New Year - gardening plans

It's not, obviously, the new year just yet on the calendar. But now that Christmas is gone, a mass plethora of guilt and jobs which overwhelms me every time, I'm ready to look ahead. In just a few days Fionn turns six and so my festive mind is now switched to how to make a Lightning McQueen cake without the services of the currently closed shop which sells those fancy things which you put on the icing and make an impressive image with. It does seem at the moment that an actual miniature car on the top is the biggest attraction and I can do that. The shop that sells them never ever seems to shut.

I've been making plans for the garden for the winter ahead and to some extent for next Spring. I've got eleven garden beds, all differing sizes. I must try and create a map and label them consistently.

Bed one has garlic and strawberries in it this year (and rogue peas and three very modestly sized tomatoes and some calendula). That needs a rest and I'm thinking I'll put lupins in it over winter. I'll plant potatoes there next spring. I try and keep potatoes and garlic and tomatoes in a new place each season. Potatoes and garlic is a four year rotation according to my reading. Tomatoes - the information varies.

Bed two is the raised bed which I made last summer. It currently has thyme, onions and one sad looking tomato in it. Also some radishes and a yellwing spinach plant. I am going to transplant all the thyme over to the old chook run, use up the onions and then dig in some generous amounts of blood and bone, compost (if we have some at the time) and sheep poo. It is quite a low raised bed and perhaps we can make the sides higher and build it up more. It is at the esttest end of the garden. Once that is all in order, then in early Autumn I will be planting more brassicas and silverbeet there. This is the bed which I had an experiment with turning into a mini-tunnel house and we might try that again with stronger plastic.

In between beds one and two is a rhubarb plant, gifted by our friend Ruth and currently looking very healthy. we mulched with more compost around it the other day and then put a circle of wire mesh around it so the blackbirds couldn't spread it all over the path so easily.

Bed three is the other side of bed two. So bed one, rhubarb, bed two, bed three, all along the eastern fence of the section. Bed three has blueberries in at the moment. They are not happy. One looks dead. The other looks okay but all the flowers fell off. In Autumn I will transplant the healthy looking one to the top end of the section and buy another one to keep it company up there. I think the other one will be compost sometime soon. The bed they are currently in is not a no dig method and there are weeds showing through, nasty vigorous perennial weeds like convulvulus and docks. So I need to dig down and do some serious weeding and possibly change the border. It is made of logs but they don't seem to deter much in the way of weeds creeeping under and carrying on their breeding party. We have been offered more rhubarb plants, this time by a work colleague. Rhubarb apparently doesn't mind wet feet, one of the very few plants to be so accommodating. So I'm going to put rhubarb in this bed instead of blueberries.

Bed four is the old chook run. Currently it is home to tomatoes, some of them looking quite good, lettuces, beans (very small plants), marigolds, a chilli, some oregano and thyme and borage. For winter this area will have lots of brassicas and silverbeet. It will be our main winter garden and I want to produce as much green food as possible. This time I hope to have better patience and vigilance with the white butterflies in the summer garden and to have more greens ready for early winter and if I can improve my game enough, staggered right through. In the photo below you can see the old chook run about six weeks ago. It is now a lot greener and full of plants but I don't have a recent photo of it. To the far left, beyond the wind break cloth, are beds one and two.

Bed five is a small square up the top of the garden. It has recently had borage, silverbeet and some strawberries. But I cut all the silverbeet out the other day and put the chooks in for a couple of days. They have had a wonderful time. It is a great little spot, very warm, raised about ten centimetres above the lawn and was well mulched with compost. I am still considering exactly what to do with the area around this bed. It is about two metres from the corner of our section and just beyond that corner our neighbour has built a large garage recently. I would like to take the entire corner part (at least two metres square and maybe more) out of grass and that is why I've had the chooks in there. They work hard in terms of digging up grass. So where the raised bed fits into my plans, I'm not yet sure. If it stays as a raised bed, then more winter greens will be growing there.

Bed six is currently in potatoes, with some cavolo nero down one end. This is the bed which had tobacco in last year. It probably has the best drainage of any non-raised bed on our section. This is where I am moving the blueberries and raspberries to. So it will become a permanent fruit bed.

Bed seven is the strip along the back of our house. It had tomatoes in last summer which were quite successful. Currently it has onions, chamomile, raspberries, Maori potatoes and broccoli in it. The plants up the higher end are doing much better than the ones at the other end which have spent too much time in puddles of rainwater. We need to do some serious bed raising work down the bottom end. For the meantime, this winter I will use my horse manure and pea straw layering method which worked well out the front last winter. Thick layers of pea straw, then generous lashings of horse manure, then more pea straw on top. Let it sit for several months. I'll leave it to Spring to decide what goes there next Summer season.

Bed eight is the herb strip down the side of the house, nearest to the kitchen door. I've got chives, parsley, aloe vera, feverfew, oregano, rosemary, marjoram, pansies and some Maori potatoes in there at the moment. Aside from the Maori potatoes, the rest will stay the same. I'll add more herbs as and when I have room or they need replacing. The photo below shows a section with feverfew, pansies and chives.

Bed nine is the punga raised bed. It is a forest of yams, garlic and one beautiful Dublin Bay rose bush at the moment. The garlic will come out at the end of January. The yams are more winter food for us and will be harvested around July. When the yams come out we will probably put the chooks in for a few days of feasting and then add lots more compost. This is our best raised bed and we try to give it as much compost each year as we can. I'm not sure what will go in there next summer. This bed has now had potatoes, brassicas and garlic already. Perhaps it will be a summer cover crop. Below is a recent photo of the yam forest.

Bed ten, out the front, is the lovely new raised bed which Favourite Handyman made for me recently. It has potatoes in it now, and I plan to put either brassicas in for winter, or garlic. The photo below shows it as it is now, with netting and bricks to prevent the blackbirds and the neighbouring dogs (this garden is beyond our fenced area) from pulling it apart and spreading the compost and soil everywhere. I'll remove it when the potatoes start to show through.

Bed Eleven, also out the front, is the raised bed which I made last Autumn. It has zucchini and silverbeet in it at the moment. I'll put garlic in there this winter.

I had tried making another bed for pumpkins out the front. But I have realised that it is in the wrong place and the area I cleared for the pumpkins which aren't growing very much, actually needs to be made into a path for Fionn to get to the climbing tree. I'll be moving the flower bulbs away as well as they are at the base of the tree and liable to get injured by climbers.

This final photo is not from any of my numbered gardens, but from the rose strip along the front of the lounge. I like the sprays of deep red.