In The Garden: Getting My Geek On

So it's been a tumultuous kind of week or two round these parts, but hopefully things are heading back to normal-ish. I can live in hope anyway!!

Aside from drinking a tonne of coffee, any down time this week has seen me embracing my inner garden nerd. I've had my nose stuck firmly in some of my favourite organic gardening books and planning what we'll be planting in August/September, and figuring out how our crop rotation system is going to work. I've also been planning out the front garden, which we'll plant in September/October.

Toby is having his christening next weekend, so it's all hands on deck to get the place looking good before then, but once that's over I'll be garden-crazy all the way. I really want to have the beds in place and the soil worked on by the time August comes. (Or maybe the middle of August.)     

There are a gazillion different gardening resources out there, but in the effort to keep it as simple as possible I've decided to choose two or three resources and just stick to their advice, otherwise I find one book will contradict another and I just wind up confused.

So in case you're keen on starting your own vege garden, I thought I'd list the resources I'm going to stick with as I build and start the garden.

Organic Gardening magazine is great, but they have recently released their third Essential Guide, and they are all excellent. You can buy the newest one online, and the others on special order or from ABC shops:
- Getting Started (bed construction, composting, soil, growing in pots etc)
- Fruit (A-Z of fruits to grow at home)
- Veges (A-Z of veges to grow at home)

City Food Growers website is awesome. There are free and paid versions of the subscription (the paid version is so worth the $50 a year) and it will personalise the planting details based on your postcode, as well as offer a list of the best plants for your area, when to plant, what to plant with and common pests and diseases. It's incredibly helpful and I find I look at it most days when I'm trying to figure out what I'll be planting.

Gardenate app for iPhone. It has less detailed information that the City Food Growers website but it has the benefit of being portable, and it has a Garden Notes section where you list what you planted and when, and it will track the harvesting progress for you. Handy to keep track of the details that seem so simple at the time but will get pretty fuzzy pretty quickly.

So that's where we're at currently. And thank goodness for the gardening distraction, otherwise the past weeks may have seen me consume way too much wine and chocolate! Gardening as therapy = win!

3 Quick Things To Do This Weekend

Recycle aluminium foil, or, you know, make an elephant out of your scraps.

As you know, I'm all about the "do what you can do, when you can do it" mentality. So here's 3 quick tips you can try this weekend, that actually do make a big difference over time:

1. If you take money out at the ATM, say no to a receipt. Over a year, this really adds up. (Just look at the contents of my purse for proof!)

2. Clean your dryer's lint filter. Apparently a clean filter means it takes 30% less power for your dryer to run (and if you've had damp and humid weather like us recently, that is very good news.)

3. Use al-foil instead of cling wrap. You can recycle al-foil in your council pick-up (just make sure it's relatively clean of food scraps and squish it into a ball so the sorters can find it.) If you want to know what else you can recycle in your council area, check this site out.

Easy-peasy!

Top (Australian) Gardening Web Resources

There's tonnes of info online for budding (ha!) gardeners, but it's taken me a bit of time to find really good, local sites that have the goods.

I'm slowly putting together a list of websites that I frequent now that we've started to plan the garden (even though the food garden is a while off) and thought I could add them here for your reading pleasure.

Cityfood Growers:

It's such a brilliant resource for anyone who already grows their own food, or for people who are interested in trying. I'm a paying member, which does provide lots of extra benefits, but even the free membership gives you a tonne of useful stuff.


Gardenate:

I'm also a big fan of Gardenate and their fun app. I can only imagine at this point, but I think it really will come in handy once I start planting our vege garden in spring.

Gardening Australia - self-explanatory really.
The Vegetable Patch - super practical info for, well, vegetable patches
My Garden - there's a lot to wade through, but heaps of helpful stuff to be found

I'm sure there's others I frequent but my brain has decided to check out. So I'm going to follow suit.

Loving it crazy: Homegrown Evolution

Hay bale image from Fir0002

I was recently reading a Design*Sponge Small Measures post on eco and green-living books (super score - I've googled all of them and discovered about 5 new favourite similar minded folk!) and one that I was really intrigued by was The Urban Homestead by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen.

Anyway, turns out they have a blog, Homegrown Evolution, and I'm loving it a little crazy right now. Their mix of gardening, green living tips, insight into the way they're shifting their lifestyle all the while living in a normal, urban area and just really cool information (like the difference between hay and straw - who knew?! Actually I'm sure lots of people know. Just not me.) is more-ish and very very readable. Plus I like how well they articulate issues and thoughts that I roll around inside my head for days before writing about them.

Thought you may enjoy taking a peek while I go and clean up the almighty mess left by our no-longer-present garage. It's either that or playdough. Tough call.

Things I Have Done

When I started thinking about living life more lavender (twee alert!), I was overwhelmed with how much I could do. In fact, I was so overwhelmed that I did nothing instead. Information overload and all that.

It wasn't until I re-read A Slice of Organic Life that I started to think in small chunks. And those chunks were things I could actually manage.

True to form, I still ended up getting way over-excited and decided I would become the permaculture-organic-make-or-grow-everything-myself Queen. But I have since settled back down and decided that any improvements we make are still improvements, and besides, I can't sew to save my life so there is no way I could possibly make everything.

The best way for me to tackle information-overload-induced procrastination is by doing one thing at a time. So weekly, or more regualrly perhaps, I'll provide a post with a you-can-do-it-now tip. Sometimes they'll be big, sometimes they'll be small, but you can almost always do it now and improve your LQ (Lavender Quotient).

So if you're looking for one thing you can do right now to improve your LQ, make it this:

Check out what you can and can't recycle 
in your local council area. 

Recycling Near You is such a cool, simple concept (Sorry, this one is Australia only at this stage). Just pop your postcode in and it tells you straight away info like what you can/can't recycle in your council bins, what your hard rubbish nights are, links to council documents, etc.

Mobius Symbol. From Bless Designs.

Again, I'm in danger of exposing what an enormous dork I am, but I was so excited to get a definitive answer to the question of what exactly I can recycle. I was so stoked to find out that any plastics from the laundry, kitchen and bathroom can be recycled by my council (sans lids and not including clingwrap) as well as the fact that the envelopes I receive on a daily basis with the plastic windows can also be chucked in with the recyclables. We can recycle al-foil here so I now use that and baking paper rather than clingwrap, and not that we order take-away very often but when we do, the plastic boxes can all go too. Score one for the nerds!

So that is one thing you can do this week that will actually make a difference. And I started paying so much more attention to what was going into our rubbish bin as a result, which has meant we now only fill our regular rubbish bin to about 1/4 of its capacity. Our recycling bin is always full though. Happy days.