Growing Your Own Food. New Garden Beds.

Growing your own food is a must for future survival, you can't trust foods from overseas, & Australia & the UK are producing less & less of our own foods! If it all hits the fan, there will be no foods to purchase, it will be a matter of grow or forage or starve.

Recently we put in a new berry patch for growing Boysenberries & Young berries, & we added another pumpkin patch ready for next spring.

We have a lot of regrowth tree saplings to get rid of for fire safety, so we spent some time cutting & mulching for the new berry patch.

The newly plowed & composted pumpkin patch.

Our New Three Sisters Garden. Hugelkultur.

This season we are trying a slightly new garden method, just to see if it works. This will be our three sisters garden, corn, beans & squash. This method of making a garden bed is known as Hugelkultur .

I will be making a video of this later when the crops are up, but right now this is as far as I have got. I dug a trench first & filled it with garden refuge, cut grass & weeds, heavier tree trimmings on top of that, some old garden edging logs that we have replaced, then the soil on top. I did add some chook manure before adding the soil to help break down the refuse.
When I started mounding the earth, I soon realised that I was not going to have enough soil to cover the highest logs. I did not want to bring more soil from elsewhere or use our compost that we needed for our other garden beds, so I removed two of the top logs.

The two pumpkins are volunteers from last year.

Gardens. Boxing and Mulching.

When we want to use a bed that has overgrown with weeds, we cover the grass and weeds with cardboard and then mulch on top. The grass and weeds will rot down to compost under the cardboard.
 If we want to use the garden right away, then we can weed the garden, add some manure, box it (cover with cardboard), then add mulch. For planting we simply make holes in the mulch and cardboard and sow directly or plant into the ground.
 Before boxing we soak the ground if we intend to use it right away. The boxing and mulching keeps in the moisture and saves water.

A short piece of fencing of ring lock for the choko to climb on.

Queensland Blue pumpkin patch boxed, mulched and sown.

Another section of garden boxed over weeds and grass but not yet mulched.

A new garden bed I have just prepared where the old compost heap used to be. This bed for Golden Nugget pumpkins. I dug out the grass and weeds and added sheep manure before boxing. I will be adding mulch and sowing tonight when it gets cool.

This section was boxed and mulched during winter, and is now ready for planting.