UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY AT NIRVANA ORGANIC FARM AT HEATHFIELD

FOR A LOCAL,RESPONSIBLE, ENERGERIC AND ENTHUSIASTIC PERSON.

A position is available for a 12 month part-time internship which offers an opportunity to learn from 30 years biodynamic growing and small holding lifestyle in the Adelaide Hills.

2 days a week – negotiable times and days. Can be made of some ½ days (week days only) Times may vary depending on season and conditions. (this is farming which is not 9-5) There is no money exchange only skills and knowledge.

For more information on Nirvana Organic Farm http://nirvanaorganicfarm.blogspot.com.au

Application in writing by October 30^th to:

Nirvana Farm 184 Longwood Rd, HEATHFIELD 5153

Further information Deb or Quentin 83392519 after dark, before 9pm.

 

BIO- DYNAMIC AGRICULTURE

BEYOND ORGANICS

Improve your soils water holding capacity.

A one day course to introduce the practical concepts of the biodynamic methods to farmers and gardeners.

The Bio -Dynamic method is a modern organic method that creates a holistic approach to building healthy soil, plants animals and humans.

The course covers history, concept of a living organism, soils, compost, special preparations that enhance nature and equipment required.

 

Sunday, Sept 23^rd 2012.

8.30 am. -4.30 pm.

Cost: $140

Includes: notes, lunch, Membership of Adelaide Hills Biodynamic Group..

COMPOSTING AND MULCHING

Sunday, October 7^th

9.00 - 12 30 $50

Principles of composting and mulching, techniques and materials used and how they can be used most effectively on your garden or farm.

ORGANIC VEGETABLES FOR YOUR TABLE

Sunday, September 30^th

9.00—12.30 $50

Practical guide to establishing and maintaining a productive and healthy

vegetable garden.

INTRODUCTION TO MOON PLANTING AND USING THE PLANTING CALENDAR

Sunday, October 14^th 9.00-12.30 $50

Working with the rhythms of nature can develop your skills in fine tuning your garden and can add a new dimension to your gardening experience.

ORGANIC FRUIT, NUTS & BERRIES.

Sunday, October 21^st

9.00 -12.30 $50

Practical guide to orcharding. Includes establishment, soils, ground covers, maintenance & pruning.

POULTRY KEEPING.

Sunday October 28^th

9.00 pm – 12.30 $50

All you need to know about getting started with poultry. Includes selection, housing, feeding, breeding, pests.

WEAVING A BIT OF MAGIC

Sunday November 4^th

9am – 4pm

$140

.The ideal way to recycle your garden prunings. This introduction to natural fibre weaving will show you the essential techniques, suitable plants & other materials to make baskets, fences, or trellises.

Course includes all materials, lunch, morning & afternoon tea.

.GUIDED FARM TOURS

Book your own tour anytime

An ideal opportunity to gain an insight into a successfully run biodynamic farm .This Garden Quality Farm demonstrates an integrated system incorporating orchards, poultry, native habitat & wetlands, home food production & hardy cottage gardens all rolled into a unique lifestyle.

minimum charge $60 for up to 5 persons

extra’s @ $12/ head)

SCHOOLS; Secondary $8 Student with 1 adult/15 student’s Primary $7 Student with 1 adult/10 students

CLUBS & GROUPS; 15 + @ $10/ head

WORKSHOPS Held at Nirvana Organic Farm 184 Longwood Road Heathfield Phone 83392519 Practical, ‘hands on’ courses conducted by experienced biodynamic/organic farmers, Deb and Quentin. Their successful small holding, which has been run organically/Bio-Dynamically since 1983. National winner of the Organic Federation of Australia Awards of Excellence as the leading Organic Educator The 4.5 ha property provides the ideal classroom filled with practical examples of how goals can be achieved and gives inspiration into this GARDEN QUALITY FARMING for both gardeners and farmers alike. Courses are aimed to maximise opportunities for participation and discussion. The number of participants will be limited so you will need to enrol ASAP

Spring workshops at Nirvana

INTRODUCTION TO BIODYNAMIC METHODS

Sunday, September 18th 8.30am – 4.30pm $120

One day course to introduce the practical concepts of the biodynamic methods to farmers & gardeners. The biodynamic method is a modern organic approach that creates a holistic approach to building healthy soil, plants, animals & humans. Includes notes, biodynamic preparations, lunch & teas.

 

 

 

 

VEGETABLES FOR YOUR TABLE.

Sunday, October 2nd 9.00 -12.30 $50

Practical guide to establishing & maintaining a productive & healthy vegetable garden. Our climate offers many opportunities to grow food for your table all year round. Discover what plants to grow, and when. Practical tips & ideas.

 

 

 

 

 

COMPOSTING & MULCHING

Sunday,  October 9^th 9.00 -12.30 $50

Reduce water use by learning the principles of composting & mulching, techniques & materials used & how they can be used most effectively on your garden or farm.

 

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION TO MOON PLANTING AND USING THE PLANTING CALENDAR

Sunday, October 16^th 9.00 -12.30 $50

Working with the rhythms of nature can develop your skills in fine tuning your garden and can add a new dimension to your gardening experience.

 

 

 

 

 

.

ORGANIC FRUIT, NUTS & BERRIES

Sunday, October 23^rd 9.00 -12.30 pm. $50

Practical guide to growing fruits, nuts & berries. Establishing, maintenance, ground covers, soils.

 

 

 

 

POULTRY KEEPING

Sunday October 30^th 9.00 – 12 30 $50

All you need to know about getting started with poultry. Includes breed selection, housing, feeding, breeding, pests.

 

 

 

WEAVING A BIT OF MAGIC

Sunday, November 6^th 9am 4pm $120

The ideal way to recycle your garden prunings .A introduction to natural fibre weaving. Includes techniques, suitable plants & other materials to make baskets, fences & trellises. Includes all materials, lunch & teas.

 

 

 

All courses are held at NIRVANA ORGANIC FARM

184 LONGWOOD ROAD, HEATHFIELD

UBD 157:G7. Exit from SE Freeway at Stirling, turn right at roundabout & travel 3.5 km.

The courses are practical, ‘hands on’ conducted by experienced biodynamic/organic farmers, Deb & Quentin. Their successful small holding has been run under BIO-DYNAMIC principles since 1983.

The 4.5 ha property provides the ideal classroom filled with practical examples of how goals can be achieved & gives inspiration into this GARDEN QUALITY FARMING to both gardeners & farmers alike.

FOR BOOKINGS & FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT

DEB OR QUENTIN PHONE/ (08) 8339 2519 nirvanafarm@gmail.com

BIG CHOOK, LITTLE CHOOK

This afternoon I went and visited our newest seedsaver.... baby Rebecca, who was born on October 16th. She is amazingly gorgeous and didn't even cry at all when I kidnapped her from her basinet, while Chook was on the phone....well, I couldn't wait any longer to pick her up....and Peter was busy watching The Wiggles so.....

Anyway, amongst all the thousand other things a young mother has to do, Chook has propogated some seedlings for me and I am looking forward to getting them into the ground and watching them grow.

The other thing she has done is to somehow end up with an extra chook....no, not a clone.... another hen! A new-laying ISAbrown has arrived, uninvited and is causing some chaos in the chook yard which is the last thing this family needs right now. What's more, this one keeps getting out and digging up the vegetables and in all the ruccus Marly, the dog, has started digging into the chook yard and between all of them the commotion is continuous!

So, if anyone wants a chook who is young and just started laying, please ring or email big Chook, or me, ASAP.

.

FROM WEEDS TO BROAD BEANS, THANKS TO THE CHOOKS

Right down at the bottom of my steep block is an area we levelled many years ago and here I grow things that don't need much attention. Basically this means pumpkins in summer and broad beans in winter.It is divided into 3 bays and I let the weeds grow all year round in at least 1 bay, for the chooks.	Years ago this used to be just very stony, hard clay with lots of enormous, very bad weeds. The garden group and I periodically go over it and remove the stones but otherwise it has been a combination of sheets of coconut-fibre underlay over the trampled weeds, topped with peastraw and left until it has all rotted enough for the chooks to be let in and work it over.
	You can see in the photo how beautiful the soil is now - completely cleared of weeds and fertilized by the chooks over the last 2 months or so. All I do now is rake it level and sow my broad beans. Chooks are excellent workers and time-savers! And mine never stop laying, all year round.
	Today I put the chooks into the second bay and it won't be long until this is cleared and fertilized by them and ready for another crop - maybe globe artichokes, I am thinking, as they take up a lot of room in my crowded vegetable garden at the very top of my block, about 100m away. Up there I have also sown a small, Egyptian variety of broad beans especially grown for falafel. I hope it is far enough away to stop cross-pollination! The house and the rest of the garden are in between.
	My broad beans saved from last year are now lying in the damp soil. I am sowing them later this year so they don't get so tall and floppy before they flower - an idea from Malcolm Campbell.
	Here is the third bay which is now a green manure crop of oats, lupins, self-sown broad beans from last year and something I have forgotten! I still cannot get lucerne to germinate. Eventually I will dig this in and leave it to rot away before giving the chooks a bit of a go in here and then sowing pumpkins in spring. You can also see the border of arrowroot(more visible in the other photos) that I grow to pick and feed the chooks during summer when green feed is hard to find.
	In the hour or so I spent down there today, in the company of the friendliest chooks around, they did a great job of getting on with clearing the weeds in the second bay, converting them into eggs and leaving their manure behind. While I was working away I was practicing my Italian, saying all sorts of crazy stuff out loud to the chooks. Luckily my neighbours are a fair distance away but I am hardly likely to care anyway and Italian should be said in a good, hearty voice! Ciao!

Scarecrow's garden

I just found a fantastic website for an impressive garden called "Scarecrow's garden".

She says:
"We live in the dry Mid North of South Australia on a half acre town block. Now the children have left home hubby (Doc) and I enjoy a simple lifestyle growing our own food and eating the results...."

http://scarecrowsgarden.blogspot.com/

The blog is a wealth of information. If you haven't already seen it, check it out!

BROODY CHOOK

There I was, telling someone that the Isabrown chooks rarely go broody, and the next thing one of mine has. All day she sits on the eggs laid by the other chooks in the nesting box and, after I have removed them, she just keeps on sitting. She doesn't lay any eggs herself and causes disagreements when the other chooks want her to get out so they can lay their eggs. Obviously she is not finding this a pleasant experience as she growls at me, like a dog when I lift her out and then she gets even more angry and pecks at my legs and shoes in a rather nasty way. (Rather like how I have sometimes felt being a mother!) Time for treatment. Well two of my Wednesday gardening friends have chook varieties that are more prone to this crazy behavior and I have seen how they manage it. Although the length of time and the severity of the treatment differed, the gist of it was this. Put said chook into a wire bird cage, without any luxuries, hang it in a tree for 2 - 5 days and it will be cured.

Sally lent me her cage and now there is a lull in the hot weather I decided yesterday was the day. First up I put the chook into the cage and then looked around for somewhere to hang it. Woops, not much in reach since we cut down the cootamundra wattles. In an attempt to reach up and hook the wire onto a rather thin branch of another wattle I had to balance the cage down on my bent leg. For some reason I was doing this in shorts and t-shirt and the blasted chook attacked the skin of my leg through the bottom of the cage. Lesson number 1 : Assemble the cage before putting the chook in it ! Now, this chook is, even at the best of times, the least friendly and has never liked me touching it. So it was too late for that as I knew that if I took her out I'd be running around all afternoon trying to catch her again - something one learns to avoid.

There were a lot of harsh words spoken to this crazy bird, including various killing and cooking methods appropriate for oldish chooks! Eventually I did get it hooked up and went to get the hose to fill the old, plastic butter container Sally had previously wired onto the inside of the cage. That done I stood back - I thought I had won that little battle and I left her to settle in. She had been growling and clicking her beak at me but now she started shouting out in a most unfeminine way, sounding more like a rooster who had lost his lover! I imagined our less-than-friendly neighbours calling the RSPCA and me being hauled away, amid the paparazzi, and appearing dishevelled and broken on that night's TV news ! However, worse was to come as next she expressed her dissatisfaction with the whole situation by flapping madly and breaking the water container.

I was tempted, briefly, to leave her to die of thirst but then the neighbours really would have something to complain about. So I found another dish to use and headed back to the scene, amid the chaos and noise of one silly chook. I then realised I would have to put my hand inside the cage to get the old container off and then to attach the new one securely on. Once bitten, twice shy. Lesson 2: full armour. I went and changed to a heavy, long-sleeved shirt and rugged gardening gloves to prove that I was indeed smarter than a chook. This worked like dream and she pecked my hand and arm crossly and harmlessly over and over until she got sick of the whole thing and calmly stood watching.

Walking away and leaving her to it she started yelling again but, as it fell on deaf ears, she soon stopped and was on the way to recovering from her bad temper and broody behavior. Hopefully she will send up the white flag in a day or 2 and I will be able to let her rejoin the other chooks as a happy and grateful member of the flock.

Tony Scarfo's black turtle beans won the race to the top of the bean frame.

Roger mulched all the bark that blew down on Friday and now it makes a nice new layer on my vegetable garden paths.

ps have you noticed that 'anecdotes' is now at 45 while the next closest label only rates 31. If you read or see or hear something you would like to share, write it here. It doesn't have to be long or fantastic but I will love it and you for having a go. Not everyone wants to rave on like me, I know, but I think you will find its fun to contribute once in a while. Make it your Christmas present to me.

Chook Compost

Today I used the first batch of my own compost! Chris (husband) came out and saw me spreading it over the veggie patch and got all excited about it. "We made our own compost!" he exclaimed and the proceeded to ask me if it was the most satisfying thing I'd ever done. I think actually eating the produce is more satisfying but it certainly brought a sense of achievement. You can see the compost spread around one of my cucumbers in the picture on the left.

Since space is precious in our garden, I was reluctant to create a big compost patch but I need lots of compost! As a result, we've developed our own compost system to use our space as well as we can. It starts in the chook pen with everything organic added to it. This includes weeds, lawn clippings, hedge clippings, vegetable scraps, leftover dinners (but not meat or anything that looks like an egg) and of course plenty of chook poo. Here's a picture of it taken in July this year with a mountain of clover weeded from the garden. The floor of the pen is about 30cm below the level of the ground around it. (I also put a wire floor under the pen and sewed it to the walls to keep rodents out.)

The chooks do most of the turning and mixing for me as they sort through it for their choice of the veggie scraps and weeds. We still need to do some turning and I've also added a bale of pea straw because it seemed too wet and was going slimy. Soon after adding the pea straw, we moved the compost into a black bin and left it for 6 weeks to decompose further. After the 6 weeks, it's ready to use.

Here's what it looks like today. The chooks are out roaming the garden but they'll be back at night. I'll turn it and add some straw if needed this afternoon. Then I'll leave it for a week without adding any more to the pen (except chook poo which I can't stop). After that, it will be ready to move to the black bin and the cycle will continue.

MORE ON EGGS AND CHOOKS

Funny thing is that I also wanted to write about eggs, even before I saw Andrew's delicious idea. I have just finished eating a boiled egg, which was laid only seconds before I collected it from the nesting box. It was so hot and still had a spot of liquid on it when I picked it up. I brought it in and put it into the pot right there and then and wondered if it needed slightly less cooking because it was already hot on the outside. Interesting how the eggs are laid hot, but uncooked ! After 5 minutes (usually I cook them for 6 when they are this large) in barely on-the-verge-of-bubbling water I extracted it and got into it, cutting off the top and popping in a thin sliver of cold butter - a refined skill which allows none of the insides to dribble out down the outside of the shell ! I didn't have toast with it because the taste of a fresh, organic egg is unsurpassed and should not be adulterated with other flavours (except for Paris Creek butter). The yolks of such good eggs are orange and very rich in flavour and the white is a total contrast. I would like to invite people to my place for breakfast and maybe Andrew and I could cook up a storm ! Yes this is a photo of my egg, not a google image!



Chooks are so easy to look after and so friendly and surprisingly different in personalities one from the next. Almost anyone could have , say, 3 or 4. Deb is very generous with her feeding regime for her poultry but I just give mine a mixed grain that contains no animal by-products and no added vitamins or any other additives . Apart from that they get all the weeds from the garden and kitchen scraps( you get to know what they like). The brown hybrids lay continuously for at least 2 years and I usually plan on getting 2 more each year to account for those that escape or die or stop laying. That way I seem to keep a group of 3 - 5 all the time.
Fox baits are often laid up here in the golf course opposite us and in the Cleland Park land just around the corner and this is why I think we don't have trouble with them, even though I often see them at the bottom of the road wandering along in broad daylight ! I didn't know this when I got them so, after a lot of reading, we made a double entrance into their sleeping quarters and each time the chooks have to bob down and squeeze through a narrow space to get into the inner section where they go, by themselves, at night. The hutches are framed with metal and sitting on a double width of bricks so nothing can dig under.
I have fenced off a section down one side where I have let weeds grow. Later in summer, when there won't be much grass left in the chook run I will let them in here now and then. I hope to keep this patch watered and green for them as long as I can.

Here is a picture that son Alex emailed to me with the caption "a better way to stop the chooks getting out"!

No matter what you do the chooks WILL get out when it is most inconvenient !