It seems unbelievable that only 5 months ago our now abundant market garden was a scruffy bare creek flat. But it’s true! And now we’ve got produce coming out our ears, thanks to many fabulous folks coming together to make it so.
Up in the hills as we are, it’s a bit of a harsh climate for growing stuff. About 4 frost free months for growing only, poor soils, 600mm annual rainfall, crazy dry winds, etc and so on. We’re not complaining, but I’d just like to flag that this is a garden created in non-ideal conditions. Except for gumption. We’ve got plenty of that.
Nick breaks ground for a soil sample in July 2011, while Joyce and Mike from Allsun consider the possibilities...
The pictures tell the story. We fenced the creek flat, brought in a pig tractor, then followed that up with a whole lot of human labor, hard-won knowledge shared with us, trial and error, and nutrients.
The lynchpin of all this action has been Stephen Couling, our Organic Market Garden trainee. Trainee doesn’t seem the right word at all however, as he’s managed this whole garden project. At any rate, he’s the dude. The keeper of the carrots. The OMG.
I wrote a fair bit about how we wanted this garden to be when it was just starting, and somehow we’re now in mid-summer, and it’s all up over our heads. Hooray! Stephen has had many thrills and spills along the way, all recorded with aplomb and dexterity over at the Milkwood Market Garden Blog.
Nick’s currently in Sydney teaching the Urban PDC and I’m bouncing around the place, but I’m headed home shortly to start to put things in place for the next round of fun at Milkwood Farm that starts this week: Rose is back, wwoofers + crew are back… it’s all on again!
Pig tractor in action. August 2011
Spading time. August 2011
Stephen makes the first beds. Sept 2011
Soil block seedlings ready to jumpstart the garden. Sept 2011
Stephen sowing the very first seedlings - lettuce! Sept 2011
Making beds, first time round. Lots of clods of cooch grass to break up! Sept 2011
Rocket in and rolling. Sept 2011
Frost! Kills slugs, slows growth. The problem is the solution. Sometimes. Sept 2011
Starting an Organic Market Garden course. Sept 2011
Students getting into bed making. Sept 2011
Rocket coming on. Oct 2011
In which we install nutrient trenches in every path: horse bedding (sawdust and horse poo) covered in woodchips. Oct 2011
First bok choi harvest! 13 Oct 2011
Stephen the day the sprinklers got installed. Happy. Oct 2011
Mulched beds. We couldnt help ourselves. Oct 2011
The inaugral radish. 23 Oct 2011
Nick planting a tomato. Oct 2011
Tomatoes off and running. Nov 2011
The harvest starts to come in in bucket loads. Hurrah! Nov 2011
Rose with 100% Milkwood OMG salad. Nov 2011
And here comes spring... late Nov 2011
Let there be lettuce. Nov 2011
Harvest moves from bucket loads to barrow loads! Dec 2011
Beans beginning to climb. Dec 2011
Michael harvesting spring onions. Dec 2011
Christmas eve family pickathon. Dec 2011
Beans and corn. Jan 2012
And here come the tomatoes! Jan 2012
Many thanks to Stephen Couling the OMG, Joyce and Michael of Allsun Farm, Michael Hewins the super-wwoofer, Georgie and James from Ormiston all the rest of you beautiful folk that have helped get the market garden at Milkwood Farm rolling.
And if we can make it happen here at Milkwood Farm with our scruffy soils and non-ideal conditions, I’m confident that local food security for Australia is really truly possible, given the ‘good land’ that every town or community generally has.
It’s just a matter of really wanting to, good planning, and gathering enough like-minded crew and knowledge to make it happen.
Organic Market Gardening resources + articles:
- Allsun’s Market Gardening CD ROM
- Eliot Coleman’s Fertile Dozen (book list)
- Milkwood Starting an Organic Market Garden Workshops
yum and wow 🙂
reckon that about sums it up!
Question… I see where are rotor tilling the soil what I assume is when the pigs where in there. Did they not turn over all the soil?
Other than that I think it looks so awesome!!!
Yep we put a ‘spader’ over the patch after the pigs – the pigs were great and an awesome start, bu there’s no magic bullet with this stuff if you want to get cranking in your first year, i don’t think – maybe 20 pigs for 2 weeks in this space might have been ok for the purpose, but despite various advice we found 2 large pigs didn’t cut it. They did manure and rip things up tho, so all good. In a 2nd or 3rd year garden this might be different, perhaps then you would see a better effect,… Read more »
Beautiful & Inspiring!
great job! How big is your OMG? And how many people do you think that area can feed? Have you got potatoes in there too, or do you have seperate area for ‘bulk’ crops?
Just wanted to say how much I have learned from your endeavors! It’s amazing how many people turn up at your place just when they’re needed. The excitement is palpable even with just pictures and text. This blog is a wonderful resource. Thank you for taking the time to document.
Thanks! Glad they’re of use 🙂
please excuse my ignorance, but i’m a newby. i watched a doco on permaculture recently and it said that it aims to mimic the natural chaos that abounds in ecosystems and avoids the planting in rows and lines, but i see your garden is in rows and lines.
Hey Rebecca, no worries 🙂 – Yep permaculture is about designing things in a way that mimic natural systems as closely as possible to obtain a yield. And yes there’s lots of straight lines in this market garden – that’s because we’re staring off this intensive food production system using existing, efficient strategies for growing a large amount of food in a small space, which in this case come from traditional french market gardening. We expect to move on from this exact way of doing things once we’ve learned our craft, but in the interests of expediency we’re learning an… Read more »
One thing that works is to make seed mixes that include fast maturing seeds, ones that will take longer to develop and a late season crop within the same beds. That way you get leaves to shade the ground throughout the season and crowd our weeds as well. Deep mulching is always good and break away from the straight lines! Even a long sweeping curve is better because it increases edge. I certainly would have not allowed a heavy internal combustion engine on my beds, there was a soil aeration device on hand that just needed to be gently rocked… Read more »
Thanks for your thoughts otherfish – if you’d like to look back thru our posts on this garden you’ll see we’ve chosen to go with an established methodology for organic market gardening in order to build on it in future years as we see fit with our permaculture principles (which we do understand, btw, but thanks for the reminder). As for the mechanized spader (used once only in the lifetime of this garden) i’d invite you to come and do the same job manually – but i really don’t think you would be able to, unless you had access to… Read more »
Your beds seem to be burgeoning with growth, that is always a good sign. I am personally not comfortable with conventional tilling, as the tines dig in, near the bottom, they are banging down on the soil, compacting it at a low level. No matter how sharp or well controlled the tillers are. I would rather use the tool that shows in one of your photos, Best described as a giant angel food cake cutter that is used with a gentle rocking action. What is most necessary in the soils, are space for exchange of gasses. Since all life has… Read more »
No we’re not much for tilling either, but as explained with this market garden project we’ve made a commitment to begin with established best-practice organic market gardening and use that as a starting point for devising a way to grow food on a community scale which is as low-impact as possible but which still gets a yield. A yield is paramount, as if we don’t have one then it’s off to the supermarket for us, just like everyone else. We don’t want to do that anymore than we have to. Thus begins the learning curve!
Production is inevitable, distribution will always be a problem. Many plant successionally, to extend harvest, but at many points along the way, you will have more than abundance than you can use even more than it is possible to distribute. In those cases, a solar food dehydrator, or being able to make pickles at a moments notice becomes a great resource! Good luck with your developing relationships, with food, your community and the abundance of Ma Nature!
I have begun a controlled study of something my good friend David Yarrow has been doing out in New York, near the Finger Lakes, adding bio-char. I took two concrete mixing tubs, built a table under them, then filled them with some fairly light soil mix. These containers are about waist high and are our of the reach of most critters. They are side by side and to one I added about two cups of finely powdered charcoal. Not your average Kingsford briquettes, but the real stuff that looks more like a piece of roasted tree. The results have been… Read more »