On Wednesday, I received a parcel of ‘live plants’ in the post, a late holiday offering of five carob saplings and some raspberry canes. Carob trees, apparently, make a great hedge in Australia. They provide a wind-break, they are fire-resistant, they are dense – and, hello!, chocolate! They also make good fodder for animals, and they are leguminous, so they help to fix nitrogen in the soil!
We’ve planted our carob trees in the south-west corner of the site. While this may not look like a great spot at first glance – you’ll see from the sketch that the fire sector is the north-west, while winds tend to come directly from the south, we wanted the hedge to provide a bit of privacy from the street; and it needs full sun and this area gets more sun than most of the other parts of our boundary. It also follows directly from the gate we’re just putting in, so it kinda makes sense.
The other factor is the soil. Carob needs well-draining soil, but most of our land is nearly pure clay. The soil towards the south in general seems to be richer in organic matter – though we still needed to put in a healthy dose of compost.
We’ve made little compost-filled basins for each of the saplings, and mulched them well. As we can’t live up at the site, they’ll be somewhat irregularly watered, though we tend to get up there at least once a week, so that should be enough to establish them. My main concern is the rabbits and wombats! We’ve put make-shift protectors around two saplings, and will get the others protected on Sunday – they were planted on a Thursday.
The aim – had the plants not arrived – was to finish off the plinth for the cob oven this week. I do have a couple of updates on it. On Wednesday, I managed to get some second-hand plasterers trowels and then went round to Ceres Fair Wood, to pick up a couple of tarp-substitutes, for mixing cob on. That’s all the progress we’ve made this week – the aim on Sunday is to get the gate on, and this time to finish up the cob plinth, will let you know next week how we got on!
Update: Four of the five plants are thriving. One plant, the best protected of the lot, snapped off.
