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'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.
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.
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