Our Wee Farm

Winter solstice

Hard to believe we're smack bang in the middle of winter as this year it's been really rather lovely. Lloyd and I spent most of the day in the garden yesterday ( after our usual market coffee drinking session). We bought a keffir lime so it needed planting and some other things I bought last week were waiting to go into the ground, so I got all that done, then cut the grass. It's barely growing just now as over night we've had a few really heavy frosts ( heavy for the far north of New Zealand)

We did a bit of tidying up down at the Acorn. We took out the passion fruit. It was growing like a weed. I found lots of fruit under it once we cleared it away, but it was too thick to get into when the fruit was ripe so I only managed to get about 20 from it then which was a bit disappointing. ( but as we've still got bags of pulp in the freezer from last year I'm not bothered!) It was also growing up the side of the house. I don't know what posessed me to plant it there! So it was time for it to go. We won't be passion fruitless as I planted a couple more near The Pip instead.

I just had a wander round the garden and took some photographs of what's growing now. There's actually a lot!



'The peapods are so much better than they are in the summer. It's just too hot for them, then. Ok they grow more slowly just now but they look so healthy. This was an experiment that's worked!


The spinach and beetroot are doing really well too. I assume the 'ready times' on the seed packets are for summer planting as they're taking much longer than was suggested, but that's fine.
The parsnips started off really really slowly ~ I think I may have planted them a touch too late ~ but we'll see. They look like they're growing fine now.

Not bad for the middle of winter - more like a balmy summer in Aberdeen!

There are even a lot of flowers in the garden.





And of course, it's citrus fruit time. I can't get over going into the garden to pick a mandarin/tangerine/whatever!