Spring time is nearly here

Its a lovely spring day and I have been out in the garden at last. I bought a small greenhouse during the winter and have some seedlings growing there now. Tomatoes and chilli peppers are sprouting well and I also have some very healthy looking beetroot seedlings. My winter crops are just about over. I have to say that I have been disappointed with my broccoli. the heads have been very small. I think I will have to have another look at things to do to improve the size. I have also planted cucumbers and water melons in the greenhouse beds because my plastic cover will keep things very huimid in there during the summer. No sign of them yet but they have only been there for a week or so. This afternoon I will plant some borlotti beans in the garden bed. Hopefully the garden is sheltered enough to miss any late frosts

What's happening in the boxes?

The last three days of warm weather and showers has made a real difference in the gardens. My rubbish bin full of potatoes has gone mad with the plants at least 40 cm above the top of the bin now. I hope they flower soon or I may have to tie them up to passing planes. The cucumber plants have doubled in size but no sign of budding yet. I have enough lettuce and mesclun to feed an army this week. Still not much hope of getting the kids eating it though. The barbecue and wicker basket are full of first leaves - always a difficult thing for me to realise that I have to hold off weeding as I will probably pull out the things I want. The earth gems look very lush and the tomatoes are getting lovely thick stems and a few buds. The only difference I have noticed with the Nature's Curator plants so far is that one of the tomato plants budded a few days before the others but other than that there is no change. In fact the unsprayed broccoli looks a bit bigger than the sprayed one although the slug battered one is picking up. But early days yet.
I have just thinned my pot of oregano, and I think there will be baby beetroot for tea this week. The garlic and onions keep plugging away.
In the square foot garden I have sprouting spinach, quite large calendula, peas that need staking today, chilli that is looking well (if much smaller than everybody else's I know), lush sage and a rapidly thickening tomato. On the down side there is still no sign of the silverbeet, about half of the carrot seeds did not germinate and I have a feeling that some of that 'grass' I pulled out of the spring onions may not have been grass at all. And no green bits in the courgette square.
A friend saw my motley collection of pots, buckets, kettle, recycling bin (shush don't tell the council they gave me two) nail boxes and home made planters and came up with a really good idea. She went to the Warehouse and bought some nice looking square buckets for less than $2 each. She has filled these with compost and put in seedlings of various herbs and veg from her thinnings. These will become her Christmas presents to her family. Very green and encouraging I thought.

Tie up tip

When I got home from work yesterday not only was my garden freshly watered from all the rain but it was looking a bit windswept. Luckily nothing had been broken but it was a reminder about tying up the taller plants. I have large flax plants in the front yard so I cut off a couple of leaves, split them lengthwise and used them to tie my tomato plants to their stakes. I also used the vertical method from the square foot gardening book. For my cucumbers I have an inverted u-shaped frame and from this I have tied strips of flax to the bottom of the plants and then twisted the flax around the stems. I'll let you know how things are going.
My heirloom Black Krim tomato was looking very sorry for itself last week and I was on the verge of pulling it out and composting it. The leaves were yellowing and curling up and the veins had become very prominent. I decided to give it a last shot and mounded the base with seaweed. This didn't seem to have much effect so as the last resort I mulched it with coffee grounds. The lower leaves died and I removed these and threw them in the rubbish but the upper leaves are looking very healthy now.

Looking Forward to a Long Weekend

YEEEAAAAH!!!
A long weekend coming up here in NZ. And it is the weekend most spoken of in the gardening books. Labour weekend. Time to plant out lots of things. I have eight Moneymaker tomato plants that I have grown from seed and now stand about 15cm high with lovely dark purple stems. Two of them I am going to plant in my home made planter on the deck next to the (flowering) Black Krim that I bought as a seedling.Four will go into one of my adapted 'fishing boxes'. These are 50 litre black plastic bins that were on special at the Warehouse earlier on in the year. I drilled holes in the bottom and then layered them with ponga stems, horse manure, wormcast and topped them off with some potting mix that I had left over from last year. (Yes I know it's not completely organic but I refuse to waste things). The other two will go into the gaps in my square foot garden. I also have some seedling basil plants which apparently need to go in at about three per tomato to improve the flavour of both.
I tried to sprout some red kidney beans from the pantry this week but they just went mouldy. Time perhaps to throw out the old stuff in the pantry? I'll tell the wife to get it done. (And probably end up wearing the pantry!)
No sign of any shoots bursting through in the SFG yet but the broccoli and courgette look like they have settled in. If the rain stops and things warm up a bit over the weekend I expect I'll at least see the radish this week. During a dryish bit this week I managed to get some mulch around the seedlings. I used the small fronds from my ponga. I have lots of ponga in the garden it causes shade and the leaves are a hassle to clear up but I do love the look of these fern trees. And now I have found a use for the bits that compost slowly. Amazing how I can justify myself to myself.

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.

things to do today

I planted out most of my square foot garden bed today. I have one square each of peas, courgette, radish, marigolds, sage and spring onions, two squares of carrots and chilli pepper and four of broccoli. Two squares are left over for my tomato plants next week. I also pricked out some chick peas I have sprouted and put them in pots. I'm really looking forward to making completely home grown hummus with my own garlic, lemon and chick peas. The only parts I can't grow myself are olive oil and salt. The broccoli I have grown from seed and put into the bed now that they are about 15cm high. the sage and courgette were seedling impulse buys from the garden centre today. All the rest are from seed, packets for the most part but the chilli is from my friend up the road (she of the huge cauliflowers). If everything comes up I should have wonderful harvests throughout the summer and autumn.
I am a bit puzzled about my strawberries. I have six plants in two buckets. each bucket also has a parsley plant which is looking fantastic. Five of my strawberries are setting fruit and flowering every day but one is is just growing lush leaves. No flowers nor any sign of them. It doesn't look a bit sick so maybe I'll just have to wait and see what's happening. While I'm on the subject of strawberries the birds that ate most of my strawberries last year left me a little present. I have a wild strawberry coming up in the front yard. It has already set some flowers but as it is under the ponga tree I don't know if it will have enough sun to ripen. Another wait and see.

Towards Square Foot Gardening

Last week I was given a book called Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew. It contained details of a way to garden without the hard digging. It promises bumper harvests and reduced land and water use. While not entirely organic it does certainly suggest that organics is the way to go. You can check out some of the details here:


http://www.squarefootgardening.com/


So after work on Monday the sun was shining (its a lovely spring here in New Zealand at the moment) and I was inspired by Mel's words to have a go. I had been eying a patch of scrubby lawn that gets between 6 and 8 hours of sunshine a day. My soil is hard compacted and boggy clay but that's not a problem with Mel's instructions. I measured a four foot by four foot square out on the grass and laid into it with the spade. An hour later I had removed the top four inches of clay and loosened the soil below to the depth of my fork. Sweat was running and I was thinking hard about this no-dig stuff!

Mel has a recipe for soil mix on his website but I will have to source some vermiculite at the weekend. Being the impatient type I decided that I would use what I had on hand. A couple of bags of rotting horse manure looked good to start with so on that went. Then I covered that with a big sack (about 30-40 litres) of worm casts that I had pulled out of my worm farm a few days before. I had tried to be careful and leave all the worms in the farm but there were still quite a few wriggling around in my garden bed so rather than leave them open to the sun I covered them with a couple of inches of compost. Enough for one night I thought. Checked the bed next morning and thought it needed something else so on the way home I stopped by the river and grabbed a big sack of sand. Mixed that into the compost with a trowel and noticed that the level of soil was still a little below the surrounding grass. I added another couple of inches of compost and a sprinkle of lime and another of wood ash. Things looked a bit dry then so I gave the whole lot a watering can full of of dilute seaweed tea.

Some friends popped in for a cup of tea and a chat and were most appreciative of my efforts so far. Her tomatoes are the talk of the town and her cauliflowers are nearly too big for one person to carry so I was proper pleased.

Didn't get home from work until late tonight so all I did was replace the soil and remove the present that our cat had left for me in one corner of the bed. Doncha just love 'em!

I'm going to mulch the lot with chopped Ponga leaves tomorrow. Ponga is New Zealand's tree fern and it is quite slow to compost but the soil in our native forests is usually very lush so eventually I hope to have the same in my bed.

Ups and downs in a Kiwi spring

A gorgeous spring weeekend saw me out in the garden for most of it. The strawberries are coming on great and flowering like mad. The onions and garlic have long green, lush leaves. Some of the tomato seedlings have fallen over and died but I still have eight healthy looking specimens that I grew from seed plus the seedling Black Krim I couldn't resist at the garden centre and planted out in my planter box on Saturday. Potatoes are poking their heads through the soil and it won't be long before I have to fill up their bins. Basil has germinated and should be ready to plant out Labour weekend. Cucumber plants are about five cm tall and looking well under their makeshift cloche. (I twisted some chicken wire into a bubble shape and covered it in gladwrap - works a treat!) Mesclun is looking ready to harvest next week onwards. On the down side my Bok Choy bolted straight to seed. It took me hours of surfing to find the reason - I had planted it too early. Apparently if it goes into cold soil and then warms up rapidly stalks with seed are what you get. Now I know. Broccoli has sprouted in the pot but will need transplanting soon.

Most fun was going to the garden centre with my young son. Like 11 year old boys everywhere he is more interested in his bike, his mates and his xbox than anything green. However the thought of devouring flies had him spellbound so I bought him a venus flytrap which now has pride of place on the sunniest window sill in the house. His mum is not too happy that not only is her deck rapidly disappearing under a sucession of planters and pots with veggies in, but her dining room is now home to a flesh eating housplant. Oh well, I suppose she'll forgive him. Me? I'm not so sure. Our other purchase at the garden centre was some swan plant seed which he planted as soon as he had fed a dead fly to the trap.

Embarrassing moment of the week was realizing why my carefully sprouted chick peas had died almost instantly after planting them. I hadn't waited long enough for the sprouting and only had roots showing. My genius excelled itself by recognising these as shoots and promptly planting them upside down. I have a new set germinating which I will try to keep alive this time.