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 [...]

With Autumn well and truly upon us it’s time to get more winter veg in the ground. Aiko and Fizz the helpful gardening cat are filling planter pots for all the seedlings to come.

Some of the seedlings waiting to go out in the garden.

Aiko planting brassicas in the beds where the potatoes were. This is [...]

We’ve just dug up the last of the potatoes and collected 103kg this weekend. Including the ones we’ve already eaten, our total potato harvest weights are:
Agria - 30kg
Rua - 11kg
Ilam Hardy - 15kg
Desiree - 15kg
Rocket - 15kg
Cliff’s Kidney - 15kg
Jersey Benne - 15kg
Red Rascall - 9kg
Maori Potato Selection - 8.5kg
Grand total - 133.5kg
We’ll store the [...]

We had some delicious roasted gem squash with dinner last night. I’m saving the seeds and hopefully we can grow some next summer. These squash came from a market so we don’t know exactly how they were grown. If they came from hybrid seed then plants grown from these saved seeds will revert to one [...]

Our garlic harvest was pretty modest this year. Considering the neglect it had to put up with I’m surprised we got any at all, let alone harvesting more than we planted.

Next planting we’ll definitely do better but here are a few lessons we’ve gleaned:

Prepare the bed well. Don’t just turn over some sod and shove [...]

Back in October we planted some raspberry canes. A few months on they are doing really well - we have some small fruit forming and the plants are sending up new canes. We were originally concerned we’d have to lift the carpet to let new shoots up but it seems the carpet has rotted enough [...]

With another burst of planting out seedlings today we are up to over 500 tree lucerne potted up. With the plans we have for native bush re-planting we’ll need a couple of thousand of these little guys as a nursery crop for the natives. I’ll post more on growing tree lucerne soon.

We’ve found that mulching the garden beds with straw or hay makes a huge difference in the moisture retained in the soil. It also helps control weeds around the desirable plants. While straw is preferable (it takes longer to break down and is less likely to blow away) you can use old hay.
This is what [...]

Here’s Kaye, our current helper teaching the chickens to weed. The chickens haven’t quite got the hang of leaving the good plants alone.