that their soufflé’s don’t deflate before the judges can lick the spoon and give them a nod of approval. I could do that, but I will stick to gardening for now.

I suppose cooking is seen as a more cost effective pastime than gardening. Ideally the two could be combined so the calories are being burnt off in the pursuit of growing at least some of the vegetables used in the latest stir fry.

Garden supply companies haven’t given up though. In fact a lot of them are becoming more and more inventive to find things that we never knew we needed and couldn’t live without in the garden. Cost is a big factor now as no-one can get hold of money, so most new innovations have to be at a bargain price. Let’s have a look at some of the new innovations on the market for the wanting gardener that will hopefully last all season and not end up in the bin after being used once..

The Latest Garden Gadgets

Wild Grass Solar Garden Lights. You can jam the plastic grass into the ground and make it appear as if you have random tufts glowing in the dark. If you have any extra gullible friends you could always convince them that the grass is a special variety that glows every single night.

Suntracking Beach Chair. This folding beach chair is unique in a sense that it can swivel 360º, enabling you to always face the sun without having to go through the hassle of getting up and moving the chair to realign its direction. Lazy gardening at its best.

Heated Weed Eliminator Tool. This unique device will kill weeds at the root using heat, making it environmentally safe as you go about zapping weeds without the need for chemicals that could harm surrounding soil, groundwater, plants or wildlife.

Wunda Weeder. An Australian inventor has created a device that creeps along the garden and lets you be far more comfortable. It’s called the ‘Wunda Weeder’. The structure is solar powered and propels itself slowly through the garden. This allows for you to weed, plant and transplant rows of vegetables, flowers and herbs. Even the radio is solar powered. Thanks to that big solar panel that also means you’ll be laying in the shade as you scoot through the garden. Along the side of the trolley are spots to put seeding trays or buckets. These devices will be best suited to large scale operations as it’s not the sort of thing you could store in the shed. Check out the prototype on the wonderweeder.com website

GOAT. If you can’t afford a ride on mower, then how about a lawnmower scooter? The Lawn Mower Scooter has an electric motor that can drive the blades and scooter. That means that you can ride on it while the blades are doing the work. It can reach up to 6 kilometres per hour, and it can collect the cut grass in a container. There is even a transparent window so you can see inside and tell when it is time to be emptied. Don’t come crying to me if you fall off though.

Poop prints. Having two dogs like us makes it hard to detect which one has made a mess on the kitchen floor in the morning. Of course they both look guilty; it’s a trick dogs have learned throughout the years. Now we have a way of finding out who the culprit is, we now have PooPrints, a company that tracks down the offending pooper using genuine DNA technology. I like it!

First of all you need a sample to obtain the DNA, this is sent off and stored. When you need to find out which dog did the business, send off the offending poop and it will be tested against the sample until a match has been found. This takes 5 days so by the time it comes to reprimanding your dog they won’t have a clue what’s happening to them. This could be (and probably will be) taken up by local councils to track down offenders in parks and on pavements.

Robotic lawnmowers. There not new and there are lots on the market. Has anyone actually got one? If so let me know how is performs. Paying 2000 euro for one of these machines would be a big investment for anyone.

Self Sufficient or Self Reliant?

Photo: Shopping Australian style. Local trading with sunshine!


Great Expectations
I dabbled in the world of ‘Self Sufficiency ‘for a long time, if you can do such a thing. It’s probably a bit like being ‘almost’ a vegetarian or ‘nearly’ stopping smoking. Attempting to become totally self sufficient in anything sets the bar of expectation so high that a majority of us would give up with a huge feeling of failure. I’m not sure if it’s the recession or just a shift in consciousness but the emphasis is changing from “Self Sufficiency to “Self Reliance”, which I am all in favour of because it potentially makes our lives that little bit easier.

So what’s the difference?
‘Self Reliance’ accepts the fact that we are interdependent on other people, but it still shows that we choose to trade as locally as possible for other products that we simply can’t produce ourselves.
‘Self Sufficiency’ tries to encompass everything in a daily life from producing your own food to making your own solar panels; it would mean you are able to maintain yourselves without any outside aid.
Both ‘reliance’ and ‘sufficiency’ can be achieved but total self sufficiency will leave you with little or no time to do anything else but provide for yourself and more importantly you wouldn’t be contributing to the local economy.

High water content
Vegetables have high water content and can be as high as 98% in cucumbers, but they are low in calories. If you grew 100% of your own vegetables it will provide you with 15-20%of your daily calorie amount, it’s bit like starving to death by eating celery as you use more energy eating it than you do from ingesting the nutrients. Most calories come from grains, meat and dairy products, so if we don’t have our own livestock or wheat field then we only really supply 25% of our own food needs. Self sufficiency gets more complicated when you look at other commodities like fuel, do you make your own? Will you save your seeds this year? Do you sew or make your own clothes and if so where does the wool come from? All questions that total self sufficiency would ask of you.

Trading Zones
I like the idea of trading with the local community for products and services. This is important at any time but seems to be even more vital in a recession. The old saying “if you want a job done well, do it yourself” seems a bit outdated now and simply shows poor management skills. We can make life easier by working together and putting our trading into Zones, suggested by author Toby Hemenway.
Zone Zero. This is your home and land and the relationship you have with it.
Zone1. Is the connection to other individuals and families.
Zone 2. Is dealing with local commerce and other activities in the immediate area.
Zone 3. Dealing with regional businesses and organisations in the country.
Zone 4. Larger and more distant enterprises.

By limiting the amount of times we need to use zone 4, by buying petrol or metal for example, and concentrating more on the zones 1-2, shopping, trading and socialising locally we build up a stronger community. There really isn’t much sense in staying in zone 1 all of the time, it would get very lonely.
Australian wisdom
The Australian “Father of Permaculture Bill Mollison makes a good observation in his Introduction to Permaculture book ““We can also begin to take some part in food production. This doesn’t mean that we all need to grow our own potatoes, but it may mean that we will buy them directly from a person who is already growing potatoes responsibly. In fact, one would probably do better to organize a farmer-purchasing group in the neighbourhood than to grow potatoes.”

So this year I can grow some tasty salad vegetables in containers and maybe join the Tidy Towns initiative to help clean up the streets and beaches to be a part of the community. It certainly takes the pressure off from the massive task of being “Self Sufficient”!

Making Space

Making Space
Not long after moving into our new/old house, we chopped back a lot of overgrown shrubs at the top of the garden. Although quite neglected and leggy, the rhododendrons and ... looked fine but we wanted to get a better feel of what sort of area we had and how much space we would eventually have for vegetables.
My intention after hacking down the shrubs was to hire a skip and have the lot taken away to be recycled at the council depot. We have close neighbours now and I don’t think a bonfire would go down too well as one of them usually has washing hanging up outside on the line.
All of the shrubs larger trunks have been cut with a chainsaw and put into an out of the way corner of the garden to season and dry out for next year when I can chop them up for burning in the fire.

Chimney Fires
Apparently there has been a big rise in chimney fires over the last 2 years and burning damp wood is one of the reasons mentioned as it forms an inflammable layer of oil in the chimney, another reason is the increase of wood burning stoves being used for more than just burning wood, anything and everything is being burned to save money. Another financial reason seems to be that people are not getting their chimneys cleaned as often because money is tight in the recession. I was told to add the potato peelings to the fire to clean the chimney. I’m not sure if it works but it does eradicate the small plants that sometimes grow in the compost heap from the potato peelings.

Saving Money
The remaining shrubbery has been piled high in the middle of the clearing and we decided that €120 for the skip hire was too much to pay. If we had a larger garden I could just leave the pile to rot down, but we need to get it moved. Our solution to the issue is to get lopping.
I have been working my way through the pile with the loppers, patiently chopping up the twigs into pencil sized lengths and filling up coal bags. It actually doesn’t take long to fill a bag and the resulting twigs added to the front room fire has actually been saving us money as we are using half the amount of coal as usual. So it’s a win, win situation. We have saved €120 on the removal of the waste and I would say we will save €100 on coal and the smaller waste that is too fiddly for the fire will go back into the garden as a mulch after I have passed it though the shredding machine. It’s also great exercise for me and the dogs as they enjoy chasing after the sticks and pulling them out of the bags after I put them in. Apart from the temporary mess there are no down sides to this form of recycling in the garden. I love it.

New Growth
As I am out lopping I’ve been spotting some new growth in the garden. It looks like we have a clump of crocosmia coming up and if the dogs stay off of the rockery area we should have some interesting geraniums popping up. I am not really ready to add more plants to the garden yet until we know what we have already, but if doesn’t stop me from looking at what’s new for 2012.

New Flowers for 2012
As usual there are a lot of new flower varieties out this year with something to please even the gardener who usually just grows vegetables, like me.

Argyranthemum 'Upsy Daisy Blush' Half-hardy Annual. These daisy flowers grow 1.5m (5’) tall in just a couple of months from a spring planting. These half-hardy climbing argyranthemums produce masses of 7cm (3”) wide blooms, that slowly fade from pink through to white,
Hibiscus 'Hardy Giants Collection' Rose Mallow, Mallow. Hardy Shrub. Superb Rose Mallows bearing huge flowers of up to 30cm (12") across! Bred in Nebraska by the Fleming brothers, the 'Van Gogh's', the shrub has short lived flowers that appear throughout the season.
Oleander Collection. Nerium. Hardy Shrub. Hardy summer patio exotic . The sweetly fragrant, funnel shaped blooms flower through the summer and well into autumn, followed by fascinating bean-like seed pods. They make a good hedge too.
Dahlia 'XXXL White'. Half-hardy Annual. A ‘dinner plate’ dahlia that doesn't need staking! Twelve years of breeding have produced this extra strong, extra sturdy Dahlia, with extra large blooms up to 30cm (12") across.
Buddleja 'Flower Power'Buddleja x weyeriana 'Bicolor', Buddleia, Butterfly Bush. Hardy Shrub. Blooms transform from deepest violet to rich butterscotch yellow for an enchanting kaleidoscope of colour. This colourful, low maintenance butterfly bush has a neat compact habit – just perfect for small gardens. Height and spread: 200cm (79").

These are just a few of the plants on offer and no doubt the local garden centres will be stocking even more as the season moved forward. It’s always a bit of a trial and error finding new varieties that will do well and thrive in our climate, but that’s the fun of gardening!