Harvest totals

Strawberries: 332g
Tomatoes: 123g

Some of the sweetcorn is three feet high and flowering. Some of the sweetcorn - in the same bed, planted at the same time - is less than a foot high. Strange. I've got no idea why this would be so.

Basil and lettuces are germinating, gherkins and courgette seedlings are almost ready to plant out, and the cucumbers are flowering. All is well in gardening world today.

Christmas harvest

Despite the fact that some of the potato plants haven't even started flowering, I was determined to get a few baby potatoes to have with Christmas lunch today. After fossicking around in all the bags, I discovered two things:
1) there's not enough compost in there, and
2) there aren't many potatoes either.

However we did manage to get a handful of teeny tiny spuds, so hurrah for that! And some of them are an exciting purple colour. I look forward to seeing how they taste.

We also pulled some carrots and found some more ripe strawberries, as well as a couple more tomatoes.

Potatoes - 113g
Carrots - 221g
Tomatoes - 94g
Strawberries - 193g

The things that look like plums or dark pebbles are actually potatoes. They are so purple on the outside that they  look almost black, and on the inside they look like this:

I haven't cooked them yet so don't know if they retain the colour after cooking, but they certainly look great raw.

Harvest totals

I've belatedly realised that it'd be smart to keep track of the total amount of food we harvest from our vegetable garden. Of course it's way too late to tell how much lettuce and radish we got a few weeks back - those are long gone, and the replacement lettuces haven't grown big enough to eat yet. I should have been more organised with the succession planting so I didn't have this big gap.

Anyway, here is what I estimate we have harvested so far:
Strawberries - 1112g
Raspberries - 20g
Tomatoes (Early Girl) - 183g
Total:  1315g

I'll try to keep a more accurate total from now on, and do my best to keep track of the tomatoes per variety. I'm planting a wide variety this year but if something is noticeably better or more prolific than something else then I should tailor next year's planting to suit.

More beds built

Even though it was almost too hot to work yesterday (I put on SPF30 before heading out the door, but forgot about my back and now have a sunburnt strip just above the waistband of my shorts - ouch), my husband and I got out there in the garden and finally finished levelling it. Today we got two more raised beds made and filled. That brings the total plantable area of our vegetable garden to 16 square metres, which should be plenty for two people. And that's not counting all the tubs of tomatoes and peppers, the fruit trees dotted around our whole property, or the plastic bags with potatoes growing in them.

Here's how things look today:

 

I know you can't see all the beds properly, so here's the layout that I use in my Excel spreadsheet. Yes, I am project-managing my garden using Excel. And no, I'm not ashamed to admit it.

Just as a reminder of how far we've come, here is how the garden looked in August 2008:

Here's how it looked in September 2008, after a hard day's work and vast amounts of help from our friends Fi and Rich:

And here's how it looked a year ago, as we attempted a traditional garden:

I can't help but be pleased with the order we imposed on the jungle that was there originally, and how much easier gardening is this year compared to the row-style gardening we were doing a year ago. Okay, so it's been a lot of work setting up all the raised beds, and not particularly cheap either, but now that we have that done we should be good to go for the next few years with only the addition of compost to keep the beds fertile. No more muddy feet, as we now have lovely paths between the beds, and no weeding to speak of either.

As far as results go, it's a bit early to judge for most things but I can tell you that the strawberries are doing very well indeed. We gather a couple of handfuls every day at the moment, and everyone who's tasted them has commented on how they "taste like proper strawberries!" compared to the bland watery supermarket offerings. Next year I'll be doing two square metres of strawberry plants rather than just one.

Tomato change of plan

Much to my disappointment, the three Green Zebra tomato plants are failing to thrive. I planted one of these outside at the end of October (probably a bit early, in fairness) and one at the end of November, and they haven't grown at all. A third one was planted on the deck and it's doing a little better, but the two in the garden are a bust. Can you even see the poor little scrap of green just above the marigold flower in this photo?

Given how much better most of the other tomato plants are doing, and how many I have still languishing in little seedling pots in the conservatory, I think the Green Zebras have got to go. It's disappointing, but I'd rather have something else than realise halfway through the summer that I'm not going to get any fruit. My garden has no space for plants that don't pay their way in some form or other, be it pretty flowers or something to put on the dinner plate. There's a Sungold and a Cherry Sweetie that'll do nicely in those spots, I think, so it's time to plant them out!

Got my first ripe tomato

Today had cause for celebration - as I was watering the tomato plants in the conservatory I found the first red one of the season!

I ate it straight away - a couple of slices went straight into my mouth (still warm from the sunshine, delicious) and the rest went into a ham sandwich. My verdict: perfect.

Lessons learnt

These are the lessons that I have learnt so far this gardening season. I am recording them here for posterity and so I don't do the same thing next year!

• Do not plant any silverbeet. It quickly grows too large for salad and I don't like it much after that. If my husband wants some he can plant his own.
  
• Stagger the lettuce plantings for a constant supply, rather than (as I have now) ten beautiful big heads of lettuce being eaten by insects because I can't keep up with it.
• Plant more strawberries. (I may revisit this at the end of strawberry season, but right now it seems like I don't have enough.)
• Don't bother with radishes. It's nice to have something homegrown right at the start of the season, but neither of us like them enough to make it worthwhile.
• Don't plant anything behind broccoli. Broccoli plants are enormous, way bigger than one square each, and their leaves completely block the sunlight from the soil around them.

I'm sure there'll be lots more lessons learnt as time goes by. This'll do for starters!

The indoor plants

It occurred to me that I haven't blogged much about the indoor plants. We are lucky enough to have a fairly large conservatory (it would feel a lot larger if it didn't have a hulking great defunct spa bath taking up most of the floor space, but we just have to work around that until we have the money to get it ripped out and the floor rebuilt) with glass on three sides and a clear plastic roof, so it is very bright and sunny in there. For the last few months it has been my greenhouse as I planted seeds and pampered seedlings.

Right now it is home to 17 pepper plants, eight tomato plants, a tub of lettuce, a small lime tree, and a number of seedings and germinating tomato seeds.

 

Most of the tomato plants are very small still, but the Early Girls have lots of flowers and a good number of baby tomatoes on them so I have high hopes of an early harvest.

It's coming into summer and the weather is warming up, so it gets very hot in the conservatory during the day, and it won't be long before it's too hot for the tomatoes in there. I'm moving some of them out onto the deck to see how they fare.

The green tubs are great, aren't they? They are relics from before Christchurch got a wheelie bin system for rubbish and recycling, and we got them all for free. They've got built-in handles and drainage holes and are a really good size for planting things into while still being light enough to lift.We've got seven of them so far and I'm still scouting around for more.

Mmmm, strawberries

The garden's going great. I just gathered a bowlful of strawberries for dessert:

There are lots more ripening on the plants outside.

 The broccoli is enormous, taking over the whole bed and dwarfing the poor little tomato plants in the back.

 

The silverbeet has grown completely out of control and I doubt it's fit for us to eat now - it's going to seed - but the chickens will enjoy the leaves.

 The sweetcorn and purple beans are getting there, slowly but surely.

And the onions and leeks are doing well too.

Even the spuds are coming along nicely in their plastic bags of compost (as are the weeds running rampant behind them).

We have had almost no weeding to do in the raised beds, which is fantastic - weeds only grow in the soil that we haven't yet levelled and covered with weed mat. The only problem so far is that the plants (broccoli and spinach) in one of the beds are not thriving, and some weird fungus has been growing in that soil. I think there was something funny about the compost we put in that one, but unfortunately I have no idea what it was. It's annoying, and honestly I am not terribly keen on eating anything that comes out of that bed because I'm not sure what it's growing in. Fortunately I do no not eat green leafy vegetables anyway so I don't have to worry about it right now!

The good and the bad

The good:

• there are green tomatoes on both the indoor and outdoor Early Girl plants
• most of my other tomato seeds are germinating quite well
• the strawberries starting to ripen in the beds outside (and in fact I just ate the first one - yum!)
• the potatoes in their plastic bags are growing nicely, and I'm particularly taken with the purple ones, which turned out to have purpley-green leaves as well
  

The bad:

• my Roma tomato seedlings all baked to death, in the conservatory on an unexpectedly hot day
• the lemon tree has shed almost all of its leaves, and will have to be planted outside somewhere - anywhere! - before it expires completely
• something has chewed holes in a lot of the lettuce leaves
• we still haven't finished ripping out the weeds from the veggie garden and putting down the last of the weed matting, so I have no new photos

Maybe this weekend we'll get to grips with the last of it. I will update if we do!

The official gardening season begins

It is Labour Day weekend this weekend, traditionally the time that gardeners around New Zealand start to rev it up a gear. This time last year we were hit by an unexpected frost which did quite a lot of damage to our tender new tomato plants, but this year I've checked the forecast and I'm hoping that temperatures will stay above freezing for the next while. We do have frost cloth but it's difficult to get it over the fence where the tomatoes are being planted, so I'd love it if we didn't need to use any.

Today I planted out some cucumbers which have been basking in the warm temperatures of our conservatory for the last few weeks. I used a beautiful oak dibber which my father made for me (thanks Dad!) to poke holes for them - it was very handy and I'll definitely get a lot of use out of it this year and for years to come.

Check out the size of the broccoli in the background, too - it's huge! There is a very noticeable difference in size between the broccoli in this bed and the one on the other side of the garden. We did use different compost in some of the beds and I wish I'd taken a note of which was which, because I'm guessing that it was the critical factor, but really we're not sure.

Here's the cucumber up close. I love eating this so I hope our four little plants do well. We've just got to add some trellis netting to those green poles at the end of the bed, and in theory the cucumbers will vine up that rather than sprawling on the ground. It's a new technique to me, but the Square Foot Gardeners swear by it so I'll give it a go.

Our tomato plans

I love tomatoes. Really, really love tomatoes. I would eat them every day if they were more affordable out of season, but this summer I plan to indulge myself until I’m sick of the things.

Last year we were complete novice gardeners and made many mistakes, but we were still blessed with an abundance of the aforementioned red fruit. Since we were just getting our feet muddy, so to speak, we went for varieties that were common and readily available; Moneymaker, an heirloom variety with smallish round red fruit, Cherry Sweetie, a cherry tomato, and a couple of sorry no-name specimens rescued from the brink of death courtesy of The Warehouse’s garden centre for 50c each. Despite our ignorance and occasional neglect, these plants somehow thrived and gave us a great harvest right up to the start of winter when the first frosts arrived.

This year I’m ready to experiment a little more – actually, a lot more. I could well be setting myself up for a fall, but I’m going to plant sixteen tomato varieties and see how they turn out. Here are the details (photos all from the internet, hopefully to be replaced with my own when something grows!).

Beefsteak/Paste Tomatoes
Aunt Ruby’s German Green

Aunt Ruby’s German Green is a beautiful green beefsteak with vivid green and gold centres, weighing up to 500g each. It’s recommended for sandwiches and for fried green tomatoes.



Brandywine Red

This is a beefsteak tomato with a sweet rich tomato flavour, and is recommended for sandwiches.



Roma

These are the tomatoes that you find in tins, ready for cooking. We’re planting four of these plants in the hopes that we get enough to make our own tomato sauce for the winter.



Black Tula

A Russian heirloom tomato, this one has mahogany red skin with green shoulders and dark green gel around the seeds. Ugly but, by all accounts, delicious. I've never tried a black tomato, but they are described as having a sweet, spicy, smoky taste.


Mid-Sized Tomatoes
Early Girl

These round red fruits are perfect for slicing, and have excellent texture and flavour.











Better Boy

These large fruits are plump, juicy, and deep red.





Green Zebra

When this one is fully ripe, the fruits are bright green with stripes of lighter green.





Moneymaker

Another heirloom tomato with mid-sized round red fruit. We grew this one last year and it was surprisingly prolific despite being underfed and probably underwatered.


Cherry Tomatoes

Sweetie

We grew these ones last year and were very happy with them – bunches of sweet cherry tomatoes in what almost looked like a blister-pack arrangement, as if somebody in a factory had arranged them that way. Delicious.











Yellow Pear (and matching Red Pear)

Charming little yellow (and red) pear-shaped cocktail tomatoes.



Sungold

Sungold is an English hybrid with super-sweet cherry sized fruits, perfect for eating straight off the plant. They are a golden orange when ripe.



Juliet

These sweet grape-sized tomatoes are recommended for salad.




Sugar Plum

This grape shaped variety produces large red clusters of fruit with exceptional flavour.




Gold Nugget

These round golden tomatoes, one inch in diameter, are sweet, seedless, and ideal for salad.



Baxter’s Early Bush Red

These orange-red salad tomatoes are a cherry type and keep for up to a month in the fridge.




That’s the lot – for now, anyway. And really we don’t have space for any more varieties this year – I’ll be restricted to just one each of most of these as it is. But we’ve got high hopes of a good tomato harvest if I can persuade all the seeds to germinate and grow up healthy and strong, enough for both of us at least and hopefully enough to share as well. I’ll keep you updated!

Garden bed layout

It occurred to me that I haven't updated the layout of the garden beds since we finished constructing them. Here's how it's laid out now:


The pale green beds are mine and the blue ones are my husband's to lay out as he chooses (although I have earmarked three of his squares for my tomatoes). He isn't as committed to the Square Foot Garden way as I am, although he's happy to go along with it for as long as it's working.

There is a tall fence along the right-hand side, and a low picket fence along the bottom. We have set up trellises on the fence edges of the bottom two beds (Beds 1 and 4), and on the bottom edge of Bed 5, to support tomatoes, cucumbers, and beans. These trellises are north-east facing so they get plenty of sunshine.

The pink square at the top right is currently just a weed patch. I hope to plant some bee-attracting flowers over there to keep the fuzzy little pollinators in our garden. We already have a family of bumble bees living in the compost heap but it's good to encourage all kinds of honey bees as well. They are always welcome in our garden (unlike wasps, which seem utterly pointless as well as nasty).

There's also a tall fence along the top edge of the layout, which casts quite a lot of shadow over the garden. I'm hoping that our potatoes thrive in their bags with a nice mixture of shade and sunshine, but if they don't do well then we'll carry them to some more suitable location.

Here's roughly what's in, or planned for, each bed:
Bed 1 - tomatoes, basil, various lettuce types, marigolds
Bed 2 - garlic, leeks, onions, strawberries
Bed 3 - not sure what is planned for this one. Right now it has broccoli and spinach.
Bed 4 - not sure what is planned for this one. Right now it has broccoli, marigolds, and some dead broad beans (the frost got them). I'm swiping three squares for tomatoes, and will plant some butter beans to replace the dead ones.
Bed 5 - not sure what is planned for this one. It has some carrots that are hopefully coming up (this bed has straw and chicken compost in it, and we fear that a lot of the little seedlings are actually weeds that were imported with the compost) and there will be cucumbers planted against the trellis.
Bed 6 - sweetcorn, pole beans, lettuce, raspberries

As well as the raised beds, we'll have lots of tubs with tomatoes and peppers, a row of Roma tomatoes against the edge of the back lawn, and a tub of herbs. We have loads of rosemary already, planted last year and still thriving, and some coriander, so I'll add a couple of others like thyme and parsley. It's always good to have fresh herbs.

Making the most of a sunny day

We've had some mixed weather recently, with a very cold snap and a lot of rain, so I haven't been out in the garden much. However, today was a beautiful warm sunny day so we took advantage of that and got some work done.

I've finally planted out the potatoes into their plastic bags. This is the first time we've tried this technique, but if it works then harvesting the potatoes will be very easy indeed. I forgot to take a photo of them when I was outside earlier, but right now they just look like a row of plastic bags full of compost - not very exciting really!


The strawberries are coming along quite nicely, and I can see the beginnings of berries on a few of them. These will have to stay covered up with wire netting to keep the birds off.



The silverbeet is thriving, as is Skry's broccoli. I don't know what he's going to do with it all if every plant is ready to eat at the same time! And I've got plenty of lettuce on the go and have been eating that regularly. It's so easy just to go out into the garden with a bowl and a pair of scissors and snip off all the leaves I need for that meal.


You can see that we haven't finished landscaping the garden yet. There is one corner which is still thick with weeds, and we haven't done anything about covering the weed matting. The irrigation system hasn't been finished either, but at least we've made a start on it. Hopefully we'll get the whole thing sorted out before Christmas and it'll all be fairly easy from then on.

I've got to say that Square Foot Gardening seems to be a real labour-saving technique. The only tools that I need are a trowel and a pair of scissors. I've pulled a few weed seedlings from the raised beds from time to time, but way fewer than we pulled from the ground last year. They're also easier to pull out because the soil is so loose, and of course it's easier to spot them early because I know exactly where I should find plants in each square of the grid. If something is not where my spreadsheet says it should be, out it comes!

Salad for supper

I should have taken some photos, but all the food is in my tummy now. I had a garden salad with my dinner tonight - lettuce, baby silverbeet, and radishes. Covered with dressing, of course - who likes bare lettuce? Not me, anyway! Still, it was lovely to go out there with a scissors and come back with enough to fill my plate (and accompany my crumbed fish fillet). Can't wait till we have tomatoes in the garden, but that won't be for a good while so I'll enjoy the lettuce and radishes while we have them.

Germinating like crazy

Sorry for the lack of updates recently, but that does not indicate a lack of progress. The weather isn't settled enough to plant much outside yet, but in the conservatory I have many little seeds germinating quite happily. Here's what I have growing indoors:

• tomatoes (Better Boy, Early Girl, Green Zebra, Moneymaker)
• peppers (California Wonder, Yellow Banana, Purple Beauty, Chocolate Beauty)
• sweetcorn
• lettuce
• cucumber
• and a variety of flowers, including gilia, cornflower, larkspur, swan plants, and many others that I've currently forgotten.

There are seed potatoes waiting for the current wet weather to pass before I plant them in bags outside:

• Purple Heart
• Ilam Hardy
• Red Rascal
• Agria
  

Planted outside are some slightly hardier crops:

• red onions
• leeks
• spring onions
• radishes
• lettuce
• strawberries
• raspberries
• broccoli
• spinach
• silverbeet

Those last two belong to my husband, who has his own beds to look after this year. I am taking the very organised pre-planned approach, and he's taking the approach of, "Plant what seems like a good idea at the time, wherever it fits," so it'll be interesting to see which of us produces better food!

I also spent about $80 setting out the start of our irrigation system. It'll cost us maybe the same again to finish it, but that should make things a lot easier for us this summer. The system won't cover all the plants but it'll cover the raised beds and leave the neighbours with a lot less to water for us if we go away for a weekend here and there!

Of course, not all the vegetables will fit in the raised beds, not by a long shot. I'm going to need at least eight tubs for some of the tomatoes and all the peppers. We had no luck with peppers last year because it wasn't quite warm enough for them, so I'm going to keep those in the conservatory and see if that improves things. Just need to find the space for them first!

It's starting to come together

A couple of weeks ago we managed to acquire 46 concrete pavers on TradeMe, for the total price of $200 (which was a great bargain - most of them are seconds, but that hardly matters in a veggie garden). They're going to make a lovely path between the raised beds.


They're not in their final location just yet, because the ground needs to be levelled a bit in places and then the gaps will be filled with stones and pebbles (I would prefer bark, but I lost that battle) to finish it off. Right now the pavers are just holding the weed mat in place, because it can get very windy at times.

My husband built some more raised beds for me, and I have been gradually buying material to fill them with. It's a real nuisance lugging heavy bags of compost and peat moss from the shops every time we go out, but I'm getting there slowly. The purchase of a small trolley last weekend has made things a lot easier!

A friend donated three raspberry canes to our cause and those are now in situ against the tall fence (they're not really visible in the photo, but they're there alright). This fence gets plenty of sun but also shade in the morning, so I'm hoping the raspberries will enjoy their location. My friend already gave us raspberry canes a few months ago but they were mistreated, overgrown by weeds, and ultimately met their demise, so I have promised to do better with these ones!

Another bed laid out

Baby steps, but I'm getting there - I pulled up loads more weeds today, raked the ground level, and assembled another raised bed. We have nothing to fill it, but at least it's in the right spot now!


This bed is one that we bought pre-sawn and ready to assemble. It cost $129, which probably wasn't worth it compared to how cheaply we bought the materials for the other two (I think they cost something like $20 for the wood and $5 for the screws), but it certainly was very easy to slot together. It's going to take a lot of material to fill, though, and I can't see me being able or willing to buy enough individual bags of compost and peat to do the job. I think we need to find a bulk supplier somewhere...

Making a start on the veggie beds

I made a real start on the back garden veggie beds today. It's still only early August, but the weather has been just glorious, warm and sunny, so it's perfect for gardening.


We only had a few bags of compost to hand so I just filled one bed with Mel's Mix and the other one is still empty. The 2m x 1m bed took three 40 litre bags of compost, half a big bag of peat, and half a bag of vermiculite to fill nearly to the top, and I've still got to top it up to the brim once I buy more supplies. It was hard work lugging all the bags around, but at least I only need to do it once for each bed! After that they'll just need topped up with a little compost every time new plants go in there, which should be easy to manage.

The rest of the garden still looks a mess, but already we can see how fantastic it's going to look when it's all done up properly. We've got another three beds planned for this area, and some free space in the back corner that might be used for an asparagus bed. Haven't quite decided yet.

Mould!

I just noticed that the five tubs of seed mixture that I have in the living room (pansy, lavender, and sweet pepper) have gone MOULDY and are covered in white fluffy stuff. Yuck. I've never seen this happen before! I've got no idea what's going on - I'm pretty sure I haven't been over-watering them, but I can't think of what else might have caused it.

For the moment, I've moved them all to the sunny windowsill rather than the rather darker corner behind the curtains. If it persists, I'll probably have to throw them out. The first casualties of summer 2009 and they didn't even get a chance to germinate. Bah.

Onions, onions everywhere

Well, not quite onions everywhere, but I have high hopes for the future. Eighteen red onion seeds, 18 white onion seeds, and 18 spring onion seeds have just been potted up in some lovely damp seed-raising mix, along with half a dozen chocolate pepper seeds just to fill up the rest of the tray. In fact I planted a whole lot of seeds today:

• red onion (sweet red)
  
• white onion (Kiwi gold)
• spring onion
• pepper (chocolate beauty)
  
• swan plant
• gilia (bird's eye)
  
• marigold
• mint
  

My Meyer lemon got re-potted too, as it's looking a bit under the weather at the moment. It was sadly neglected for the last few months, and when I finally took a proper look at it I discovered that it was infested with greenfly and most of its leaves were yellow or dropping off. Poor lemon tree. The last few weeks I've been spraying it with insecticide, feeding it, and trying to clean the sticky honeydew off its leaves (with limited success, it has to be said). Hopefully it will perk up a bit now.

There's life in the lettuce patch!

The winter lettuces are starting to germinate! Five tiny seedlings are starting to poke their heads up above the soil. Hopefully there'll be another three to follow in the next day or two, since I planted eight seeds, but we'll see.


In other news, I planted some more flower seeds today, indoors in seed raising mix. They are in the conservatory and also inside a covered mini germinator, which should keep them fairly cosy. I planted five each of these seeds:

• nigella
• meadowfoam
• hollyhock (not sure what type - these seeds were donated by a friend)
• nicotiana (tinkerbells)
• stock (dwarf 10 week)
• dianthus (black and white minstrels)
• dianthus (rainbow loveliness)
• dichondra (silver falls)

Those that successfully germinate will be planted indoors for the time being, although some of them are destined for the new flower bed outside when the weather warms up.

More seeds planted

This is probably not very interesting for anyone to read, but I figure it'll be a good record for me and might help me figure out what works in future. I planted some more indoor seeds today: pansies and lavender. I'm trying to produce some lavender plants to grow down our driveway, but apparently it can be quite difficult to grow from seed so I shouldn't get my hopes up.


I was going to leave them in the conservatory beside the lettuce (in the square tubs above) but it gets really cold out there at night. The flower pots are now in the corner of our living room beside the Jingle Bell pepper seeds, where they get sunshine during the day and some heat from us during the evening.

First seeds planted

About a week ago I planted some winter lettuce seed in a couple of pots in the conservatory. They haven't sprouted yet but I hope they will do so within the next week or so. The tubs are filled with Mel's Mix, and temperatures in the conservatory are above freezing at night and very warm during the day if the sun's out, so I'm hoping that'll be a nice combination for the little lettuce seeds.

Yesterday I planted four Jingle Bells pepper seeds in a tub (filled with seed raising mix) which is currently in our living room. The temperatures here are more stable than in the conservatory, with less extreme differences between night and day. Hopefully they will germinate. The Jingle Bells peppers are miniature fruits on a plant suitable for growing indoors. We had no luck with our pepper plants growing outside last summer - from about a dozen plants, we got one solitary green pepper - so this year they are all going to be indoors. I've already got some larger tubs to use outside in the conservatory, and I've ordered more seeds (Chocolate Beauty, which has brown fruit, and California Wonder which should result in red peppers when ripe) so hopefully we'll have a bit of variety. Having said that, I'd just be glad to have something we can eat at the end of it all!

Oh, and I scattered some California poppy seeds along the edge of our driveway. It's not really the right time of year for planting poppy seeds but the worst that can happen is that they don't grow. It'd be lovely if they did, though, because the driveway is very bare in places at the moment. We did plant some small shrubs, hebes of various kinds, but it'll be a long time before they grow big enough to merge together. Poppies would be lovely in the meantime.

Finished the flower bed

I finished the flower bed today, with the addition of a bag of pig compost and a grid layout made with garden twine. I think it looks great! And the soil is just so gorgeous, light and nutritious.




Well, I say "finished", but there is one more thing to do and that is to tack a chicken wire fence around the edge. With three of our own chickens plus countless neighbourhood cats looking for a litter box, I think that soil will be just too tempting. But for the moment there is nothing growing in that bed, and there won't be for a few weeks, so I've put down a temporary barrier of left-over fencing. It should flummox the cats, anyway!