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
9 Comments
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, but this was virgin ground, which required a lot of breaking up and prep in order to get to vegetable bed stage…
The spader Allsun crew brought with them – it’s a marvelous thing – sortof chops up the clods without turning the soil over – and from there on you can deal with it, as long as you have great intent – it’s hard work, turning recovering pasture into super-productive vegies the first year – no mistake about that!
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 established way of doing first, then we’ll diverge from there – lots more musings on straight lines in market gardening here: http://milkwood.net/2011/07/13/shifting-to-community-scale-food-thinking/ and here http://milkwood.net/2011/06/03/planning-our-organic-market-garden/
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