MOO I MADE IT!

[from my flickr set]

I’m Permablitzin’ faster than I can post em!

Here’s one we did at Mel’s place in Seddon, organised by the Permaculture Out West group. It’s a quite new group, I attended my first meeting this week and have signed up! Check out the swanky new site here.

I’m going to let the photos do most of the talking for this one.

Here’s the front of Mel’s place. She had planted a native and perennial edible verge.

She also planted some green manure that needed turning in. That’s what you can see here:

My wonderful weeding! There were some native grasses, warrigal greens and other natives and herbs amongst here for passersby to enjoy:

And yes it did give me a big kick up the butt to go home and finally tackle my OWN weeding! Here is Mel’s great little courtyard area out the front which she plans to eventually turn into a food forest. Perhaps at a future Permablitz?

An essential part of any great Permablitz – a scrumptious, energising feed for the volunteers!

Woah check out that line of rainwater tanks! Jealous. Surely they’ll just about be self sufficient in water with this much storage!

Putting together the chook house from scratch. Think we could put chook house on a wedding gift list?

Chook house was clad in reused weatherboard – so cute! Very nice touch.

Justa about done and ready to set up the chook run

Mel’s also got a rabbit(s?) Soft, furry, cute and their manure is great for the yard.

There is usually a workshop or two run at a Permablitz. Here is Kate running one on propagating soft wood cuttings

Kate also runs a business called ‘Rapunzel’s Wild Garden’ growing advanced edible seedlings to order, ready to put in your garden beds at home! Quite a brilliant idea. It means you need to plan ahead BUT gives you some wonderful choice of unusual heirloom varieties like those offered by Diggers Club, which are quite often not available at your regular nursery. Contact Kate at rapunzelswildgarden [at] bigpond [dot] com

She provided some WONDERFUL ideas about growing your own advance seedlings though. You can use strawberry punnets as mini glass houses to propagate from seed. And then you can pick them out and plant into the bottoms of 2L plastic milk cartons! Cut the tops and bottoms of them, fill with soil, plant your seedling. When they reach the size they are above, you can pop it directly into your garden bed and just slide the plastic off the top! You can reuse these a few times too. Brilliant idea and reuse of materials.

Now here is the area of the yard that believe it or not, was once all concrete! A wet concrete cutter was used to cut up the concrete to be reused to create raised garden bed (again – fantastic reuse of material!). Best thing about this method is that you can cut the concrete to the exact size you want it to be to create height of garden beds as well as a path to access them.

Here they are using builders sand to held level out the concrete pieces and compact it down to create the paths and walls for the garden bed

The beds were filled with soil and compost

A cover was made to protect the piping from the kitchen

Beautiful!

Ready to plant out with all these goodies

Mel and her fabulous new garden even made it into the local paper! Check out the story HERE.

UPCOMING WEST-SIDE PERMABLITZES:

Both in West Footscray!
Sat 10 Oct – Permablitz #77 Michelle’s at West Footscray.
More info here.

Sat 31 Oct – Nyree’s place in West Footscray.
More info here. Viva la spring. Please come and join Nyree and Willie in the West to help transform their small, barren, concrete yard into a scene from “The good life”. We will be building and planting a chicken house and run, raised garden beds and a vertical garden using the wire frames from old bed bases that require stripping. We also need help pulling up the front fence and garden to prepare the soil for a future food forest.

I’m sad I won’t be able to make the one this Saturday. I’m already booked into a CAE class to learn how to string my own pearl necklace! But hope to see you at Nyree’s at the end of the month.

In the meantime be sure to check out the fabulous newlook Permaculture Out West blog!