sauce and strikes

So today I made tomato sauce, deciding to leave passata and sofrito experiments for another day. The recipe (Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's, with a few tips from my Mum's recipe added in) did not advise walking outside in the middle with the roaring baby and then noticing that a caterpillar is eating my latest kale and broccolli seedlings, getting hump with it and killing it and all the seedlings and then going inside and finding the sauce burning on the bottom. Picking that out of the mix occupied a bit of time.

Still, it tastes great and nobody noticed the remaining black bits when we gifted a bottle to our dinner hosts this evening.

We spent part of the evening with friends talking about the centenary of the Blackball strike, the reason that Blackball (a tiny village on the West Coast) is often seen as the birthplace of the union movement in New Zealand. Celebrations are this Easter and more information is here. I'm looking forward to it a great deal.

list

to myself, for tomorrow
I want to plant some basil inside and some coriander outside. Half the basil can go outside once it is established. My outside basil is in great shape. Aphids have infested the existing inside basil.

The coriander may well bolt quickly, though I will put it in a pot in the shade. But the flowers and seeds are both pretty and tasty.

I also want to turn the 6kg of sauce tomatoes I bought yesterday into sofrito or passata. I will do some ordinary sauce at some point, but want to play around as well. Most of our own tomatoes are cherry tomatoes which aren't much good for sauce. Now I've worked out that they are ripe at apricot colour rather than yellow, we've all been finding them pretty tasty and the way they ripen just a few at a time is excellent for salads and nibbling. Next year I will aim to have some staggered varieties and some where the crop ripens all at once. The all at once type would be good for preserving.

I have yet to finish burying the Bokashi as I couldn't fit it all in my first spot. So there is that and then a walk around admiring all of our wood chip mulch. It rocks.

I did heaps more mulching in the afternoon and now have a thick layer on four of my garden beds. I got a bit impatient with some of my beetroot for not growing fast enough and pulled it out. By contrast, I'm finding my lettuces (a mesclun mix) too beautiful to pick. Of the 24 seedlings I potted up earlier in the week, I've given away three and might end up decorating the rest of the garden with lettuces.

Went for an impromptu picnic with friends by a river this evening. Our friends have access through private land to the warmest and most beautiful river spot I've seen in ages. We had to cross the river to get to the picnic spot with babies, wine and dinner on our backs. Truly fantastic. I feel so lucky to be alive and so blessed tonight.

Favourite Handyman and I have been discussing 'affluenza' of late, particularly following an article by Oliver James in the Guardian Weekly. This link is a review of his book, as I cannot find the paper article online. We are convinced that always trying to do something to lessen global oppression is worthwhile. Flinging of hands and ignoring the issues as 'too hard' to our minds creates the message that oppression for western comfort is in some way acceptable, even the natural order of things. Growing our own veges, wearing hand me downs and charity shop clothes, driving one car only. They are the things which make us feel like we are moving in the right direction. Probably the biggest most helpful thing for us is realising we are in paradise, very wealthy and coveting fewer and fewer material goods. I know there is a soapbox here, but recording this is useful for me, to remember how I think now, to push me to make more change in my life in the future.

admiring the gardens over east

well Leanne's anyway. How gorgeous is that?

I've been burying more Bokashi this morning. This time I'm digging into sand it seems. We live on a rise about 300 metres from the beach. The area where we live is an old gold dredging site and exactly where our 809 sqm fits into that history I'm not sure. I do notice big differences in the composition of the soil in different parts of the garden though. Because the house has always been tenanted until we bought it, I'm creating garden out of soil that hasn't been gardened in for years and in patches possibly forever.

Favourite Handyman has been lopping branches and mulching them all morning. I've just put another barrowload of wood chip mulch on my lettuce/silverbeet/leek/2 red onions and 1 carrot/not much beetroot left garden. What a wonderful difference.

photos

Some photos of the garden. I don't think I'm going to be a professional photographer somehow. These were the best of the garden ones... The beetroot is chioggia and I love cutting it up for the pleasure of seeing the red and white concentric rings. I made small sticks of it in a salad the other day and they looked like candy. The garden photo is the new raised bed I made earlier this month. Today we had the loan of a shredder and Favourite Handyman worked all day shredding branches and thus this new bed now has an added layer of chip mulch on it. The front garden (will have more herbs which tolerate the shade soon) is now mulched up, as is the garlic bed.

The sunflower pic is because sunflowers are too gorgeous to ever get sick of looking at. Only four plants out of my sowing of 20 survived, but they have rewarded us greatly for our perseverance. These ones are dwarf and the packet of skyscrapers never went in this summer. Always next time. I'll be starting next year's batch inside this time - it was just too cold I think. Plus the blackbirds.

garden roundup

I've had a week off gardening while I got rather serious on the parenting thing and planned and threw a fifth birthday party for Fionn. Pirate everything. Was marvellous. I'll have a bit more of my own life and interests back again now thanks.

In NZ, glycophosphate is called 'roundup' but that doesn't touch my garden.

We've been eating zucchinis (I even made pickle earlier this month), beetroot, silverbeet, lettuces and potatoes from the garden. All good. Recent weather has been hot and humid and the green veg are responding by growing noticeably faster. I have a little bit of everything and no gluts (the pickle was from looking after a friend's garden who does have gluts). Shame I haven't managed to get carrots to grow yet. I've read the good things to do but I just forget or don't manage to do them. Constant even moisture apparently. I'll keep trying.

Today I transplanted 24 lettuces into small pots and 9 silverbeets. Twentyfour is a few more than we need to eat in one week, but I'll find good homes for them. Most of the silverbeet will go to my chook keeping friend Rayleen when they are bigger. Rayleen also has a source of sheep poo for me at her brother's farm up the valley. Looking forward to that outing. I'm not joking, though I accept that you might prefer to think I am.

My comfrey plant is growing very very well in its pot, doubling in size in less than a month. I'm going to divide it soon (I hope) and put some of it in the front garden (I guess we will just scream permaculture hippy from the moment people pull up the drive then. oh well) and some in my invasive patch where it can hang out with the mint (planted there by me), the nasturtium, (growing wild but welcome) and the Wandering Jew, Docks, Convulvulus who are like lecherous men in seedy bars. Always hanging round and never appealing.

recycled treasure

We have been very very super lucky recently. Two more friends have passed on to us materials they no longer need and so now we have a houselot of old window frames (with glass intact on most of them) which Favourite Handyman will turn into a glass house and posts and chicken wire and fencing mesh which will be used for the chook house and for growing beans and flowers and squash on.

I really liked the programme "The Wombles" as a young child. I think the legacy is evident. I recall the trip we made to see Wimbledon Common when we were living in London. Never mind the tennis, I wanted to see the purported home of Madame Cholet and Uncle Tobermory. Lovely day out it was too.

some rearranging, some linking

High time I revisited my list of growing projects, which I've just done on the sidebar (is that the correct term?). I've stuck with what is in the garden at the moment and been pleased to see more successes than I had thought, compared with my previous Spring planting list.

I will have more to add shortly, as I posted another Kings Seeds order off yesterday. I'm aiming for a diverse range of winter greens this year, including foods I have never even tasted such as Mizuna and Black Radishes.

I do have favourite blogs and until now have not managed a blogroll (hoping I have the correct terminology yet again). So here is an annotated sample, and hopefully I will create my own blogroll soon. Nobody who I see locally, to my knowledge, has a blog. Not that I have mentioned locally that I have a blog either - it seems to be my 'other life' pastime, the one which is not connected to what the baby has eaten or where to buy school uniform.

Nikki, Sharon and Rachael are three very fine women who I knew online before they were blogging. They all combine gardening and parenting with thinking outside the square. Everybody else calls Rachael 'Rach, but I can't. She is 100% Rachael in my head and nothing has managed to change that.

I could give you a list of women who I would love to see blogging but that wouldn't enable you to harass them. So I need to do it privately. Tania I haven't changed my mind about wanting to see you blogging. Nor Jemma...

I like this permaculture blog. I've mentioned the wonderfully named Bifurcated Carrots before.

A regular read for me is Beansprouts. Melanie at Beansprouts consistently writes very interesting things and I feel like I have learnt a lot about her via this crazy but fun modern phenomenon of blogging. But like a grizzly old lady, I am about to grizzle. What is it with this craze for having sound on blogs? Internet time is peaceful time for me, as the day invariably involves large amounts of small child noise and I really dislike sites with noise. All computer noise is bad in my old lady universe despite the fact that I'm not really old at all.

Much as I like the sense of a community of bloggers, I'm still jolted and surprised when someone finds me from nowhere. I don't know what expectations people have and, just like in face to face local encounters, what makes two people click, clash or slide off each other's radar is difficult to explain. But here in Sandra's garden is not a place for consistency. I rarely make labels for my posts and mostly do gardening posts but not always. Sometimes I'm thinking about something else completely and here is where it goes. Filing is not in my nature.