My Garden

It's a long time since I last wrote. I have been very busy reconditioning & selling Christmas cards for charity but this is the last year that I will be organising the project. Two reasons why.One, because not a single person wants to take it over from me and secondly the cards are not selling very well because most greetings are sent by e mail.

The heading of this post is 'My Garden'. For the last nearly 3 years I have kept compost worms in boxes in my garage & still looked after by Gale & Christina.The worms must be very happy as they have been breeding profusely, suppling me with ample worm T now called leachate and wonderful black gold, their castings.I add it to my gardens & watch the plants flourish especially a small rhubarb plant that was given to me and which is now becoming a delicious monster.It's leaves are enormous and the edible sticks are quite long & thick that Gale pulls & cooks for puddings with ice cream.We love the taste.

Adding worm leachate & castings does not enhance the soil immediately, it may take a year. It can be combined with home made compost made with the help of Fitzgerald my part time gardener.I use the left over vegetble peelings that the compost worms don't like,weeds & lawn mowings & store it in a compost bin. When full I add horse manure with straw that is mixed in & then placed in milk crates to mature for a few months.Being in a retirement complex we are not allowed to construct compost heaps as such.Putting the stuff into crates keeps it tidy & out of sight behind a hedge.

It's all very well having a healthy garden but with the Cape summers that have very little or no rain, watering is a constant worry especially when I go away.The complex has a sprinkler system that should spray every 3 days except for the week ends but as it only runs for twenty minutes it's not really sufficient.I just hope I can revive plants that have wilted when I return.

Watching a TV series by Justin Benello,a chef & most of all a person who loves to know where the food we eat comes from, visits farms that have turned to organic farming on a big scale after they dicsovered that their soils had become hard & their produce less because of chemical fertilizers that were introduced to the market after world war two.

I would like to know how the farmers make enough compost to spread onto their lands other than saving what would possibly have been ploughed in or discarded.Manures of all types are a must and added to all waste material, mixed with soil and formed into 'windrows', (long rows of continuous compost) kept well watered which in turn heat up destroying harmful bugs and when cool can be added to the land.It must take a long time for the first windrow to be ready to use and for the soil to return to it's natural self.

This makes my heart feel good.Reminds me of my days of farm work when 'muck spreading' and a little agricultural lime was the only fertilizer added to the soil.
I know that vegetables do not taste as nice as the pre-war vegs did or even during the war when my father kept an allotment using the droppings as fertilizers from the rabbits & chickens we kept.

That's all for now. I'll try to keep up more often with other news especially after returning from a holiday in the Kalahari Gemsbok Reserve at the end of this month.