Mad Bush Farm Diary: weeds

Oct 25, 2015

10:31 AM -

gardening,horticulture,learning,weather,weeds

Wind, rain and battles with cats

Diary Entries 22 - 24th October
It's been a frustrating last few days. Wind, more wind and even more wind and then rain We need the rain, I just wish it had been some other time. I had planted a tomato for our use, but that was destroyed by one of the cats deciding it was the perfect spot for its toilet needs. I was so frustrated over it. I should have protected it with netting but never thought to. Lesson learned. I'll plant another elsewhere and this time make certain the cat don't go digging it up. This wind is not helping anything. I can't spray any weeds which need doing. Instead they are bigger and weedier than ever. I've had a downer over it all. But nothing is ever easy.

dug over more ground it was like concrete!
dug out more thistles they will make good fertiliser
figuring out where to put the barrels for the liquid fertiliser I'll be making

Oct 20, 2015

8:46 PM -

blackberry,gardening,learning,permaculture,planting,recycling,sunflowers,vegetables,weeds

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Life in the blackberry patch and it's a struggle!

This is my enemy right now. Rampant blackberry all over what used to be a garden. I've been gradually hacking away at it section by section. Oh for perfect soil and no blackberry, but all I have is hard impacted clay from years of stock walking all over it and not much else. It's disheartening to even thing about it, But over time I have coaxed what was a struggling mandarin tree to grow. This year it's twice as big as it was back in 2012. Here it is in the photo below a struggling sad tree not anymore. I put a tyre around it and started putting in horse manure and any other organic matter I could find plus a good dose of blood and bone. It worked. Each year since I've mad sure it's well fed. Someone made the mistake of suggesting I should put lime in my soil with a PH of 8.6 no way!

Here's what I did today:

Planted a Beefsteak tomato plant to join a second for our own use\
Dug out a huge blackberry root that has bugged me for years
Finished building a tyre wall in the first stage of the growing area
Prepared a bed for my Moulin Rouge sunflower seeds
Made up four more trays of seeds to germinate
Dug out heaps of unwanted Californian thistles
Listened to the third lecture in the course I'm doing with the Open Permaculture School

I've had a great day and a very productive one. I woke up this morning feeling much more grounded and with a sense of purpose. I won't say that my depression wasn't trying to get me down. It was but I carried on. I know now I've done the right thing by making a firm decision to get out of the mire I'm in and keep moving forward. I am going to make this work. Happy me!