Hello everyone
I hope you all enjoyed a fantastic weekend and got to rest and do something fun.
We’ve been quite busy of late getting the garden looking a bit better now that we’ve had some decent rain. We still have level 4 water restrictions here so we’re literally saving every drop that we can.
I figured I’d share some of the recycling we are doing in the garden, we really upped the bar this year when we moved here and it makes me quite proud to see how it is paying off.
The Soil
The soil here is rather problematic. It’s clay loam so when it’s wet, it holds onto the moisture well but that often also doesn’t mean the plants have easy access to the water it holds. When it’s dry, it’s freaking bone dry and it bakes hard.
When we arrived here it was the end of summer but we still got some pretty hot days reaching 38 to 40 degrees C. When the summer hits, the ground dries up very quickly and if you don’t have a protective layer, it can become quite difficult to make sure the plants are getting the water they need.
The Plants
The plants in our garden are mostly waterwise and luckily most of them are well established. The grass here is Kweek grass or Cynodon dactylon which is quite hardy and drought tolerant but it still took a beating before we arrived and the majority of the back lawn was patchy and brown. The photo below was taken on 9th March 2021, a week after we had moved in. We hadn't even put up the Jungle Gym yet.
Water Saving
We have been utilizing all our water in the most efficient ways. We keep the hand washing dish water and use it to water the established plants. All of our grey water from baths and hand washing clothing goes into the garden instead of into the sewer.
Two months after we moved in and got our first municipal bill (which was crazy high) we scouted the property for water leaks. The irrigation system has huge holes in it so we switched it off at the main water supply to stop any leakage from that running up the water usage. We also found that the pressure release valve on the main inlet to the house was dripping water. Over the month this drip became a constant stream.
I informed our landlady but she didn’t seem too concerned and was not prepared to pay the call-out fee for a plumber at the time. As this was potable water that was literally just being wasted, I took to trying to collect as much of it as possible in clean containers and used it for hand washing clothing. This seemed to offset the wastage in my mind somewhat, but considering that there would be a full 4 to 6 hours of running water overflowing the container being wasted while I was sleeping, I still didn’t like how much was not being used.
Eventually at the end of May I sent through a condition report to our landlady with photos and a detailed write up of the defects that were high priority. She seemed to get the message that I was serious and she did get out a plumber who replaced the pressure release valve and I’m very happy to say that there is hardly any water now leaking from this inlet. I’m looking forward to a much lower water bill this month too.
All the rainwater and condensation that comes down the gutters drains into buckets that I empty out into totes every morning. Our landlady originally said that she would provide a water tank for rainwater but she has not fulfilled this so I am trying to collect as much as possible before the rain stops and the dry months set in.
We recycle all our 2litre milk bottles and hold rain water in these as well as some 6litre bottles that my mom in law dropped off with us. It’s not nearly as effective as having a rainwater tank, but for now it’s manageable and we’re still doing more water saving than if we weren’t collecting anything.
I’ve even started using coffee tins to collect water but I don’t really like the ferris oxide that starts to develop in the water and I’m not sure that this ground needs anything but organic matter added to it so rust water probably isn’t a great addition.
Organic matter – the lack of it
The soil here is so devoid of organic material. I don’t think that the owners have ever really thrown down compost or if the did, it was a very long time ago. We did an experiment on the front lawn where we used a garden fork to make holes in the ground for aeration and then we threw a bag of compost over the area. Within a week, the grass was growing madly in that section and taking full advantage of the change. We’d like to do this on the whole front lawn but it’s going to cost a lot of money and I’m not sure I want to invest more into the lawn financially.
The fruit trees in the back yard took quite a hit over summer and the original lemon tree had been cut down to practically a stump – I’m not sure why the previous tenants did that. When we arrived I could see that there was a very bad infestation of mielie bug on the lemon tree. They are a horrible pest to try and get rid of and they are spread by ants which we have millions of in the garden. I sprayed the tree every second day with organic neem oil, gave it some epsom salts and later some liquid nitrogen fertilizer and it started to bounce back slowly but it was really struggling with drought stress.
The two pomegranates, one apricot and one tangerine (I think it’s a tangerine but not 100% sure) seemed to fair slightly better than the lemon, but none of them had any mulch layer when we arrived here so they were my first port of call when it came to mulching.
I used cut grass clippings from the lawn mower as well as broken up twigs and leaves and I chopped up some yucca leaves that I had trimmed back to protect our toddler from them around the jungle gym. This seems to have worked well in keeping some moisture and also providing the organic material layer that will break down over time and hopefully give the soil a better structure for root growth of the plants.
Recently we trimmed all the old dead leaves off the mature yucca plants. This has never been done before because there were leaves right from the ground level that we removed. So now we have a metre high pile of yucca leaves. They are too fibrous and hard to cut up successfully with secateurs. I tried and was left with a very sore hand and a very small pile of cut leaves. My husband came up with a great idea and suggested I use our guillotine.
This has worked amazingly well and we have now got a sort of conveyor system going where the cuttings are collected on a tray and then we disperse them around the plant beds. My daughter absolutely loves helping us with this.
We have managed to now chop up about a third of the original pile, so it will take us probably about a week to get through it as we are doing it a bit at a time in between other things. We don’t know anyone around here with a chipper and hiring one is probably going to be very expensive for the day that we have it and it’s not like chipping this would take up a whole day with a machine so I don’t think the expense would be justified. This way we can do it at our pace and there’s no huge rush really. It will make it’s way into the garden when it does.
Around some of the bigger trees I've simply used the whole yucca leaves and made a ring around the base with them. It'll be interesting to see what this looks like after a few months of breaking down.
Composting
All our green kitchen waste goes into our compost bin which smells pretty awful after it got saturated with the heavy rainfall we had. I’m pretty sure that it’s not the right way to make compost according to the various experts, but we did this last year and we had such beautiful soil come out of it as well as too many volunteer tomatoes, avocados and green peppers to know what to do with.
Considering the tiny garden that we had last year compared to this large yard, we grew a lot of things. I’m very proud of what we accomplished last year.
Unfortunately since we got Star Beam last month, we’ve had some challenges keeping him out of the compost bin. I used some Yucca leaves in criss cross formation on the top which has deterred him somewhat. Here's a photo of him just for funzies.
I know that when he’s fully grown this is going to pose absolute no challenge for him though so I’m hoping we can train him well enough now to know that the compost bin is simply off limits. He does get rather jealous of the various birds that get first pickings. We even had a family of Olive Thrushes going through the bin a few days ago which was lovely. It was the first time they have visited our garden that I know of.
Grass Cuttings
When we first cut our lawn with the lawn mower, my husband used the bucket and I spread the cuttings around some of the established garden plants as mulch, but then I started questioning whether this wasn’t maybe doing a disservice to the lawn. We have been trying to nurse it back to green health and now we were removing nitrogen rich material to another place. We decided to cut the lawn the second time with the bucket off and just let the grass clippings fall where they were cut. This seems to have provided a nice bed of organic material on the open patches that the grass is now taking advantage of. I think we’ll do it this way from now on.
So that's what we've been up to the last while and I'm hoping it's going to pay off. We've made a pact with ourselves that we'll leave any rental property that we lease in a better state than when we moved in.
Here's our first aloe in flower. So pretty... hoping they will attract some sunbirds too.
Have a good one everyone :)
