Always a hot topic in the mountains, come along and find out more about those plants we call weeds with local expert Linda Thomas.

Permaculture Blue Mountains

Permaculture Blue Mountains is proud to present another sustainability talk next week.

This talk will be presented by Linda Thomas of Blue Mountains City Council and will explore the extent and impact of weeds in the Blue Mountains.

Linda Thomas has been the Community Weeds Officer at Blue Mountains City Council since 2005. The position is focused on encouraging & supporting conservation works on non- Council land and manages various programs including Landcare , the Bush Backyards Network and the Rural Practice Improvements program which works with landowners in the Megalong Valley and Sun Valley.

In the past 25 years as a resident of the Blue Mountains, Linda has also been a bush regenerator, working with various contractors in the Blue Mountains and Western Sydney and has been involved with various community conservation groups.

Linda will talk about weeds in the Blue Mountains and Council’s bushland conservation and weed management…

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bees in the walls

There’s a sweet smell of honey wafting by as I approach the wall. I’ve just parked up and apiarist Gavin Smith arrives, up from Sydney but a moment later. Elspeth greets us with an offer of a cup of tea, a lovely start to this misty morning. We’re here because there are bees living in her wall. This is part one of an attempt to encourage them to relocate from the wall into where they are wanted (in my hive).

First up we clear the bushy growth which hides a small hole in the wall where bees are getting into the wood panelling behind which they’ve made their home. Ta-da! Next Gavin (also a carpenter!) constructs a small shelf on we sit the base of the bee box close to the hole.

A couple of guard bees follow us around in turn and we stop a couple of times to walk away from the scene to take the warning level down. Considering the amount of disturbance we’re creating in their routine the colony is not becoming very aggressive and taking it slowly they seem to adapt to each change we introduce without too much drama. The sun comes out, the day is slowly warming up and so the bees becoming more active now…

One guard bee tails Elspeth and loses its stinger on her shirt, another ends up trapped in a sleeve and  that bee pings stinger number two in Gavin’s arm before the job is complete. We lose a third squished on the new base, but this doesn’t seem to cause the colony any further distraction. With pollen gathering ramping up, a wall full of honey behind them we appear to be a bit of a nuisance, but no real threat apparently perceived. Still, its enough of a warning for now. Out comes the smoker which pumps out delicate wafts of pine needle smoke, which Gavin uses to direct them away from the hole so he can get a drill in to the hive’s existing entrance space. Next he drills into the wall to make the hole a bit bigger (and rounder) and inserts a small piece of tubing to fit snuggly inside. It doesn’t take long for them to find their way around and inside the wall again.

Next the base of my bee hive goes onto back onto the shelf. The bees spend a little while getting used to the floor of this hive, not landing so well on the metal plate to begin with. Although they get used to this new entrance fairly quickly its a bit of a hop up, so Gavin adds a little stick from the base which they immediately use as a ladder to the tubing entrance.

Here they are coming in through the entrance and lining up from there to the hole in the wall.

Now we have them landing on the base and going in through the tube we’ll add the rest of the hive bit by bit.

In a couple of hours then the first part of this job is done, Gavin heads ‘down the hill’ to help some more bees transition from one home to the next. Before he does, he leaves us honeycomb from a hive in the Rocks. Yum! Instant gratification for us.
For more details and pictures from this morning’s bee adventure with Gavin here:

You’ll find Gavin Smith at the Sydney City beekeepers’ meetups and demonstrating the ways of bees at various community events around Sydney. I’ll be back with more parts of the bee hive later on today and over the next few days(/weeks/months?) and will post updates here. Will the queen resettle, or will we ‘just’ end up with a boatload of honey?

—

Update @4pm

A few hours later, lots more bees hanging outside the wall than usual.
Looks like a move maybe already underway! I was going to add the box at this point but it looks way too busy out here for bee novice Kat to mess with.

Update at 6:30pm

Once I’ve seen my hens go to roost for the night I think, ‘well that’s animals going to bed’, and head out to see where the colony in the wall is up to. They’ve settled down again; was this a demo for the other bees ‘come see how to get in now?’ or are they on their way somewhere new? So much bee language to learn!

I ready the smoker, kindly lent by local beekeeper/s.  I’m no so secretly proud of being much quicker at lighting it up this time). I pick up gloves and move in with the empty bee box. Gently smoking the bees as I go I put the box down as far in as there are no bees along the edge of the base, something I saw Tim Malfroy demonstrate when handling a hive to harvest honey at a fabulous natural bee keeping workshop he runs. And I leave it there, dashing away, dash dash! They’re onto me! I’m learning to recognise the swoop of the guards’ intent, and walk away quickly several times to avoid being made an example of.

Today, I declare quietly, is not Sting Kat day, ladies. Thinking calm assertive thoughts, on approaching them once more I pick up a stick to flick remaining bees out from behind the box. It’s a bit tricky as I cant see well from the front what lines up with what, and I’m quite vulnerable to having a beeline made for me by some well posted sentries.

From the space between the wood panelling and the back of the bee box, a distinct tone is audible and carries along the side clearly, I hear it change, and this seems like ‘on alert’ to me. I want to stay and listen but this is ‘no sting for Kat day’ so I keep going. There’s definite confusion as the remaining bees walk the circumference around the entrance which I’ve just mostly blocked off.

I make the smallest movements I can to begin with, but see I am still agitating them so I work quickly to give them maximum time to work out a new route in before bedtime. Three or four jiggles and the box is in place. I haven’t secured the pipe into the hole at the back but it’s lined up well enough for the bees to get back in, if they can work out how to get there.

It’s around 7:30pm now, I stick around to make sure the last couple of dozen bees figure out their way around the box and in the tube, all but a few are in by the time I leave. Phew!

 

Update Friday 22/02/2013 – 8:15

Beetown is pretty quiet when I arrive on this typically damp Katoomba morning, and its a little cooler than it has been.  I spy a few early morning bees clustering around the tube entrance, but no buzzing overhead yet. This is good. I came after a very swift coffee and zoomed over for the next phase of box installation before community gardening this morning. I have an hour and a half, and I’m playing it by ear. The smoker is in the car and stays unlit today. I figured on coming early enough not to disturb the colony so this is going to plan. (yay). The box is above me so I don’t see if activity is building inside the box, as I add the three sided frames that come with this warre hive. Last one in, just as a few more bees poke out from the box and start showing some interest, crawling along the frames and starting to occupy space in flight around the box. Great timing! I think, but too soon. Oh no! the frames are in the wrong way round. So much for swiftly and methodically. Still, its not a drama, I take frames out and neatly replace them 90 degrees to the original position, and here they’re sat correctly lined up in the rebates of the box. I slowly creep the mesh over the top giving bees room to come in or go out working around bees coming and going. Will they find their way out the front again? Oh yes! They’re not even slightly phased. Moments later the first bee exits from one of the holes designed to be an entrance.  First one, then two on the right, then the same pattern on the left, within seconds half a dozen more from the right. Ok Nothing to worry about here.

On goes the quilt box on top (providing insulation) finally top the construction off with the metal finished roof. Now we wait. Pictures uploading now at Flickr.com

 

Recycling geeks alive and well on Katoomba Street

Great little write up on recyclable plastics from local Katoomba Street business Zuri homewares. It’s where I get refills for my recycled plastic bokashi bucket… Find out more about those at Zuri. 

The Chilling Facts of Life

Oops! I’ve just put in an order to buy a couple more of these fruit trees, there’s barely space left but I just can’t help myself. If you’re considering buying any bare root fruit or nut tree this winter, it’s worth taking a good look at the needs of the tree first. Not only is it important for a fruit tree to get sunlight, air and water, many of the trees we rely on for fruit and nuts rely on a good deep winter dormancy to produce fruit the following Summer.

Both pome fruit trees (with a core and pips like apples & pears) and stone fruits (cherries, peaches, nectarines, apricots plums etc) need cold hours to stimulate the massive phsyiological changes these trees undertake in the noble pursuit of fruit production. Pome fruit especially rely on a good long chill, and there are also berry plants which also need the cold including raspberries & blueberries. It’s amazing to think that the productivity is directly brought about by that winter chill. And this is one of those rare occasions when us cold climate dwellers get to be the envy of people living in the tropical, sub-tropical and even the warmer temperate areas. You’ll see in fruit tree suppliers’ catalogues like Woodbridge, Daleys or Diggers that different species and cultivars and their rootstocks are variously described as having Low, Medium or High Chill requirements which vary from species to species.  Traditional apple varieties have a minimum chill requirement of about 1000 hours, that’s a ‘high chill’ requirement for an apple tree. Use this ready reckoner to estimate the chill hours for your area, based on the average temperature of your coldest month of the year.

Using this method, Katoomba comes in with an average 1200 chill hours whilst Springwood’s milder climate gets around 1100 chill hours.

It’s important also to consider how variable the seasonal conditions are too, particularly if you’re aiming to provide for your fruit needs from your own trees. Too few or too many chill hours can interfere with a tree’s ability to fruit, so look at the maximum and minimum chill hours as well as the average to understand the range of winter your area has historically experienced.

Our climate is changing, and that’s another factor to take into account in a long term fruit production strategy. In this visualisation of Sydney’s seasonal temperatures, you can clearly see that the lower temperatures shown in dark blue decreasing over time, indicating milder winters, with less chill hours.

 The band of blue is also narrowing as it fades meaning winter is also getting shorter.  In the upper mountains its a familiar story, the snows don’t come down in big drifts like they used to. In Katoomba if the temperature rises as predicted, we’ll see an increase in temperature by 2 °C on average over the year, which will bring Katoomba chill hours down to about 1000. That will knock off very few varieties out of production. In Springwood, which is currently marginal for high chill requirement fruits, its a different story. That 2° C increase in Springwood would drop their chill hours well below into 900 , so they’ll either have to get a bit nifty with engineering cooler microclimates around their existing chill requiring trees or perhaps get more familiar with trees traditionally grown at latitudes nearer the tropics.

Find out more about trees, climates and resilient strategies for food production with Katoomba Street Permaculture’s permaculture design certificate course this Spring.

Words by Sue Girard & Kat Szuminska [CC-BY-SA 3.0]

Crabapple photo by Tatania12:flickr [CC BY 2.0]

Awesome Seasonal Temperature Visualisation by Hatchersan @markact

Illustration Resources graph courtesy of http://www.newcrops.uq.edu.au/acotanc/papers/campbel1

More information about growing fruit trees (especially apples)

South east Producers Association (SEPA) http://www.davewilson.com/homegrown/gardencompass/gc14_jan_07.html http://www.orangepippintrees.com/articles/fruit-tree-minimum-chill-requirement

http://hydrology1.nmsu.edu/nmcrops/Trees/apples/ http://www.aussieapples.com.au/ http://www.motherearthnews.com/blogs/blog.aspx?blogid=2147484355

Discover the Future of Farming

You may believe that we live in an unfortunate age only filled with terrible news, where farming  is untenable, and farming communities unable to cope with an increasingly difficult and hostile environment. We see lives, farms and food supplies ruined daily, heads shake, and no one knows what to do. The twenty-first century has brought some new challenges, and there are sure to be testing times ahead. But this is really isn’t the whole picture, and here’s a documentary which reveals another side to rural problems, and some smart people finding solutions.

It’s a familiar tale of a girl grows up in idyllic farm, a land transformed by her parents by ploughing and by fertilizing. Encouraged to leave home, she pursues a career as a wildlife photographer. She returns to the farm just as oil prices rise dramatically its here the documentary begins.

‘All the farms I know including organic ones are utterly dependent on fossil fuel […] there’s growing evidence that the oil we need may soon be in short supply’

While the family has taken its stewardship seriously and cared for wildlife as well as the crops, its future still relies on ever dwindling fossil fuel inputs. They’re confronting the same problems that all farmers face. At the heart, she asks a core question  surprisingly quietly. How I run a farm without petrol and gas inputs when every part of the farming process relies on them so heavily?

Could the answer lie with permaculture design,  a way of thinking that overturns the stickiest of problems? In under an hour of this BBC Natural World documentary, Rebecca Hosking meets with academics, farmers,  and forest gardeners, examining the brutal facts and uncovering what sustainable farming might look like for her own family farm. As we follow a camera meandering over the fields and hedgerows, there is a feeling of lightness in this profound journey, and perhaps there a sense that it is really possible to lead this farm successfully into the future.

“the only changes I can make are right here”.

This is a heartwarming story telling a very practical tale, and in it we find truth and more than a little beauty in a carefully tended family farm in Devon.

Take control of your own future whether on a farm or in the city, with an introduction to permaculture or dive straight into a permaculture design certificate course this Spring.

A few references to follow up on from this docco

http://www.peakoil.net/

http://www.postcarbon.org/

http://www.fordhallfarm.com/index.php

Words By Kat Szuminska [CC BY-NC-SA]

Harvest Image by Chris Upson [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

What Are The Rats Telling You?

Rats! Not much discussed in polite company, rats are just as big a part of the urban and suburban experience as dogs and cats. They have adapted incredibly successfully to living in close quarters with people, and we create ideal conditions for them to thrive with all the food we leave lying around. Remember one way or another we throw away about 40% of the food we produce in Australia. No wonder rats are everywhere.

In the suburbs especially you may not notice them until Winter, when they take shelter in your roof. Once they’ve moved in rats make an obvious pitter patter of little feet running around in the ceiling and further squeeze in through little gaps in the walls into your house, lured by wonderful smells from your kitchen, where they eagerly find all your not so well protected foodstuffs. Have you looked behind your cooker lately?
Rats can easily enter under doors if the gap is 15mm or so (another good reason to get draft excluders on outside doors), and can climb up the outside walls or drainage pipes. Indoors that agility translates to easy climb up chimneys, tables, up over and into kitchen cupboards, they’re really very agile.
Not only a bit annoying, wild rodents including rats, can carry a variety of disease pathogens, The Black Death is traditionally believed to have been caused by the micro-organism Yersinia pestis, carried by the tropical rat flea which lived on black rats during the epidemic outbreaks of the Middle Ages, as well as much closer to home in Sydney in 1900. Other diseases linked to pest rodents include classical swine fever (not to be confused with swine flu) and foot-and-mouth disease.[1]

So what do you do if you have unwanted rodents in your house? Block up the holes where they are getting through. To close up any small hole from which they are entering, chicken wire works well. If you only want a small piece or two, keep your eyes open for suitable offcuts during council big trash pick-ups and freecycle. Don’t leave food lying around, where rodents and other animals can find it. If you don’t have what they consider food available then they are much less likely to come and visit.

If they are still getting in and you just want them gone, the choices in the store seem endless! snap traps, electronic traps, live traps, chemical baits, glue traps, and more…
As for the baits out there, people used to poison rats with an anticoagulant, warfarin, found in products such as Ratsack™, but many rats now carry a gene resistant to that particular anticoagulant, making it ineffective, however much you pump out into your environment. We have simply bred a more resilient rat! Newer rodenticides, come in 2 basic forms- a single dose quick kill variety (bromadiolone) and the multidose version (coumatetralyle) . If you are driven to having to eradicate your highly possibly growing family of rats (with 24 offspring in a year) by a chemical method, the multidose appears at this stage not to give secondary poisoning to pets or wildlife who eat the unfortunate creatures. The problem with this kill first ask questions later, is that you don’t know what you’ve got til its gone. “Snap!” a little late to find you’ve accidentally destroyed a super rare, protected or even useful species. Who needs to live with that level of guilt?

So, First Catch Your Rat or what ever else it is running around out there…

Using a live trap lets you identify what your visitor might be, and can allow a more humane way to deal with your visitors. Live traps designed for small animals are fairly commonly available at hardware stores. If your unknown beastie is bigger, you’ll need to find a licensed trapper, call local RSPCA, vet or pest control for advice here. Be very aware that being caught in a trap is a distressing experience for any wild animal however small. You will need to be prepared with whatever measures you’re intending to take beforehand. This will mean preparing to consider the animal’s welfare through this process. Don’t catch an animal if you don’t know what you can and can’t do with it first. Once you have your trap set you will need to check it regularly to see if you have made a catch, because leaving an animal in a trap will cause undue stress. Overall your objective is to cause the least interference with the animal’s welfare, and that applies equally whether Antichinus or Rattus rattus. All animals deserve your respect.

Once you have your critter in a cage you’ll want to quickly identify it. The biggest deciding factor is the Roof rat’s furless tail, which is always longer than it’s body. Having decided that you have is Rattus rattus, or perhaps Rattus norvegicus is then only the beginning; what to do with it next? Just bear in mind if you release it less than about 2 km it is very likely to find it’s way back home, and release it in an unknown environment and it’s probably going to die a slow death through hunger. Rats will indeed eat what you leave lying around, or not well protected, but consider too that some rats, like Rattus norvegicus, are omnivores, and are also really rather partial to gorging on snails.

If there are rats around on or near your property but they’re not getting into your house,  your veggie patch and your food are protected and they pose no immediate threat, consider if there are predators who could do the job for you. Snakes or powerful owls enjoy a live ratburger* given the chance, so investigate if you could positively encourage them. Awake to find that you don’t have a rat poison deficiency in your cupboards so much as a natural rat predator deficiency in your neighbourhood. You may have inadvertently just creating a lovely niche for rats, but not much else. Could you actively help tip the balance in their favour, and create an environment that’s welcoming to a more diverse range of wildlife, and help bring the rats’ natural predators back? So, what are the rats really telling you?

Words by Katoomba Street Permies Sue and Kat [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0], images from Wikipedia,  and by Lord Jim, and Charles Danoff on Flickr**

References, and further information about rat identification, humane dispatch and creating wildlife friendly habitats.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat

http://kb.rspca.org.au/What-is-the-most-humane-way-to-kill-pest-rats-and-mice_139.html

http://www.ufaw.org.uk/rodents.php

http://australianmuseum.net.au/Bush-Rat/

http://www.backyards4wildlife.com.au

* Rats are eaten as part of an ordinary diet in some places

**mouse over images which link back to their originals on flickr.com

pruning heritage trees

This weekend join me and Sue, Brian and Wayne at the community gardens, and learn first hand from experienced orchardists how to prune, and help lick our heritage fruit trees into shape. Our heritage apple walk was planted out in the mid 90’s, soon accompanied by quinces cherries and plums, you wont find these varieties in the shops so help keep this precious resource of cool climate fruits healthy for future generations to enjoy.  Winter is a great time to take stock of trees, look at their shape and how the branches form and relate to one another. Being deciduous the branches are bereft of leaves clearly revealing their structure. Come along, learn a new skill, or flex your pruning muscles, and help these fabulous fruit trees be productive and bear fruit for the years to come.  Find out more at bmfruitandnuttreenetwork.blogspot.com

photo credit Pictoscribe on flickr

Announcing Spring Permaculture Courses

We’re delighted to announce our Spring 2012 permaculture design courses to suit busy lives. It doesn’t take long to master the basic concepts and skills, we’ll have you designing before you know it.

Introduction to Permaculture Design    Easily pick up these fundamentals in a weekend:

• Ethics & principles
• Designer’s toolkit
• Home scale strategies

 

Find out more or reserve your place in our upcoming  Introduction to Permaculture or register now 

Permaculture Design Certificate  (PDC) Course*  features:     

• The full 72 hour classic design course
• Real world design exercises
• Visits to exemplary properties

Find out more, and book in to a  part time Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) course. This course will run on Friday and Saturdays for 6 weeks.

*Certified by Permaculture Research Institute

Way out West: Permaculture in the Blue Mountains – part 1

Now, rumour has it that there are more permies per head in the Blue Mountains than anywhere in Australia. This being the mother country of Permaculture, it seems hard to imagine that there might be a greated density anywhere else in the world.[1]

Just in case you’re an absentee landlord, frequent overseas intrepid adventurer or other breed of occasional mountain dweller then before reading on you’ll need to know that Permaculture is the art and science of designing truly fabulous sustainable ecological systems that benefit all forms of life all over the planet, including you. And a permie, is mostly used as an affectionate term to describe anyone who has successfully completed a permaculture design course (most likely way to begin to see the permaculture way of thinking). So you should be nice to them.

As if to prove this point, last week saw the launch of a new book down the hill in Sydney. ‘Permaculture Pioneers’ as the name freely identifies, showcases some of our finest ecological system designers in a chapter of their own, and features two iconic mountains residents, Stuart Hill (Foundation Chair of Social Ecology at the University of Western Sydney, BSc (Hons), PhD, Queen’s Silver Jubilee Medal) and Rowe Morrow (Dip Perm. B. Agr Sci (Uni Sydney) BA (Uni Qld) MA (Reading UK), Dip Rural Soc (Sorbonne Paris) Cert Hort (Ryde TAFE) Dip Ed (UTS), Donald Groom Fellow) ). Now, a new generation of permaculture designers, educators and farmers are now growing up standing on the shoulders of their inspirational work; in her view, family permaculture demonstration farmer in nearby Mudgee[2], Milkwood’s Kirsten Bradley applauds the book’s  ‘ability to un-smudge the origins of some ideas and parts of the permaculture movement.’

The name Permaculture Pioneers is also a nod to ecological succession. Pioneer species, often identify as weeds. They draw deeply from hard won resources in their environment by their ability to thrive in conditions where others don’t even survive, and produce alot of productive seeds in a short period of time.  Weeds break up the ground, and do the hard work, allowing gentler folk, er I mean plants  to come in and be nourished by some of the good nutrients the weeds made available. Early adopters were often open minded hippies, and there has been some association thus with minority alternative lifestyle groups until recently.

Twenty years later and we appear to have sorted out the ‘woo woo’ from the ‘wow this really works’ and now permaculture is no longer in the fringes, but its ideas are accepted into the mainstream, its even being adopted by governments around the world into everyday policies;from the city farms of Cuba to the city of sydney’s bike lanes governments are getting the message, and solving problem with sustainable systems  thinking that makes sense.

[1]I have no idea if this is true, but I like to think it might be.

[2]Milkwood.net the Blue Mountains nearest and dearest sizeable permaculture demonstration farm.

Watch Stuart Hill’s presentation in the Blue Mountains

Street Gardens

Street gardens are an integral part of the vibrant Katoomba Edible Streetscape … if you live work,  shop or holiday in Katoomba you’ll have seen our beautiful edible planters, overflowing all summer with nasturtium ,chocolate and apple mints. Cittaslow instigated this wonderful initiative back in 2008 and local shopkeepers help with their upkeep by watering them. Bay leaves for all and abundant herbs and flowers waft delicate natural fragrances up and down the hill throughout the summer.