Jackie's October message continued . . .
Intro
Mothball News
Book News
Awards
Schedule for this Year
A Solitary Wombat Joke
Some Recipes
Surviving Drought- again
Gourmet Chokoes and other Easy to Grow veg
Intro
It must be spring. We've just seen the first red bellied black snake. It was asleep by the back doormat, and we both got a terrible fright when I bent down and tried to pick it up- I thought it was the hose and was about to water the zuchinni seedlings with a metre of startled black snake. The snake wriggled off indignantly and I went and had a nice cup of tea.....
Anyway the pear and apple blossom are out, and look magic, the gum trees are dripping with wonga blossom and the loquats are nearly ripe and the first strawberries too, and Bryan picked the first Papa Meilland rose this morning- they are great deep red fragrant ones- and put it in a vase by my place at the table, as he does every spring. And we're eating the first of the asparagus as well!
The only drawbacks have been the gale force winds, that have twisted out most of the grevilleas and bottlebrush that survived the drought, and next door's cattle that have eaten all the flowers down on the flat again, as well as the mulch around the fruit trees, and the blue sky that looks wonderful but a few days of good wet clouds would be better....
Mothball News
That wombat and I have been having a battle. (I think she's won).
Our Mothball Wombat has been doing a spot of renovating, digging out a new and bigger bedroom then lining it with leaves. And for some reason she decided she wanted my Tasmannia bush for her mattress.
Tasmannia is a native shrub that mostly grows in rainforests. You can use the dried berries like pepper. I've grown two before, and both died in droughts, so I've been really cosseting this one. Except every night Mothball would pull it out and carry it off to her burrow, and every day I'd haul it out and plant it again.
Anyway, I think the poor plant has finally died, so Mothball can keep it. I don't know why she was so set on that one. I suppose she's wondering why I was so set on getting it back!
Mothball has also been leaving her droppings all around the house again. She does that every spring to tell other wombats very firmly that THIS PLACE IS HERS! Her droppings have got bigger and bigger every year. They look quite impressive. I suppose they smell impressive too to other wombats!
Book News
Phredde and the Purple Pyramid is out! It looks fabulous, and I think it might be the funniest yet. The cover and illustrations are by the miraculous Mitch Vane, and they are WONDERFUL. She's done new covers for others in the series too, plus a great 'three in one' sort of book package for the first three books- a feast of phaeries, Phreddes and fruit! Hopefully they'll be at your nearest bookshop.
The next book will be A War for Gentlemen, the historical book for adults, a project that's been close to my heart for the 30 odd years I've been researching it. It comes out at the start of December.
Awards
Well actually there is another award coming up, but I'm not allowed to mention it yet. So I won't, which means the last award was the ABA Book of the Year award for Diary of a Wombat. It was a great night- love any chance to talk about wombats, till finally someone shuts me up.
Schedule So Far For the Year
8 October: free writing workshop for Club Cool kids in Canberra. Contact the ACT Library Service for details and bookings.
18 October
11.00 Marymead Fun with Books day- I'll be talking about books, and reading Diary of a wombat, and signing books, but there's masses of other stuff happening too, lots of fun and games- literally.
2. I'll be at the national Museum in Canberra for the MSS Readathon Awards More details from the National Museum- in other words, I don't know excatly what yet!
22 October launch of Children's week at the National Museum in Canberra- I'm the Children's Week Ambassador this year, but I'm not sure yet what activities there'll be!
26 October Vaucluse House Sydney: In the Chookhouse with Jackie French, plus a Kid's Club session . Public warmly welcomed; contact Vaucluse house for information on how to book- limited numbers
30 October 10-3.00. I'll be at the Koala Awards at Meriden School Strathfield Sydney. Contact Val Noake at the State Library for more information about the day and the Koala awards- they are the 'kids' choice' book awards!
5 November Workshop at Giralang Primary School, ACT.
9 November Open Garden at our place to raise funds for the new Braidwood Hospital garden- two 3 hour workshops on how to grow just about everything in your back yard, even if your backyard freezes regularly, and how to grow herbs and make your own perfume, deodorant etc. plus morning or afternoon tea. Contact the Open Garden Scheme to book- numbers are strictly limited, especially as most people from last year have booked again!
12, 13 November: at the Dubbo Zoo talking about wombats! Contact the Dubbo Zoo for more information
19 November talk at Canberra Girls' Grammar Primary School
24 November Inverell library, 2 day sessions and one evening session
25 November Glen Innes library 2 day sessions and one evening session..
26 November Armidale library 1 day session
6 December. Book launch of A War for Gentlemen, plus talk and dinner at the Grapevine Cafe Braidwood. Everyone welcome but you do need to book- contact The Grapevine Cafe in Braidwood or Winchbooks, Canberra. A War for Gentlemen will be on sale plus lots of the other books.
A Solitary Wombat Joke
Why did the wombat cross the road?
It thought the chicken had some carrots.
ps please send me more wombat jokes!
Some Recipes
Black Spot Spray
1 cup milk
3 cups water
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
spray twice a week
Mildew Spray
(downy or powdery)
1 cup milk
9 cups water
Ancient Japanese Face Scrub (sort of)
1 cup bicarbonate of soda
1 cup ground rice
1 tsp avocado oil
1 tsp rose oil
Mix well. Use about half a tb- rub on your wet face then wash off. Also good on gungy arms, legs etc after long winters.
Bitter Lemon Cordial
2 cups lemon juice
1 sliced lemon
6 cups sugar
2 cups water
2 teaspoons citric acid
2 teaspoons tartaric acid
Simmer five minutes. Hoik out the lemon slices. Bottle. Throw out if ferments or goes cloudy. Very very good with cold water and lots of ice in mid summer. Not bad as a hot drink either.
Possum Repellent
2 sachets gelatine
2 tb waterproof glue
2 tb boiling water
4 tb tabasco
4 tb fish sauce
Mix gelatine and water; when soft add other ingredients. Should be sloppy- if not add a bit more boiling water. Apply while still slightly warm with a paint brush, or omit the glue and keep in a jar marked HOT AVOID. paint on as needed, but without the glue it will wash off when- if- it rains.
Surviving Drought- again
The sky is blue, the grass is brown, and there are little wisps of hay all through our house, including a few tufts that have somehow got into our bed. In other words, we're in drought, and I've been spreading LOTS of mulch.
I wish every plant sold in a drought had to come with its own sack of mulch. No matter how often garden writers keep muttering 'mulch mulch mulch', most Australian gardens are still baking hot and naked under cloudless skies!
Mulch is always my first line of defence in dry times- a good thick layer, at least 30cm deep. My favourite mulch is lucerne hay- things really seem to grow better with leafy lucerne. But pea straw, sugar cane slash, old horse or cow manure, compost, chopped up young wattle trees et al are also great. If possible mulch over DAMP soil, as mulch will also stop drizzle penetrating.
Our giant avocado trees are just mulched with mess- any old corn stalks, cabbage stems, prunings are all tossed under their wide skirts where no one can see them. I toss in Dynamic Lifter or old chook poo once every year or two, and the mess breaks down into good rich soil.
Mulch stops moisture in the soil drying out. It also helps stop soil turning into concrete, so any water just rolls off. Soil that has been mulched also retains moisture better- so even last year's mulch and the year's before is still helping to keep my trees alive.
HOWEVER: a layer of thickly packed mulch will stop SMALL showers of rain reaching your plant roots! Which is why I mix my mulch with garden 'mess'- it makes a light, easily penetrated mulch- and its a great way to get rid of waste leaves, corn stalks, prunings and dead branches! it's amazing how mess becomes mulch if you hoosh it under a tree.
Watering
Work out what HAS to be watered. Like General Macarthur, grass will return! You can let it brown or even mostly vanish, then a few days after rain the ground will be green again. But give trees and shrubs you've cosseted for years a good soak every couple of weeks- or once a week if you haven't mulched them.
One deep watering a week may not be best!
Water only to root depth when water is scarce- any more means you're watering the soil, not the plant! Seedlings may only need a gentle water, but they'll need to be watered often. Big trees will need a longer soak.
When I put the sprinkler on, I leave an empty 400-55 gm jar under the spray. When it's about an eighth full I know I've watered the seedlings enough; a quarter full is about right for veg and grass, half full is a decent water for a small shrub and totally full is a good soak for trees.
Tree Sleeves
These are plastic sleeves you put round your trees, shrubs or even tomatoes. They're mostly used to establish trees in paddocks or along roads, but even though they're pretty ugly in the garden they can really keep your young plants alive in bad times. They protect plants from frost, but just as importantly, they help stop plants drying in hot winds too, and I suspect a little moisture also condenses from the air and runs down the plastic and waters the tree. It's just a little extra dampness- but can it mean the difference between dead sticks and new leaves.
Water Tubes
These are fat bulging tree sleeves filled with 20 litres of water that seeps around the roots of your plant over about 16 days. Like tree sleeves, you need three stakes to keep them upright. You get the advantages of a tree sleeve, plus extra water.
Aqua Spikes
Really dry soil repels water, but these little doovers are great for getting moisture right where it's needed. You screw an old soft drink bottle into the 203mm spikes, poke a few next to your shrub or one by your capsicum plant, then fill them up with the hose. The water drains out at about a litre an hour.
Poly Pipe Pokers
These are home made. You take about 1 and a half metre lengths of black 50mm polypipe, and bury one end of it about 30cm deep near the plant you want to water. The rest of the pipe sticks up in the air. Once a week or fortnight fill the pipe with water.
Upside down pots
I discovered this trick quite accidentally. Snails kept eating my bean seedlings, so I cut the bottoms out of some old pots, wriggled them down around each seedling, and wow! the snails were foiled- but also in the two months of hot dry gale force winds that followed all my other beans shrivelled- but the 'potted' beans flourished! The same trick worked for capsicum, tomatoes, cucumbers, climbing peas and lots of other veg too. The small, protected area around their base kept them not only alive, but thriving.
None of these of course are a substitute for a good down pour. But unless someone can send me a rain dance that really works (believe me, at times I've been desperate enough to try anything) at least these tricks mean that when the rain does come again, you'll still have a garden to grow and flourish.
ps Mulch!
pps make sure your hose connection isn't leaking- you may be stunned how much is lost with a leaky tap or hose! If it is, buy a new washer- you know, that little rubber doover that falls out and gets lost in the grass
All products available mail order from: Green Harvest, ph 07 54944676 for a free catalogue, email inquiries@greenharvest.com.au, or write to Green Harvest 52/65 Kilcoy Lane, Maleny QLD 4552
Prices last time I looked (ie a few months before October 2003)
Tree Sleeves from $18 for 20 small ( 450 H x W 350) $29 for 20 large (800mmH x 450 mm W). Three stakes are needed for each sleeve- not included in price.
Water tube
$11 each or 11+ $10.50 each
Three stakes are needed for each tube; not included in the price
Aqua Spikes
Pack of 6 $10
Pack of 50 $75
An empty soft drink bottle is needed for each spike.
Gourmet Chokoes and other Easy to Grow veg
Gardens are like washing up. If you do it after every meal, it's child's play. If you leave it till every saucepan has a crust tough enough to build an average ten story apartment block out of, it's easier just to buy new saucepans.
If you crave a vegie garden, but know you won't be able to water it, weed it, cosset it and mulch it every week, consider hiring someone to do it. You'll have the thrill of growing your own, even if you didn't actually grow it., a bit like Lord Whosemewhatis's ancestral asparagus bed...good crop this year, eh what Jeeves? If you direct the growing, of course it's yours..
For those who can't afford the garden version of a Jeeves for a couple of hours a week, try the following. They are plants that crop even if you forget about them.
All you have to do (but you actually have to DO it) is mulch them with either lucerne hay or one of those nice compressed mulches you an buy at the garden centre as soon as you plant them Š and apply more mulch when it's getting thin.
These will all survive without regular watering, but bunging on a few handfuls of something good once a year or so will help their general happiness enormously.
Sorrel. Sorrel is a weed if it's growing in the cracks in your paving. If it's growing in your garden it's called French sorrel (no relation), and the leaves will be bigger and not as bitter.
You can make a sorrel soup (see below), which isn't bad at all...and even better, it's one of those last minute jobs, so you can actually dash down to the garden when your visitors arrive, and return brandishing genuine slug tattered home grown produce.
Leaf amaranth.
This is a close relative of the flower, and the flowers on this are pretty too. It's an annual, so you need to plant it every year- except you don't, as it reseeds itself with sometimes alarming generosity ie if there's a bare patch of soil under the gum tree it won't be bare next year, it'll have 1,000 little amaranth seedlings in it.
Pick the young leaves; bung them in the salad ostentatiously. They're not actally GOOD, but they're okay, look pretty...and are virtuously home grown
Garlic chives. These really are good...plant three punnets; the clumps will get bigger and bigger every year and may even throw out a few seedlings.
I use garlic chines chopped into everything, with the possible exception of sponge cakes and icecream .... omlettes, stews, on top of soup or pizza... and they don't die down in winter or disappear down snail's gullets as often as normal chives do either.
Spring onions. plant; pick, and watch them multiply. Use them very finely chopped instead of onions.
Lovage. this is a herb, a sort of ancestral celery, but perennial, and you use the leaves instead of the stems.
Dandelions. No, not the skinny leafed weeds- the improved large leafed form, which with any luck your garden centre can sell you. Toss the leaves in salads. If you pick them often, you'll need to throw them a handful of food every month or so, and water at least once a week, to keep the leaves sweet and tender
Salad burnet. This is a tiny bush with hardy leaves that taste a bit like cucumber; chop them finely into a salad.
Chokoes. Okay, the choko is no longer a fashionable veg, but have you ever had tiny steamed chokes, no bigger than your thumb? They are exquisite.....
Buy a choko; shove it down the back of the vegie cupboard till it sprouts, then plant it in a sunny spot with the sprouting bit out of the soil. Pick when they are tiny and before the tough seed inside has formed. Just as a marrow is quiet different from a baby zuchinni, a miniature choko is a delight.
Gourmet chokoes
Take a handful of tiny chokoes; peel them but don't bother to cut out the centre...it won't be tough yet. Steam them for ten minutes, then dab with butter or toss in light sour cream with lots of chopped parsley or chervil.
Alternatively, saute with garlic in olive oil; chopped red onion can also be added, or a few small chips of fresh ginger. Tiny chokoes with ginger are very good indeed.
Sorrel soup
Ingredients: 6 cups of chicken stock, 1 handful of sorrel, splash of cream optional: 2 potatoes
Place 1 cup of chicken stock- the boxed kind- in the blender. Add a handful of sorrel leaves. (Remove slugs first). Blend. Pour into a pan with another five cups of stock; simmer five minutes; remove from the heat and stir in a little cream, or not as you prefer. Serve hot or cold.
This is also good thickened with a couple of spuds; in which case simmer everything except the cream till the spuds are tender, puree, reheat, add cream, and eat.
ps If you don't have a garden at all, everything above can be grown in largish pots...including the choko, as long as you give it somewhere to climb...and warn the neighbours to beware of falling veg.