DIY food

This post is not really about how to grow your own food. There are plenty of excellent websites giving that sort of information.

Rather, it is about the reasons for DIY food. Of course there are many reasons - the freshness and the intense bursting-with-life flavour of home-grown produce, the avoidance of chemicals (if one chooses), and some sort of basic satisfaction or sense of achievement. Some might say DIY food saves you money, but I doubt if that is really the case, especially in the short term. It certainly is not true if you put a dollar value on your time...but there are other values.

In "Growing food in our cities" (p2, Best Garden Ideas - Growing edibles, published by The Diggers Club), Clive Blazey presents some compelling reasons for DIY food.

Nearly 30% of the CO2 in our atmosphere is caused by us not growing our own food.
Non-renewable energy is used to plough the fields, harvest and process the crop and take it to market. The fertilisers, pesticides and weed killers used to grow the crop are derived from oil. ... The kitchen fridge uses more energy than the farm tractor. ... Up to 25% of the energy is consumed in wasteful packaging. 

If this [growing our own food using compost rather than fertilisers] sounds like Utopia it is, and we have been there, before the supermarkets manipulated our lazy nature.

Blazey then tells how Cubans, who formerly relied on imported oil, tractors and fertilisers, have been growing their own food on disused building sites since the 1990's. These days "the city of Havana produces 60% of its own food" and "80% of the nation's food is organically grown". 

Whenever I read yet another article about the current and potentially increasing food security problems being caused by climate change, I can't help remembering something I read many years ago about the breakdown of the old Soviet Union. The author (Solzhenitsyn, I think it was) said that the hardships caused by disruption of mass food provision and distribution systems would have been much more dire were it not for the fact that many Russians were still in the habit of growing at least some of their own food in their own gardens. He wondered how well the average American (and presumably anyone else who relies entirely on supermarkets for their food) would survive under similar circumstances. For me, this is yet another compelling reason for pursuing DIY food.

I currently fall far short of food self-sufficiency. However, I am accumulating experience and knowledge about how to grow food - there's so much to learn! - and about what works well and gives good yields in my local area. Maybe this knowledge, and the seeds I am saving, will some day assist others who want/need to grow their own food as well.

I wonder how many people assume (without realizing that it is an assumption) that our supermarkets are obliged to keep us fed (they're not!), and to do so at "affordable" prices?

So...how achievable is DIY food?

To quote from Clive Blazey again (p14, Best Garden Ideas - Growing edibles), "In just 40 square metres you can grow 472kg of vegetables [per annum] which is enough for four people". (His planting plan is available online at http://www.diggers.com.au/pdf/MiniPlotHarvestPlan.pdf .) To do that he says you will need plenty of sun and well-rotted manure, and also compost and blood and bone. You'll need to practice crop rotation, sow high-yielding heirloom varieties, and provide 22,800L of supplementary water per year. (I think you'd also need to do some preserving of the summer bounty to supplement the few types of vegetables harvestable during winter.)

I understand Blazey conducted the trials on which his yield figures are based at Seymour, 98km north of Melbourne, which has a mean annual rainfall of 593.9 mm. Comparing this with average rainfalls in your particular area will give you an idea how much supplementary water you would need. (For rainfalls within Australia, go to Climate Data Online and select Rainfall - Monthly - your location.) For example, Sydney's mean annual rainfall of 1129.6mm is almost double that of Seymour, Perth is also higher at 738.6mm, but the Adelaide figure is only 542.6 mm. So, by rough guesstimate, the supplementary water requirement in Sydney would be around 12,000L, in Perth it would be around 16,000L, and in Adelaide up to 25,000L of additional water would be required to grow those 472kg of vegetables. Even this worst case is quite achievable - one of my rainwater tanks holds almost that much.

A family of four having 3 minute showers with a water-saving shower head would generate 4 x 30 x 7 = 840L of greywater per week. Assuming slightly longer showers when washing hair, etc., we can probably assume at least 1,000L per week. (Click on the tabs at the top of the page, or start with this page, for collection and distribution methods). Given the wet winters and dry summers expereinced in much of southern Australia, we might need to water our gardens during only 26 weeks of the year, and so we'd only collect the used shower water during those weeks. That would mean a ballpark figure of 26,000L of greywater from the shower per year. That is enough, even in Adelaide!

One complication with the above greywater figures is the health guidelines for safe use of greywater, which indicate that greywater should not come in direct contact with food that will be eaten raw. Even so, lettuce, carrots, spring onions, and other salad vegetables that touch the ground could be in a separate bed that is watered with rainwater or mains water, and the shower water could be used for the other vegetable beds and for some fruit trees.

Despite being very approximate, the above figures indicate that a lot is possible, even for those who might not have quite the expertise, space, or soil fertility to match the above yields. Even a few pots on the patio containing, for example, a tomato bush, a climbing cucumber plant, a few loose leaf lettuces and some strawberries will avoid some of the food miles, packaging, etc. involved in supermarket food.

Links...

Food swaps
http://communitygarden.org.au/food-swaps-in-south-australia (SA)
http://www.sustainablemelbourne.com/events/sga-food-swaps/ (Vic)
http://www.pigswillfly.com.au/?p=7542 (Vic)
http://yarraneighbourhoodorchard.webs.com/aboutyuh.htm (Vic)
http://www.ceres.org.au/node/114 (scroll down for national list)


Blazey's 40 square metre planting plan
http://www.diggers.com.au/pdf/MiniPlotHarvestPlan.pdf . (I've not personally tried this planting plan, so I'd be interested in comments from anyone who has.)

Mean annual rainfalls
Climate Data Online. Select Rainfall, then Monthly, then enter your location. Look under the "Annual" column in the "Mean rainfall" row of the table.

Preserving the harvest
http://urbanfarmingoz.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=64:preserving-the-harvest&catid=6:ufarm

Growing food
Sustainable Gardening Australia

Buying local - next best thing to growing your own
http://www.localfoodmap.net/

Community gardens
http://communitygarden.org.au/

Farmers markets directory
http://www.farmersmarkets.org.au/markets

DIY deep-watering system

About the time I was first setting up my current garden, 9 years ago, I read about an ancient Chinese clay urn method of watering. They would bury an urn up to its neck in soil, fill it with water, and then plant seeds around it. The water moved through the wall of the urn to the surrounding soil by capillary action and spread out through the soil in the area around the urn.

This struck me as being a very efficient method of watering, with next to no water lost by evaporation, and with the water going directly to the root zones. In addition, the plant roots would head towards the water source and thus make the method even more efficient as time passed.

After a bit of trial and error, I came up with a design that uses ordinary terracotta pots with a top diameter of about 15cm. The cost of these might normally make this method prohibitively expensive, but fortunately I was able to buy around 200 of these at a fraction of their normal cost at a clearance sale.

The picture below shows how I put two pots together to make roughly an urn shape.

I used silicon (either bathroom or guttering silicon is fine) to stick the two pots together and to seal up the hole in the bottom of the bottom pot. The hole in the top upside-down pot is used to fill the pots with water.

Most of the perennial sections of my garden are watered this way. In each section I laid out ordinary 13mm poly irrigation hose, in a loop where possible, with the poly hose running past about 20 of the buried pots. An off-take tube runs from the poly hose to each pot and is poked into the hole in the top of the buried pot. You can see what I've done in the next picture because this raised bed is newly planted (raspberries under the rope trellis, and strawberry crowns around the edges). Once the plants grow the watering pots will be largely hidden by foliage.

This watering method has been (and still is!) very effective for my perennial plants, shrubs, and fruit trees, but with my clay soil, it is not very effective for germinating seeds or supporting young plants that still have under-developed root systems.  So, even though I like this system and use it in much of my garden, the only veges I use it for are perennial ones (such as asparagus). In the past, when I did use it in vege patches, I found I needed to supplement this watering system with surface watering during the first half of the growing season. I suspect you would need almost perfect soil to rely entirely on a terracotta pot watering system in a vege patch.

Using this watering system has had one unforeseen effect - the interiors of the pots make a perfect hiding spot for slugs. This could be seen as a disadvantage, or it could be seen as an effective way of trapping slugs! If you let the pots fill to overflowing with water, the slugs all crawl out of the top hole and accumulate on top of the pot. You can then dispatch the slugs in whatever way you see fit.

DIY alkaline soil work-around

The experts say that one simply adds as much organic matter as possible - lots and lots of compost and manure and mulch and pine needles - to fix an overly alkaline soil. I've been doing that for 9 years now. Perhaps I've simply not added enough of all that. My Bay of Biscay clay soil still gives pH readings of about 8. :-(

When I first started my garden I had a blank slate to work with. I spread enormous amounts of autumn leaves, mushroom compost, manure, gypsum, and coarse sand, then spread around a bag full of field peas to grow as green manure. Once that had grown I hired someone to rotary hoe everything into the ground. That summer I did have quite a successful vege patch, but after the end of the next winter things didn't go so well.
The local gardening experts tell me that the winter rains make the subsoil alkalinity leach up to the surface, so that however much one improves the surface layer, it will revert to being quite alkaline inconveniently quickly.

Next I tried making raised beds for my veges. A friend gave me a whole bunch of old sleepers, and I used them to make three raised beds. Two of them were about 30cm high, and the other about 60cm. I bought garden loam for them and added lots of organic matter and manure. These worked very well at first, but after a couple of seasons my veges were again very disappointing, despite regular additions of manure and compost. Loose leaf lettuces, silverbeet, broad beans, peas and many herbs grew well enough, but things that are a bit fussy about soil pH, like tomatoes, cucumber, capsicum, eggplant, and numerous other things were dismal failures.

About a year ago I invested in a soil pH tester, and was shocked to see that the soil in my raised beds had become very nearly as alkaline as the base soil in my garden. One possible "solution" was to graciously go with the flow and simply grow veges that tolerate alkalinity, but I didn't like that idea much. I decided drastic action was required.

In my case, "drastic action" meant a major garden revamp involving an enormous amount of hard work and a lot of money. The areas of the garden where fruit trees, herbs, roses, and a few other ornamental things grow well have been left as is, but I've replaced the old raised beds and other ground-level patches with a number of new improved alkalinity-proof raised beds.

What I did...
My new raised beds are designed to stop the soil in the beds being affected by the alkalinity in the subsoil. I've constructed them in various ways, but essentially they all function like garden pots...garden pots that have enough area and depth to support small acid-loving fruit trees, kiwifruit vines, and berries, as well as having plenty of space for all sorts of veges.

I used 200uM builders plastic under the raised beds as a barrier to stop alkalinity leaching upwards, with the soil under the plastic contoured so that water drains out at the base on the sides (towards other fruit trees and plants). On top of the plastic I spread a layer of coarse gravel, then covered that with some old shadecloth. I then piled in a loose layer of coarse prunings, and then filled the beds with garden loam and mushroom compost. I also lined the walls of the raised beds with builders plastic to prevent the soil from drying out too quickly. Here is a very large L-shaped one - my main vege patch - with its winter crop in progress.

My chooks can free-range around all sides of this raised bed and intercept at least some garden pests before they reach my veges. This bed is 80cm high - hopefully deep enough for the mango and persimmon trees and the kiwifruit vines, planted in the central harder-to reach parts. I had hoped this would be too high for the chooks to get in but, despite their wings being clipped, I had to add the blue plastic trellis stuff to keep them out. This bed is constructed from 20 x10cm sleepers of various lengths, supported by 80mm permapine posts. I had to buy these materials and the gravel, soil, and mushroom compost, so this was a very expensive project (about $1,000 all up). However, already my veges are growing much better and quicker than ever before, I'm excited at the prospect of finally being able to pick some of my favourite types of fruit that don't like alkaline soil, and it is a sheer delight to be able to weed the vege patch without bending over! Already I think the hard work and expense were well worth it.

In the front garden, I replaced the old raised bed with a scattering of five 1.2m square planter boxes. I bought these in kit form, but the kit is for a 31cm high planter box, so I bought 3 kits for every 2 boxes, cut one in half vertically and added those halves on top of the other 2 boxes to make them deeper. These have the same layered treatment - builders plastic to protect from alkalinity, then gravel, shadecloth, prunings, and soil and compost. As seen in the photo below, a winter crop of potatoes is growing in these at the moment, but I plan to plant pumpkins and melons in these beds in Spring.

I've used the same type of planter boxes, with the addition of rope trellises for cane fruits, in my "indulgence section" of the back garden. In these I've recently planted raspberries, a marionberry, and a thornless blackberry under the trellises, and lots of strawberries at the sides. There are also leeks around the watering pots, but these are still too tiny to show up in the photo below. The leeks too are part of the indulgence. I really like cooking with them, but until that time they make very attractive foliage plants.

For the last of my alkalinity-proof raised beds, I reused the sleepers from the former ineffective raised beds. This bed is about 60cm high and currently has a green manure crop (broad beans and chickpeas) just starting to grow. This too is in the chooks free-range area, hence the blue plastic trellis seen on top of the walls in the photo below. I've planted a fig tree in the middle - partly because figs start fruiting sooner if there roots can't go down too far before hitting something (in this case the builders plastic), and partly because one can never have too many fig trees and I had nowhere else to put this one! In summer this one will also have pumpkins and melons.

DIY free-ranging chook feeder

Chooks are quite capable of free-ranging all by themselves without any DIY input from us of course, but mine seem to do it too well. They eat all the grass and weeds in their free-range area inconveniently quickly, and gobble up newly germinated greenery the moment it pokes through the soil. They can still scratch around and find bugs to eat, but it does not seem like proper free-ranging to me if there is no living greenery for them to eat.

At first I tried partitioning off a section of their area and waiting for that area to revegetate. Once it had, I would allow the chooks back into that area and partition off a different area. I guess that is worth doing (and I do still do this), but its not really very effective. The revegetated areas are stripped bare again in a matter of days, whereas the revegetation process takes weeks. Thus, most of the time the only greenery the chooks get is the grass and weeds I toss over to them when I weed my vege patch, and the outer leaves, tops, etc. of the veges I pick for us to eat.

What I've done now...

My Big Bucket greywater project involved cutting the top 2/3rds off  of a round 500L poly tank, and of course I kept the offcut part just in case I ever needed circular walls for anything. This offcut, cut in halves vertically, now forms the walls of two 90cm diameter free-ranging chook feeders. These are bottomless, and sit on on the ground in the free-range area. I secured chicken wire over the tops of them so the chooks can't get inside them, and I planted alfalfa, broad beans, mizuna, and various other seeds I happened to have in the soil inside the walls.

The chooks can now graze on the greenery once it grows enough to poke through the wire netting without destroying the plants to the extent that they stop growing. In the photo below the alfalfa, etc., is just starting to poke through the soil, but the broad beans have been growing quickly and the chooks are already snacking on the one in the foreground.

The other day I was telling Gloria about my chook feeder and she said, "Oh I've done that too, but I made mine out of wire mesh"! Apparently her chooks managed to get in under the wire the other day, so her feeder is looking a bit bare at the moment.

Gloria's free-range chook feeder

DIY yoghurt

We really like yoghurt. Until I started making it myself, plastic yoghurt containers would account for at least half of the contents of our recycle bin, and I'd often wonder how 1L of yoghurt could cost about $5, when I could buy 1L of milk for about $1.20.

A while back I bought an EasiYo yoghurt maker. It really does live up to its name - just put cold water and the contents of an EasiYo packet (containing powdered milk and yoghurt culture) into the 1L plastic jar and shake. Fill the incubator flask with boiling water up to the indicator line, place the jar onto the baffle in the incubator, put on the lid and wait 8 hours. That's it. The varieties I tried tasted pretty good too. However, the packets of powder are not much cheaper than ordinary supermarket yoghurt, there still is packaging, and I imagine it takes a lot of energy to turn fresh milk into powdered milk.

Time for some DIY experimenting with making yoghurt from scratch using ordinary milk and yoghurt culture, I thought!

First I tried extrapolating from the EasiYo incubation method. I heated the milk first and put it in the EasiYo jar, then cooled it to roughly the temperature of cold water. I then added in starter culture (a few spoons of commercial natural yoghurt). Then I copied the EasiYo incubation method - boiling water up to the indicator line in the incubator, with the jar sitting on the baffle so that only the bottom 2-3cm of the jar was sitting in the water. Don't do that! The result tasted alright, but the consistency failed badly (it was drinking consistency). I still don't understand why the EasiYo incubation method works perfectly with their powder, but fails with ordinary milk and culture. Both essentially have the same ingredients and cultures, so I would have thought the same incubation environment/temperature would work for both.

In any case, after a bit of experimenting, I've now discovered what does work well. I'm still using the EasiYo 1L jar and the incubator flask, but I don't use their baffle in the incubator and I use cooler deeper water for the incubation. (Of course you don't need the EasiYo incubator flask and jar. Any sort of small esky or similar can be used for incubation, and the yoghurt itself can be in any sort of container that has a well-fitting lid.) The entire process takes around 30 minutes, but most of that is waiting time (while the milk heats and then cools). Hands-on time is maybe 5 minutes. I usually do the dishes at the same time so I am "there" in the kitchen to keep an eye on the milk temperatures. Obviously this method is not quite as quick or easy as making EasiYo yoghurt, but now that I've streamlined the process I find this almost as easy...and I prefer the more natural taste of my DIY yoghurt!

How it is done...

Preparation: Remove the starter culture from the fridge and set aside to warm a little by the time you will need it. Place the incubator in an out-of-the-way corner so that it won't be moved at all for 10 hours or so. Put on the kettle - you'll need about 1.5L of boiling water. If you are using an EasiYo flask as your incubator, remove the baffle (the red plastic part closest to the window in the picture below) and instead place something about 6cm high (I use the small heatproof dish seen in the picture below) in the bottom of the incubator so that the top of your jar will end up roughly near the incubator top.

Killing bacteria: Place the jar and lid on the sink, put your thermometer (to be used later) in the jar, and fill the jar and lid to overflowing with boiling water.

  
Heating the milk: Pour some boiling water into one saucepan and place another saucepan on top to mimic a double-boiler. Pour about 930ml of milk (assuming you will be using a 1L jar) into the top pan. Use a medium heat to keep the water boiling slowly.

After about 8 minutes, the milk will develop a subtle cooked milk smell and small bubbles will form around the wall of the saucepan. At that point, stir it with and ordinary clean spoon (the hot milk will kill any bacteria). If you can feel that milk solids are starting to stick to the bottom of the pan, and if stirring the milk makes it look frothy all over (as in the picture below), then the milk is hot enough.

Cooling the milk: Pour the hot water out of the jar that the yoghurt will be made in and just shake out the drops (don't dry it). The water will still be rather hot, so its easiest to use two hands, but you don't want to contaminate the thermometer by putting it down anywhere. I sit the thermometer in the saucepan of hot milk simply as a place to put it temporarily. Pour about half the water into the incubator ready for later, and discard the rest (I use it to top up my washing up water).

Pour the hot milk into the jar and put the thermometer in the milk. Then, put the jar in a container of cold water - you can apply permaculture-like principles and use the saucepan you used to heat the milk as the cold water container (to soak it to facilitate washing it). Add a large handful of ice (if you have it) to the cold water, and periodically swirl the jar around in the water and stir the cooling milk with the thermometer. Once the ice has melted I start checking the thermometer every minute or so - I'm always amazed at how quickly the milk goes from too hot to too cold at this stage! I aim for 46C (115F), but usually overshoot the mark and end up with the milk being cooler. I've had successful batches of yoghurt with the milk temperature at this stage being anywhere between 46C (115F) and 43C (110F). (I've not tested outside that range.) The milk temperature at this stage is only one factor that affects the consistency of the final product, but I think I've had my best consistencies when this temperature was about 44C. Last time I timed it, the cooling process took 16 minutes.

Making the yoghurt: Remove the thermometer from the milk, wash it, and place it in the hot water in the incubator. Remove the jar of milk from the cold water and tip in roughly 2 dessert-spoons of starter. (You don't need to measure it, but sterilize and cool your measuring spoon first if you do.) Tip the boiling water (that was) out of the jar lid, and screw it on tightly. Shake the jar well.

Check the water temperature in the incubator and add cold water to adjust it to about 46C (115F). This does not have to be too precise - I've had successful yoghurt with temperatures a degree or two higher and lower than this.

Place the jar in the incubator, adjusting the water level so that it is just below the lid of the jar.

Put the lid on the incubator and leave it undisturbed for somewhere between 8 and 24 hours. The longer you leave it, the more tart the yoghurt will become. (I like it best at around the 10 hour mark.) After the yoghurt has incubated, remove the jar from the incubator and place it in the fridge.

Yoghurt and dishes all done!!

Saving starter for next time: Always save some starter as soon as you first open a new jar of yoghurt. Place a small clean jar and its lid on the sink, put a spoon in the jar, and fill the jar and lid to overflowing with boiling water. Let sit for a few minutes, then pour out the hot water and shake out the drops (drying these items would risk contamination). Allow to cool to roughly room temperature. Then spoon several table-spoons of the new yoghurt into the jar, attach the lid, and keep in the fridge ready for next time you make yoghurt. I believe the culture can be stored for up to a week in a fridge, but since I make yoghurt every 2-3 days, I've never tested keeping it that long.

Other starter options: If you've not made yoghurt before, or if you've not made it for a while, you'll obviously need to use something other than yoghurt from your previous batch as starter culture. You can buy a small container of commercial natural yoghurt (unsweetened and unflavoured) and use some of that as starter. Again, make sure you remove the portion you will use as starter as soon as you open the container. Or, if you happen to have the EasiYo kit, you can make up one of their unsweetened and unflavoured varieties in their usual way, and use a little of that as your starter. (I've made successful batches of yoghurt using Farmer's Union European style natural yoghurt, and also using the EasiYo Greek style yoghurt.)

DIY planet rehabilitation

While those in power are quibbling over the economic impacts of reducing our carbon footprint and haggling over how to apportion/regulate our limited supply of fresh water, and while the UN posts warnings of increasing food security problems, there are many, many "little" :) people who are quietly (and not so quietly!) getting on with "doing it themselves". Call it DIY planet rehabilitation if you like.

Household by household, we are reducing our own carbon footprint, collecting and reusing our own water, and growing our own food. We are getting on with the business of sustainable living without waiting for decisions and action from people in power.  In that sense, this is a DIY blog.

It is also a DIY blog in the traditional sense of DIY - projects we can do ourselves instead of hiring experts to do them for us. DIY projects, especially original ones, tend to involve a good deal of trial and error. Please email me about your own sustainability-oriented DIY projects so that I can publish your ideas here. Allow others to learn from your mistakes and copy your tried-and-tested successes! Also feel free to use the comment function to suggest improvements and alternatives to the methods described in this blog or to add additional useful information. Enjoy!

Links...

1 million women
http://www.1millionwomen.com.au/index.cfm?ruuid=4FFDB6A5-9689-1AD3-F54D2CEC032CF853

Greenleap
http://www.green-innovations.asn.au/

Climate Code Red
http://www.climatecodered.net/

Geelong Sustainability Group
http://www.geelongsustainability.org.au/