LivinLightly Permaculture solutions for sustainable living

After the 95 mm of rain we had in 2 weeks, one of the pomegranate trees I planted in August has started to leaf. I had almost given up on them altogether. The other one was planted about a month later and still shows no sign of life.

In the bathtub pond behind, you can just see some water chestnut emerging from the water. This is another new plant this year. They were put in the pond in early September and so have also taken a long time to emerge.

I have been busy the last couple of days building some compost bays and putting up shade cloth on the trellis over our ancient septic tank, to provide another propagation area. This will be for seedlings that need to start hardening off and cuttings that have already taken and been potted up, because this area is not as sheltered or shaded as the main propagation bench.

I had been building hemispherical domes of compost (see foreground), but Armidale's very dry summers (at least during the drought) and very cold winters meant that they weren't as successful as I would have hoped.

I plan to make the bins a bit taller and put fronts on them, but I'll need to get more corrugated iron for that. Now I can start composting my urine from the sawdust bucket!

This picture was taken in late afternoon - it is shaded for most of the day - picture is looking north-east. I shall have to add a drop down cover for when it gets really hot, I think. As you can see I have a grapevine growing over the top of the trellis, so I have tied the shadecloth to the underneath.