Tree House

This afternoon Favourite Handyman and Fionn made the beginnings of a tree house. They now have a platform up in the tree above the old large compost spot, so while they sawed and hammered, the chooks pottered around in their temporary shelter on the other side of the tree.

I think I have one ripe cherry tomato. I am saving the picking and eating until the children are tucked up in bed. Otherwise the Garden Murderer will get in and pick and eat all the green ones. It's in her genes, so my parents have told me.

She does get to do a few garden jobs though, ones where she cannot murder plants. She and I made a new batch of seaweed brew today. Later I remembered I had comfrey and added some of that to the lidded bucket.

We ate our own broccoli and zucchini as part of dinner tonight. I have quite a bit of silverbeet going to seed and not really the right weather to feel like eating it. I do wonder what makes some go to seed and not others. Perhaps I should wash, chop and freeze some? Perhaps indeed.

a whole barrowload

We went for a walk allong the beach after dinner this evening. Sin ce our fireworks evening on the beach in the weekend Fionn, who is usually not at all keen on the beach, is now enthusiastic.

We collected lots of fireworks packaging and broken beer bottle glass for the rubbish bin. The most wonderful find was a huge piece of kelp. About two metres long and big branches 40cm wide. I went back home for the wheelbarrow and it just fitted in. We walked back with the barrow piled high with nutritional bounty for the garden.

I tried the same no knead recipe with kibbled rye which I found in the cupboard. 1 C plain flour, 1 C high grade flour, 1 C kibbled rye, mixed with 1/4 t yeast, 1 + 1/4 t salt and 300ml warm water. Leave in warm place about 20 hours. Then fold over 3 times and leave to stand with bowl on top for 15 minutes. Then sprinkle a clean teatowel with polenta and put dough on one side in ball shape and cover with rest of teatowel. Leave to rise for 2 hours. 1.5 hours into last rising, heat lidded casserole in oven at 230 celsius. Cook for 30 minutes with lid on and 5-10 further minutes with lid off.

The kibbled rye experiment was successful. My next experiment will be doubling the recipe to make a larger loaf.

I transplanted six Great Lakes lettuces tonight. I bought these from our garden centre once I realised we suddenly had space to fill after the big wind. They are traditional crunchy heading lettuces which is what we missed last summer.

Shelter belts

I can't bear to discuss the election. The news is so awful and I am disgusted with a significant percentage of my fellow New Zealanders. Oh. Oops I am discussing it. Two more details then. Firstly, where are the brain cells of the green voters of West Coast-Tasman? 1800 of them gave their candidate vote to Kevin Hague, the green party candidate who was likely to get in on the party list anyway but who had no show of winning the electorate seat. And by what margin did the Labour candidate lose to the National candidate? 935 votes. Secondly, even worse than National winning the election, they are dependent on the ACT party for a majority in parliament. Act only got 3.6% of the vote and yet they are in parliament (5 of them) because Rodney Hide won Epsom. People of Epsom, hang your heads in shame. I suspect the ACT party have some quite intelligent members, just incredibly selfish ones.

So eventually, some time round lunchtime, the fog of my gloom began to lift. The chooks are now back in the mended Poultry Palace which is now living up the north-west corner of the section. The feijoa trees are in the chook run and hopefully they all enjoy the experience.

Yesterday I transplanted my two bay trees from pots into the new garden space which used to be the chook run. I planted some beans and made a bamboo teepee for them to climb up. I planted a zucchini and some lettuces and three kale and some anise hyssop, garlic chives and borage. I covered the soil around the zucchini with grass clippings.

One of the blueberries looks quite unhappy. I've weeded the blueberry bed and covered that with grass clippings and watered it with seaweed brew. Tonight I added the ammonia-sulphate (I think) which I got from the garden a while back. The garden beside it is going yellow on the edges, even of the thyme. So I'm believing Linda Woodrow (the goddess) more and more that mulching with woodchip is bad for plants which like nitrogen. So more grass clippings all over that and then seaweed brew on top. I added chopped up comfrey and some sheep poo and more water to the remaining brew. It can pootle on making me liquid fertiliser for a while yet. Exactly as long as it takes for me to find more seaweed I expect.

The new garden in the old chook spot is very exposed to the wind. So I bought 10 metres of shade cloth and Favourite Handyman made two windbreak fences for the garden. One on the west side and one on the east. He is truly very wonderful, my Favourite Handyman. I also bought punnets of marigolds, alyssum, rainbow chard and great lakes lettuces to plant out in the new garden. Too windy to plant today but they can wait.

Last night we went down to the beach with friends and ate and drank round the camp fire while we watched their fireworks. It was a lovely evening and I'm keen on repeating it often this summer, though obviously without the fireworks.

Truman Track

This is where we went today:

More info on this track here, where you'll note I've copied the photos from (is that allowed? please tell me quick if I've lined myself up for a court case). No camera was even thought of in our haste to take off with our chicken sandwiches and fruit.

We walked down through native forest in wonder, then through flaxes and then some kind of primrose and then onto the beach. We explored caves, let beautiful multi-coloured pebbles run through our hands, climbed on rocks, drank in the sky and sand and waves, marvelled at the echo which magnified the sound of the waves.

And I thought of Rob. Of Denise and Woody and Mungo who will bury their husband and father today in England. Goodbye Rob. Will you let the pray-ers pray for you? I hope the Spring birds sing when you go down into the ground.

As we left, I gathered a small handful of sea kelp and carried it back up to the road, to the car. It's resting on the garden at the moment, but it will go in the hole which we dig when we plant a tree in your honour, Rob.

The compost obsession

I never believed Linda Woodrow (and a host of other gardening books) when I first read that it's all about compost.

That was then, before I got my head round gardening in the same place for more than one year. Now I am obsessed with compost. A wonderful friend from Auckland came to visit this afternoon and of course we were talking about gardening. She asked if I had a compost. Just one?!? It was a long answer, involving various manures, seaweed, comfrey, lawn clippings and leaf mould (I might have that last word wrong. There is, I think, a special word for composts made entirely of leaves).

The new garden bed I created this week and reported on here, cost me $18 to make. $16 worth of pea straw and $2 worth of horse manure. Which is pretty good value for the size I made. Not content with that, I've started a new garden bed quite close to it and have the goal of creating it without spending any money. Yesterday I laid out lots of newspapers, passed on to me by my cousin. Then I put some fine river sand on it, left over from when we filled the sandpit at Christmas. Today the children and I headed to Rapahoe, which looks like this:

It has also had some super high tides lately I suspect, which have brought up lots of kelp. It took very little walking to fill the equivalent of five supermarket plastic bags. Back home I tipped out one large horse feed bag's worth of mixed bark and chicken poo on top of the sand and then put half of the seaweed on top of that. The rest of the seaweed went on my main, oldest compost site.

Later in the day I drove to the local rugby grounds near our house qand filled up an enormous IKEA bag with semi-composted grass clippings. That went on top of the seaweed and I think I'm about half way to the height I want that bed to be. I still have one more bag of chicken poo mix which will go on top and then another, thicker layer of grass clippings. Being a slothful person inside, I have several months' worth of fluff from the tumble drier sitting in a container on top of the drier. That can go on the pile just before something heavy so it doesn't blow away.

I'm getting comfrey leaves ready for cutting and composting or digging straight in the garden every week from one plant. The second is starting to grow better now. Not much sign of it getting invasive yet. I'd find it quite convenient if my comfrey grew madly and spread.

The stench

Fine wine aged well smells beauuutiful. Mature seaweed brew does not. I have poured it all over every one of my edible garden patches on purpose and on much of today's clothing not at all on purpose. Given the whole children juggle thing, I was still wearing those clothes when I returned the DVD to the shop today as I am on a fine reduction mission (the library, the video shop, the toy library). Oh the elegant impression I must create here in small town some days...