Father's Day

I just entered the NZ Gardener get growing e-newsletter competition to win a Fiskars flash weeder for my Dad for Father's Day. Which I'm quite pleased about because I've planned to enter at least 38 competitions to do with gardening in the last six months and this is the first one I have actually entered. I've composed quite a few competition entries in my head but the judges cannot read my mind unless I put my mind onto an email and send it.

I wrote about how my Dad encouraged me to garden and helped me set up my own garden when I was only seven and I wrote about how we talk about organic methods (he is a synthetic fertiliser man) and it turns out these are methods my grandfather used. Like chook run rotation across garden beds and using beans to fix nitrogen.

Thanks for smudging some green across my thumb from an early age Dad. Thank you also to my maternal grandmother, who is still alive, who also taught me about gardening. I used to gather flowers from the garden with her to go in vases inside and sometimes I went to garden club with her. I have a memory of going up the creek on a far from the house part of their farm with her and an aunty and gathering ferns for the garden. She put in a waterfall and rock garden which I walked past each afternoon to go help round up the cows for milking.

I also remember going to that same creek with my brother and Grandad and catching eels. Hoping to take my own children up there to play next school holidays.

sharp

Yesterday I bought a new knife. It is made in China by Kuhn Rikon who originally hail from Switzerland. It is very sharp and makes preparing vegetables faster. I bought the pale green version. I like it.

I still love my chooks.

That's all I have to say tonight.

sugar and stealing

Today I wrote about the sugar on the floor.

After school Fionn and I went out stealing. Grass. It must be Spring. The council mowed the large verge at the end of our street and we took big and little wheelbarrows and the rake down there and filled them. When we got back home we added it to the beautiful wormy home made compost which we had strewn over the punga raised bed. Should enrich the soil for the garlic and yams and the climbing rose.

I still love the chooks.

I made carrot and ginger and kumara soup for dinner. I used beef stock from the freezer for the liquid, bacon pieces and borlotti beans for the protein and I added a few handfuls of dried seaweed - wakame I think it's called. It was good. I should use it more often.

Introducing chooks one, two and three

of Poultry Palace, smalltown.

They eat slugs.

I love my chooks.

chook love

I love the chooks. They are nameless but loved. We let them out into the run this afternoon (I was too impatient to wait two days) and they clearly enjoyed that and we all stood mesmerized by chooks pecking grass and straw...

I've convinced Favourite Handyman on my scheme to create a large garden bed by the poultry palace building site by having the chooks there for a few months and then finishing off any digging they haven't done myself. I'll put potatoes there in late October and create a herb border all the way round it. The garden bed will be 5 x 2 metres which is the sort of gutsy sized garden bed I want/need rather than just itsy bits around the edges of the section. We're talking about modifications to the poultry palace now that it is up and running. Not that it means much here without any photos. Couldn't find my wallet this evening either. Obviously cleaning the kitchen today wasn't sufficient effort to organise my chaotic physical surrounds.

I've made no progress on the yeast-free eating front. Today I even started making bread again. I tried a new recipe - sweet rye bread. I didn't have aniseed which I gather is the key taste in the recipe but it was still good. Nice with hummus. It is supposed to be great with strong cheese but we've run out of that until Wednesday. It uses treacle which must be good. I need to start my use up the cupboard project again. Stuff just creeps in there and sits unused if I'm not very vigilant.

Happy fortieth birthday to my friend and childminder Robyn, whose party I've just come home from. Robyn's friends and family have already raised $2500 tonight towards the next Watoto project. She makes a huge positive difference to many lives, including mine, here in our small town as well as on the other side of the world.

chookville

I am now a woman with chooks.

Three point of lay Brown Shavers are now settling in to their home in our backyard. The poultry palace isn't quite finished but I used a bit of masking tape in lieu of nails on the last details and Favourite Handyman can make changes later next week when they are in the run fossicking.

They've got water, grit, pellets, wheat, a tray of sand as some kind of dust bath and lots of straw in the coop. I'm keeping them locked into the coop for the first two days to get them used to this being their home.

We didn't have any time in reasonable weather to shift the poultry palace from it's building site to our preferred first spot. So as the forecast this weekend is for rain, more rain, heavy rain and thunder, I expect they will live on the building site for a while after all. I assume they will peck up all of the lawn the run is sitting on and am now thinking it will become another garden spot. It will be fairly exposed to the wind and perhaps I should plant some kind of lowish windbreak after the chooks move on. I don't want anything high as then sun would be lost. Might be useful for low growers like beetroot, lettuce, radishes and some herbs. Straight after chooks would be too rich for carrots I gather - makes them fork. But some more garden would certainly allow me to plant more of the herb seeds that I own but don't yet have enough places for. Perhaps it is what I need to get me breaking up the garden away from just patches around the periphery of the lawn. It would be very fantastic to eventually have lots of curves and a somewhat magical effect of walking round the corners and finding surprising things in the new garden vista. We don't have to have one big rectangle of lawn edged with plants always.

I seem to have misplaced the camera which is even worse negligence on my part than usual. Perhaps there is someone else to blame but I'm not confident on that one.

garden

Yesterday: sowed tomato seeds (sungold F1 and sub-arctic plenty) and basil, parsley and lettuce (webbs wonderful) seeds. Also planted my Dublin Bay rose. Noticed I need to add more soil/compost/mulch to the punga raised bed. The torrential rains have pushed the level down a lot.

Today: frosty morning and sunny all day. Felt wonderful. Transplanted white welsh bunching onions from the propagator tray to a long planter box and tucked it under the long cloche outside. Noticed the strawberries looking sad in beside the garlic but it is all far too wet to replant them atm.