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.

Please excuse the missing month

I was all set to get back into gardening at the start of September, which is also the start of Spring. But before I could do anything else we got hammered by a 7.1 magnitude earthquake on September 4th 2010.

I'm not going to discuss the earthquake at length here, except to say that it was very traumatic, it put all thoughts of gardening out of my head, and a month later we are still getting powerful aftershocks.

The garden is now edging back into the picture and I did a little bit of cleanup at the weekend.

The strawberries are in bloom!

I dug compost into two of the beds in preparation for growing things. The tall bed will have potatoes and cucumbers just like it did last year, with some carrots in between (assuming they will grow well together -- I need to check my companion planting guide).

The low bed will have tomatoes and other salady things as yet undetermined. It already has pansies and another flower that didn't actually bloom last year, so I've forgotten what it is. Guess we'll find out later this season!