Of Mice, Fridges and Men

Finally, “That” blog post.

Hi All,
Firstly, don’t faint, it’s a blog post from narf7! Yes. A real blog post finally. I am not going to mutter any of those vague excuses as to why I haven’t posted. I just haven’t…but here I am back again with a brain full of things to post. The first half of the year has been a whirlwind of study and ensuring that we pass this year. Things are going really well in that department and what was so much gobbledy-gook last year makes perfect sense this year. We also have more girls/women in the class this year and the male confraternity are in the minority. It is amazing to see how very different a class can become with an injection of new people. This year most of the class are interested, invested and “there”. We have a vibrant community of people who want to design, to create and to learn as much as they can which fosters a really good class community of like-minded people who share what they are learning and anything that they find that might help. SO much different to last year when I felt the need to bring as much cake as I could to fill the gap that my complete lack of understanding about the subject matter brought to the board. I have only brought cake once this year and that was to yesterday’s morning tea to farewell the first half of the year and welcome our school holidays.

Even Batman got caught out in our recent flooding event.

Me feeding the hungry with some of the political propaganda we have been inundated with prior to yesterdays Australian Federal Election. The recipient was MOST happy with the results. Always good to find somewhere to stuff unwanted items…

That brings me to the next phase of Serendipity Swamp (don’t ask…) and the promised Sanctuary redevelopment. We had to wait until we had a few spare weeks to get this project underway. We also had to collect the required amount of fridges. Yes, fridges, from the tip shop. “Fridges?! Has the women gone mad?” No, not yet, BUT I have found a way to significantly reduce the amount of water that we use in the vegetable garden each growing season and which is going to completely change the way that we grow our veggies here on Serendipity Swamp (Farm). Ok, the “swamp” bit refers to the amount of rain that we have had here and what it has done to the soil and our driveway. I refuse to complain about it as we had it SO very dry over summer but occasionally, when I am holding onto a gate post to stop myself from performing a magnificent narfish version of the splits I must admit to being a wee bit muttery under my breath…

Our most precious resource at the moment that we split and move in wheelbarrows up to the deck to keep it dry.

Say what I might about my dad’s “craftsmanship” when he made these steps, I have to admire their ability to turn into a small waterfall at the slightest deluge

And look, there is even a pond at the bottom (sigh)

And don’t even get me started on our back gate…

Now, back to the main event. That garden! Stevie-boy and I have had a really bad cold. He is just recovering from his, after 9 weeks of hacking and wheezing. I have had it for just over a month but I seem to be recovering a bit faster than he has. Hopefully we will be back in our prime for next week’s start on the veggie garden reno but even if we aren’t, it will be “full steam ahead” as we don’t have another window of opportunity like this one for the rest of the year and we NEED to get this underway so that we can have it all set up and ready for planting out come spring. Now to a bit of back history…(consider that wibbley-wobbley like visuals for “going backwards” into the past OK?)

We seem to have ended up with 5 “regular” feral cats on our property. They are all male bar one small female and we have decided to tame the female till we can catch her and take her to the vet’s to be spayed. We are then going to accept the feral cats as part of Serendipity Farm sans kittens. They do a great job of clearing out the rats, they are actually scared of our bolshie chooks and don’t touch them and as you can see, they are getting quite tame.

Here are our “feral” cats eating a tin of tuna. There is one large male who looks after them all and the whitest one is the female that walks up to us and takes food from our hands. Steve can stroke her and soon we will catch her and take her to be spayed.

Sanctuary is my summer sanity. If I didn’t have somewhere green to go in summer I would probably start to dry out, turn brown and blow away just like everything else does here by February. As someone who was born an optimist, I can’t allow my husk to dehisce, so I had to find a way to reconcile the ENORMOUS amount of water that is inefficiently poured into Sanctuary each year in order to feed the whiteflies in the manner to which they have become accustomed. I got up at 3.30am and headed off to water the garden at 4.30 till 6.30am when I woke Steve up and we headed out to walk the dogs before TAFE. For 2 hours I speed watered Sanctuary and by the time I turned off the water and started racing for the door I could see the water seeping down the slope and knew that by that afternoon the top beds would be bone dry again. Our whole property is on a steep slope and as you may (or may not) know, water likes to pool at the bottom of slopes and is averse to staying put halfway up. Every day I would feel enormous guilt about how much water I had to use to sustain my little green bit of sanity but I wasn’t ready to give in and give up. I HAD to come up with an idea for how to efficiently water Sanctuary and use less water as Tasmania is now prone to drought in our summers and this is only going to get worse with global warming so “How to reduce water use and water more efficiently?”

Steve took this photo of some pelicans who have set up shop just over the road from our front gate.

We took the dogs for a walk over at Beauty Point a few weeks ago and noticed this revegetation notice. Obviously dogs can romp around on the newly planted grass but NO zombies…

Well enter Bev from https://foodnstuff.wordpress.com/water-wicking-boxes/  and John http://joharthash.blogspot.com.au/ who taught me about a concept called “water wicking garden beds”. I have alluded to this premise and we have even dabbled in water wicking by turning dad’s old yacht dinghy (that I ran into in the car and put a hole in) into a strawberry bed. This was the ONLY garden that didn’t need daily watering in Sanctuary, in fact, it could go without being watered for a week thanks to a large reservoir of water held in situ in blue stone chunks at the base of the boat. I can check the level of the water through a length of plumbing pipe that we buried vertically in the mix and the water level is easily ascertainable by looking into the pipe. I keep a pot on the end of the pipe as I don’t want mosquitoes breeding in there.

I knew that I wanted to find a way to convert Sanctuary to water wicking. I headed off to find tutorials about how to do it and ended up back where I started, and even more depressed because the cost would be prohibitive due to the amount of plastic, rocks, soil, pipe etc. and the most expensive part would be the surrounds. As penniless student hippies, we have had to rely on our wits and our ability to problem solve to find ways around paying out for what we want to do here. I had to go back to the drawing board in a serious way to work out how to do what I wanted to do without turning the moth eaten sock under the bed inside out and having to rehome an entire generation of moths…

How to do it? I had NO idea. That was when my old friend Google came to the rescue. I typed in “cheap water wicking beds” and about 7 pages into my search (I am nothing if not persistent…) I happened upon a story about a couple in Perth, Western Australia, who had turned some old fridges into water wicking beds. Perth is very hot and dry in summer and if anywhere needed waterwise gardening techniques it is Perth! The couple said that fridges were perfect for the purpose as aside from being cheap to get hold of, old fridges offer a nice deep space when turned on their back that allows for a decent reservoir of water to be held and thus, less time spent watering due to less evaporation of water from the soil. Efficiency, thy name is “fridge!” So Stevie-boy and I decided to work out the logistics of how we could use fridges to facilitate what we want to do.

http://salvageart.org/2016/01/13/how-to-make-a-wicking-bed-from-an-old-fridge/#comment-22

Here is the beginning of our fridge wicking empire. We had just unloaded the 24th and final fridge ready for transformation.

All of the fridges that we ended up with are different. Some have less work to do on them, some have us performing calisthenics in order to render them ready for our purposes. You can see how much room there is in a fridge and when you flip it onto it’s back, the potential for growing veggies is excellent. Much more space than a regular raised garden bed and plenty of room for a water reservoir at the base. The thick pipe in the foreground of the image is water pipe and our friend has generously given us as much as we like for our project.

I remembered seeing fridges lined up at our local tip shop and so we headed off to the local tip shop to see if we would be able to purchase them and if so, how much they wanted for them. We had a heck of a time convincing the tip shop man about what we wanted to do with the fridges but after we explained (twice) he finally got it and told us that we could have the fridges for $3 each. Over the course of the next few months we assembled 24 fridges in various stages of decrepitude. Some of these fridges were most probably in action prior to my birth back last century and some are so new they still had the stickers on them but all of them were currently defunct and ready for action. We had to strip out the shelves etc. and some have more holes inside them than others but we have our fridge potential and we will be spending the rest of this week sealing them up and assembling the blue-stone chips to fill up the reservoir section of the fridges ready for shoveling the soil out of Sanctuary’s garden beds and into the lines of fridges.

As you can see, there are holes in some of the fridges where various components have been removed to give us the maximum space for gardening. Earl spends a good amount of time unstuffing stuffed toys and we finally found a use for the skins. I keep the stuffing for making crochet toys with and the skins make perfect fridge wicker hole stuffing

Over the top of Earls dehusked toy skins we squeeze a fair amount of silicone and then top it with a piece of thick pond plastic (also donated by our generous friend Guy 🙂 ) We then silicone all around the edge of the plastic thickly in order to form a waterproof barrier. We need the lower 20cm of the fridges to be water tight to hold the water reservoir required to make these fridges useful to our purposes.

It aint fancy, but its cheap and fingers crossed, it will do the job.

Next we have to measure where we want to put the overflow pipe for the fridge wickers. Without an overflow pipe, the beds could fill up with water and kill the plants inside. This pipe ensures that excess water flows out of the bed. We have a clever idea about how to collect this water and recycle it. I will share it with you when we install it in Sanctuary.

Steve using a very large drill bit to drill the overflow holes.

We found some old black 13mm irrigation pipe that had been used for irrigating the garden and that we kept when we disconnected it (the greater garden fends for itself here now) and decided to recycle it to make the overflow pipes.

We only need a small portion of the pipe inside the fridge wicker and we sealed around the inner and outer pieces where they intersect the holes with more silicone.

I have already thought about the aesthetics of this garden. I don’t want to be greeted by mouldering white goods every time I open Sanctuary’s door, no matter how waterwise and verdant they are, and so we cleverly kept the back grills of the fridges and are going to turn them into the fridge equivalent of a picket fence in front of the first (visible upon entry) line of fridge wickers. I will be using the rest of the space on either side of the wickers (as they shall from now on be called to save my typing finger) to plant out with perennial herbs and at either end of each line of wickers, we will have a keyhole garden or a small pond to take advantage of the thermal mass of that big line of garden.

As we finish completely siliconing up the fridges and inserting the overflow pipes we move each fridge out to the side of the shed and turn it upside down to dry. They have a nice view don’t they?

Some of the fridges have two individual compartments. This requires us to add 2 overflow pipes but allows me to consider putting perennial plants like currants or blueberries in this freezer section.

Some of the fridges are as old as Methuselah and have a lot of metal on the exterior. Steve’s drill bits had some serious hard work to do

One of them didn’t make it…

I did give Steve the option of me “adjusting” this image but he said “use it, I don’t care how I look”. I will attempt to redress his current appearance at the end of this post ;). This fridge had both fridge AND freezer combined. It offered a very large possible garden area but was a HUGE pain to prepare. Here Steve is removing the freezer door after already removing the fridge door.

We are attempting to be clever with as much of the material that we are removing from these fridges as we can. We are saving the veggie bins, the shelves etc. to use and some of the really old fridges had excellent enamel water pans in the base that will be reused as baking trays. It is interesting to see how fridge construction and materials have changed through the years. One of the older fridges actually had a full sized light globe in it!

Showing you the size of this fridge/freezer combo when all of the extra gear was removed from it. I think Steve is a bit over gutting fridges don’t you? He is currently playing dead to get out of doing any more 😉

We have 11 completed fridges, 6 drying off, undercover, in the shed, and ready to seal and 7 still to gut prior to prepping them as of when we finished for the day yesterday (Saturday).

One day Steve will get his shed back. He has a “thank-you” spoon to make for Lissa when we finish all of this wicking!

The benefits far outweigh the negatives in this situation. Anything can be made more attractive with a bit of clever thinking and so I don’t care that there will be 24 upended fridges lined up in rows in Sanctuary. I have plans to buy chest freezers to line the sides of Sanctuary and plant out dwarf fruit trees (in particular citrus) and to make Sanctuary even more impervious to predation but for now, we have our 24 initial fridges and will be setting out excitedly (and with some trepidation, as moving 24 fridges over hilly, rocky terrain isn’t ANYONE’S idea of a fun way to spend their holidays…) to shovel out the slippery slopes that currently house my summer sanity. We ended up paying $2 for most of our fridges and by the time we got to the end we were getting three for $5. We are doing the tip a favour as they have to pay someone to haul the fridges away and thus, their bill this quarter will be significantly less than what it was last quarter. We are reusing something that would otherwise go back into the chain of production and that can only be a good thing. I keep thinking about all of the excellent potential of our fridge wickers. Here are some of the good things I have assimilated: –

1. The fridges, when installed, will be higher than current garden beds so not as much bending involved.
2. When assembled, a row of fridge wickers will hold significant thermal mass which will be good for both the plants growing inside them, and plants we choose to plant next to them.
3. We can run a series of hoses directly to the water fill pipes on the fridges and could theoretically fill them automatically by using a timer. “SQUEE!”
4. We can install worm tunnels into each garden bed but John  has said that he doesn’t think this will be necessary.
5. By elevating our garden we will be minimising the problems of gardening lower down and it should (theoretically) be easier to protect them from pests or at least treat them organically.
6. It will be harder for the local rat population to scale slippery fridges and easier for us to install rat bait stations should they ever try.
7. We will have a significantly lower water bill and more importantly, we won’t be wasting water inefficiently watering a large garden.
8. We may actually be able to collect all of the water that we need to water Sanctuary right through summer in a series of water barrels over our wet winter period.
9. No more 2 – 3 hours a day spent watering Sanctuary and no more guilt! I will still have to hand water a small area of perennials that will remain in the soil (berries etc.) but I can set up an automatic watering system for this area until we can figure out how to make it more water efficient.
10. Time saved in daily watering is less stress for me, more time to walk the dogs earlier in the day so less stress in having to race back and get ready to head off to TAFE.

I am guessing I could probably add 10 more reasons easily and probably another 10 with thought to why this is a GREAT idea. I know there are drawbacks including soil fertility etc. but I know that we can get around these problems and that these gardens are going to save my sanity as well as give us the best chance to garden effectively and efficiently in our terrible rocky, silty and sloped conditions.
So there you have it. I have revealed what we are going to do. I have also reinstated my childhood habit of having my nose welded to a good book and have been hooking up a storm. Add TAFE studies into the equation and I have filled those blog free months to an elegant sufficiency. Sorry to have been AWOL for so long but you know how it is. Now I have to go and find/take some photos to populate this post and make the length of it worth your effort ;). Cheers for staying with me folks. Sometimes you have words and sometimes you don’t. My words are back for the duration and I will be sharing the progress and process of how to move, install and wick a fridge garden over the next few weeks.

Finally, I had to redress the “casual” Steve image with a final image of Steve and his guitar in front of the green screen at TAFE. We weren’t ready for this photo shoot and thus you won’t see ANY of me (I have them hidden away) but Stevie-boy tends to look OK in most photos (present blog post excluded 😉 ) so here he is in all of his charming musician glory.