July Hive Garden Challenge from Ligaya Garden

It's July already and the real cold is here. This is the time to do the physical work that the garden needs and stay active - we Aussies hibernate in Summer! The results of the recent work will form the basis of my entry into the July Hive Garden Challenge.

I reckon it's pretty nice of @riverflows to ask me to be a mod in this community too.

I'll start with a selfie so folks know who is rambling on here. It's a pic taken from a plant's perspective and edited for human eyes (plants only see red and blue so a real plant perspective pic would look even weirder than the people pic).

Then here's a pic of my ever lovely assistant, Athena -

If you've been following my gardening and foraging escapades, you'll be able to tell in an instant what I've been up to. Yes, cleaning up!

After an early prune of the really tall trees so that branches don't fall on my head when I get stuck in later with the chainsaw, I mulched all the green and woody material and put it in our hidden compost bins. We haven't had a compost bin for ages but now that the garden is pretty mature (6 years old), there's so much stuff to mulch and process. Usually, all of the organic material goes into the chook run for them to deal with but this year, I had to press some blue plastic drums into service. In these is the mulched material has been mixed with waste coffee grounds and biochar.

A tip from recent experience - add the coffee and biochar to the mulcher as you put the plant material in. It mixes it nicely and has the benefit of breaking the biochar into smaller pieces. It's a great way to save effort and time.

After all that, I've cleaned out all of the not healthy and non-productive plants at ground level, covered the place in spent mushroom substrate and had a general cleanup.

Onto this, now blank, canvas, I've splashed lots of colourful edible and insect attracting flowers. I haven't included a pic of them because they're not flowering at the moment. They include Ornamental Kale (yes, that's edible!), Alyssum, both kinds of Marigolds (Calendula and Tagetes), Corn Flowers and Borage. More to come too!

The purpose of the cleanup is to let more light into the garden and to plant a new shrub layer of edible berries. The addition of so much mushroom substrate over the last year has tipped the soil pH toward acidic and most berries love that!

We're upping our game a little because of the crazy food shortages that are hitting everyone. If you want to read a post that I recently published on the causes of this craziness, check out 'Nothing on the shelves'. It's a bit long, so sit down with a cuppa if you read it.

I'll keep you up to date with the changes in the garden as they progress and hopefully I'll be able to add lots of pics of berry harvests next season!

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