Covered beds

We haven't covered any of the raised beds before, but I decided this year to cover a couple of them and see if it make a difference to what we are able to grow, particularly capsicums. The price of capsicums over winter is crazy so I want to grow lots of my own this summer and then slice and freeze them, but we haven't had much luck with them turning red while growing out in the open. I hope the greenhouse effect will help with that, as the green ones aren't as sweet.

A late potato harvest

Today is the six-month anniversary of the February earthquake. It's hard to believe we are still having significant aftershocks and the city centre is still behind a cordon while most of it is demolished or repaired. But nature doesn't care much and things will still grow where they can.
The weather has warmed up considerably since last week's snow, and it's hard to believe we had a blizzard less than a week ago. This afternoon I was off work and spent time digging potatoes from one of our raised beds, and it was so hot that I was just in jeans and a t-shirt!
The potatoes are very small apart from four or five half-decent sized ones. The plants didn't thrive last year so I'm surprised we harvested anything at all, but this recycling bin is about one-third full.

Feeling the urge to garden again

The earthquake was nearly six months ago, my mojo has returned, and our garden needs some attention again if we are going to have any harvest this year. But I am going to have to wait a little while longer before I start doing any serious work out there, as you can see in the photo!

The weather has been very mixed recently. We got a heavy dumping of snow in July right down to sea level, which is almost unheard of in this part of the world, and then got an even bigger snowstorm in the middle of August!

Here is our snow-covered vegetable garden, including my poor sad little lemon tree hiding in its portable greenhouse.

I'm still here, but so are the earthquakes

You may be thinking that I have abandoned this blog, but the sorry truth is that our garden itself has been abandoned. There has been too much going on in the rest of our lives with the repeated hammering that our poor city of Christchurch has been getting from these earthquakes. Nothing is normal in our lives right now - we have no office (although we do still have work), no shops, no cafes or bars or restaurants to go to in the city centre. The heart has been ripped out of Christchurch, and my desire to take part in activities like gardening has gone with it for the time being.
Our garden is still there but it is mostly empty beds right now. I don't plan on doing much with it until Spring rolls around again in a few months, by which time I hope things have settled down. We're still getting aftershocks every few hours at the moment following quakes of 5.7 and 6.3 on June 13th, and until those aren't such a major part of my life I'm not going to beat myself up over not doing enough around the house and garden.