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!

Our first raised bed

Here's the first raised bed. It's made with fence palings screwed together, about six inches high, four feet deep, and five feet wide (approximate measurements), and filled with compost, peat moss, and vermiculite. Underneath the soil mix is a layer of weed mat to keep the grass and weeds at bay. Hope it works!

This bed is destined for flowers, which is why it's in the front garden rather than the veggie garden. It's in the gap between the chicken run and the garage. After being in the house nearly a year, I think there's nothing much going to come up in that area that I'll miss. The only thing apart from grass that grows there is a whole lot of Solomon's Seal, which I don't particularly like anyway. It'll be interesting to see if the weed mat can keep that particular plant at bay - the roots seem to be all over the place under the grass.

The bed needs to be topped up with compost and have a grid made on it (with string or wood laths or whatever else comes to hand), and then I'll be ready to start planting things out as soon as the weather warms up enough. Oh, and I need to wrap some chicken wire around it to keep our three little birds on the outside rather than scratching up the inside!

How many beds?

How many raised beds should we have? Our back garden is fairly spacious, maybe 7 metres wide by six metres deep, with a 1 x 4m chunk taken out of it for the compost pile. We also have a large front garden with a lot of bed space, but the beds are fairly irregular and have trees and shrubs here and there, so I don't think that will work for large containers. Having said that, there is one patch of bare grass beside the chicken coop which would fit a 2m x 1m bed and allow plenty of sunlight at the plants.

This is the layout that I'm currently considering for the back garden. Each 2m x 1m bed will be divided up into nine 33cm squares, allowing for 18 different plantings per bed.

The bottom edges of beds 2, 3, and 5 will have trellises to support tall plants (most likely tomatoes) and allow them to get sunlight without shading the rest of the bed.

Beds 1 and 4 will be partially shaded for most of the day, because of the tall fence and trees which belong to our neighbour. I expect we can put something like lettuces in there and protect them from the worst heat of the summer.

How to build our containers?

There is a garden centre down the street from us selling lovely pre-made wooden containers, two metres long and one metre deep, and about 50cm high. They come apart for storage and easily slot together once the garden is ready for them. They cost $129 each, but for the convenience and neat appearance I think we should get a couple. My husband thinks we can make our own but I think they'll just end up looking slightly crap (like the "compost heap" I can see through the window right now, which is a pile of dead leaves surrounded by decrepit pallets and rotting sections of picket fence). I'd much rather pay for something that looks like a professional put it together!

Having said that, Mel's book says that for all but the long root vegetables a six inch depth of soil is all that's required, so those pre-made containers are deeper than we need for most of the garden. Mitre10 sell fence palings for $5 each which could easily be nailed together to make a low container, but they're also treated and I don't know what they've been treated with. It wouldn't be good to have chemicals leaching into the soil, then into the vegetables, then into our mouths. I've emailed Mitre10 to ask them how the wood is treated, so we'll wait and see what (if anything) they come back with.

Planning ahead

Here in New Zealand it is the middle of winter, which makes it difficult for me to actually do any gardening, but I sure can dream.

A few days ago I purchased a copy of Mel Bartholomew's book, Square Foot Gardening. This is THE reference book for those who are interested in the square foot approach, since Mel was the man who invented it (or at least polished and packaged it into something anybody can follow). Having taken note of the recipe for the soil he recommends for filling the containers (one third vermiculite, one third peat moss, one third compost), I set out to find some suppliers. The only place that I could find nearby selling vermiculite had it at $69 per 100 litre bag. Ouch! Luckily I managed to track down a supplier just outside town, Egmont Commercial, who will also sell to the public. Their 100 litre bags of vermiculite worked out at about $33 each, which is considerably cheaper. I also picked up a large bale of peat moss (about $27 for 150l) and a roll of weed mat.

The garden is far too wet and cold to start building any container beds yet, but I can gradually buy everything I need and then we'll be ready to go in a couple of months.

Welcome to Grid Gardening

So here's the thing. I live in Christchurch, New Zealand, and I want to try Square Foot Gardening, but we use the metric system here. No square feet for me! But I'm going to use the same concepts anyway and just convert my grid to slightly different measurements :)

The concepts of Square Foot Gardening are simple:

• build above-ground containers
• fill them with a special soil mix
• create a grid on top, breaking each container into one-foot-square mini plots
• fill each mini plot with as many plants as it can support

Sounds simple, doesn't it?