Rooting Cuttings

I planted out half of one of the backyard raised beds with cuttings. I even recycled old plastic bags I had tucked away, and made it look nice and tidy.

Part was chilean guava cuttings.

Part was box hedge cuttings.

Unfortunately, the chickens have recently taken to scratching out this bed. The black plastic is in disarray and the cuttings are all dislodged and strewn everywhere. Never trust anyone who tells you that the chickens will magically not get anywhere you don't want them, and will listen when you tell them to scoot and stay away from something! Lies! Even if you rolled your eyes and didn't believe them, you still should have put netting over whatever it was. Two words: chicken enchiladas.

Pumpkin Residue

I had some pumpkin steaming on the coal range, and forgot about it. Luckily I caught it before it had cooked all the liquid away, but what was left was this sugary syrup. It was sweet, but malty tasting. It was quite a nice pumpkin, and I assume it must have had a really high sugar content.

Green Manure

I bought a bag of green manure seeds at a local store, and while I intended to plant them out, the problem is that I'd need to clear grass to do so. But I did manage to scatter some around a French Sugar fig seedling I planted, and to fence it off enough to prevent the chickens from getting in. They can easily fly over netting this high, but I suspect the limited area prevents them from doing so.

An earlier picture.

Two and a half months later.

The growth should start taking off now it's spring. I think the mix is lupins, and some other nitrogen fixing plants. I'll probably scatter in some bee attracting flowers and just let it all grow.

Nettle Tea

I've had a bucket of nettles sitting under my water tank, since Autumn. As it is Spring now, I've bottled it up and am using it as part of a 1/20 dilution (with added seaweed tea, and worm tea) to water my plants. When I researched it, people talked about not doing it if there were seeds on the plant, and cutting the roots off. All sorts of complicated nonsense, with no reason why it would be a problem. I just push as many nettle plants in a bucket as I can fit, then add water, and tie a cloth over the top to prevent fruit flies getting in, and then leave it.

Then I take a cut off 2.25L coca cola bottle as a funnel, and use that and some old mutton cloth to sieve the resulting green liquid into empty plastic milk bottles. The coke bottle funnel fits in there perfectly, and the mutton cloth collects the seeds, which I scatter somewhere so I can get even more nettle at later date. The more the better! I go through this stuff too quickly.