Clevedon Markets

 I found the contact for all that magnificent peastraw at the Clevedon Markets. These are a really chill place to go to on a Sunday morning for a bit of down time. And a nice brunch - I usually have a venison sausage in a roll, a coffee, and some really delicious home made crumpets, hot and spread with honey from the honey stall man.

And if you are small enough, you can ride a pony, lead around by an enterprising teenager. Even the excellent coffee stall is totally manned (personned?) by students.

Or just chill in the sun listening to Paul TT the local entertainer. Although the week before there was a Scottish drumming band, pretty cool too, and a bit different.

Peastraw Bales - Gardener's Gold

So, in Rumpelstiltskin, the miller boasts that his daughter can spin straw into gold. Well, no need to here - the straw IS the gold. This is a trailer load of peastraw bales, just magic for a garden, and especially magic for one with a thick layer of clay spread all over. The straw will help with breaking down the clay, improve drainage, and add nitrogen to the soil. Might also produce a crop of peas next year, who knows!?

We managed to get all these bales down the back without a ramp or stairs, by tossing them over the neighbour's fence. They are quite sturdy, you can see how people make strawbale houses.

I spaced them out a bit round the section. I had calculated that they would cover the ground by about 60mm thick, but wasn't entirely sure I was measuring the right thing. Its looking about right though.  Then I couldn't resist, and had to open a few bales and spread them out. I do need to keep them away from the builders' works though, I thought that straw in your wheel barrow path could be annoying. Or maybe just the thing to keep the sticky clay down? But anyway, I refrained, so I've got at least half still to break open and spread. 

They are very easy and satisfying to spread - you cut the binding and they just flake off in chunks from the small end - very simple to manage. It was quite windy today and I thought they might blow all over the show, but it all seems to be in place still.

Strawbales are pretty hard to find in Auckland, especially at this excellent price. I found these marvellous people at the Clevedon markets, and now they have a website Peastraw

Plants for Shade

This little strip of garden is between the new (envisaged) paving and the back of the house. Because we have had to cut a bit lower than the existing ground level just here to keep the paving mostly level, I need to make this into a small planter to protect the house foundations. 

So...a planting opportunity! This is quite a tricky area as it gets absolutely no sun for 3 or 4 months over winter. But in summer it bakes in the later afternoon sun. I have tried growing things here off and on over the years, but not with much success, so what to plant?

Well, I thought I would try with something fairly hardy like lemon balm, which the bees will love too. Mint always works. I would love to grow bergamot, but I've tried before with little success. Fuscias would work I think, and they do survive for me. Fuscias would also be good along the big retaining wall. Other things that work in shade, which I might keep up my sleeve as Plan B are nasturtium which grows as a weed for me, leafy greens, and pansies.

Varroa Free Bees to save the world

Our world's food supplies rely heavily on bees for pollination. But they are increasingly under attack from various causes, creating colony collapse disorder. But here is good news of an amazing dude who has been working hard on bees in Niue since 1999. That's 16 years, so patience is often required when working with nature, as this guy must know.

Check out the article Creating a Global Bee Sanctuary.

DIY Retaining walls

The builders have arrived. Yippee! DIY is all well and good for many things, even hard and boring things like schlepping clay from here to there and then to over somewhere else. Even if it takes months. But for things like retaining walls, and big deep holes for the concrete footings, and nails and sawing and such, then it is time to pay a professional.

It was colder than the arctic today, but there were 2 burly men (women would have been good too) out from dawn to dusk (literally, as it was the shortest day last Sunday), heaving a big post hole holer around. Didn't look like something that I would have enjoyed doing and I am really pleased to be watching. Only.

Vintage Glass Bottles

Every where we dug on my backyard, we uncovered old bottles, and bits of glass, and broken crockery. Even some unbroken stuff. I've saved the best and planted them in front of the hebe hedge. Although I rather wish I had saved more, even broken crockery could look good. I think the digger managed to smash quite a bit though, some of the breaks look pretty recent.

This blue bottle, above, is a beautiful shade of glass. Some of the little bottles in the front are interesting shapes, maybe they were medicine bottles?  I think these are really vintage, not just slightly old. If they were there before the old retaining wall was built, that would make them more than 96 years old.

The little white object here above, is a candlestick holder I think. It has blue markings.

Another possibility is that they are from the drinking days of my house. For a number of years my house was a speakeasy, an illegal drinking house. This was back in the day when NZ had prohibition, so people had to sneak into houses for a drink. Or something like that. There was another speakeasy down the other end of my street, which had until recently, still got the barred grill over the front door. My house had a big bar, complete with coasters on the walls, in the lounge when I bought it.

And just for a really funny twist, my house was also owned by the Salvation Army for 40 years. Not for old men with drinking problems though, which would be very ironic, but for the Auckland commander.

Dawn

"When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love."-  Marcus Aurelius  

Planting Fruit Trees

So here are my first 2 fruit trees planted. This one is a grafted plum with 3 varieties on it, Black Doris, Omega and Santa Rosa, so it will fertilise itself. I dug a couple of huge holes, half filled it with compost, added sheep pellets and watered it all, then plonked the tree in and filled with more compost. Each hole used about a bag and a half of compost. This top hole was in the clay, but half way down I hit the original ground and top soil.

And this one is a Black Boy peach. Peaches don't do so well in Auckland, too humid I think, but I've been told that black boy is OK. My Grandma used to have a huge black peach tree, and I loved them, but she was allergic to them, so never ate them. This hole is in the bank below where the clay mountain was, and is deep into a lovely pile of composty mulch that was buried by the clay.

Now, the only real problem that I have is I just googled 'planting fruit trees distance apart', and par for the course, I have planned them all about 3 times too close. So if I could just stretch the boundaries of my section a bit.....

How to make a path in 3 easy steps

And in 5 minutes....

1. Tramp up and down for a few weeks, creating a flat place.
2. Buy some bags of bark.
3. Pour out bark on flattish area.

Or in this case, half a path. So step 2 should read: Buy twice as much bark....

Rosehips and the last roses of summer

Not much to say about this one, the picture says it all. Those rose hips, so lush and shiny and pregnant with possibility.

And the roses, still going in winter..

Tapestry Cushions

Projects Finished and Unfinished: While I was decluttering the cupboards the other day, I found my cushions. I had been searching high and low for them. One was awaiting washing, and one had been attacked by moths (the pink lady). And both had damage to the back covers. So I've chopped the backs off, pulled out the stuffing, and given them a good wash. The braid around the edge has got a bit chomped too.

So now I need to stitch over the moth holes, buy some more braid and remember how I put that on, and find something more robust for the backing. Last time I used some leftover thai silk, in a beautiful blue. But maybe denim is going to be more suitable?

And I also have this one which I have stitched, but it has been sitting around for, oh say, a few years, waiting for me to get to the edging and backing. Its about twice the size of the other 2.

And, of course, there is always one on the go. Sometimes these projects take me years, I'll do a bit, or a lot, then move on to something else for a while, come back to it all in a year or 3. No rush after all, its all meant to be fun, no household ever ground to a halt through lack of cushions....

These are all Jennifer Pudney designs too.

How to grow Kowhai from Seed

My kowhai tree is beginning to set seed. All those lovely flowers from spring have morphed into long ribbons of hard-encased seed pods. I'll wait until they start falling off naturally, then collect a few and have a go at germinating them.

But I found this:

http://www.doc.govt.nz/documents/getting-involved/in-your-community/volunteer-programme/otago/how-to-grow-kowhai.pdf

Which would imply that it is not easy. Or quick. And it looks like spring is better than right now at the beginning of winter. I'll just have to admire the silhouette of the seeds against the winter sky for a bit longer. 

Nature has a rhythm, we just need to listen.

Feildays

Its Feildays week. Feildays is the big rural fair of the year for all of NZ. So if you are a city girl like moi, and you feel like a taste of country life, then this is the place to visit. Pack your gumboots and rain coat, be prepared to feast on pies and chips, and admire the plethora of farmery type things for sale.

Whoever knew that there were so many machines in existence even. Tractors and diggers and harvesters and utes and trucks. And untold strange machines to do things to animals, and land. Quite a wonder, all of it.

They had tractor pull races, all probably terribly serious, with rules and times and records and all. It seemed to be BYO tractor too, just imagine! all those tractors toddling down the highway on their way to Feildays. When I was watching a female farmer won, go feminism!

I was looking for a trailer, but alas, there only seemed to be gung-ho type trailers for farmery things, not small city girl trailers, so I'll have to move to plan B. Eventually, don't need to rush into these things.

Mail Order NZ native plants

You can buy anything online these days! This is my first time buying plants, but it worked out really well. So I ordered 35 plants, 23 hebes all the same - Wiri Image, which is a purple flower and medium size, so about 1m high I think. And 12 pratia angulata, which is a NZ native ground cover, with little white flowers. And 35 seems a magic number because you can have 5x7 fitting neatly in a box.

The hebes are going to make a low hedge around the back and front of the Harmony Garden, and the pratia are in between. If they don't spread very fast I'll have a go at propagating them, which is by division. Or so the book says, we shall see.

I've put them quite close, but it looks miles apart because they are little plants. Its always a balance, how far apart to plant when they are new, and how to allow for the end size. And I always seem to err on the 'jam them in close to each other' end of the spectrum. Still, a hedge is meant to be close, right?

What to do to bees in winter

I got to be bee girl today! And I didn't get stung! Although all the bees were quite quiet and sleepy, as it was quite cold, and they are mostly settling in for the winter, ready to seal up their hives and bee-hibernate. Even the dog wasn't so wary, and came up round the hives.

Some of the hives were being attacked by wasps though, so we went out to deal with that, by restricting their entrances, so the bees had more chance to fight off the intruder wasps. Here you can see that the bees have got a whole lot more interested in us and what we were doing, they all came rushing out to defend their hive, perfectly proper bee behaviour.  Normally in summer, there would be crowds of them like this anyway, just going about their foraging business.

These hives have all got a feeder in them, the black box hole to the left. This contains sugar syrup and helps with those hives that don't have enough honey reserves to see them through winter.

Strength of Character

I feel this plant deserves a medal. Barren clay all around for miles, but here it is, still standing where nothing else will.

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” – Albert Camus

How to make a ramp safe

Ramp ingenuity: It has rained so much lately that our ramp access to the backyard has become impassable. If you take even one step off the board walk you end up deep in the mud and squelch, and stuck. Gumboots definitely not going anywhere. The boards were the first step, to try and extend the range into the garden without getting your feet glued down.

But with the water still on the ramp it was like a slide. So we have nailed a piece of plastic garden mesh down the ramp - I found this lurking around, I think it held up beans in a former life. I suspect that after a wheel barrow has been up and down a few times, it will not have another reincarnation.

And it is working really well too, after the rain lets up. We had a couple of dry days and managed to wheel some more of the pile of top soil down without any OSH style mishaps (occupational health and safety - which would actually be OHS then wouldn't it?)

Growing Vegetables in Winter

Growing vegetables in winter is not always such a great idea. Here are my lettuces that I planted a while back. Its been raining a lot, but its not really cold yet, so the ground is lovely and wet for the snails and slugs to crawl over, feasting on everything they enjoy.

Not everything is suffering though, here are the 'weeds' that have colonised alongside the retaining wall. So, just in this patch I can see dandelion, and nasturtium, and puha.

And here in the foreground, some tomato plants, from the neighbours plants that hung over the fence at the end of summer.

And after all, a weed is really just a plant that grows well. I'm not quite sure how much I am going to embrace all this growth though.

Spring Buds

Signs of spring already! I'm always so excited when the first blossom trees flower in late winter, it feels like the winter is over and summer will be here any minute. Well, we are nowhere near there yet, and I don't have any blossom trees, but before the blossoms comes the winter flowering plants. This beautiful furry bud is on my stellata magnolia. It has beautiful flowers in late winter, but the buds are even better, just so soft.

And the bay tree is budding up too. I can't remember when this flowers, but it looks like it will be soonish.

What NZ native plants flower in winter?

This tecomanthe speciosa is a NZ native climber, and in winter it has the most luscious huge flowers, hanging down under the leaves and hiding. They look like they ought to have a rich heavenly scent, but have no smell at all. These photos are from underneath, definitely worth the effort to bend down and peer up though.

Tapestry for Kids, big and small.

It was raining the other day, so I got to work on some of the lifetime's accumulated junk and decluttered a bit.  And I discovered these...old tapestry projects of the kids, that they have grown out of. But not me, I'll never be too old for this.

We've got several finished ones of these on the walls already. I think I'll buy some cheap frames, get a couple of test pots of paint and paint them up, then they can go in the gallery of others.

The crafty dog and dreaming cat are Jennifer Pudney designs, a particular favourite of mine.

Winter Fecundity

The persimmons are almost finished, just a few left for the birds. Although, as we are in quarantine at the moment, for the Queensland fruit fly, I can't give away any of this fruit to anyone who is not also in 'zone'.

The persimmon leaves are all turning red, will be just beautiful in a couple of weeks I expect.

And the oranges! A totally bounteous crop! The best ever. Both these trees have been sprayed weekly by MPI for the fruit fly, so technically no longer organic. Thems the breaks....