Good Shit / Bad Shit

26 May 2011

This week is my week at home, although I have 2 days at the office while my colleague attends a training course.

Monday, Tuesday were just stunning weather-wise; Clear blue skies and mid 20s temperatures. All very pleasant!

Both days I tackled our vege gardens. They’ve become overrun with weeds, yet again, and so I laboriously trowelled every piece of dirt, removing every weed and weed seedling I could find.

The Sussex chickens absolutely loved my presence in the vege gardens out the back, with a couple of the girls following me closely, darting in to retrieve any bug or caterpillar I might dislodge, not to mention the occasional worm.

Those garden beds are in fact full of worms and I put this down to both the composting we do on these gardens with fruit and veg waste, leaf litter and woodchip, and also to the chickens who spend many happy hours scratching and pecking amongst it all, at the same time depositing their own manure.  We did introduce a few worms to these beds initially but they have clearly multiplied several times over.

It was an experiment to let the chickens free-range the entire back orchard and vege garden and for the most part it’s been a great success. They do all the turning of the compost for us, they gobble up random bugs and they shit in lots of useful places. The only part that’s not yet working is our ability to protect the veges we do grow.

I had a bumper harvest of aubergines this summer and I lost them all to the chickens. They also pecked their way through the capsicums and strawberries and then to my annoyance gorged themselves on half the low hanging peaches.  

I have planted about 25 comfrey plants around one of the vege gardens and these have not only grown well but have provided much fodder for the chickens. They look terribly pecked but this is not an issue. The plants do not suffer, and if anything, thrive from the constant harassment. I only planted them last spring after digging up and dividing part of a big mother plant that grows on the other side of the stream. They’ve done so well that I suspect I may actually be able to divide these new plants come this spring.

I removed some of the big, older leaves from these comfrey plants and threw these into our 2 compost piles. Comfrey supposedly does wonders for compost and so far it seems to do well in ours.

The compost we originally bought in for these gardens was nutrient poor and so we have slowly added stuff too it. The fact that the worms are thriving suggests we’re getting something right. However, there’s always more we can do and once again I am challenging myself to collect more pig and cow manure to add to the mix.

Having weeded those gardens I then started on the original raised vege gardens. These are so far our most productive but also the most in need of TLC.

It took a long time to weed these. The larger of the 2 beds was overgrown with Stinging Nettles and Strawberry plants.

The former is of course an absolute pain in the butt to eradicate and in fact, despite several previous attempts, I haven’t managed to yet. It grows so unbelievably fast and can’t be weeded with anything less than thick rubber gloves and a fully clothed body. The roots travel the length of the beds, throwing up random plants all over the place. I dig deep, and pull and heave the long runners but I know I miss the odd one and then the process of garden domination takes off once more.

Still, it’s not all bad. Every leaf, branch and root I remove from the beds goes straight into the liquid compost barrels and it does a wonderful job of creating something special for my gardens. I would also use it for the fabulous Stinging Nettle Ale but this particular patch is often shat on by roosting chickens so I use a completely different pest patch of nettles for my ale.

With nettles seemingly removed I started on the strawberry patch. We had at the start of the summer, if I’m correct, 6-8 strawberry plants. These grew beautifully but are now directly below another chicken roosting spot and so were thickly matted with shit. They looked a little sad once weeded around and cleaned up, however, perhaps in a desperate attempt to save themselves from dying out, they sent out numerous runners and created an estimated 120 new plantlets.

I dug all these up and kept about 100 of the plantlets. After completely weeding that bed I was running out of daylight and so I quickly popped them back in the soil until I have another day in which to properly prepare the bed.

The soil looks lovely but is almost devoid of worms and probably nutrients. My plan now is to dump buckets of cow and pig shit onto the bed, sprinkle over Rok Solid and then to dig it all in and plant out my baby strawberry plants.

Pretty much most of the bed will be planted in strawberries, these juicy red ones, plus about 10 Alpine strawberry plants. In amongst these will be about 10 Welsh Bunching Onion plants I managed to unearth, a couple of celery and half a dozen big, bushy Society Garlic plants.

Hopefully the worms will also move back in.

As for the chickens eating all my strawberries again, it’s not going to happen. These beds will all be encased within a new glasshouse structure come spring.

So that was my hot, sunny Tuesday.

Today was quite a different day. It was by no means cold but damn it was wet. There was 24 ml in the rain gauge at 7:30 this morning and another 45ml by 5:30 this evening. Needless to say I wasn’t that keen on being outside today. Apart from feeding out and taking the dogs for a walk I kept myself busy inside.

And oh how busy I was!

I hate housework at the best of times but to be honest I’ve well and truly had enough of seeing shit on every surface inside the house. What kind of shit? Fly shit. This last summer New Zealand was plagued by flies and the interior of our house was no exception. On any one evening there might be 100 flies hanging upside down on our livingroom ceiling. I went through several cans of fly spray and hung natural fly traps outside from the verandah posts and yet still they came.

Quite frankly there’s only so much fly spray you can spray before you wonder what kind of toxic affect it’s having on your own body. I did spend a few evenings with an electric fly swat and then normal fly swats but this was a laborious task and resulted in the dogs going absolutely mental outside the French doors. They absolutely cannot tolerate the slapping noise of a fly swat and no amount of yelling, admonishing or even reassuring would placate them so eventually I had to give it up.

The end result was the flies won. They outbred my killing sprees and plastered every surface in my house with those horrid, round, brown fly dirts. It’s gross, really gross to see so many fly dirts on fly dirts that eventually some of them just start merging into one big dirt.

Today it was shit outside and shit inside and I’d had enough.  Over the morning muesli and coffee I consulted a couple of ‘green’ cleaning guides. I didn’t have most of the ingredients but I did have a litre of white vinegar in a spray bottle.

I grabbed myself an old cloth and the step ladder and started in one corner of the kitchen and cleaned every surface I could reach, from ceiling to floor. It was a mammoth task. Every surface needs to rubbed over with vinegar, left for about 20 seconds and then rubbed over again, and then several times again to remove the really stubborn shit.

The 2.7m stud height and my short stature means that once I’m on top of the ladder I can clean an area of ceiling in a maybe 50cm x 50cm square. Then it’s down the ladder, move the ladder, up the ladder and repeat the process. I also cleaned every groove in the moulded architraves, scotias and skirting board, the grooves in the moulded doors and the windows themselves. I cleaned the cupboards and the glass frames of my paintings. By 5:15 this evening my neck was sore and I’ve only managed to clean the kitchen and 2/3 of the livingroom.

I used a good litre of white vinegar and now I’m out of vinegar and my throat is feeling somewhat irritated, which certainly hasn’t helped the nagging cough that I’ve had for the last 3 weeks.

But still, where I have cleaned looks fantastic. It really, really looks clean and it occurs to me the house the kitchen and livingroom may not have looked this good for at least a couple of years.

The only thing letting the room down now is the cream curtains. The top 1/3 of my curtains are thick with fly shit and I really don’t know what the solution is.

The last set of curtains I sent away for cleaning came back complete with a verbal tirade from some woman who said they were worst curtains she had ever had to clean and she would never, ever clean them for me again.

Not that the curtains were more dirty than the average curtains but because the black-out lining sewn onto them is of a completely different material to the curtains. They need to be cleaned with 2 completely different methods but it is impossible to separate them without undoing all the hemming. I could see the woman’s point but it wasn’t me that made the curtains. I may have chosen the fabrics but at no point did anyone point out to me that putting the 2 fabrics together would mean I could never clean them.

I’m tempted to fill my bath with cold water and some gentle fabric cleaner and just throw them in but I may of course ruin them. Still, they’re pretty rank as they are so maybe I don’t really have any choice.

I have to wonder if maybe next time I get curtains made I should make sure the fabric is fly dirt brown. Curtains that colour might look like shit but I guess that’s the point!