A spot of gardening - sowing winter veg

Well howdy folks, long time no see!

Our little MrBaby slept ALL NIGHT last night! (perhaps to make up for not sleeping at all - okay, perhaps for an hour or so - the night before!). Even so, I have a little bit of headspace to be blogging.

Aren't you lucky?

I thought I'd do an update on our garden.

Having completely neglected my veggie patch (and all the rest of the garden) in order to pour my energy into the baby and his sisters for the last 7+ months, I had the urge to get my hands dirty a couple of days ago.

So while Miss6 sat inside reading a book and MrBaby had a wee sleep, Miss3 and I sallied forth.
First, we took a couple of days to double-dig the small garden patch, incorporating the manured straw from the chicken's coop into the top-soil. If I was tougher and more dedicated it could have been done in one day, but I'm not. Big deal.

Meanwhile, I looked up the gardening book to see what would grow as a winter crop in our climate. The answer? silverbeet, cabbage and cauliflower. Excellent. I have seeds for a variation on that theme, so I set them aside and went back to readying the patch.

Once the soil was well dug and raked out to a (relatively) fine tilth (not anally retentively fine - but not too lumpy either), I marked it out into square-feet.

I'm using the 'square-foot' approach instead of the 'rows' approach. The idea is to plant out the veg into little blocks of plants. You can fit more into the patch, and it's better for soil health and weed control than having great stretches of bare earth open to the weather. Anyhow, I've never quite managed it before, so I figured it was worth a crack.

The patch is about 12 square feet, so I planted out 6 this week and will plant the other half in a couple of weeks to give a bit of a succession for the winter, instead of a glut (I hope).

So far I have 2 types of silverbeet (swiss chard), red cabbage, green cabbage, pak choi and kale

Now all I need to do is remember to keep it moist.

And find some way of keeping the chickens off it.
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Rodents

It would seem that mice like nice warm houses as much as we do. Go figure.

It would seem we are a trifle over-run. (Apologies to all those who have already heard me go on at length about our mouse issue - there's nothing new here, but I still have a need to get it off my chest!)

I knew we had a small mouse problem - the odd dropping here and there, the occasional full trap, that sort of thing. I figured this level of rodentry was acceptable, given that we have active compost heaps, chicken food, and a lots of hiding spaces in the garden. And no cats or dogs. Some mouse encroachment was inevitable, I figured, so long as it didn't get out of hand! About a month ago I made sure all the food was in mouse-proof containers, found one open box of cornmeal that was well-moused (which I got rid of), and figured that would keep their numbers down, or at least, easily managed by the one trap in the kitchen.

How wrong I was.

Our living area is semi-open plan. There are double french-type doors between the living room and the dining room, and an open doorway from the dining room to the kitchen. The french doors are usually kept open, except in really cold weather when we shut them to keep the heat (from the heatpump) in the living room - usually in the evenings and overnight. Yesterday these doors were closed pretty much all day as I and the girls kept the living room toasty warm. They stayed shut overnight too.

I have once seen a mouse run from the kitchen, through the dining room, into the living room and along the living room wall behind the sofa. I have no idea where it went after that - I couldn't find it. I didn't think much of it (except to go re-load the trap) - just "gosh the mice are getting brazen, time to step up the trapping". It never occurred to me that I had just seen a mouse using one of their super-highways.

This morning while sitting in the dining room with my morning coffee I noticed a large amount of carpet-fluff in the doorway to the living room. "That's odd," I thought, and went closer to inspect. Mixed in with the fluff was a considerable amount of mouse droppings. And on closer inspection I found that the little blighters have chewed the carpet bare along where the french doors close - apparently in an attempt to dig through and re-open their super-highway. I then noticed a similar, but much smaller, bare patch with associated carpet fluff at the other door out of the living room.

"How big is my mouse problem?!" I muttered to myself, and stalked through to the kitchen to investigate. One clean and empty trap. The mice have (once more) successfully removed the bait from the trap without springing it. Great. What about the bottom cupboard where the cornmeal box used to be? Oh. Oh dear.

There was a whole layer of mouse droppings in this cupboard (despite there being no available food in it), and in the adjacent cupboard (which has never had any food in it).

With brush and shovel in hand and droppings and carpet fluff cleaned away, I went on a further investigation of the super-highway.

The rubbish bin and paper-recycling area yielded further copious quantities of mouse droppings, and some nibbled cardboard.

sigh.

I turned to the internet for advice. It is not comforting. A house mouse can have a litter of up to 6 pups, each month. One mouse usually means a nest. They don't usually range far from their nests, so if you see a mouse the problem is likely to be yours - not your neighbours (not that I thought for a second that my neighbours, all of whom have large dogs, and are more obsessive about their sections than us, were the source of our infestation!). The advice boils down to: seal up all holes larger then 1.8cm (a U.S. dime was the 'measurement' given - so then I had to look up how big a dime was - annoying), trap, trap, trap the highways, poison in the roof and floor cavities, get rid of clutter (which is a nesting place haven) and if that fails, call in the professionals.

So we went out. I needed to run away from the problem for a little while.

And then we came back and the day continued along its happy course. We had dinner, we said goodnight, we put the kids to bed. I availed myself of the bathroom...

A mouse ran into the bathroom.

I could do nothing except lift my feet off the floor and squeek "eeek mouse! go away!" (I didn't want the kids to leap out of bed to investigate). It ran behind me, and I couldn't see it! And I am now hugely pregnant and can't twist around at all, so I was just stuck there with my feet in the air hoping the mouse would get back where I could see it, because I knew there was no exit at ground level behind me and I sure as heck did not want it climbing...

Fortunately it ran out to behind the door.

I made my escape with all due haste, leaving it an escape route into the laundry (and thence out the back door, I hope!).

I have since set all the traps we have - 4 of them - mostly in the kitchen and one in the living room.

I do not know the exact route the super-highway takes - it concerns me that there were scratchings at both living room doors - trying to get out of the living room. I have no idea where an entrance point in that room might be - unless there is a largish gap in the floorboards somewhere behind the couch or piano, or possibly through our disused fireplace. At 30 weeks pregnant, however, I am not shifting the piano to find out! (Merl can do that this weekend).

There is no earthly way of effectively sealing the underside of this house. We know one entrance point for the mice is in the kitchen, where the sink and dishwasher pipes exit the house, but there are nooks and crannies everywhere for them to come in.

Properly ridding the cellar of clutter is on our 'list of things to do'. The underneath of our house is packed to the brim with hoarded building, gardening, painting, you name it supplies from the previous owner. Loads of stuff that is just junk - it might have 'come in handy one day' if it hadn't been stuck in a damp mouldy cellar for 40 years. Now it's all just a rusted, rotted pile of junk. Which we bought with the house. At some point we will get around to hiring a skip and clearing it out, but thus far that has fallen into the 'not this weekend' category. This provides nesting-sites aplenty for mice - right beneath our floorboards.

And that's pretty much where our mouse situation is at. I heard one of the traps go "sproing" while I was typing this, and I'm in two minds as to whether to go investigate it this evening - giving the trap the chance to trap another mouse overnight - or to wait until morning and check all the traps at once.

I'm also not that keen on actually handling dead rodents. I don't know what diseases they commonly have in this country, but I doubt that they can be good for unborn babies (given that we're not supposed to deal with cat faeces, I can't see that dead mice is any better).

I'll need to find my disposable vinyl gloves.

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Chickens update

Miss5 takes most of our chicken photos. An endless fascination.

I recently had someone ask me for a chicken update - especially with how well they are coping as the weather turns cooler. So here it is!


The girls are doing well. Belle went into her molt almost as soon as she arrived, but after a few weeks started laying again. Abigail looks like she's just starting her molt now - we've had only one egg to 'harvest' for a few days now (although back to two again today), and there are feathers starting to fly around the coop again. I hope she gets it over with before the winter arrives properly or she'll be a little chilly for a week or two!

While we were in Wellington for our holiday a couple of weeks ago the weather down South here took a turn for the worse. (Remember, in this part of the world, 'South' means closer to the Pole and further from the equator - i.e. colder). I got a worried text message from our friends who were chicken-sitting - would our chickens cope if it snowed and what should they do?

Well, actually I had no idea :) But there wasn't much they could do anyway. Before we'd left we had moved the dome to the most sheltered part of our section - right under some trees that would provide protection from the wind and rain. The chickens still like to sleep in their beer-crate nesting box, so would be out of the wind and close to each other for warmth. I also know that plenty of people keep chickens in this city, and I've not heard of a chicken freezing to death. (Trust me. It would make the newspaper. "Unseasonal Cold Snap. Feathered Family Pet Falls Fowl of Freezing Temps").

So my advice was not to worry. To give them extra food the next day (they eat more when they're cold), and to make sure they had plenty of straw in their coop and nesting box.

In the event the snow never arrived (or if it did, it was not in this part of town), and they coped just fine.

Chickens are pretty hardy animals. They will go off their lay if they get too cold and miserable, but they don't lay in winter here anyway, as there are not enough hours of daylight for them.

Advice I have heard includes feeding them warm porridge in the morning and making sure their sleeping quarters are dry and draught free. Also to make sure their water is neither too cold nor too hot - I guess warm water in the morning on those really frosty days.

The key thing to remember about chickens in this climate is that our climate isn't really that cold! People keep chickens in places like Russia and Canada (with fancier and warmer accommodation than I'm providing, to be sure).

My plan for winter at this stage is to continue converting the rabbit hutch into a nesting box/roosting house that we'll set up next to the dome over winter, and use the dome more like a deep-litter run. This is a 'work in progress' (which means that it has been started and not finished...).

Changes made since the 5th dome post:
- water container. When we were given the chickens, we were given one of these

Self-filling water dish

Or at least, something that looks very similar (you wouldn't believe how long it took me to find a photo of this on the 'net. There are too many products in this world for cats to drink out of). This works very well, so long as you peek in whenever you wander past the dome and scoop out the dust and straw and muck that they've kicked into their water in their scratchings. Once a day to clean it out and refresh the water is fine. The chickens drank more in the warmer months, but I really like the security of knowing that they will have water if we forget for some reason - especially now that Miss5 has the responsibility of feeding the chooks in the morning. So long as I have fed them and topped up the water the night before, this is not something she needs to worry about.

Okay, that's probably the main change :) Everything else is pretty much the way it was the last time we took a tour of the dome.

The biggest thing, really, has been that we've started using the dome over the veggie patches. Having done this for two patches, now, I can say something with feeling. Do NOT feed your chickens wheat seeds while they are on a veggie patch. Linda Woodrow feeds hers sprouted wheat, which would be okay since it is unlikely to survive the chickens and the elements to turn into wheat. But I now have a lovely veggie bed with seedlings of cabbage, cauliflower, red cabbage, kale, kohl-rabi, and turnip... and wheat everywhere! Am not impressed.

I am not feeding them wheat any more, since they clearly aren't eating much of it, and am giving them pellets morning and night. I found that with the size of this dome, the chooks devastate everything growing inside within 24 hours and are back to depending on outside food sources after that.

However, the veggies are loving being in the freshly chickened veggie beds, so that part of the permaculture equation is working well!


For our instructions on building the dome, start here

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An irish omelet in our garden

We did some harvesting yesterday! It's so cool when you can head into the garden and get food out of it.


No photos, sorry, cos we left our camera cable at Merl's parents' house, so you'll just have to use your imagination.

It all started because the chickens were in dire need of a change of location. They had been in the same place for the 2 weeks we were away, and then a further week while they waited for us to get around to shifting them. The dome was starting to smell and needed some fresh ground.

But, of course, before they could go onto the next veggie bed, the potatoes needed to be dug. Merl did a valiant job of digging up the two rows of potatoes I'd planted at the back of the bed. From an initial 'investment' of about a dozen or so smallish potatoes, we got a bucket and a half of good-sized tatties - most of a paper sack full. So that was awesome.

While we were lifting up the droopy tops of the potato plants I discovered a row or two of onions that I had completely forgotten I'd planted. Most were on the small side and some had started to go slimy cos I'd not harvested them soon enough, but I'm pretty darned excited. I have never grown onions before, and now I've got about half a dozen lovely onions to braid up into one of those old-fashioned onion strings. Of my own onions!

Having seen that I'd left the onions a bit too long, I went and pulled up my elephant garlic. This was a little disappointing. Next year I'll plant them somewhere sunnier and just generally better. Only three of the cloves I planted grew to produce a flowerhead, and each of the three bulbs when I pulled them were underwhelming in terms of clove size and number. But the bed that they were in is in shade for most of the day and alternates between being terribly dry and extremely wet. Not ideal. So I hope for better for next year.

While I was prowling around the garden I noticed that the parsley I had left to seed was indeed seeding, so I harvested an envelope of seed from that too.

So there we have it - potatoes, onions, garlic, parsley (from the other, younger plants) and the continuing supply of eggs from our cooperative chooks.

Sounds like an Irish Omelet to me!

Now all we need is a milk cow so we can make our own cheese... (Well, okay, that might be a step beyond what our suburban section can handle - but what good is an omelet without cheese?)
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Using drawers as 'seedling flats'

This year I've been sprouting my own seeds and actually successfully coaxing them into seedlings and then into actual plants in the garden! This is very exciting and a big advance on my prior attempts to grow from seed - usually I'd forget about them and they'd either fail to sprout, or sprout and wither due to neglect.

Not this year

I've been roughly following the instructions given by John Jeavons in his How to Grow More... book. Instead of making my own seed sprouting mix, or using my own, rather poor, soil, I bit the bullet and bought potting mix from the garden centre.

Step one is to fill your seedling flat with soil and lay out your seeds, then water etc and generally look after them (sorry, this is not a step by step how to sprout seedlings - but there are lots of those on the internet :)

My cool innovation was to use discarded dresser drawers as my seed-sprouting containers. These are small enough for me to lift easily, and hold a sensible amount of seed for our small vege patch (while still allowing me to give excess away to friends). I drilled drainage holes in the bottom, but otherwise use them unmodified.

They are not painted in any way, or I'd be a bit cautious about lead paint.

The reason this has worked so much better than any other attempt I've made to grow from seed is that I've got them set up right outside my back door. So any time I exit the house I can see my little plants and give them a water and some TLC if they look like they need it. This is good. As a result we've already feasted off lettuce this year and this week I've got cabbage, turnip, kale, kohl-rabi and red cabbage to transplant into little re-used yoghurt pottles to get bigger and tougher before putting them in the garden.

So there you go. Works for me. All pretty exciting stuff :)

Sorry, it's too dark for photos just now but I'll take some tomorrow and update during the week.
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planting potatoes!

I'm using a mish-mash of techniques - a little bit John Jeavons' How to Grow More... and a little bit no-dig gardening technique.

I'm using Jeavons' recommendations for spacing (9inches offset - not in rows), but I'm not digging them into the ground - I pulled the mulch layer back off the earth, scratched a little hole in the surface of the earth, sat the potato in and covered it back up with mulch again.


Then I layered 2 wheelbarrow loads of lovely aged compost onto the top of it to keep them nice and dark and bob's your uncle.

Hopefully they will like this treatment and we'll have new potatoes in early to mid January - they're 'karaka' potatoes and are 2nd earlies - so 80 to 90 days to maturity. Allegedly. I've never grown tatties before so I'm hoping they'll be fine.

Dad has grown them every year for ever and he reckons they'll be great, so I'll trust in experience, the elements and Providence. Read more...

strawberries and apples

Apple Oratia Beauty

I love spring. Have I mentioned that before? Here is the third of our three new apple trees, planted yesterday just before a Southerly (cold) front came through a kindly watered everything for us. If you squint a bit you may be able to see little strawberry plants nestling in the mulch around it. I figured that was as good a place as any for them. Each of the new trees has now got some strawberry plants for company. Oratia Beauty is a New Zealand Gravenstein variant. Sounds yummy.



And here is our rhubarb, gooseberry and garlic patch. The plant in the very foreground is a flowering annual of some description (I'm leaving it there to see what it turns into), but you can see the rhubarb is doing very well just behind it. The gooseberry bushes have both started to sprout little green leaves, evidently both surviving the transplant from our friend's garden - excellent. Right at the far end is the garlic, but you'd have to use your imagination to see that very well. Only the garlic I bought at the local farmers market has sprouted - meaning that the other stuff we bought was imported and irradiated. Something to remember for next time! Read more...

peasgood nonsuch

Apple peasgood nonsuch

The stick in the ground next to the glowing beauty is an apple tree seedling. I liked the name Peasgood Nonsuch as soon as I first saw it in a catalogue last year. Since then 2 different people have been very enthusiastic about Peasgood apples that they've grown and eaten. So when I saw them in the local nursery it was a done deal. This one is on an M9 dwarfing root-stock so hopefully won't get too big (but also hopefully won't stay too small either - I'm hoping it won't fall victim to too-vigorous horseplay by les enfants).

I also planted the thornless blackberry today. I'm pretty excited about blackberrying without getting scratched!

And we had a surprise gift of strawberry plants. One of Merl's workmates has more plant babies than he has room for, so we very gratefully relieved him of about 20 strawberry plants. They are on my list of things to get planted tomorrow, along with the comfrey and the final apple tree...

I LOVE SPRING!!!!!

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how d'ye like them apples?

After humming and haaaing about whether it was too late to plant fruit trees (spring having definitely sprung in this part of the woods), and whether it was too boggy in our garden to plant them, I went on a "let's just see what's at the garden centre" expedition with a friend this morning.

I dithered and waffled and eventually decided it was too hard, gave up and we went for a coffee. Lovely coffee, lovely cafe - lots of room, and a toy box! excellent.

Got home, fed Miss1 her lunch, ate mine, and was just thinking about getting Miss4 from kindy when I thought "No, blow it, I am going to buy some trees today!"

I hopped online, looked up a couple of the cultivars that had caught my eye this morning, made a mental list of 3 and off we went! Collecting Miss4 on the way, of course :)

I headed straight for the apples, and loaded the cart with a Peasgood Nonsuch, and a Mother, but paused when I saw how tall the Oratia Beauty was. Could I fit it in the car??? (apples described here)

Yeeah, she'll be right! Give it a go... So onto the trolley it went too.

Of course, since I was in buying mode I then couldn't walk past a thornless blackberry, or a couple of comfrey seedlings, or a packet of runner beans, which is why I usually try and avoid the garden centre - but it will all come in handy and all be good for the garden and our food supply, right?

Managed to get them in the car by lying the tall ones from the passenger side floor, up over the tilted seat-back and along over the kids' heads. No worries!

Headed home, put Miss1 to sleep and then Miss4 and I were straight back outside into our lovely spring afternoon.

Here is Mother in her transplanted splendour.

Apple Mother

She'll need staking, but I was too pooped to bang a stake in. The root-ball is quite small, though, so Merl can do that in the next few days without fear of damaging anything. yay. Read more...

ta daa!

Play fort complete!

What you see here is Dad getting the cement ready to fill in around the posts, while Miss4 gets her first sit inside. It now also has a ladder attached down the front where Merl is standing. Brilliant. I'm thinking that underneath is a prime place to move the sandpit to, come summertime.

In other news around the house, I've got some photos of what's been happening in the garden lately. First up is the gooseberry bushes and rhubarb that I planted. Here they are in their not-quite-final resting places. The gooseberry starts are just small dead-looking twigs, and the rhubarb is dormant, so believe me, a closer shot wouldn't have shown you any more :) Although you might have been able to see my classy re-used envelope plant labels. The bush you see at the far left is a dahlia, then just in from there is my wee garlic patch, then two gooseberries, then the rhubarb crown near the righthand-end. I edged the garden with branches from our trees which lately received a much-needed cutting back. The mulch is mostly leaf-litter, with some lime and blood-and-bone sprinkled on and forked in. Our dear friend who gave us the goozies says I have planted them too close together, but upon looking it up in a gardening book to see just how far apart they should be planted, I see that they are often planted close for the first year then transplanted to their final spots once they're more bush-like. So that's good - one job that can wait until next year!

Here is our wee Meyer Lemon tree, gifted to us from my Dad. He'd been unable to get it to fruit down at his place, but we have a much milder micro-climate here so we'll give it a go. I am very pleased, as I was going to go buy one and just happened to mention it to Dad in passing. He then promptly offered us his, and also my Nana's, which was also at his place in a pot. It's now at our place too, re-potted, and in a sunny spot. We shall see if we have more luck than Dad. I've promised him some lemons if they do prove fruitful up here on the hill.

I also have begun using very un-organic poison on an ivy that is growing up one of our fences. I've drilled holes into the trunk and poured un-diluted poison into the holes, so it's a very very targeted use of poison. Ivy must die. Can't stand the stuff and can't understand why anyone would plant it in this climate - it just runs rampant. And besides, I need the fence-space for the fruit trees I plan to espalier along there... I'm thinking an apple, a plum and perhaps an apricot or a peach if I can get heirloom varieties that will suit.

I haven't looked into it but I'm guessing it is too late to order them for this year, but that gives me a year to prepare their spots with legume crops, good mulch and other goodies.

Or perhaps I'll just nip down to the garden centre and buy the first ones I see. You never can tell :) Read more...

rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb

It even feels funny when you type it over and over.

A dear friend of ours gave us half a rhubarb crown and some starts from her gooseberry bushes yesterday. Yay. I like rhubarb and gooseberries.

Gooseberries

So they are nestled into their beds, well mulched with leaf-litter scavenged from the road-gutter outside our house (it blocks with fallen leaves quite frequently, which then turn into lovely black compost quite quickly).

I'm feeling like quite the gardener.

We've got a full-on weekend coming up. Two of my brothers had a birthday this week (on the same day, but 21 years apart), so we've got a get-together at Dad's tomorrow night, and we're looking after a friend's wee boy for a couple of hours tomorrow, and a sister of mine is coming to town on Sunday with her partner, so we'll try and catch up with them too, as well as church of course.

And I've got a bag of carrots to blanche and freeze, and a big bag of pears to sort through and maybe stew up. And a bag of apples too. (Merl got some bulk organic fruit through his work somehow).

But what I really want to do right now is curl up on the couch with a hot chocolate and do some knitting. So I think I'll leave the cooking and cleaning for another day... Read more...

Marigold tea

I was reading a wee Herbal the other day. Which has gone missing now that I think about it, last seen being 'read' by Miss1. Hmmm, that will bear some investigation. Anyhow, was reading this Herbal and learned all about the wonders of Calendula officinalis (pot marigold), some of which was new to me. I had known that it was good for soothing skin complaints, but apparently Calendula has been used as the cure-all for pretty much everything. Wouldn't surprise me if there had been someone, somewhere crediting it with healing them from the Plague.

Still, making marigold tea felt like a lovely sunshiny thing to do, and the sun was surely shining. So I put on my purple woolly hat, and dashed out into the cold to harvest some. Fortunately Calendula grows like a weed and there were 2 plants in flower. Back inside in the sunshine and out of the wind, I roughly cut the flowers up with a veggie knife and steeped them in my coffee plunger. It looked so pretty I just had to share it.

I'm sure that for any medicinal effects I'd need more petals than that, but the sight of it in the sunshine was tonic in itself. The tea itself was very nice with a bit of honey. And if nothing else, the honey was soothing to my sore throat. Read more...

"down to earth" website

Here is my current favourite simple living website

http://down---to---earth.blogspot.com/

The author is an Australian who has, with her husband, turned their backs on rat-race wage-slavery. Lots of lovely stuff on simple living with elegance and grace.

Also, she keeps chooks - a current wanna wanna of mine :)

On the home front, we had SNOW yesterday! Didn't stick around for long, which a few teacher friends of mine will be sad about (snow is such a rare occurrance here that people are not used to driving in it, the roads aren't really built for it, and so the school buses don't run on snow days - the schools have a 'snow day' about once every couple of years). This pic taken by Merl while it was still snowing about 3pm yesterday afternoon. Merl took a day off and had a great time being parent help at kindy and generally staying inside keeping warm :) We had a nice day yesterday. Read more...

winter solstice gardening

As per tradition, we planted our garlic today - to be harvested on the longest day. Last time we grew garlic, a few years ago, we didn't use it much so we haven't planted any since. We found those jars of pre-crushed goodness to be so much more convenient.

However, since discovering that you can roast the whole bulbs and eat them spread on bread, and the power of garlic's antibiotic properties, I think we could find a use or two for the mighty bulb. And growing it is way cheaper than buying those little jars! (an increasing consideration in these times of ever-higher fuel and food prices).

So Merl bought 1 bulb of garlic today while veggie shopping. After ensuring it hadn't been irradiated (which apparently included a conversation with the check-out operator explaining what 'irradiation' is), we brought it home, stripped it into individual cloves and planted the cloves out in a wee corner of the garden. So hopefully all will be well!

Why only one bulb? Well, there's no use getting carried away, is there? If we use it, we can plant more next year (I believe its our scots ancestry emerging).

Additional gardening adventures today: planting out some purple sprouting broccoli seeds into little 'pete pots'. These are not actually made of peat, but of wood fibre and peat-moss, and are great, because you can grow your seedlings then transplant the whole pot into the ground without disturbing your seedling. It's a little late to plant these, so I've tucked the wee pots into a cold-frame and we'll see how we go. Also, we bought some seed potatoes and I laid them out in the garage to begin sprouting.

So I feel virtuously prepared for the coming spring. Hardly an uber-gardener, but certainly more than we got done last year!

P.S. Photos of the 'garden,' as promised! Most of what you see in the top and middle photos is hedge-trimmings mulch - dormant beds waiting for spring (and the forlorn remains of our scarecrow). The bottom photo is a largely neglected garden along the side of the house which has quite pretty flowers come spring, and the very beginnings of food production - if you squint you can see the cold-frame/cloche at the far end of it. The garlic I planted today is just around the corner beyond the cold-frame.
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And now for something completely different

Enough with the preachy self-congratulatory, pompous posts, we hear you say! (or at least, I imagine some of you are thinking).

Well, as those of you who know us will know, we do lapse into boring self-congratulation/philosophising from time to time.

Sorry, sorry. Can't promise it won't happen again, because I know for sure it will, and probably sooner rather than later :)

But I do note a complete absence of funny stories/garden stories/children stories this month.

So, as light relief, I offer photos of our garden in winter. Partly so you can see that 'winter' in this part of the world very rarely involves snow, (although it does quite often frost), partly so you can see that our dream/vision/goal of a permaculture-ish abundant food-producing haven is almost purely castles in the air. A work in progress, if you're being kind :)

Or at least, I will, once the camera batteries recharge...

[truly, I got half way through writing this post, went outside to take some photos and the camera turned itself off. We only have one set of rechargeable batteries, and so we will have to wait until they're full up again...]

Does this post win the prize of most pointless blog post yet? I sure hope they don't get more pointless...

[photos finally posted here] Read more...

Suburban Renewal - backyard permaculture video

Here's a video from "Peak Moment TV". It's about 25 minutes long, but worth a peek if you've never come across the concept of permaculture, nor seen it in a backyard type setting.

Their climate sounds similar to ours - at least, the same types of fruit trees will grow. Apples, pears, stone fruit and berries, with olives and some citrus worth a crack if you have a very sunny and very sheltered area.

I'm dreaming of edible hedging and espaliered fruit trees now...

Hat-tip to Treehugger Read more...

I hurt!

I have given my ankle a mighty twist, and it is very sore!

I was wheel-barrowing the leaf-mulch stuff from under our newly-trimmed hedge (thanks Dad!) around the house and dumping them in the garden, when I stepped down a step and into a hole.

I have carefully avoided that hole every time I have used our side gate for the last 15 months, but not this time.

So I am thankful for several things
- I am thankful that my Dad has titanium knees and therefore a ready supply of walking-canes. He delivered his tallest one up yesterday morning
- I am thankful that he also gave my kitchen a thorough clean yesterday morning, while I sat and put my foot up
- I am thankful that Merl's Mum is here to stay until Monday. She has been wonderful - doing laundry and all the other stuff that is very difficult to do one-legged (and one-handed - since my left hand is holding onto my cane)
- I am thankful that it appears to be not too severe a twist. The tendons are definitely damaged, but there's not significant swelling or bruising and much better mobility today than yesterday. (after my home-group members prayed for healing for it last night). Read more...

And suddenly it is winter

We woke this morning to surprisingly cold weather. During the last week we've had some very fine sunny days that have been quite hot in the middle of the day. This morning there was snow on the tops of the hills - not in the hill suburbs of the city, but you could see that the Silverpeaks and the other high hills were snowy.

Brrrrr

On the plus side, we found that a snow-suit that was passed on to us fits Miss1 just right!

I've put a weather icon onto the blog. The 8degC that it shows does not do justice to just how cold it feels! The wind is coming from the SW, and there's nothing between us and the South Pole except a few tiny islands and maybe a penguin or two.

Yesterday I started digging over the vegge patch to prepare it for winter. It was very dry so hopefully this rain will help things along. This week I plan to dig in a bunch of compost and then leave it for the frosts to do their work. I want to plant food crops into another area of the garden in Spring too, so I should tackle that bit of earth soon too. Read more...

Siblings at Play

This afternoon. Yes, that is dirt around Miss1's mouth - she had recently been exploring a pot-plant. (The sorry remains of our sunflower race, as it happens. We have one plant valiantly struggling on, but whether it flowers before the Southern Hemisphere winter is upon us is doubtful...) Read more...

Home-made Worm Farm

Well, I've finally lived up to my blogger-name :) I was home-handymumming it up yesterday as Miss3 and I made a Worm Farm. Very exciting indeed. ("Wow! Does Daddy get to be the farmer?!")

I have been planning to use a laundry tub that we removed from our laundry when we moved in (it was too big to let our washing machine in) as a worm farm for some time. I just needed to get around to it - so with it being kindy holidays and all that, the time had come.

First, I set the tub up between two saw-horses that were generously left behind by the previous owners of our house (along with a big pile of other stuff).

Then Miss3 and I researched Worm Farms on the internet and found this good one {link repaired Dec 08} from a place in Christchurch who sells farms and worms. We found out what bedding we needed and what food we needed, and also that we'd need to make some sort of lid for our sink so the worms wouldn't drown in inclement weather. We also found out we could buy worms from our local Nichols garden centre.

So off we went to buy worms, and we bought sand for the sand-pit while we were there. And when we got home we made the lid - from some scrap wood in the garage.
Leftover paper pulp from our paper-making day on Monday went into the tub, along with a couple of handfuls of dirt and some food scraps from our compost bin

This was a bit soggy, so in went some straw to soak up the excess sog, and then the worms!

Cover the lot with some damp cardboard,


and voila! Our worm farm is in operation. Forgot to take a photo of it with the lid on, but it just looks like the first photo, but covered with wood :-)
According to that Christchurch site we found, they'll eat about a litre of food scraps a week, and will gradually increase consumption as the population expands. It will be about a year before the farm is 'established' and we can harvest vermicast, but in the mean time I'll be able to dispose of all sorts of paper waste in there that currently isn't recyclable. yippee. Read more...