Filed under: Uncategorized
A nice break in the weather today and I took the opportunity to plant onions (red and white),shallots and garlic. Took two hours! An animal has eaten all my brassica seedlings. I have covered as many as I can. I hope it doesn’t like onions.
Filed under: Uncategorized
The reason my blogging has suffered (and my garden has suffered) is because I abandoned it for ‘other pastures’ over January and spent some time as a wwoofer on a newly emerging organic farm/eco village in Motueka.
I LOVED every minute of it. I will find a way to go there permanently.
Here are a few photos.
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It’s amazing how fast things grow between October and november. Also I was delighted to discover the runner beans are indeed perennials (as stated in all good gardening books) and are starting to sprout.
runner beans sprouting from last years root
Courgettes after one month of growth in rich compost.
courgettes in tyres Nov 08
spuds nov 08
Woops this photo is mainly weeds! there are carrots and spuds in amungst them.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Siver beet and onions were the main plant to grow through winter, carrots and beets also but too woody to eat. Red cabbages grew a little through winter and are going great guns now (Dec) Also some lettuces went through winter and edible in spring. Planted carrots, broccoli, cabbage.
silver beet
red cabbage, onions, lettuce, radishes
These plants (except the raddishes) grew through winter. Onions and red cabbage seem to need two seasons here to grow big enough to harvest.
I have decided to grow courgettes in stacks of tyres this year, as my experimentalone went well last year and the potatoes in tyres failed. This year the spuds are getting the vege garden proper.
spuds 08 - about 1 month old
The beans are cropping heavily now. I am still eating the carrots and courgettes. Tomatoes are just about finished. The one and only pumpkin isn’t doing too well. I have cabbages and broccolli coming on and lettuces. I’m not all that interested in lettuce now strangely enough and it is more bitter than earlier in the season. I still have one potato to dig up and lots of onions for later. The beetroot will hopefully grow through the winter? I*’m starting to get into tidy up mode. I ripped out the rasberry becaused it has a rust and didn’t produce any berries. But I got my first (2!) berries off the Myrtus – its a kind of cranberry I think. I will replace the rasberry with black currants.
I made some green tomato chutney in the weekend from Val’s tomatoes. I also harvested some lovely organic grapes from her garden. My small grape plant has shot up this year, I’m a bit worried it will shade the other berries.
The strawberries are cropping now, I didn’t realise they were so late in the season, the birds are getting them all because I didn’t get around to covering them with netting -I did that back in December! then took it off because I thought they were finished. Photo’s are all on my phone – will download them one day.
Filed under: Beans, pumpkin, strawberries | Tags: Vegetable Gardening Dunedin
Beans are in full flower and pods are ranging in size from tiny to huge.
Here are the pods with the background in focus!
onions
strawberries – arn’t these a bit late??? weird
I am still harvesting courgettes, squash, carrots, raddishes, lettuce, potatoes, tomatoes, rocket, spring onions, beans. Planted beetroot grown from seed in a cloche. Red cabbages planted last weekend are still quite small but healthy similarly Bok Choy.
The pumpkins are about twice the size of a golf ball.
View of march Vege Patch:
Filed under: flowers
Today I realised I had more flowers in my garden than I realised. I tend to think of it as a native garden with largely flaxes and ferns and trees, here are some close-ups of some of the flowers.
Hydrangia
Filed under: Bees
I counted 25 bees on this flowering plant yesterday. Mainly Bumble Bees, about 5% Honey Bees.
And the Honey Bee – my favourite (wish I knew where the honey was.)
Filed under: potatoes
Last weekend I dug up three of my potato plants which I had grown in tyres. I put the tyres on the already mature plant in early January, in the hope they might sprout tubers from the buried stem – well it didn’t work. The tubers were where one would expect them to be – under the ground and not all the way up the tyres. I still have one plant to harvest. I’ll try it again next near from day one instead of as an afterthought.
Carrot Tops 
