Images from January

These were taken a couple of weeks ago. Above is our front of house potato patch. Favourite Handyman built the raised bed for this patch just before Christmas.

Here is kale (red russian and cavolo nero) and borage, with tomatoes, lettuces, Maori potatoe, thyme and peas in the background or around the edges. This is part of the old chook run.

A photo from our day out mussel collecting on the beach further up the coast from us.

This is the raised bed which I built in January 2008. It produced some reasonable food over the last few months but I felt it wasn't high enough and noticed the spinach had yellowing on its leaves in this patch. So we piled it high with compost and pea straw and sheep and chook poo. Since this photo, I've planted cabbage, kale, cauliflower and broccoli in this patch.

The flowers in the vase are feverfew. It grew so prolifically that I've had to cut it back hard in order to let light in on the nearby parsley. I like to have a lot of parsley in the winter garden. It's magical stuff nutritionally. The wee pots on the table have basil in them. The orange and yellow flowers behind the table are calendulas. They grow there all year round since I cleared and composted that area. Calendulas are my personal emblem of hope and strength for my friends who are trying to conceive or who are pregnant. Right now Tania, they are glowing brightly and producing more and more flowers (despite Brighid's enthusiasm for picking them and making floating bowls in the rain-filled wheelbarrow). I'm still praying for you and your lovely baby throughout each day.

The corrugated iron you can see behind the table will be made into a very high raised bed in the too wet garlic patch later this year. The wooden pallet will go underneath the wood when it gets stacked (soon I hope) and the old car tyre will go in the corner on top of another tyre in order to make a cactus home. We have one cactus in a tyre and one of my latest ideas is to make a corner feature of cacti in tyres at different heights (i.e different numbers of tyres as the bases for the plants). Then I will dig bokashi along that strip against the fence, slowly across this coming winter. Eventually, the entire fence line will glow with flowers. The plant beside the calendulas is a canna lily. It has shot up and started to flower since I took this photograph.