I’m loving the selection of greens in my garden this time of year. There’s such an abundance, I pick some for us and some for the chook bucket every day. It gives us eggs with glorious deep yellow yolks and lots of Vitamin A.
I’ve taken lots of finger thick cuttings, using a very sharp knife to cut at an angle just below a bud. I’ve dipped the bottom of the cuttings in a bucket in which I’ve been steeping the willow cuttings – willow is a rich source of rooting hormones
I quite like deadlines – they give me a target. Without them I find that, in my busy busy life, things that are important get put aside in favour of the things that are most noisily urgent. And seasons don’t scream urgent, but they don’t wait. They are a wonderful reminder that we humans can argue all we like but nature holds trump cards. We live on a little spinning…
In the southern hemisphere, we are about to turn the corner into Spring. We are about to pass the point on the bell curve when the rate of change in day length begins increasing exponentially. The season of short days is about to end!
Fruiting planting days through until Monday, and it is such perfect garden weather – such a contrast to last weekend – that you would think the garden gods are conspiring to get me planting peas instead of spinach!
I’m a sucker for a baby plant! It’s a mistake I make over and over – resisting wasting a cute little seedling, planting too much in the early rounds and not leaving enough space for the later rounds.
Onions are strongly day-length sensitive, so you need to choose your onion variety not by your climate but by your latitude.
I try to remember the permaculture principle that a glut of anything is a feast for something, but I don’t really know that I want the population explosion in snakes that would logically follow this mouse plague. I am trying to keep my imagination focussed on lovely storybook owls feasting!
We are coming up to the winter solstice in about three weeks time, but until then the days are still getting shorter. So leafies planted now will not want to bolt, but rather wait until their lovely fine tuned endocrine sensing system tells them the days are getting longer, spring is on its way, and it is safe to set seed.
I have Oceans Eleven being enacted in my garden. I’ve got just nineteen pea seeds up so far this year! I thought it might be birds getting them before they germinated, so I put some net over the boxes in the shadehouse. But they still got got. So I moved the boxes out into one of my fortress fenced garden beds. But they still got got. So I planted all…