little extras

I decided to tidy up a little in the garden. There was one area that had become a rubbish dump with stuff being prepared for the tip. In this mess were the old barbecue which had seen one rainstorm too many and given up the ghost and an old firewood basket coming apart at the seams. Both have now been filled with compost, a little clay and wormcast and are new garden beds. In the barby, I planted parsley,(from some I had in a pot that was looking sorry for itself) coriander seeds, chive seeds and courgette seed. I am hoping that this effort with the courgette might avoid the slugs as it is raised about a metre. As for the basket I have backed it with a bit of old trellis and planted peas, tomato, spring onions and calendula.
So now my rubbish pile which was nearly a trailer load and ready for the landfill is back to a quarter the size again- she who must be obeyed is not overly impressed that I have avoided throwing stuff out again but I tell her its about saving the world, reducing my footprint and becoming more environmentally conscious. She says it about me being a hoarder and too tight to spend out on the landfill fees.
I was surfing the net a few days agao and found this website
http://weathersfieldorganics.co.nz/

They are supliers of organic herb seedlings and are looking for new franchisees. I liked their little newsletter with tips on what to do this month.
As for today the rain has started coming down quite heavily which hopefully will be jst right for the seeds I planted yesterday.
Happy gardening

Beer IS an answer

Despite my best efforts with coffee, pine needles and the torch, our weather cycle of a few warm days and then a few wet ones means that it is a constant battle to beat the slugs. I really do not want to use derris dust if I can possibly avoid it (anything that smells that bad can't be good to put on my food). So I decided to sacrifice some of my precious home brewed beer and set out slug traps. A little plastic pottle with a couple of centimetres of beer in the bottom and dig it into the ground a bit to give the slugs easy access. On my first attempt with only 1 trap, I caught 9 slugs and the second night I caught 12. Inspired by this, last night I put three pottles around my square foot garden. And the result? Three slugs! Oh well, I suppose the hard part was having to drink the remaining beer each night as the sun was going down.

Bloody slugs

Bugger. Just when you thought it was safe in the garden along comes a slug . I've just been out with my torch and my brolly and caught a big fat slug eating my courgette. It has made a helluva mess. It's munched just about every thing except the stems. Early tomorrow I am following the advice of Sister Loyola and putting pine needles all around my square foot garden. Sister Loyola is NZ's 2008 gardener of the year check out her video here:

http://tvnz.co.nz/view/video_popup_windows_skin/2223331

This lovely nun has been a fulltime gardener since she "retired" at the age of 72. Now 86, she only does organic. And man just look at her compost heap. She has a lot more land than me but she feeds a lot more people too.

On the bright side I have had several lovely green salads this spring already from the deck. Baby mesclun , lettuce and beetroot leaves, a squirt of lemon juice and a touch of salt. Yum.

Wet bits in NZ

Well the spring rains have come. Softer and warmer than the winter ones but still stopping me going out to do too much in the garden. I am creeping around my pots at night with an umbrella and a torch looking for slugs and snails but (touch wood) I seem to have done a reasonable job of wiping them out for now. I have moved some plastic sheets and large pieces of timber over the last couple of weeks and have found hundreds of snails and quite a few slugs. My organic method of dealing with them has been to put them in a bucket and smash them up with a thick branch. The resulting pulp I have buried deep in the hottest part of my compost heap in the hope that at least some of the nutrients they have acquired can be returned to my garden. The snails and slugs I have found recently tend to be very small so I am hoping that I have destroyed the breeders. But I know they will return.
I have been spending my time reading up on organics and found some interesting books from the second hand book sale last week. Mel Bartholomew's Square Foot Gardening has been great but I have also been reading Organic Gardening in New Zealand by Richard Llewellyn Hudson which give some interesting information on NZ conditions as well plant by plant descriptions.
The other book that has been a regular companion is The Fruit and Vegetable Gardener's Handbook edited by Robin Wood from material which appeared in Grow Your Own. This has very detailed plant by plant descriptions but best of all clear instructions on when to harvest. Other gardening books tend to say harvest when ripe or mature or something and for a beginner like me it's not always easy to tell when that is. Both the latter books I have were published in the early 80s but the information still seems goood.