The last few weeks have been incredibly busy, so I haven't had a chance to post a weekly round-up since the end of Sept. Being in the running for NZ Gardener of the Year is lots of fun! I've been interviewed and photographed by two reporters, and have an email interview to respond to this week. I've given one talk and am preparing for another, with others booked in the future, and I had a group tour my garden this afternoon. In the meantime.....what's been happening in my garden? Lots!

My greenhouse had become crowded and messy, and the weeds were growing all around, not to mention if was very wet in places after all the rain, so I emptied it completely, laid thick newspaper down after pulling the worst of the weeds, and then covered it deeply in the remains of the sawdust/calf manure that my son collected last year. For now, that makes a tidier floor and supresses weeds; when the new glasshouse is built in it's place, it will make great soil for planting.

Then I put back shelves and tables around the sides, along with a new table I acquired cheap from the op shop, covered in a trailer tarp. Pallets underneath provide storage space for bags and boxes.

There are seedlings everywhere! While the greenhouse plastic is now pretty much only held on by virtue of the pallets I've leaned against walls and placed on the roof, it's still providing a sheltered, warm place for germinating and growing seedlings. Which is just as well, as we've had continuous strong, cold winds!

The greenhouse is now a pleasure to work in. Looking forward to the new glasshouse when we can afford framing timber, but for now I enjoy pottering in here!

I gained a lot of hazelnut cuttings through Freecycle, and am attempting to root them. I soaked them first in Willow Water - which encourages roots and boosts their immune system. I've read since I got them that hazelnuts don't root well from cuttings, so we'll see how this goes.

Am also going the same with some grape cuttings also gained through Freecycle.

I gave a talk at the local library which went well......it was more in the "show and tell" style. I wanted to show people ways you can begin to grow food without spending much money. There are so many things you can do free or very cheaply, especially when you learn to keep your eyes open for possibilities!

I've built and planted the first of the pallet beds that will run alongside the sleepout, containing leaf lettuce and similar. The pallet is on top of cardboard to suppress the grass, and will eventually be surrounded by paths covered in pine needles. Using a pallet works well for shallow-rooted plants such as strawberries and lettuce. The timbers help to keep the roots cool, and act as solid mulch, reducing weeds. The location of this pallet is such that it will get morning sun, but be shaded by the building in the afternoons, when the sun is hottest, which is great for lettuces which prefer it cooler.

With help from my husband, I put together this excellent small worm farm set-up, based on a design I saw in a book called "Green Urban Living" by Janet Luke. Excellent book too - lots of great ideas, lovely photos etc!

My son helped me put together my new pallet compost bins - two bins are up so far, with the third to be done in the next day or so. I'm going to leave the middle bin empty for now, so I can walk into that space and reach the grapes that will be on the grapevine behind it over summer; the first bin has the nearly finished compost in it that was in a pile where the wheelbarrow is sitting, and I will build a new pile in the third bin. By the time the grapes have been harvested, I'll be ready to use the middle bin.

Yesterday I set up a drum of water with a sack of fresh manure soaking in it to make a manure tea for the garden. The sack is suspended off a piece of timber, and every time I wander past, I life one end of the timber like a lever, dunking and swishing the "tea bag" sack. It's already looking like a pretty good brew!!

What do you see here? A pile of old bicycle wheels you say? I see all sorts of trellises! One wheel suspended horizontally on top of a pole, with strings coming down would be great for peas or beans to grow up. 2 or 3 wheels attached one above the other to a pole or waratah with cable ties would make a cool trellis too. Or I love an idea I saw on Facebook - lots of wheels cable tied together forming a quarter of a sphere over a steel frame - making a curved trellis to grow a vine on, and a lovely shaded play-hut for kids underneath, or if you did it bigger, a great place for a garden seat! Lots of ideas - watch this space!

I finished clearing this bed, added compost, Rok Solid and Blood & Bone, and then have sown it in buckwheat as a cover crop. The buckwheat will be ready to cut or pull in only 4 weeks, when it will be a great mulch as I plant the bed with tomatoes. Buckwheat is also great for the bees, who love the flowers, and if you were to grow it longer is an excellent, tasty and gluten-free grain. The net curtains are laid over the bed until it sprouts to keep off the blackbirds which have been constantly digging in my garden of late!

I've mulched the tyres with sheep's wool from last year's shearing. It makes a great mulch - supressing weeds, holding moisture, releasing carbon and nitrogen as it breaks down, and looks and smells pretty nice too.

This red currant bush is looking SO healthy! I've promised myself I will NOT water it with chlorinated (tap) water this summer - if I do the leaves turn brown and the whole plant looks awful!

I planted broad beans with spinach in alternate rows - the spinach will shade the soil, and the broad beans will shade the spinach - making them both happy! I put a wide stake at each end of the broad bean rows, and wrapped string around them and down each side of the broad beans, which supports them in the wind. I'll add more lines of string as the plants grow. I did criss-cross with string too, thinking the cats were digging up my plants, but it's birds, not the cats, so that hasn't been very effective.

When you have noxious or really tenacious weeds in your garden, tossing them in the compost bin is a bad idea; they just keep growing. I have creeping buttercup and couch grass in mine; I pull it out roots and all and place in a black plastic bag in the sun for a few weeks until the heat kills them. Then I can compost them. The other alternative is to place in a drum of water for a couple of months, in which time they rot down into a really excellent brew for the garden; the remaining solids can be composted. I need to get some more drums before I can do that.

I planted out 3 zucchini and 3 spinach plants - a bit early for the zucchini, but I decided to risk it (I have more sown in the greenhouse in case a frost gets these ones, but if not I'll get an early harvest). The wind is wicked, and quickly flattens seedlings, so I've protect them with plastic bottles with the top and bottom cut off. This also keeps snails off while they get established.

I visited a local stables and asked if they had any spare horse manure - they pointed at a huge pile of stable cleanings, and so far my darling kids have brought home 18 trailer loads, which we're piling on the front lawn (on top of paper/cardboard to suppress the grass) so it can finish composting, and then we will spread it out and plant veges in it. It really needs some extra nitrogen added, so I may contact a local lawn-mower crew and invite them to dump some loads of grass clippings here. There is still a lot more manure/sawdust to collect, which is getting done a little at a time when someone is free.

I even cleaned out my garden sink - and Fluffy immediately decided it was a new place for her to sleep! This cat just LOVES to sleep in my garden beds - so this is an improvement as far as I'm concerned; the peas she kept lying on haven't really recovered!

Well, that's it for this post - I hope I've inspired you with some new ideas!

It has been a week of wild weather - gale force winds nearly every day, along with heavy showers. Most of the garden work that has gone on this week has been in the greenhouse, where my seeds are happily sprouting.

I moved the two choko plants in pots that have been growing in my foyer out to the greenhouse, as they have been slowing down inside, probably because I haven't been putting them out in the sun often enough.

I've been collecting free pallets over the last couple of weeks, for various projects I have in mind - building compost bins, vertical gardens, pallet gardens for lettuce and so forth. They also make handy tables in the greenhouse. Various veges and flowers are in various stages of sprouting on them. I also splurged and bought myself an attractive plant called "Paper Cascade" which has beautiful crimson and white buds, followed by straw-flower like flowers. I have just the spot I want to plant it.

I put the yacon crowns in a bin of compost to over-winter in the shed. They are starting to sprout, so I moved the bin to the greenhouse. It won't be long before I lift them out, divide the crowns and plant them in the garden. Only I'm not sure where I'm going to put them yet - they grow up to 8 feet tall, so need to be somewhere they won't shade other plants, plus like a warm, sheltered spot. They did well outside the bathroom last year, but there will be a lot more plants this year, so I need more space.

These broad beans are getting very large. I need to plant them out as soon as possible. The pumpkins and green zucchini are also sprouting well, cucumbers and gherkins are being a lot slower off the mark.

Leaf lettuce are getting large too - these are going to go into a pallet bed as soon as I have it ready.

There are many more trays and punnets of seeds all over the place - here we have onions and tomatoes on the upper shelf, beetroot, buk choy and nasturtium on the lower. The beetroot also needs planting out as soon as I have a bed ready for it.

Today I marked out a 10 square meter patch of lawn and started digging it over in preparation for planting seed potatoes which are well sprouted. I had hoped to get them planted by today, but between last week's weather and getting ready for the homeschooler's ball which was held on Saturday, I haven't had time to get the prep work done. Today I got about a quarter of the bed dug over - hopefully I'll get the rest done tomorrow. I'm digging it by hand, with a spade, despite the rotary hoe in the background. Couch grass and creeping buttercup are my two worse nuisances in the garden - rotary tilling just cuts them up and spreads them. The turf and weeds I remove will be put into black plastic bags and left in the sun until dead, after which I will add them to the compost. 

Potatoes are one crop I keep seeing so much conflicting advice about: sprout them, don't sprout them, sprout them in the dark, sprout them in a sunny place, don't plant before Labour Weekend (late Oct), any planted from Oct on will probably fall victim to psyllids, use the no-dig method, the no-dig method doesn't work, plant in tyres, don't plant in tyres, use plenty of manure and lime the soil, don't use manure or lime or you'll get scabby potatoes, yada yada yada! Hmmmmm! I think I'm going with my general plan this year - try everything, and figure out what works for ME!

Last summer I planted potatoes using the no-dig method. I planted late though, and didn't get very many decent sized spuds. However, the method DID do a wonderful job of clearing and making the soil nice in that area. It's just a pity my son now has car parts spread all over it for his restoration project, and I can't plant there again just yet!

This year, I'm going to dig over this patch of lawn, make traditional trenches, and add grass clippings (for nitrogen), sheep manure, blood and bone, Rok Solid (ground rock with a huge range of minerals) and gypsum to the bottom of the trench before planting the seed potatoes and slowly hoeing them up.

My greenhouse has about blown itself to bits in this week's gales. We never finished adding more framing and battening to finish it off, and after pricing the materials decided we needed a cheaper option. I bought a big load of cheap windows off Trade Me last week, and we're going to use those to completely rebuild the greenhouse into a glasshouse just as soon as we can. Meanwhile I've had to improvise to keep the greenhouse from completely disintegrating by putting pallets on the roof and things against the side, so the seedlings remain sheltered until we can plant them out and rebuild. Then I will reuse the greenhouse plastic to make some cloches, growing frames etc.

In order to keep the chickens out of the garden, we've also been working on raising the fence between the yard/garden and the paddock where the chickens free-range. My husband and I raised the back fence last weekend, and my eldest son built me a wonderful new gate to replace the disintegrating and hard to shut old ones. My husband laced the wire with help from our daughter, and hung it on Friday. No more chickens in my garden! Yay! We've talked about raising the fence for ages; it turned out to be much quicker and simpler than expected, using some fencing battens and a left-over roll of wire netting. My younger son had the intelligent idea to hammer a nail into the top of each batten before putting it up, so that we could then roll out the wire and hang it on the nail, holding it up while we went along and attached it properly with fencing staples. Worked brilliantly!

My lovely, new gate - light and easy to swing open, strong and tall to keep the chickens and sheep out of the yard. Excellent work family! The extra tall bits at each end are so we can string wires across if the chickens ever decide to fly up onto the gate, as they might do when there is a solid surface to land on.

As Spring has sprung, and we are now entering the busiest time of year in the garden, I have decided to post a weekly summary of what has been going on over the past week, starting with this one.

Last Tuesday (17th) was the last day for sowing or planting above-ground crops for the month, according to the moon calendar. So early in the week I was busy sowing lots of seeds in trays and pots in the greenhouse. While in the past I have tended to focus on only plants for human food, the more I read and learn the more I realise how important it is to plant things that benefit bees and other beneficial insects as well. This month so far I have planted:
Fruit & Vegetables: I have sown seeds of heading lettuce, gherkins, cucumber, spinach, watermelon, green zucchini, crown pumpkin, freckle lettuce, leeks, silverbeet (green and coloured), tomatoes (three varieties) and I also planted four feijoa bushes, and set up a bin full of potting mix and compost in which I planted some extra raspberry canes, and dug up the black currants that have been growing in a corner from cuttings I was given last year, and moved them to pot until I have a permanent place for them.
Flowers & Herbs: I have sown bee balm, borage, thyme, dill, chives, marigold, nasturtium, zinnia, Mexican sunflowers, alyssum, snapdragon, phacelia and cosmos. Many flower and herbs are both edible or medicinal for us, as well as providing food or shelter for bees and helpful insects, such as ladybirds, hover flies etc.

On Wednesday morning I awoke to a very frosty morning, with the outside taps frozen, ice on the troughs and all over the plants. This is why tender warm season crops need to be nurtured under cover at this time of year!

This week, my strawberries are flowering well (the photo above was taken on Wednesday morning, and they are all frosted but strawberries are pretty hardy plants and it doesn't bother them). My dwarf peach tree is in bloom too. The raspberries have all burst into leaf, and are showing signs of developing flowers, and the boysenberries are just starting to leaf up. The first of the buds have burst on the grapevine. Mmmmmm can almost taste the summer fruits to come!

I finally got around to going to say hello to a guy up the street who grows and sells herbs and veges, and we had a nice chat about his garden. He told me that last year he had a bed full of gorgeous cabbages in the middle of summer, when everyone else around here has all their brassicas decimated by white butterfly. At first he couldn't understand why, and then finally realised that prior to the cabbages, the bed had been full of garlic! So guess what I'm going to plant this summer after I harvest my garlic bed?? Normally I don't even both with brassicas over the summer, but maybe........

Speaking of garlic, I have a bed planted in garlic, in two halves. Traditionally, one is supposed to plant garlic around the shortest day of the year, and harvest it on the longest. This year, June 21st was the shortest day. I planted the first half of the bed on June 7th with cloves from garlic I bought from the supermarket (not knowing anywhere else to get it). I planted about 48 cloves. Four or 5 sprouted a while later, but I nearly gave up on the rest until I read they can take up to 6 weeks to show, so I decided to be patient. I planted the second half on August 25th (about the last chance for the year) with cloves from garlic purchased at a local market garden. Those are now just about all showing through the soil, and more of the first half have come through, but in disappointing numbers. I'll give the first half a little longer before just planting something else in the gaps. I've never grown garlic before, but I've read they can take ages to show above the soil, but meanwhile are developing strong root systems underneath. We'll see. I've had to cover the bed in netting to keep the cats off - when it's no longer needed there, I'll move it over to the strawberry bed.

My Frugal Fortnight concluded successfully - I did manage to stay away from the store and not spend any more money on food, and we certainly ate just fine! I saved some $500 over the two weeks that way. On Thursday, I did a regular fortnightly shop, but am thinking of making it last a month, as we still have some things I'd like to use up in the pantry. Meanwhile, I have more recipes to post over the next few days.

By Thursday, the weather had turned bleak, with lots and lots and lots of rain over the last few days. Today (Sept 22nd) is the Equinox (day and night of equal length) and one expects unsettled weather at that time. Earlier in the month it was gales, now it's heavy rain. A lady I know who has grown a lot of food for years not far from here tells me gales are the norm for late November too (when tall plants are vulnerable if not staked). Local knowledge of what to expect is invaluable to gardeners - always talk to those around you who are experienced, and make note of what they can share, as well as keeping a diary of your own to record weather conditions so you will begin to see patterns.

When the weather is too nasty to work outside, it's a good time to work in the kitchen! I finally found time to begin harvesting and bottling my beetroot. I got half the bed done on Friday, before running out of time and energy. I will post my Pickled Beetroot recipe separately.

I've been keeping a record of how many eggs are being laid by which group of chickens over the past fortnight. As of yesterday, we've gotten 206 eggs over the last 13 days! That's a lot of eggs! I'm going to try out some methods of preserving them this week, but then I also need to start selling the on-going surplus, which will help to pay for the chicken feed. Free-range eggs anyone?

And lastly, I've begun planning a gardening talk I'll be giving at the local library on October 12th. If you're local, I hope you will come along!