After earthworks

3 Months Later

Sunflowers

It was really easy growing these sunflowers too.  I bought a bag of sunflower seeds from the supermarket in the pet food section for about $5 then sprinkled them all over the swales. 3 months later I can wake up to the beautiful faces of these flowers which can brighten anyone’s days!

Don’t forget though this is beautiful to look at, all the plants here also serve a purpose to the overall balance of the garden.

I have him under the house again where he can at least stay dry. Here he is with not much room left to move with the rising water in the creek.

Kevins Dilema

Me, neither.  It either didn’t happen, or I buried it deep down in my sub-conscious.  So, we’re going to have that talk now.  Except without the birds.  Be warned, his tale does involve swollen body parts, and a sticky ending.  Of course, I’m talking about extracting honey from my bee hives.

This being my first time I called on my friend Matt to come help as he has done this before.  Matt seems to be there the first time I do lots of things, I’m not sure what to make of that.  Anyway, honey extraction… This is the process:

Smokin'

1.  Make sure you are fully covered and wearing two layers of clothing because the bees can stink you through one layer…. yep, found that out about four times, including one on the neck.

2.  Wear gloves and make sure they are sealed at the top… lots of lessons for me today.

I am not an elephant, I am a human being!

3.  When bees do get into gloves, do not run away screaming like a little girl trying to rip gloves off… whoops

I have a bee book here with photo’s of beekeepers just wearing shorts and a shirt, with only a veil to protect their face, while they pull frames out of the hive.  I now no longer believe these photos, they must have been  photoshopped!

Phat Hand

I was also told wearing white stops the bees stinging, but they will attack dark clothing (something to do with bears being dark).

Well, here I am dressed whiter than a bride, and being stung. Eight times!  Something tells me the bees don’t like having their house broken into and their food stolen.

Anyway, lets move on as this hand is still swollen and itchy as hell, so I don’t know how much more I can type.

The first hive we opened was so full that the bees had started to build honeycomb onto the underside of the lid.  Once we get the frames out of the hives, the honeycomb needs to be decapped in order to extract the honey.  The normal method is to use a heated knife which will make removing the wax caps easier.  But we found that the wax was quite soft and just needed to be scraped off.  Another advantage of living in the sub-tropics.

Hive lid with honeycomb

The wax that is scraped off is dropped into a bucket of water, this is so the honey stuck to it will dissolve, and we can then salvage the wax to use later.  My girls are looking forward to making candles so we’ll see how that goes in another post.

Once the frames are decapped, they are put into the honey extractor.  This is a large stainless steel drum with wire frames inside fixed to a rotating shaft.  This is used to hold the hive frames, which are then spun to extract the honey using centripetal force.

Decapping with a knife

This is done with a hand crank, and you can see the frames spin and the honey being thrown out and oozing down the side of the tank.  The frames are double sided so once one side is done the frames are flipped over and the honey on the other side is also spun out.

Honey extractor

All of this is more manually intensive than it sounds, so, being the good dad than I am, I let the kids experience cranking the extractor handle for while.

Once the honey settles on the bottom of the extractor it needs to be drained off, or else it gets too high and impedes the spinning frames.  A plastic bin is placed under the extractor with a wire mesh to filter out any wax.  We used fly screen wire for this, which is probably a bit course because some fine pieces of wax did sneak through, but not enough that would ruin your honey on toast in the morning.  I am told pantyhose is probably a better option but I didn’t want to part with any, I mean, Cheryl didn’t want to part with any.

Honey being filtered

As the frames were emptied we put them back into the hives for the bees to start filling them again.  Getting them back was nowhere near as traumatic as pulling them out.  The bees were still mightily pissed off, but we had wizened up and taped up the top of the gloves so the little buggers couldn’t get in.

At the end of the day we ended up with a 25 litre bin full of honey.  Along with two swollen hands (Matt also was stung – reminds me of a Pink Floyd song… my hands felt like two balloons…), a swollen neck, lots of itchiness, and a mess to clean up.   I’m sure we will do much better next time.  Well, I say we, but the chances of getting anyone to help after this little episode is probably quite slim.  In fact, I shouldn’t really be posting all the bad bits on here should I?  Now I’ll never talk any of you into helping me.

Free honey anyone?

Namaste

Namaste!

Yes, it hurts!

According to the local rag we had 400mm dumped on us here in the Gold Coast Hinterland on Saturday night.  This is apparenlty, “the worst dunking in at least 25 years”, to quote the GC Bully.

Swale blowout!

Our property faired quite well considering the deluge.  However, we had one swale ‘blow out’, and the wall of our second new dam did not cope with the sudden onslaught of water rushing down the hill.

The swale with the collapsed wall was the one we were capturing water from the road with.  The original idea was to bring in water from the road into the swale to help with the soil restoration, rather than let it run down the hill and go to waste.  But we did not (could not) anticipate anything like the amount of water pummeling down the road on Saturday night.  The swale filled as it should, but the constant pounding of the water rushing from the road, and the torrential downpour from above, teamed for a two pronged attack, that became too much for the swale mound to handle.  GUSH!

On top of nearly a weeks worth of rain, the flood gates of heaven opened up about 1am on Saturday night when we had the aforementioned 400mm start to fall.   The photo here was taken the next day in the afternoon and you can see the water is still gushing through the gap in the swale.    All of that water runs a short distance straight into the dam below.

Down to the dam

We have a short swale that is kind of part of the dam.  The idea is to feed water into the dam, and then when it is full it acts as a spillway out the other end, where the water would rund down to the lower dam.  Unfortunately, the top of the dam was too weak from the pounding rain and sudden on-rush from the broken swale.  So, the top of the dam wall gave out before the water level was high enough to take the designed overflow course.

Breach!

The photo to the right shows how the top of the dam wall collapsed and the gush of water has eroded a valley into the dam wall.  All the debris from this breach ended up across the road below the wall and into the community garden area below.  What a mess!  Luckily the breach in the wall only happened at the top of the dam, so we still have a dam full of water.

At least it is full

Funny how a few weeks back I was thinking it would take months to fill this dam!  DAMN!

The swales on the other side of the property faired much better.  They did what they were supposed to do, captured the water and slowed down the flow.

Below are a few photos of our main dam, and the “summer creek” that now looks like a river!

Once this rain stops and we get a few days of dry,  it will be time to clean up and fix the dam wall and swale.  I’ll be sure to keep you updated with how things progress.  Now, where did I put my gum boots?

Whitewater

Where's my raft?

Coffee Tree

Left is a coffee plant which was really important to get in first so we can keep up our energy with a good ‘ol home brew asap!  This was planted on top of a Swale because it doesn’t like wet feet.  Most of the land we are planting into is clay.

Clay

You can see what we are up against in the photo of the clay.  Using Mother Nature in the right way we will be able to over come these obstacles.  When we plant anything we mix into the soil a handful of worm castings mixed with manure, then place another handful of the mixture on the top to keep the plant feed for a while.  Then cover it all in Lucien.

Yummy Bananas

Marty has also planted a banana circle or 2.

With all the rain you can now see evidence of the system starting to w

ork.  We have swales collecting water, trees and plants thriving and sprouts from all the seeds we sowed coming to life in as little time as a month.  We did however, have a hand from Marty’s sisters that decided they wanted a holiday with us but little did they know they were then put to use everyday slaving away with Marty and me planting sweet potato, lemon grass, various seeds were sown and Lucien spread everywhere.  I think they had to go home to have a real holiday.

We have action on the swales

Swales being useful

Just a last sad note, we had another chicken taken from us last night by another python that consequentially has taken a trip to Cunungra for a long vacation.  RIP little chicky.

I had cow pea on order for a few weeks to use for this, but being the end of an old year and start of a new, most businesses were still in go slow mode.  So I only just got the cowpea last week.  I didn’t want to wait though so I threw a bag of parrot feed over the swales which had a mix of all sorts of things in there such as sun flower seeds, millet, corn and other grains.  After a few days things were sprouting and already the swales have a green tinge to them.  Although, it has now been a while since rain and the swale mounds have gone back to being as concrete as the ground they were dug from.

For mulch I sourced four Lucerne ’rounds’.  These are those big round hay bails you see if ever you drive inland.  I am told they are the equivalent of about 14 of the normal lucerne ‘squares’ but it is much more economical to buy them this way.  Cost was $55 delivered where the cheapest square bales I could find were about $10/bail.  Three of them were enough to cover all the swales with one left for mulching around trees when we start planting.  Of course one can never get enough organic material so I emailed a bunch of local lawn mower guys asking them if they would dump their clippings here rather than pay to take them to the dump.  So far no response, but I’ll keep trying to find someone willing.

The (innoculated) cowpea, buckwheat (oh, yea, I also through down some millet, just because I had it) were all just scattered sown.  Literally just grabbing a handful of seed from the bucket and throwing it out like feeding the chooks.  We then raked this in a little and through the lucerne over it.  I also through down a few bags of gypsum which acts to de-flocculate clay (sold at Bunnings as Clay Breaker) but not sure on how that will go.  I guess time will tell.

A few days on I have picked up a heap of different plants from Justin at Urban Edens on the Gold Coast.  We spent last couple of days getting these into the ground.  At this point I need to mention that my profession is in IT, so I’m not really used to digging holes dawn to dusk – any volunteers to give me a massage?

Although it is quite exhausting (and I still ache all over!) I am getting a great sense of contentment from this.  I feel much more connected to my property now, and nature in general.

Some of the things I have been planting are:

• Cassava
• Sweet potato
• Lemon grass
• Vietiver grass
• Galangal
• Ginger
• Cana edulis

I’ve also potted HUNDREDS of nitrogen fixing and other trees that I am growing from seed.  These include:

• Agati
• Tree Lucerne
• Cassia multijuga
• Albizia lebbek
• Tamarindus indica
• Moringa (miracle tree!)
• and plenty of othes

I’ll give a full species list soon as a downloadable attachment rather than fill these posts with long lists of plants.  Suffice to say there are lots of seedlings growing and lots more holes to be dug once they are ready to be transplanted.

Below is a mud map of our property and a very rough idea of where things are being planted.  You should be able to click on it to get a larger view.

Note that we have donated the top half of the property to ‘Land for Wildlife’, so it will remain native bush for now.

Mud map of property

Dam site for higher dam

road that traverses across the property from the main driveway and connects with the new lower dam wall to make a continuous driveway from the new entry all the way to just above our house where it merges with our existing driveway.

Above this road, just above the horse arena (which I will  call the community garden area henceforth) is where the new dam has been created.  This area was chosen as it will capture the spill from the swales higher up the hill, and can gravity feed water down to the community garden area for irrigation.

This dam has a short swale on either side to feed into the dam, and one of them also acts as the spillway once the dam is full.  Water from the spillway then flows down to the lower dam.

Another dam site view

This dam is a long football shape so it fits nicely across the hill.

Scratching out the new dam

The final product was actually quite bigger than I had imagined.  It is about two meters deep to water line with about 750cm of freeboard (the wall above water height) which is hard to tell from the photos as their is no perspective.  I’d estimate this dam will hold about 70,000+ litres of water when full.  The bottom dam is a little smaller so probably about 60,000 litres in that one.  The point is that this is over 130,000 litres of water that is captured for irrigation (not counting what is captured by the swales) that would have just flowed away taking top soil and nutrients with it.

We have scatter sown a bunch of ground cover plants over the outer wall of the dam (same as we put onto the swale – a full species list of all the plants we used will be the subject of another post).  These will hopefully take root before we have a major storm to stabilise the wall and prevent erosion.  We will be planting lemon grass seedlings along here as well within the next week or two which will slow down water flowing off of the dam wall.

Finished dam

We have not had a rain event since this higher dam went in so it is still empty.  I’ll post photos of it when it is full.

Dam wall above driveway

One further point about these two new dams.  There was a lot of rock to dig through to create them (thank goodness we had a 20 ton excavator!) but more importantly there was plenty of clay so they should be sealed quite well.  As the dam was dug, about ever 30cm of wall height the excavator operator would change the bucket for a big round compression tool and use this to get almost 100% compression.  So these dam walls are very solid made from a mix of rock and clay.  I can’t wait for this one to fill up.

Later today we are transplanting some lilies from our existing dam into the already full new lower dam.  The lilies help to slow down evaporation, attract wild life, and of course also look pretty.