Coppicing Port Jackson and thinking about our reservoir

The rain has come! Woohoo!! I'm not sure how much growing the trees will get in before winter, but I'm hoping that with a huge amount of mulching, the summers will get progressively easier and more productive. This was a tough summer, and watering was very time-consuming and exhausting, and we watered barely enough to keep everything alive.

With the rain, we knew it was time to coppice our invasive Port Jackson, Acacia saligna, before it went to seed and we earned the hatred of all our neighbours. We cleared it last year, and it came back with a vengeance, but with more rust fungus than previously. This year, we've coppiced the hundreds of trees at waist height- we expect them to be back, but hope that their strength will gradually be weakened as we add other trees, improve the soil, and cut them back more aggressively (and the rust fungus spreads). To my knowledge the rust fungus attacks these wattle/acacias specifically. For this year, I'm so grateful for the mulch and biomass provided by the Port Jackson, as well as the wind break they provided to our apricot and guava trees, which did pretty well this, their first year (one guava is even bearing fruit at the moment!).

Let's talk practicality: Finding time to coppice three hundred trees with three kids and jobs? I've had to do it in the evening, holding Hana in the carrier, often breastfeeding while chopping. Yeah. She's gotten so used to it she doesn't like me just walking around with her to get her to sleep-- she wants to feel the jerkiness and the occasional branch landing on her head. Lest you think Eug is slacking off, I think I may have the easier task. While I'm cutting, Eug is busy cleaning and putting the animals to bed, and making sure the boys don't do anything too crazy. At the moment the boys are into playing in the sand of our driveway, which they bring into the house right after Eug finishes cleaning. Aah, to have it all. (that's sarcasm, but only partly, because what kind of person has an acre of land and a red tiny house and three great kids and then whines about it? Yeah. I guess I do.)

Here you can kindof see that there are a lot of cut trees on the left. I think there must be about 300 trees cut.

It's hard to tell from the picture, but midsummer our plot was covered in high port Jackson-- this is when we were close to finishing the coppicing. I think (hope) our plot looks greener than the vacant plot next to us-- in the top left corner.

Chicken catches a baby snake... I am utterly terrified of Cape cobras, and yet I still only wear sandals. I can't bring myself to wear gumboots on the farm. They're so cumbersome. I try to remember how irrational I am when I'm busy making public health recommendations on what other people should be doing.

Hana tries bread baked on an outdoor fire. Eli mentions casually that he dropped it on the chicken poopy verandah before giving it to her. Yup, those black things are flies.

Hana connects with the guinea pigs in our sunroom. As in, she's actually trying to crawl into the guinea pig area, while completely naked. They live under the table, at least at night...  In the sunroom, we're extending the growing season for some young pawpaws (papaya, not American Pawpaw), persimmon, and moringa in here. That's all we have space for... I may have made some promise to Eug about keeping things limited to the table... We're growing sunflower sprouts for the guinea pigs and chickens in the container to the top right. Those don't count.

Eug saying goodnight to the ducks.

This is our thriving swarm of bees-- our other swarm seems to have already died-- cold, wind, American foul brood?? My dad will check it out next week. Hoping for another swarm to take it's place on one of the remaining hot days of the season.

Protea bush.

Guavas have thrived in the shade of the port jackson. Doesn't look like much but this healthy looking, if small, tree is nothing short of miraculous in the past year's drought.

Another tree, with small guavas beginning to form. So we have 2 living guava trees, 2 that are close to dead but not quite. The main difference seems to be the wind break supplied by the port Jackson.

With the copious mulch produced by the port jackson and the advent of rainy season, we're heading into planting and mulching season. I love mulching. It's addictive. some places where I mulched well last year have really been transformed. Mulching right before winter, so that mulch gets wet and starts to decompose, seems to work very well. I have a lot of plans for planting trees, and I just have to be a bit cautious because we're limited by the amount of free manure we can bring in-- otherwise watering will become an almost impossible chore in summer (on the list of projects is drip irrigation-- a project for late 2018?). This year, I'm committed to preparing for summer so that the trees thrive rather than just survive, as was the case this summer. That said, our list of trees is long (40 plus fruit and nut trees) and growing, and we've only been living here for about seven months. Our major successes have been in the greywater systems-- with plentiful water the reed bed (kitchen and washing machine water) and the moringa trees (bathroom water) have thrived. We now have a legitimate crop of moringa-- our first. So maybe that's actually a bit of a caution if you're trying to grow moringa in the western Cape. We have a short growing season for this tree, and it helped a lot to start the moringa in our sun room. If you're struggling to get them going (and they're great once they're going!) consider starting them indoors in the late winter, and keeping them indoors until temperatures reach around 19C consistently.

Enough moringa to eat-- and big enough to grow really large next summer. There are 5 in the greywater system.

As we head into winter, another project is our reservoir. It doesn't currently hold water-- possibly due to a crack or because it was never really finished with a waterproof material. Anyway, we bought some concrete pond paint that we're going to cover the crack, then try it out. Watch this space to see if we poison ourselves. Don't worry, we're not drinking the reservoir water. We'd be poisoning ourselves second-hand. secondarily? We're planning to put some tilapia in the pond, and making a really nice habitat for our ducks to enjoy. I figure that-- at least in three years' time-- about 3 meals of meat per week would be sustainable, with minimal outside feed, on this plot of land. With 6 chickens and 6 ducks, we go through 25kg of feed in about 10-12 weeks. They forage for the rest of their food. At R200 for a bag, the cost amounts to maximum R20 (US$1.25) per week for 12 birds. Once we have regular eggs, we'll know the cost of the eggs. Ducks don't start to lay until around 10 months. So the cost of feed has to somehow factor in those nine months of feeding between when we got them and when we start eating eggs. The good news?: No eating duck this round. By some miracle, we seem to have 5 females and just one male muscovy. Given that we're struggling to kill rats humanely (wack! wack! Woops! AERK It ran away! How is it fine after being wacked on the head with a hammer!?), I'm so glad we're not killing ducks. So anyway, we're not winning any awards for growing our own calories. Give us a bit of time.

Anyway, back to the mythical three meals of meat in three years time and how the planning works, at least theoretically: If we eat 1 chicken every two weeks, one duck every two weeks, and fish every week and stretch the chicken and duck meals so that 1 life=2 meals for the 5 of us. This should be easy with the ducks-- they're huge at just 3 months of age-- but maybe a bit more of a stretch with the chickens who grow more slowly and are smaller. We'll see. Anyway, back to the fish. One meal would likely be 2-3 tilapia. Meaning we'd need to grow about 100-150 fish per year in our reservoir, which holds about 30000 L. The catch is that we don't want to have a pump to aerate the water or pump water out. We don't have enough electricity capacity with our solar system. I'll write more about design and thoughts as we start to fill the reservoir. Basically we want to get the maximum number of fish that can live happily eating duck poop, algae and floating plants without overloading the pond. And in the winter, when rain is plentiful, we'd harvest the nutrient-rich water. When I look at the state-of-the-art tilapia growing operations with pumps and feed, they produce about double our needs in about 1/2 of our space. So I'm hoping with no input, and being completely not state of the art, we could be 1/4 as efficient (can you plan inefficiency?) and produce enough for our needs, ideally allowing them to reproduce and grow the next generation with some genius setup that allows baby tilapia to hide or be separated from their cannibalistic parents. When I say genius, I mean we're just going to wait for Eug to have an idea. Eug's ideas are usually awesome.

(Sorry about weird formatting-- internet is having trouble.)

March farming (looks like parenting)

We had our first good rain last night. It was brief, but it spells the beginning of the end of this long, dry summer. We've had unprecedented drought across the country. The Rand has crashed (that's due to a bunch of other things), making imports very expensive, but this year we're having to buy billions of rands worth of maize and wheat. Groceries are expected to cost about 30% more this year. And some stuff is just not on the shelves: Nutella, for example. Not that I would ever buy Nutella, of course. hehe. But in the midst of lopsided shortages and changing expenses, it also feels wrong that here we are all deeply dependent for our daily basic foods-- not interdependent but dependent-- on decisions and actions made in offices far away. The problems of growing enough food, and making it available, definitely feels a closer, more intimate issue this year as we admit to ourselves that growing stuff takes time, effort and even some money. 

Reading about what people are doing in response to food being ultra-processed, or exploitative, or GMO, can be challenging or annoying to me. Maybe it depends on how much I am the intended audience. I don't really like reading these things where you grow all your vegetables for a year in a tiny little space and it's so easy bla bla bla. I've tried-- it's not that easy if you don't have much space. I also don't like people growing all their calories on their tiny urban farm, even though I'd love to do that-- I've looked at it a lot of different ways and I don't see that as a worthy, attainable goal. I think it's much better to be inter-dependent. But I also have to be a bit cautious about underselling our life because I'm trying to be authentic. Our tentative, first year attempts suggest that farming is a lot of work but I do think a lot of stuff we read about does work. In our experience mulching is very good. bringing in a lot of leaves works. Muscovy ducks really do gain lots of weight quickly, just by foraging. Which is to say, it's a lot of physical labour and we don't have enough time to do a bunch of things we really would like to, but it's stuff you can learn about and troubleshoot, with a healthy dose of luck thrown in. One tiny bit of rain and now I'm getting all cocky, hey. I just mean it's hard but you can do it. And I do think we can make our farm much, much more drought resistant, resilient, (and beautiful) than these ridiculously large commercial farms big corporations (and governments- at least the SA one) are constantly pushing for.

In all this, Eug and I are mainly just managing the push and pull of working and caring for the kids. I remain really grateful for everything we have, even when it's too much.

guinea pigs had the least awesome life on our farm until this week, living under the table in the sunroom. This week, Eug had the idea to tractor them around using the wire top of their old cage. They're able to run around on the grass and seem to love that.

Eug and the kids made a treehouse out of some wood we had lying around. We gave the kids Eug's cell phone to listen to radio using headphones. Old school.  

Below, our humanure compost and banana palm are doing pretty well. And pecky is pretty happy too. 

Menacing chickens. No they have not grown on me. Yes I do love them.

Ducks,chickens and other ill-advised decisions.

We now have chickens and a second beehive. We're lucky to have the Green Guerrillas  just two doors down from us (and bordering our back fence), so we got some pork from them. We know the pigs in the adjoining property are treated truly well, and slaughtered quickly and professionally. So anyway, back to the chickens. In addition to some pork, Akim was selling 19week laying hens, and one thing led to another....

I was pretty keen on getting ducks only. But I'm also pretty keen on using our property to the best of our ability, as quickly as possible given the pressing need for land even out here in the southern-most tip of Cape Town. I can't physically manage the number of fruit trees and vegetables we'd need to use the property to its full capacity. The ducks are going to take a while to lay, as they lay later. So, chickens. A second swarm of bees inhabited our second hive, through no effort on our part. Despite trying to be sensitive to the limitations of our time and energy, we find ourselves with an awfully long to-do list. More things to think about than we have time. So we're trying to decide which balls to drop. Which is to say, some balls will drop in favour of sanity, and hopefully they won't be too important.

worms, lots of them. Our worm farm is pretty huge, but now that we have ducks and chickens we don't have as much to feed them. Eli loves picking out the soldier fly larvae to feed the worms, and getting the worms out before we use the compost.

Guinea pigs-- the barrier (under our table) is only a few cm high, but they don't hop out. They're a little bit timid.

Sack race.

A few chameleons, here and there. 

Seaweed for the ducks and the trees..

By mistake Hana's first food was a pear.

so many mice. 

Eug said he was going for mafia but noone would stand still and look serious.

proteas in bloom on our property.

chicken house. For extra cred (and, like, trying to do it without any money), Eug built it from the leftover wood that even the people who took our wooden cottages left behind. 

surrounded the verandah with pots and tyres to try to stop the ducks from pooping in our house..

Boschvelder hens. A good dual purpose free-ranging bird for South Africa. But, stuck in their pen for the week before being allowed to free-range, they are not my favourite. they're like feathered mini dinosaurs. 

Yeah. Muscovies are awesome.