I thought i'd start blogging about the goings on @ chez moi and hopefully provide some inspiration for someone out there.

Knowledge is portable.

Our house is pretty hectic, we're on a journey of knowledge, learning new skills everyday; from agriculture to aquaculture, cooking to preserving, building and designing and a whole host of things in between, all with one central purpose. Self sufficiency.

Never before has it been possible for so many to learn such a wide range of skills. Literally at the touch of our fingers we have the largest repository of information ever known. But dont take this resource for granted. We need to hardwire these skills into our societies before this gift is subverted and suppressed. It is our generations responsibility to learn the skills required and disseminate them to the next generations.

The Garden

We live in a small rented terraced house with what was a dreadful concrete and paving slab overgrown jungle of weeds, or as some might call it, a garden.

In Feb 2011 we attacked the thorny hydra, tamed it, and set about building our raised beds and building up some sort of border.

What came next is best summarised in this lil vid

 So its spring 2012, great time of regeneration and hope springing eternal. 100s of seedlings are all standing tall and awaiting planting into their positions.

Its this time of year millions of us will be tinkering in the garden making adjustments and plans for the forthcoming summer and here is no exception. Things have moved, systems refined, plants split and replanted (YAY for raspberries and strawberries), genesis has indeed begun.

One of the things i've started is a simple salad bar tray, for all the leafy needs of the household this summer. It's 1m long 55cm wide and 15 cm deep, perfect for this purpose, and it sits lovely on the chicken coop roof (try eating these you buggers)

Due to changes in the law it is now acceptable for irrigation systems to be used during hosepipe bans as they vastly reduce water consumption (10 minutes with a hosepipe uses 28 Gallons whereas 10 minutes with a home irrigation system uses 1.5 gallons).

For this reason we have upgraded our system to incorporate a second soaker hose to service a bed previously watered by hosepipe.

Whilst adding this soaker ive also removed the sprinklers from above the beds and replaced it at bed level with a combination of drippers and sprinklers, this is due to a powdery residue left on the foliage from watering from above, as i am in a very hard water area. This can adversely affect the plants ability to photosynthesize and reduce transpiration.

Ideally i should be using harvested rainwater, however this is impractical here as i cant make alterations to the guttering.

One solution to highly chlorinated water is to allow it to stand for 24h this will allow the chlorine to evaporate.

This video shows the irrigation system and the installation of the soaker.

I'm going to wrap this diatribe up with a little word for our UK growers just stepping out in the wonderful world of GYO (Grow Your Own), with the weather being so lovely the past week its tempting to think spring has properly started, which in a way it has but the cold snaps expected to return, keep those seedlings you planted inside for now or under cover, if you have already planted some out use plastic bottles with the bottoms cut off to keep them covered up or a simple mini poly tunnel. The cold will likely kill or at minimum stunt most seedlings growth.

The next installment of my ramblings will likely be kitchen based as we are just as productive in our kitchen as our garden.

Hope the reading/watching wasn't too painful.

Till next time, Peace and Light.