After a long, dry summer in Perth (8 months with no rain), winter has finally arrived. The gardens are looking refreshed (as are the weeds unfortunately!), and the rainwater tanks are looking much healthier.

The ‘pumpkin palace’ had provided plenty of zucchini, tomatoes, eggplant, rockmelon, green beans and of course pumpkin over the summer, and once we had harvested the last pumpkin, it was opened up to the chooks for the coming few months.

This rotation system is working well- the previous season’s pumpkin palace has been eaten down, fertilised and received lots of scraps, buried fish, carcasses etc so after a clean up it will be ready for the next round of planting.

We used to use a three way rotation, but find the two way pumpkin palace rotation we currently use works well. We manage to grow so many greens in the two aquaponics systems, we tend to use these two large beds for things like pumpkin and zucchini that take up lots of space!