Winter is coming in and there is less to do in the garden. I have raked up the leaves from the big trees and prepared a leaf mulch for next year. Easy enough to do, I just ran the lawnmower over the piles of leaves and emptied the catcher into black rubbish sacks. I added some water to the leaves and tied the sacks with flax. Then I made some holes with a stick and left them to rot down.
I have made a couple of new beds and prepared them with compost and last year's leaf mulch. I also planted some peas which I don't expect will have much fruit with the weather cooling like it has been but will provide a green manure base for the veges I grow there in the spring.
For the winter I have planted lots of cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower and silver beet. And this seems to be doing very well.
I have had a couple of feeds from my spinach and this morning I picked another dozen tomatoes. Probably the last of the tomatoes I think but I have had a good run from them and I am pleased that they have done so well in what has been a poor year for tomatoes for many people I have spoken to.
Amazingly I am still picking one or two strawberries! However there was a frost this morning down on the flat nearby so although I didn't get it yet here on the hill I expect that I will soon, so they will go to sleep.
I have a pot full of parsley that I planted from my own seeds at the beginning of autumn and although it's not big enough to harvest yet it will do me good for the spring. I still have lots of seeds that I will plant by the patio in the spring in the hope that it will keep the sand flies away. Not sure if that will work but I read an old gardening book that recommended it so here's hoping.

Back to blogging organically

I am sorry for not posting here regularly of late. I've been a very naughty boy and have just been out enjoying my garden rather than writing about it!! :)
The tomato harvest has been great and it is still going well, and although it has calmed down from the boomer days when I was picking 10-15 tomatoes a day I am still getting three or four good sweet toms every day.
On the not so great side I have been feeding a wonderful crop of cabbage white butterflies with my broccoli. I seem to have finally got on top of them with repeated sprays of rhubarb leaf and garlic but the broccoli plants have great stems and... er that's about it. Never mind, I have planted some more seeds and I hope that these will keep me in greens in the early spring before the caterpillars return. I have also planted lots of spinach which should be ready during the winter, Chinese cabbage (hopefully these will not bolt to seed at this time of year).
My cucumbers gave up the ghost a week or so ago. I think they did not appreciate being close to my tomatoes despite cropping OK they have died before many of my friends' plants have. Next year I will separate them and see what happens.
I am still getting a few strawberries too which seems like a very long season to me. Next year I will plant lots more so that I don't just get a couple of fruit at a time. The kids have loved helping themselves but I would also like to have a few proper feeds on them.
It's autumn here now so I am gearing up for winter crops like carrot, parsnip and the greens that I mentioned. My Borlotti beans are almost ready and once they are harvested I will cut off the stems and leave the roots in the ground to nourish my winter greens.
My compost has worked really well this summer and almost everything I have cut or trimmed has rotted down great. In fact I have had to start a second heap because I can't use it fast enough! The worm farm is also producing lots of nutritious worm casts now that I have finally persuaded the whole family to put food scraps in my collection box.
Looking forward to the next few weeks I expect to harvest pumpkin, tomatoes, onions, basil, oregano, beans, lettuce, potatoes and mint. That should keep me out of trouble with all the drying, cooking and storing that I will be doing.
Oh by the way my parsley seeded this year so I have planted lots of seeds around the place as apparently it is unpleasant to sandflies. I just hope that all of it comes up in time for me to be sitting outside next spring. Happy gardening:)

Nature's Curator

The six week trial with nature's curator is over and I can't say that I'm particularly impressed with it. The Black Krim tomato which was very sick is now healthy and has two fruits on it but I'm not sure that two tomatos on a plant is particularly great. The money maker tomato has more fruit than that but is smaller than the untreated plants and has a few less fruits. The broccoli has recovered from the slug attacks but has not yet budded whereas the untreated broccoli is on to its second budding already. All the plants were in the same sort of conditions and for the tomatoes they were in the same planter as the untreated ones. To be honest I seem to have more success with just the seaweed tea rather than NC and the tea. My comment is that if you have sickly plants then this stuff could save them but at $80 a litre (which admittedly dilutes to 100 litres) it could be an expensive way to go. Probably a better idea to make sure that your soil is healthy and contains plenty of compost, is mulched well and you feed the plants regularly.
On the upside my strawberries are still fruiting well but I know that next year I will plant a lot more of them as I don't seem to get enough for a proper feed all at once, especially when the kids go out and help themselves every day.
My cucumbers all seem to be the small pickling type, which is a bit of a disappointment but they are yummy raw and in the next few days I will have enough to pickle a couple of jars. The Courgettes in the barbecue are just coming into flower and there looks to be plenty of fruit coming. I ate all the spinach last week and I even had a feed of silverbeet (chard) at last. No sign of fruit on the peppers yet but I have a couple of healthy plants. The potatoes are about ready to lift and the spring onions are doing well. I lifted three large white onions which grew from one that sprouted in the pantry and they were delicious.
I had a bit a problem the other day after some really strong winds. One of my Tomato plants fell over and snapped the stake at ground level. The stem of the plant was creased so I put in a tripod to hold up the plant and mulched the bottom 20cm or so of it, seems ok so far. I have planted some more potatoes, some in a bucket and some in the square foot garden. I will hopefully have some more planted in the next few days. To be perfectly honest I think my best crop has been marigolds, which I only planted to keep the nasties away but I have been able to cut flowers almost every day.
A friend told me that he has a greenhouse that is surplus to requirements and all I have to do is take it away and its mine. I just need to borrow a trailer now and hopefully I will be able to continue growing right through the winter. I also met someone else who has a greenhouse for which he bought a small solar panel that is sufficient to run a heater. That looks the way to go. A place to hide from the kids in the wintertime!!

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.

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.

Battling the slimies

Much as I thought that the slugs and snails had died down they were back with a vengeance last week, so over the weekend I added some more pine needles around my square foot garden. I was speaking to a very nice lady who sells organic seedlings at our local market and she had a great idea. Coffee grounds also repel slugs and snails but it can take a while to get enough grounds to make a difference. So this morning I went to my local coffee cart and asked them for their rubbish sacks full of coffee. They were very happy to let me have a couple of sacks which I have layered over the top of the pine needles but still left a few centimetres of needles between the coffee and the beds. There were a few milk bottle tops and receipts in the sack but it only took a minute to remove them. Our particular cart uses organic and fair trade coffee so I am compromising neither my organic nor my ethical values and I am recycling what would otherwise be destined for the landfill.
I have also planted some capsicum, some more beetroot and some spinach. The mesclun just keeps on coming and I am eating green salads almost every day. Now the challenge is to get the kids eating them too.

Things are growing

The rain and wind this week have not been too good for me but my garden has loved it. The tomatoes that I planted out Labour weekend have taken off, I have now filled the bucket of earth gems and the bin of potatoes with compost. The cucumber are reaching for the skies and my onions and garlic are tall and lush. In the square foot garden the sage looks great, the chilli have germinated as have the peas, radish, carrots and marigolds. I think the spring onions are coming up - either that or I had grass seeds in my compost, always a possible given that I compost my lawn clippings and put some of them in the worm farm. The carrots are just poking their heads through. Three out of four broccoli look very healthy but the fourth is a bit sorry for itself. I gave it a spray with seaweed tea to try and perk it up. The courgette gave up the ghost after being dealt to by the slug and I have replanted that square with dwarf silverbeet. I kind of guessed at how many to put in the square and decided on 9 as the seed packet recommends growing them 5 cm apart. I was down at the beach this morning and collected some of the compost like 'seagrass' that gets washed up after bad weather. I have used it to mulch the beetroot which were poking their beets above the surface of the soil, but I think I will be able to harvest them in the next week or so. The strawberries and their companion parsley are doing really well although one of the six plants still has no fruit and I still have no idea why.
I went to visit someone who lives by the beach yesterday and their garden seems to be about a month in front of mine. It's amazing the little microclimates that form - my friends who live in the same street as me never get frost whereas I, living at the bottom of the hill, get three or four quite hard ones every winter. But, hopefully, the frosts are completely over and now its growing time. And harvest time. I have had several salads from my mesclun and lettuce and I am looking forward to being able to eat my own cucumber and tomatoes too. Oh yeah my kettle full of carrots is doing great too and I repotted my chick peas into a larger pot.

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.

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.

Introduction to organic gardening

Hi
My name is Paul Callaghan and I am a newcomer to the world of organic gardening. Earlier this year I had some problems with my digestion and decided that I was sick and tired of going to see the doctor (as well as being sick and tired generally). I have been interested in organics for a while so I decided that a way of being healthier is to eat better. I have cut down on the amount of meat that I eat and I am moving towards an organic food diet. The trouble is that organic food is so expensive in the shops. Only way to fix that is to grow my own, so in July this year I started to prepare for our Southern hemisphere spring. Some garlic and onions had started to sprout in the pantry so I put them into some compost in pots and put them on the deck. My garden is small and quite shady so I will do most of my growing in containers on the deck so that they get some sunshine. The garlic and onions look very healthy and so I have added lettuce, mesclun, beetroot, spring onions, carrots and peas to the containers. I also have tomatoes, cucumber, chilli and basil growing inside waiting for the end of the frosts which I can get until the end of October here.