20th January 2019

What happens when you ask Anika to photograph the flower bed before picking the sweet pea flowers…. She likes to experiments with the different settings on the camera and is also fond of a taking a quick selfie! Not sure if she enlisted Jamie to help take photos or figured out the self timer function!

Photos from this morning.

I was thinking that I must focus on what is happening vegetable wise more. Mixed success in maintaining that focus!

Found this new creature on the tomato plant. Will use the creature identifying website to find out about it. The amount of stink bugs went up quite dramatically after removing the Hollyhock near the tomato house but the spike in numbers decreased again fairly quickly. Found the first couple of caterpillars in their today. Will have to get a photo, they are quite attractive looking, they destroy tomatoes though, so are definitely on the search and destroy list.

The black cherry tomatoes have formed a wall of foliage and fruit.

Glorious glowing red orbs on this Dalmation Oxheart tomato plant.

Crazy amounts of fruit set on this Orange Roma tomato plant. The only other variety of tomato we have growing this year is one plant of Aileiron. It is a modest size, smooth red tomato. Not that fascinating to look at but it is Zara’s favourite and does seem to start ripening slightly earlier than the other varieties.

This cabbage is nearly a metre across. It is a January King savoy type cabbage.

Carrots with a lone poppy flower. I was going to weed it out but felt sorry for it so it stayed. There are about 6 different varieties of carrots in this patch and we’re looking forward to eating them all.

The rockmelon plants have taken to the structure to climb on extremely well, they are still covered in flowers and setting new fruit. It remains to be seen as to whether the plants are strong enough to hold on to fruit that sets up off the ground. I might have to support them with something. The earliest fruit that set is now getting quite large.

The Dalmation beans are producing really well. These always produce well up here unless we get a lot of wind and the plants get battered. Have picked some pods that got away from us and are drying them for seed. The Koanga seed is unavailable at the moment. Garth’s Uncle Trevor has said he will save some seed for us also. He is a long time gardener living at One Tree Point near Whangarei. He has been growing what he calls “Dally beans” for a long time.

The Giant Russian Sunflower in the middle of our keyhole bed. It is somehow majestic even in its advanced stage of maturity. The seeds are getting big and fat and we will harvest it soon. The seeds will go to the chickens (they are better at getting them out of the hulls than us otherwise we could eat them). The high carbon content of the stalk will go to the compost. It I wait too long to harvest the seed head we will most likely get a visit from Cocky the resident free range Cockatoo. She likes sunflower seeds.

Peppers and eggplants. Both late this year with having establishment issues. The eggplant plants are looking strong now and flowering. The one Jimmy Nardello pepper plant that established straight away is fruiting heavily. Maybe it is enjoying the company of the purple basil, marigolds and Anise Hyssop.

The first Old Hopi pumpkins to set are getting large, probably about 10 kgs already! The Blue Hubbards always remind me of blimps or torpedos with their unusual shape. They are reputed to be able to be stored for up to 2 years. None of ours have lasted that long yet as they get eaten up. The Red Kuri early pumpkins are probably ready to start being harvested.

Noticed these gladioli opening their buds last night while watering by moonlight. As they are so dark I couldn’t really see them so was happy to get out this morning and admire them. I also love the multicoloured Mutabilis rose blooms. This rose is tough as boots and flowers almost all year round.

My favourite snack! White alpine strawberries. They are slowing down with their fruit now but I keep watering them to try and keep going. Delicious!

17th January 2019

Feeling a bit weary this morning as I was out late watering last night. Didn’t start watering until I had planted out the buckwheat seedlings into the cover crop/carbon crop bed. Couldn’t start planting the buckwheat out until I had reweeded the bed. If I have the seed at the appropriate time I think next time I will just sow the buckwheat at the same time as the other seeds. Was experimenting with sowing it separately in a tray. Yes the germination was good but the planting it out was a bit of a hassle. I did enjoy having the netting off the bed and looking at how the carbon crop was coming on though. I planted sunset dwarf amaranth, millet and hull-less oats in this bed. The amaranth has germinated spectacularly well although much thicker in some places, the millet and oats averagely well but enough to give a bit of diversity. I like using oats as a carbon crop as they are reputed to help make the calcium and phosphorus in the soil more available. The soil does always seem to have a nice texture when they come out.

We won’t be eating the grain from these crops but will pen some of our chickens over the grain plants when they are mature. The chooks will harvest the grain and till the stalks into the soil, while depositing fertiliser. This process usually works really well with amazing fertile soil the result. Can be difficult if the weather is really wet or really hot and dry and the chooks then struggle to turn over the soil well though.

Along with the seeds I planted in this bed there were many seeds that I didn’t plant that germinated. Some people call these self sown plants ‘volunteers’. I’m liking the sound of that terminology at the moment (much more exciting than ‘weeds’). At one end of this bed last summer was a plant called golden purslane. A great summer green for eating that apparently is full of Omega 3, this plant grows strongly throughout summer. This summer I carefully transplanted the odd one that had come up in various beds. Now however I have a whole bed full of it. Its acting as an underplanting to the Amaranth and with its light green fleshy leaves it looks absolutely amazing. I hope the chickens will like it, because we certainly aren’t going to be able to eat it all.

To build our soil I’m trying to have 50% of our garden beds grow cover crops over the year to add carbon back to the soil. It should be 60% really, but with a growing family to feed I need the space for veges. Sometimes I also run out of time and energy to sow cover crops when I should. However we are able to top up our compost making supplies with chipping the monkey apple shelter belts that surround a couple of sides of our house. They are excellent biomass producers, managing to put on metres and metres of growth every year. Growing my plots of grains, greens and flowers for the insects and then using the chooks to harvest and till is my method of choice however for increasing the carbon and nutrients in the soil.

Our chooks make the most lovely little noises as they scratch and move around in their mobile cages in the garden. Weeding seems more worthwhile when we can take the weeds directly to the chook cage and have them start turning them into compost immediately. The weeds are always received with excitement by the chooks along with the slugs and snails.

The latest plants to have a support structure provided for are the rockmelons. Always tricksy to grow to maturity, this years rockmelons are actually looking so rampant that I decided they needed to start going up rather than sprawling further and further out amongst other things. Having had past rockmelon plants and fruit decide to rot overnight when not happy with the weather I was a bit worried to mess around with them. After extremely carefully untangling them from the netting they were growing through I threaded them up onto the elevated bamboo support structure. It then started to rain and I realised I could cover the whole structure. And then it got hot and sunny and then it rained and so on and so on. Managed to keep them pretty dry and not cooked with heat and several days on they look happy. Whew! I really like rockmelons. Homegrown rockmelons are luscious and full of flavour, cross fingers I can nurture these ones to maturity.

Today all of a sudden there are two Fire Circle Poppies flowering. The bees found them quicker than I did and are in love with them.

16th January 2019

This morning I was able to pick a pretty nice bunch of flowers to send over to my sister Freya for her birthday today. Happy Birthday to you baby sister and I hope the year ahead goes smoothly for you. I’m really enjoying the beautiful cook book given to me by Freya at Christmas. Called ‘Eat your veges’ by Pete Evans, it is awesome, and I’m so happy to have a great selection of veges coming in from the garden to try out the new recipes with.

Still drizzling a bit today so the task of the morning has been deadheading flowers. Started lopping off dahlias with relish as they are looking bedraggled and I know they will send out lots more flowers if I get rid of the old ones.

Suddenly I wondered where the two-spined spider was, as I had just lopped off ‘his’ dahlia. Had to check through all the prunings and sure enough there he was so I carefully transported him back to a fresh dahlia flower. Jamie came along and wondered why I was sounding a wee bit distressed and searching through the old dahlias. We were both relieved to find the spider and return it to the dahlia bush.

I was just thinking in my head how it would be neat if there were more of them and would it need a mate to reproduce. The information we looked up about the spider did not run to that much detail. All of a sudden I heard Jamie gleefully burst out, “look Mum there’s another one!” It’s amazing how with a child’s enthusiastic and receptive mind nearby your attitudes can ‘rub off’ on them so readily. Have to be a little careful about which attitudes one practices. Jamie’s next outburst was that the ‘bloody stink bugs’ are even in our comfrey Mum!

I’m enjoying observing the garden through the viewpoint of it being an ecosystem. The dahlias are just full of bugs and now when I feel the need to take a photograph it is often of an interaction between a plant and an insect or some other combination of life. Today there were honey bees, bumblebees and native bees all buzzing round the single yellow dahlias together, almost jostling for space to land. We were learning about our native bees from one of our local bee keepers the other day and they are quite different in their habits to the introduced honeybee. Probably more resistant to the varroa mite as well.

Next task is to remove the chive plants from the tomato bed. I transplanted them there when planting up the tomato bed and they were older plants then. They have been covered in aphids and ants for months now. In this new and forgiving ecological mindset I am trying to sustain, I have tried to leave them there as part of the ecosystem. However the plants are basically dying, so I think the time has come for them to go and something else to fill the gap.

The preserving season has begun. The exuberant basil growth in the tomato house was given a haircut the other day. Zara, Anika and Jamie set themselves up on the kitchen floor and went full speed removing the leaves from the stalks. Then we jammed the food processor full of basil, adding parmesan cheese, pine nuts, olive oil, garlic and salt. With the second batch we substituted homegrown walnuts for the pine nuts. Thirteen jars of pesto for the freezer, one deck covered in walnut shells, one kitchen floor strewn with basil remnants.

There is lots of harvesting to be done at the moment; tomatoes, beans, snowpeas, podding peas, sweet pea flowers (Anika likes to pick these). Zara is in charge of harvesting the cucumbers and zucchini’s as the plants are so big that it requires a long arm and talent for contortion to reach them. After never quite reaching the point of zucchini overload in the last 5 years or so, we seem to have finally cracked it this year. We have 4 Cocozelle Bush courgette plants, two crookneck squash, two Deka cucumbers and two Port Albert cucumbers all producing well. As we don’t eat grain based pasta (or grain based anything for that matter) we eat a lot of zucchini made into pasta shapes or just cut up.

15th January 2019

Rain, blessed rain. Over the last day or so we have had showers of rain. Most of them very light, but it has been cool also, so the grass and plants have probably had a chance to make use of the moisture without it getting sucked up out of the soil again before they can.

Fat, happy cows and sheep. The rain will give the Kikuyu grass a boost and keep them in feed for a bit longer. The ducks are always happy when it rains.

I have been enjoying the watering in the evenings watching the stars and seeing the moon waxing and waning. Much more fun to see what stage the moon is at than look it up in the gardening diary to check what I should be doing. However, not having to water for the last two evenings, has been very restful and conducive to actually cooking for the family instead of leaving it to Garth.

14th January 2019

I’ve been rereading the book Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemingway. I so love this book and anything by Kay Baxter of the Koanga Institute. When my enthusiasm for the hard or time consuming (watering!) tasks in the garden wane I find dipping into these books inspires me to keep going. Keep planting, keep digging, keep watering, keep feeding, keep observing. As the trees, hedgerows and comfrey plots get established they are easier to look after. As the soil gets built up with compost and carbon crops and chook tractoring it gets better and able to sustain more life. It is just not a quick process with our soil which is very well drained and has very low organic matter and mineral levels.

What is it they say? Good things take time.

These Zucchini flowers are up to 20cm across. I wonder if that is why the bumbles are enjoying them so much (easy access for even the fattest bumblebee)?

Having to work in with the insect life at the moment. Watering the zucchinis especially. Even when I start watering at 6 am the bumblebees are already at work flying in and out of the zucchini flowers and they don’t like getting an impromptu shower! We always have lots of bumblebees here for some reason along with plenty of bees. Kay Baxter says to plant a diverse array of plants including lots of flowering ones and you will get diverse insect life and it will help with pest control. Toby Hemingway says to plant a diverse array of everything and aim for a diverse array of everything from soil bacteria and fungi to birds to grazing animals.

I feel like at some point in the future. when we get the balance of diversity of flora, fauna and soil conditions right, that our garden will start to take on more of a life of its own, sort of become more than the sum of its parts. When this happens the I hope the resilience of the soil, plants and animals will be increased and that the nutrient cycling within the property will cycle away without so much human effort and input. Partly this would be good for the selfish reason that my body will not keep up the current workload indefinitely (although the kids and Garth help out a lot). Partly it would just be a wonderful thing to have happen for its own sake.

Pulled the last of the onions today as rain was threatening. We are very happy with the harvest from one bed of onions. The bed is quite narrow and we didn’t think we would get so many onions from it. I think we harvested 45 kgs of onions last year so the proof will be in the weighing once they have dried off. Jamie said he enjoyed being responsible for the onion bed as it involved so little work. He found it so easy that he might like to have the onion bed again next year. Hhhmm he might find himself without his mum doing the bulk of the planting this time…. Actually aside from getting the blimen things to germinate, which requires a heat pad in our conditions, onions are remarkably low maintenance. We find that as they get ready to be harvested they need to be kept dry. The days of pounding rain and/or intermittant drizzle and tropical heat that we get sometimes leads to rotten onions so we cover them with a temporary plastic shelter when it rains. Just have to get it off before the sun comes out otherwise we then have cooked onions. This year the dry weather has been great for getting the onion crop to harvest safely.

9th January 2019

Today felt like hard work in the garden. It got really hot by the time I finished watering. I feel like the watering in the morning is not as effective as when I was watering mainly at night.

On the positive side, we had a great swim with our friends in our local swimming hole. We are blessed to have a river nearby big enough to swim in. Whole body immersion in cold water seems to be the best way to feel revitalised on these hot days. These hot days are seeming to follow each other endlessly with no respite (or rain) in sight. A little cooler today…. only 26 degrees celsius. It has been over 30 on some days.

I had a siesta and then went out and watered by starlight this evening. Nice and cool, and will mean a quicker watering round in the morning. The trick is possibly going to be to try not to exhaust myself totally during the day, so that I have enough energy to water at night.