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THE WICKING PRINCIPLE The wicking principle is basic to this particular design for growing plants. Colin Austin explains it and some basic ideas how we can use water to help capture carbon on his website:
SHADE CLOTH Not all retail hardware shops stock 30% shade cloth. It can be bought by-the-roll directly from wholesalers. We get ours delivered at home from:
WORMS We use “in-bed” worm feeders: flower pots dug into beds, upside down with the bottoms cut off and the saucers as lids (See “In-bed worm-feeders”). Everything that worms can eat goes into them: kitchen scraps, weeds, crop residues, grass clippings and so on. It needs to be topped up regularly; worms can eat a lot. Once this material started to de-compose, we put the worms in. The worms move throughout the bed, but come back. Their numbers build up rapidly when fed well. We bought four species of worms from: www.KookaburraWormFarms.com.au
BIOLOGICAL INSECT CONTROL Shade cloth keeps out most large insects, but not small ones such as aphids. This year we released AphidiusColemani in our shade houses when we spotted the first Yellow-green peach aphids. We bought them from: To control green aphids we bought Lacewings from “Bugs for bugs”: To control green leaf hoppers and grass hoppers, which come in as tiny juveniles, we use pyrethrum oil in a hand spray gun, as well as catching and crunching. We chase the insects onto the shade cloth or a cover crop and wet them thoroughly. A weekly hunt has been sufficient to control numbers after an infestation that had gotten out of control.
KNOWLEDGE Attending a course by Dr Elaine Ingham showed us how little we know about the mysterious but vital field of soil biology. There are many web-sites, but one we appreciate very much is: We are really novices at vegetable growing, let alone growing them organically. There are many sites where you can find information, but the best source of information (and seeds, cuttings and ideas) are more experienced growers. We are members of the Bundaberg Organic Growers. That group has no web-site but a sister group, the Brisbane Organic Growers Inc, has: Soil-born pests and diseases know no boundary, and root-knot nematodes are one of those. We found the notes on the website of the Queensland Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries very useful: http://www2.dpi.qld.gov.au/horticulture/4752.html
ORGANIC MINERAL SUPPLEMENTS There are reputable suppliers of organic mineral supplements in most Australian cities, see your yellow pages. Make sure you get as complete a range of minerals as possible. Our test is to feed it to worms. Worms shy away from artificial fertilisers, but eat the organic ones readily. Within the worm gut, the minerals are enclosed into more complex molecules which the plants can absorb more easily. Plants don’t absorb raw minerals readily.
Humans absorb the minerals from the plants they eat. One of our main aims of the wicking beds systems therefore is to be sure that we get all minerals we need in a readily available form. |
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