Tui are enjoying the autumn gardens. Photo / Duncan Brown
If you're just getting started with a food forest or orchard, or really any other types of perennial garden, now is a perfect time to mulch.There are a few garden chores I've been avoiding, but I'm now starting to crack on with them at our place.
Weeds plus autumn leaves equals compost
After all this rain, grass and weeds are getting a foot-hold and the dreaded Mignonette vine has started winding its tentacles up a tricky-to-access back corner of our property.
It is so tenacious, it has managed to wrap itself around the leaf tips of the neighbour's Butia capitata (jelly palm) to escape our grasp. The tricky bit about this plant is its ability to produce little tubers along the length of the vine, which drop off as you're pulling it down. The tubers then go on to start new plants. Waikato Regional Council does not recommend putting this vine in the home compost bin.
As we are an organic property, the only recipe is to keep at it and not let it get away on us, and dig out any new seedlings which appear. The vines and tubers go into a covered bucket of water for several months until they are completely rotten. This technique also works well with kahili ginger. The gloopy mush gets poured straight back on to the soil and feeds the bananas. Alternatively, put them in the garden bin to be dealt with in a commercial hot compost.
The leaf fall, weed and grass growth of autumn are perfect for composting. Just ensure you're not composting problem weeds with their seeds. Making a big batch at once, with alternating layers of soft greens (nitrogen) and dry browns (carbon) plus microbial starter such as soil, chook or grazing animal manure and you're away with a good chance of achieving a hot compost. Mixing to aerate every couple of weeks will ensure the cooler edges are composted as well.
The food forest
Our small urban food forest is supposed to look a bit like a jungle, with a large Abyssinian banana, cherimoya, babaco, mountain paw paw, fruiting bananas, taro, and a lemon tree on the sunny edge. But even jungles need management. Several large bunches of bananas were harvested over the past couple of months, and the remaining trunks need cutting down and chopping up into shorter lengths. These pieces are placed on the soil in the food forest where they will decompose and enrich the soil for the next generation of bananas and other fruiting trees.
We started out with quite heavy clay soil when I first planted this spot more than a decade ago and now the soil is rich, light and airy, full of organic matter and soil life. It looks almost like pure compost - and we've not added any, apart from the occasional tree mulch in the first five years. On occasion, I spread a little seaweed around and sprinkle basalt rock dust to give the soil a mineral boost.
If you're just getting started with a food forest or orchard, or really any other types of perennial garden, now is a perfect time to mulch. The soil is moist and warm and the macro and micro invertebrates are still active, and will help break down that carbon-rich material and integrate it into your soil. This is a much more cost-effective way of improving soil without buying tonnes of compost. Mulch is essentially slow-release compost for fruit trees. A sprinkle of rock dust around fruit trees will add minerals to your soil, benefitting the health of everything living in it.
Mulching now will also protect the soil, preventing winter rain from leaching the nutrients out. Even better, it will help suppress those pesky weeds.
Protecting native birds - rat control in the garden
Tui are visiting our garden more regularly. Three have appeared, warbling away as they make their way from tree to tree. They particularly enjoy sipping nectar from the tiny banana flowers that hang in cream clusters inside the main "bell".
The tui artfully hang upside-down to get access to the delicate inner flowers. I'm pretty sure they're attracted to the copious numbers of sweet yellow fruit from the jelly palm, which are scattered underneath and along the top rail of the neighbour's fence.
Rat control at this time of year is really important as they like to come inside and nest under floor boards or in ceilings. We've had to resort to using a couple of secure poison bait stations (well out of reach of pets) as organic methods haven't been enough to cope with the invasion. Our border terrier has caught a few rats but for the most part they are too elusive for him. The humane Goodnature trap has recently come to our attention and we're keen to give it a go. It looks like a good piece of Kiwi ingenuity and is a great option for organic properties where certification is an issue.
Hopefully, we'll continue to see tui, grey warblers and fantails gracing our garden in the years to come.