I'm ruined. I'll never be able to walk past a pile of dirt ever again and ignore it. I have developed a deep, deep feeling for dirt. Kind of like Adam's deep feeling for chickens. He's watching youtube videos right at this moment on how to sex chickens. He commented that 'sexing chickens' was perhaps not a youtube search to stumble on, and we're specifially trying to learn how to identify cornish cross hens from roosters for breeding purposes, but otherwise Ad seems to be enthralled. More on sexing chickens another day.
I digress from soil.
We're surrounded by it, as you always are when there's a building going up. We have new rules: gumboots ON when playing on the pile of dirt, girls, ok? We've only wrecked one pair of white sandals so far.
The digger guy loves our soil so much that he had a moment of dismay when he considered that this site will be covered with a (modest) slab of concrete at some stage soon. We'll be growing heirloom vegies in large quantites on another patch of equally lovely volcanic ex-dairy-farm soil soon! Please pour the damn concrete.
As an aside, I love the meter box on the site. It's the actual house power box which will be attached to the side of the house when it's no longer a drawing but a building. Cool, hey.
Dad has very kindly shifted a big pile of beautiful topsoil over next to my pumpkin patch so I can improve the patch once the pumpkins are finished. He's also shifted another big pile so I can top up my raised beds too. It's gorgeous soil. We're so incredibly lucky here, it's rich, gutsy, soft, full of worms and fertilised by 150 years of quality cow poo. I have an heirloom veg list for the market garden and I cannot wait to get planting.
Meanwhile, in the house vegie garden, the beans are finished and in the freezer, the zucchini is out and the turnips are on the menu just about every night this week. Tonight we had a chicken pie made with turnip and spring onion. It was yummy. We're harvesting radish, rocket and rhubarb, the pumpkins are still maturing on the ground (very late for around here), the beetroots are up and the broad beans are solid and soldierly. The teepees are for the sugar snap peas. The garlic has to go in this week. My horticultural guru, Permaculture Vanessa (as distinguished from Pole Dancing Vanessa) told me this week that garlic needs to have a foot of green growth on it before the shortest day of the year in order to adequately photosynthesise the reduced sunlight from that point into fat bulbs. Makes sense. Must plant the garlic. And google when the shortest day of the year is.
Also must find a home for the flats of seedlings I'm currently enthiastically spraying with water and peering at daily. I'm attempting onions, leeks, broccoli, cauliflower and brussels sprouts. Probably doing it all wrong, but whatever, I'm excited about those sprouts. Might need another garden bed or two…
So here's to dirt.
And correctly identifying chicken vents.
xxx