In the Wet Tropics, a whatever approach to gardening, and life, can be challenged by waterever weather – when the rain seems to go on forever. Well, yes, it is the Wet Tropics with a distinct wet or tropical monsoon season that is generally expected from about October to April. Rain, lots of rain, is part of our annual cycle. It’s mid-June now, though, and today I heard a local primary producer remark that the clear sunny days of the dry season started last Monday. The 2023-2024 Northern Australian wet season, which was the ninth-wettest on record, just didn’t know […]
Whatever Gardening in my Scratch Patch
I am not really a gardener. I’m a sort of gardener, a ‘whatever’ gardener. I simply don’t have the time and energy to do much. Nevertheless, when I had a house built on a small block of grassed clay soil, I decided to try. After decades of shrivelling any plant I was supposed to care for, I was starting from scratch in more ways than one. My aims in developing my scratch patch were to improve the soil and sequester carbon on a small scale, creating a habitat to feed myself and others, including other species. These intentions completely ignored […]
Planting in patches
Starting from scratch, whatever planting in patches: trees and pumpkins from scraped-out seeds, tangles of weeds. Endemic, endangered, cultivated and cropping: feeding the multispecies collective.