Here’s the finished result of Karen’s hard work - garlic plaited and ready to dry. We ended up with eight big plaits and a whole lot of heads with no stalks attached. We’ll eat the singles first while the plaits can dry in the cool shed.

The cleaning was quite laborious this year as the ground [...]

About six months ago on the shortest day (or not long after as I recall) we planted 200-odd garlic cloves. It looks like almost all of them have grown well and now it’s time to harvest. The tops are just starting to die back which is as good a sign as any they are ready.

Here’s [...]

Despite the very unsettled spring weather (or more likely because of it) we’ve had our best year ever for brassicas. It seems that a cold, long winter killed off most of the white butterflies and the last few months of weird weather has disrupted the life cycles of those that survived. We’ve seen perhaps only [...]

I don’t usually get so excited about a bit of fencing but this one has been on my to-do list since we arrived. No more will helpers (or us) need to climb the electric fence to get to the back garden.

Here’s the before pic of the fence line we used to traverse regularly.

Like most projects, [...]

I snapped this little guy this afternoon on one of the tree lucerne. There are vast armies of bumble bees collecting pollen at the moment and very few honey bees. In fact I’ve seen exactly one honey bee so far this Spring. That will change when our new colonies arrive in November but until then [...]

You can tell it’s organic - there are weeds in the background. We had this with a delicious cheese sauce for dinner about ten minutes after this photo was taken.

We had spent the afternoon planting and the wind was picking up so I put some straw bales on edge along the row to protect the larger bean seedlings.

The smaller seedlings were quite happy nestled down in the wells we created in the mulch.

Karen is quite pleased with this harvest - mainly because she got to it before the chickens did.

Daniel and Kelly helping out in the (so far) chicken proof garden.

Karen showing one way of planting basil seeds between the tomatoes. I’m sure there are others, but they wouldn’t be as fun to photograph.

Here’s the end result. Half the beds planted up, composted and mulched. Off to a promising start for Spring.

Karen’s planter pot system is working a treat with these broad beans ready to go in the garden. We thought we’d try planting a few before winter as we’d read a sneaky pre-winter bed can be up and producing much earlier in the Spring than starting from scratch then. We’ll see in a few months [...]