Piccy time

Out the front. The beginnings of my yellow garden.
The herb and flowers strip near the kitchen. Chives, pansies, aloe vera, parsley and freesias.

You wanna be our neighbours? I abandoned the potatoes in tyres project and piled all these up to take to a friend's. Only they haven't quite got there yet. There is a lot growing around the chaos though - bay trees, a lemon, garlic, strawberries, miner's lettuce, spinach, calendula, onions, borage, silverbeet and chamomile.
Mint good, silverbeet good, wandering dew not so good. Getting there though. This area was overgrown invasive trees two years ago. At the top of the photo you can see the wandering dew peeking over from the neighbours. That source of roots and seeds isn't going to disappear any time soon. Lovely neighbours though.

Midwinter

Even though it is the middle of winter, we are still blessed with much greenery and growth. The first photo is of one of the pungas in Brighid's forest. Favourite Handyman planted these pungas the day our daughter was born in January 2007.The second photo is of our broad beans. These beans don't get any direct sun in winter but they are growing well enough nevertheless. We haven't staked them all but they are (hopefully) fixing nitrogen anyway and I'm sure we'll get some broad beans to eat even if they are flopping on the ground. I planted them back in March.

These swiss chard or silverbeets are growing in the shade also and seem to be doing well. This area was totally overrun by weeds and trees not too long ago and now we are eating off it. I chop some leaves off these plants each week for soups and stews.This fourth photo is beside the pungas and the silverbeet/swiss chard. I cleared it and buried bokashi in it and planted some beneficial insect blend seeds. Immediately, lots of onion weed germinated and colonised much of the area. I haven't got around to eating any onion weed yet, but I will.
Photo five is the corner of the invasive garden patch. You can see some silverbeet in the midground, our sad little attempt at a scarecrow in the background and in the foreground a wet patch where we left tyres and managed to kill the grass. I've buried bokashi in that spot and come summer we'll grow something to eat in it. It doesn't get more than a sliver of sun at the moment, but that will improve as the sun stays higher in the sky in coming months. We used the tyres for an experiment with growing potatoes last year but it wasn't successful and they are now laying around until I think of a good use for them. You have to pay to drop tyres off at the local landfill so I'll be making sure we think of a home-based use for them.

mice

Now it is cooling down outside, the mice have sought warmer shelter - in our house. I forget how many houses we have dealt with this in. Our terraced home in London was by far the worst as they lived inside all the time and appeared to move from home to home along the terrace. The ate anything and weren't the slightest bit scared of humans. Here there are fewer mice, they are scared of me, less intrepid and altogether more manageable. My Dad and Grandad have both advised us to put down rat and mouse poison bait. They find our comments about toxicity in the soil and our horror of a child finding it and eating it less than compelling but that's okay because Favourite Handyman and I are big kids now and get to decide ourselves. We're not cat lovers and we are near-cat-sneezers so that rules cats out. Plus it's hard to get them to catch and eat mice but not birds. Or to catch the blackbirds but not the native birds.

So at our place our main strategy is traps plus keeping food in mouse-proof containers. The modern kind of traps are very easy to deal with. The mice don't splatter (FH tells me horror stories of being sent up to deal with rat traps and rat splatter in the ceiling as a teenager), I'd say death is fairly prompt and you don't have to touch the mouse when emptying the trap. We've caught three this week.

What else today? Planted six swiss chard seedlings on the edges of the invasive garden and six kale seedlings across two established beds. All from our friendly local garden nursery. My own weren't the size I wanted for planting straight away. I still have some seedlings of my own for planting out in another ten days or so. I am now growing three kinds of swiss chard: Ironman silverbeet, Argentata beet and Rainbow Chard.

Favourite Handyman has started to harvest the tobacco. Two plants' worth are hanging from the ceiling of one of the garden sheds now. He also repotted some flax and cabbage tree plants a friend gave him. I don't actually want cabbage trees in this garden but at least while they are in pots we have some flexibility.

An apprentice

I have a gardening apprentice. I wasn't looking for one, but she was so keen that it was churlish to refuse.

May I introduce to you my apprentice, Brighid. She is twelve months old and it was her enthusiastic copying of my transplanting efforts which both wound me up and showed clearly that I was going to have to find an outlet for her green fingers - a more appropriate one.

So we set to work on the invasive garden patch. I had more bokashi to bury and so we worked on that, finding weta (I think) larvae as we dug. Brighid has an interest in soil testing. She found a large clod of earth and held it to her face like a hamburger and took several bites.

She acquainted herself with a number of tools and has an admirable ability to fall over multiple times with forks and trowels in her hand without piercing her stomach. Useful skill.

Brighid is an enthusiastic tomato taster and today even felled a tomato plant in its pot. She seems to prefer green tomatoes to red ones.

The invasive garden patch now has bokashi buried in it and pea straw on top along all of one side. I've cleared the weeds along part of the second side (third and fourth sides are fences) . Favourite Handyman muttered about clearing the tree stumps but I don't want sterile suburban lines. The stumps can stay and more things can grow over and around them. I've also arranged (you might say ordered but I really was more gentle and polite than that) for FH to start a new compost patch on the edge of the invasive patch next time he mows the lawn.

new projects

This is the front of our property and of the garage above. This picture is after the trees were felled but before they had all been mulched for the garden or sawn up for firewood. This area was all in darkness because of a thick stand of unpleasant looking, invasive trees. I had thought it was ungardenable but actually now the sun is on it, there is mega potential. This area gets the late afternoon sun, that lovely golden hue as the sun stretches out it's last rays for the day. The crop of yellow weeds in front of the flax looks quite nice and has inspired me to think of a yellow garden. Pumpkins, zucchinis (for their food and their yellow flowers), sunflowers, daffodils and other cuties yet to be decided, I think. I'll start by planting bulbs in Autumn around the edges.
The photo above is another of the plot which was all lawn merely months ago. The woodchip mulch has helped the plants cope with the sun and the liquid fertiliser has helped with growth. I'm always thinking this area isn't lush with growth the way it *should* be. Forgettting that I pick from this garden for lunch and dinner every day and the plants keep producing. In the bare-looking patches are small lettuces and chard. I put in three beer traps after losing sevferal lettuces seedlings to the slugs in this garden. The beer traps proved successful and hopefully the replacement seedlings I put in today will thrive. For the beer traps, I used baby food jars, one third filled with beer and buried them in the garden so the top of the jar is level with the top of the soil/mulch.
The photo above is of my invasive patch. The area under pea straw has bokashi buried in it and will be planted in Spring. The plastic bag to the left is full of seeded docks which I don't want in the compost. A bit closer to the centre from the bag is the mint area. The invasive nasturtiums and convulvulus have kept the roots of the mint cool and damp. This area was also full of ugly invasive trees when we moved in and I'm yet to decide exactly what I will do with it. Some afternoon sun. Quite a cold spot in winter in the morning.
Three of my borlotti beans. Good to see they will grow, though a very small harvest this year. I think they are growing in quite poor soil. I'll get some poo down over winter.