Kiwi Urban Homestead Blog

Garden Photos Summer 2014

2/8/2014

Since I haven't been posting my normal monthly garden pics over the last few months, I thought I'd just do a catch up by posting some photos from this past summer, so you can see the continuing development of the garden.

With help from my son and his friends (fortunately all well over 6 feet tall!), the beginnings of my seating area was erected - 4 posts, with old fence posts across the top. The plan is to have a swing seat underneath and trellis up the sides and over the top, covered in fruiting vines, creating a shady place to sit in summer and survey the garden.

This year I finally did something I've meant to for several years - grew swan plants for monarchs! I ended up having to buy and plant more and more plants, as well as netting them to limit the number of eggs laid. Next summer I'll also grow some milkweed as extra food for them. To my surprise, the swan plants don't die over winter, so I trimmed them back a bit after the caterpillars were all done, ready to shoot off in summer.

LOVE completely home-grown meals - lamb, potatoes, pumpkin and tender green beans, all from our wee homestead. Feeding the family with meals we're rolled up our sleeves and grown or raised, then harvested and butchered all by ourselves feels really good! And you KNOW it's got to be better for our bodies and our pocket.

We acquired two beehives over summer - looking forward to home-produced honey. The smaller hive contains a captured swarm. Photo taken just after they arrived - soon to be inspected and extra boxes added if needed. I'm allergic to bees, but looking forward to learning how to care for them. Fortunately my husband spent a year working for a commercial beekeeper 16 years ago, so knows quite a bit already. I have it on good authority that these two hives and lovely, mild-mannered bees.

The cosmos just kept on blooming and blooming and blooming - and getting bigger and bigger! They were supposed to be dwarf ones....but ended up over 1.5m tall! The bees loved the flowers, and the finches loved the subsequent seed, which are also very easy to save (if you beat the birds), so more cosmos will be seen next summer too! Frost tender, they died off as soon as the frosts came.

This is also the first time I've successfully grown nasturtiums - next year I might even try pickling some of their seeds to use like capers.

When we bought the property 8 years ago, there was this pathetic wee dwarf peach tree down the back behind the sheds. The last guy told me he'd run it over with the lawnmower twice. Most years it tried to produce a few small peaches, but either the goat or sheep would manage to get to it and chew them off, or the fruit would drop before ripening. I think ONE year we managed to taste an ok peach or two. Last year, I asked a visiting arborist when would be a good time for me to move it to a better location. After checking it out, he told me not to waste my time, as it was more than half dead. He cut off one side to show me. So I just ignored it, intending at some point to dig it out, and also get a new peach tree or two. Well, this past summer, it suddenly grew a LOT and produced a lovely crop of luscious peaches! (Most are behind it in this pic). I think being between the greenhouse and plant nursery area probably had something to do with it - because when I would use the hose to water the other plants, I would finish by laying it down near the tree while walking back to turn the tap off. First time the poor thing has ever had summer watering. Guess it gets to live after all! Going to be extra nice to it now and get rid of the grass and weeds around it.

After re-watching my favorite organic gardening film, Back To Eden (which can be watched free online HERE), I was thinking about how wonderful it would be to use lots of wood chip in the garden, as wood chip is wonderful at absorbing water, then releasing it as the surrounding soil dries out - effectively acting as a sponge. It is also an excellent mulch, suppressing weed, retaining soil moisture, and as the lower layers slowly compost, adding a lot of nutrient to the garden. But it costs more than I have to spend. Fortunately a local contracting crew turned up not long after that, wanting to know if I would like a truckload of woodchip (shredded trees), in exchange for a donation to their Friday night social hour. Yes please!

In the front yard, we installed some tractor tyres filled with soil and compost, to act as a barrier between the soon-to-be expanded driveway parking area, and the front garden area. These were then planted with extra potatoes in 3 of them, and various flowers in the 4th.

Do you recall all the sawdust mixed with horse manure my kids hauled home for me? (18 trailer loads!) We spread it out on top of cardboard on the front lawn, and over the summer used it to plant pumpkins, as I hadn't yet decided just how to develop this area, and didn't have time just yet. This photo was taken in Feb - the vines at the back were mostly transplanted from volunteer crown pumpkin vines that came up in the corn patch, and around the stakes, I had sown seeds of buttercup pumpkins.

Some other pumpkin plants popped up next to my compost bins, in a spot where there was a compost pile last year. So I draped them up over a rough structure next to them, and let them go for it. Why is it that "accidental" pumpkin plants are always stronger, more productive and healthier than ones planted on purpose??

I planted 4 different varieties of corn this summer - Rainbow Inca (a multi-colored, multi-purpose corn), Golden Bantam (a yellow sweetcorn), Kaanga Ma (traditional Maori corn, seeds saved from last year) and Strawberry Popping Corn (a pinky red colored popcorn) - all are heritage varieties. I've stopped buying or planting regular packets of corn seed, as almost all are imported and/or treated with a fungicide which is systemic - it's residue is throughout the growing plant and is bad for the bees, bugs and us. Unfortunately I was running late with planting corn this year, and while I got a reasonable harvest, it wasn't as good as it could have been. In this pic are the young Rainbow Inca patch in Feb. As I planned to save seed from each of the varieties, I had to make sure they were planted at least 8m apart to prevent cross-pollination. I have discovered that the first season I grow any given corn, it often produces so-so cobs, but if I save seed from the best of them, and replant the following season, I get really excellent, large cobs.

It turned out to be a bad season for both Tomato-Potato Psyllid (TPP) (will write a separate post about this major but tiny pest) and blight in my garden, but I still managed to get a reasonable amount of tomatoes from the first bed I planted - seen here surrounded by marigolds and underplanted with dwarf beans. The marigolds are lovely and cheerful too, as well as being good for the bees. I'm not sure yet how I'm going to avoid TPP next season - probably planting as early as possible, and possibly using quarantine cloth known as Wondermesh - the only really effective organic non-spray way to keep the little blighters off your crops!

The "wild corner" blooming nicely - and in front of it, a no-dig bed I put in early Feb as a demonstration for some lovely visitors who came to stay and learn about gardening. We mowed the grass short, lay down overlapping newspaper, wet it down, piled on compost and soil, then mulched with woodchip, and planted some late zucchini.

Sunflowers along the fence - grown from some random sunflower seeds given to me by a kind neighbour. There is also some borage growing amongst it, which is as close to the strawberries as I could plant it (the strawberry patch is under the green netting you can just see). In the bottom right are calendula plants growing among the Roma tomatoes.

January's garlic harvest, plaited together and hung on the wall - I was very pleased with my first ever garlic crop, despite the fact that only one quarter of the cloves I planted grew (the other 3/4 were from the supermarket). The largest cloves will be replanted in June, and the rest we will eat. Garlic is grown by splitting the bulb into individual cloves, then planting the largest ones about 20cm apart in soil which has been enriched with plenty of compost and/or manure. The papery covers are kept on - they help to prevent the clove sprouting before the roots have established, and protect the clove from various soil organisms that could cause it to rot. The bigger the clove that is planted, the bigger the resulting bulb - some of these ones have huge cloves - can't wait to see what next year's crop looks like!

First Monarch to emerge from it's chrysalis, which takes around 2 weeks, depending on the weather. Their long, curling tongues are fascinating to watch moving in and out! They hang like this for several hours to fill out their wings and dry, before flying off.

The main garden beds as of Feb 4th - lots of things growing. The netting is over a bed of Tiny Tim tomatoes with a row of Rainbow chard (multi-coloured silverbeet).

Thanks to the TPP substantially reducing our tomato harvest, I ended up buying in an extra 60 kg of tomatoes when they were at their lowest price for the season - they were in the store for $2.50/kg, and due to buying in bulk we were able to negotiate a price of $1.60/kg. Together with what we harvested and didn't eat fresh, I was able to make a nice amount of tomato soup, tomato sauce, diced tomatoes to use in winter dishes, and dried tomatoes. I would ordinarily use quite a lot of tinned tomatoes in cooking, but cans are lined with plastic which leaches BPA and other chemicals into food. Acidic canned goods (such as tomatoes) cause higher rates of leaching. Wanting to avoid that, I prefer tomatoes preserved in glass - easy to do at home.

After fully pruning our grapevine by myself for the first time last winter, we yielded crates and crates of luscious grapes this summer. They were very popular with the local kids! I managed to make some grape leather too, but it didn't last long. The bunches were very large! Pruning can be a bit scary - you reduce this huge mass of growth to just a few selected canes, tied in to the trellis. But it's definitely worth it - lots of good you-tube clips on the two different methods of pruning (cane pruning or spur pruning) can be viewed online.

Summer saw another first for me - growing watermelon! I honestly didn't know if they would grow and ripen here, so I just planted 4 Sugar Baby watermelon plants in a patch I dug under one of the washing lines. They did very well, considering my lack of experience, late planting, and a summer drought, giving us 6 lovely watermelons. Will definitely try more melons next summer!

You can also see in this pic the Stauntonia vine I've planted on one side of the seating area trellis - an unusual vine, it apparently can handle the cold, is evergreen, has nice flowers and produces a passionfruit-like fruit. Time will tell.

I planted some cornflowers behind the wee Chilean Guavas, and they provided a mass of colorful blooms all summer - in fact they continued most of the winter too, getting bigger and bigger, finally coming to and end in late July. The bees love them, the flowers are edible, they self-seed prolifically, and are easy to grow. What's not to like?

I found a swing-seat for free at a local thrift store. The cover was in need of replacing, so I removed it use as a pattern for the new seat, and my daughter painted the frame. New seat cover and canopy to come.

Herbs growing in brick squares, carrots surrounded by chives behind them. Yacon underplanted with buckwheat. Choko vine sprawling over fence. The yacon grew more slowly this year than last, and never got quite as tall.

The pallet beds turned out not to be too good for lettuce over the summer, as the sun was on them longer than I anticipated, and they dried out constantly - needed to be watered every day, and even then the lettuce all bolted. Have now added some trellises to two of the pallets, to grow beans up, and shade the pallets a little. More greens being planted.

Strawberry popcorn looking good!

Tired of the fact that every winter the area under the washing lines turns into a muddy bog, I laid down cardboard, covered it with old woolen carpets, then mulched with woodchip. We also dug a swale out along the end of the garden beds, where water tends to pool, then filled it with woodchip. I hope that this will reduce surface flooding.

A bed full of brassicas - broccoli in the fore, with brussel sprouts behind. I have found that brassicas planted out in Feb reach a good size by winter. Any later and they never grow very well, remaining small over winter then bolting in spring. The nets are to keep the white butterfly off - originally I had windbreak fabric over them, but now they're getting bigger I wanted to give them more light. Some butterflies still squeeze through the bird netting, but by the time they're this big, it's not too unmanageable.

Yum! Sugar Baby watermelons.