The first compost pile of the season, and it’s a good one. It’s a lasagna pile with nice thin layers, with mulch from the Mulch Mountain every second layer.
Azolla is a really valuable plant. It’s a rampant native waterweed, that is symbiotic with a nitrogen fixing bacteria, so, like legumes, it is capable of harvesting nitrogen out of the air and putting it into a form that plants can use as a fertilizer.
Everything has lined up beautifully for a planting day today – no bottlenecks for once. I have old compost and creek sand for seed raising and potting mixes, seeds and seedlings for planting, a new bed just vacated by the chooks ready to plant into and mulch to mulch up the spaces in the old beds, a barrel of old seaweed brew, a dam full of water, a lovely cool,…
I like mowing. It’s just hard enough work for me to feel entirely justified ignoring the gym. A few kilometres of power walking, a bit of aerobic exercise pushing it uphill, a bit of weight training emptying the bag, a bit of stretching and flexing. The perfect workout.
There is a reason that Greek salads have no lettuce. Greece has a Mediterranean climate – cool wet winters and hot dry summers, and lettuce and hot dry summers don’t mix.
Jackie is sitting on 9 eggs. At least we think there are nine. Patrick and Trevor get very upset if we try to go near her. Geese are supposed to be monogamous (or at least “in an open relationship”) for life, but maybe because we have two girls and three boys, both Patrick and Trevor seem to have decided it’s a modern family.
A neighbour is killing a couple of their free range male ducks today, and putting on a duck stone casserole dinner. Stone casserole is another…
When I am away from my garden, it is the herbs I miss most. If I only had pots to garden in, the top dozen plants on the priority list would all be herbs. There are just so many recipes that depend on fresh herbs to move food from fuel to experience, and it is so difficult and expensive to buy fresh herbs. And dried herbs just don’t do it…
Plants know. Well, mostly they know. They do get it wrong, but a lot of years of evolution have gone into picking the change of season. Despite the cold snap we’ve been going through, this morning my garden reckons Spring has truly sprung here.
Leafy planting days today and tomorrow. The trick with leafies this time of year is to think about sex.