Category Archives: Building & Repairing

Much to do …

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I have the day off from my day time job and a list of things to do.

Sheds to clean up, wicking beds to build, shelves to make.

And yet I suffer from the dilemma that we all often feel of the flatness. I could blame the weather it has been all over the place and is currently quite cold. I could blame having travelled and competed in a martial arts seminar for 4 days or the running around we did yesterday with my family to make up for the 4 days. But at the end of the day there is little point in blaming anything. I am making some sourdough cheese toasties and making another coffee, writing this and then I will start.

 

sourdough toastie

I remember reading an article in which they had a quote from one of the rural class who moved to the greater cities in England in the early part of the industrial age. He discussed that the standard of his life had improved in a material sense. Material things he could never have afforded before, greater food security and education for his children. But one of the negatives that he mentioned struck a chord with me. He discussed the grinding shifts day and night, how on the land he could sit back and relax for 4 days and then for the last 3 work long hours to get everything done. The natural rhythm of his life of all of our lives. But in his industrial job he started by the clock and finished by the clock day in day out. Good days bad days productive days less so it was all driven by the machines he worked with. He found it tiring and draining.

So today I will eat my toasty drink my coffee and get what I can get done while I remind myself I am a man not a machine.

The Olla Bed

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About a year ago I built an Olla bed. For those of you not familiar olla are a low tech unglazed earthen ware containers used to provide water directly to the roots of a plant.

A much better article than I could ever write is found at

http://permaculturenews.org/2010/09/16/ollas-unglazed-clay-pots-for-garden-irrigation/

With summer just around the corner (despite the sudden cold snap) I thought I had better give a report on how it is doing.

My Olla are not so pretty being made of some old clay pipe I had access to and some pot bases. I Sanded them to remove any glaze and used silicon to bind it all together. Over the last summer they lasted really well requiring a single fill up of the three olla to last the week.

I also incorporated a mini worm farm into the bed that helps to keep up the worms in the beds and compost it.

As you can see the beds are thriving. Last summer almost all of our salad vegetables came from this one bath tub. I was sick and tired of plastic packets of salad vegetables costing me a fortune and going bad after about two days.

The bed requires very little work to keep the plants maintained and as you are feeding directly to the roots of the plant the amount of weeds has been very minimal. I have used seedlings for the most part planting them around the Olla and this seems to work best for me, the developed roots seem to find the water without much trouble. Direct seeds seem to go the way of the weeds and not do as well.

This year I will be adding some herbs and more leafy greens to the mix and seeing how much I can push the system and how long the reservoirs will last with the bed fully loaded.

In the next week or two I will drop a post on the build process I went through.