The Garden Share Collective ~ June

It's almost June already? How on earth did that happen?

So, there's not a whole lot going on in my garden just now.
Here's what there is...

The broad beans are growing incredibly fast. They've only been in for 6 weeks. Can't wait to get some beans - yummy.

My sweetpeas are coming along nicely. I'm hoping for some beautiful flowers this spring.

The lavender is flowering and is attracting lovely bees to the veggie garden. I just planted it in there this summer. I really like having flowers in the veggie garden.

And the bumper avocado crop. I am SO excited about this. Even more exciting is that there is a new market starting up in the town near us. We're hoping that we can sell a mixture of things - like Lloyds Chilli Sauce (he booked a day in a commercial kitchen last week and made about 12 litres), his book, and perhaps some avocados.

The globe artichokes are on to their 4th crop! each time we hack them down to ground level they zoom right up again and produce more! Amazing.

I don't think I've posted about our lemongrass before? well, it got a bit dried out and meh last year, so I hacked it right back to ground level  ( i seem to have been doing a lot of ground level hacking!) and cleared out the dead and dry bits. Gave it a bit of a feed with alpaca poop and voilá, lovely lemongrass again. We use it a lot in the kitchen. Often just using it as a skewer for chicken - the flavour is amazing.

Greenhouse tomatoes still producing well. One of the sub arctic plenty plants from last year is still producing. I gave it a good prune and lots of feeding. I've never had a tomato go on for so long.

Citrus season is in full swing. Which means lots of baking of lovely lemony things!

Olives - another thing I've never mentioned before! We had a wee cottage put on the farm a good few years ago, now. We use it for friends and family when they come to stay, but it's also rented out as a holiday let. We planted the garden from scratch at the time. Not having a lot of money, we pretty much bought trees that were on special! Some turned out beautifully and some not so well. Not that they were horrible or anything but one was a silk oak, that grew to over 30m in about 4 years. It sadly, had to come down as it was simply in the wrong place.  Having volcanic soil here,  everything just grows so fast. We did, however, plant a olive tree. It is laden. The branches are bending with the weight of the fruit, but unfortunately we have no idea what kind of olives they are. We're guessing they're for pressing as they are small. Can anyone help with the identification??

and finally...lovely autumn Acers.

So, that's it from me this month. 

Please go and have a look at all the other amazing gardens in the Garden Share Collective. This is the brain child of Lizzie from Strayed from the Table. 

The Garden Share Collective ~ May

We're well into Autumn now, but it doesn't feel like it. We're still having lots of lovely weather with a little rain mixed in. Perfect.

And something rather odd is happening in the veggie garden! My asparagus, which has a season from around October to December has, all of a sudden, started popping up now! We're getting new spears by the day. it's ace, we're feasting on fresh asparagus dipped into poached eggs. Yum. It'll be interesting to see if the crop is as good again in September, or if this strange happening will affect it. But for now, we're just making the most of it.

There are also dwarf butterbeans coming up. I didn't plant them! They self seeded from the summer crop. They were actually a huge disappointment to me - I thought that they were, what we know as, butter beans in the Uk, just a dwarf version!  But no - they're what I think if as string beans. Meh. But Lloyd likes them.

Our bananas are ready - Lloyd took this hand off a few days ago, so that it could ripen on the outside table. I'll maybe make a banana cake this afternoon. As I've said before, I'm not a huge fan of bananas, but I can just about handle them in a cake.

I did!! Here's a Hummingbird Cake. It was absolutely gigantic - and lovely!

 I planted some sweetpeas, broad beans and parsnips.
The sweet peas and the beans have popped up and are doing great.

Sadly, Kopi, our wee ginger cat, loves the veggie garden. It's her domain. However when it's cleared 

(like it is now) she seems to think it's her Loo! And her favourite place to dig is where I planted the parsnips. They appear to 'be no more'. I think she may have flung them out! That's why there is a bamboo cane lengthways in the beans photo. They were going the same way, so I put canes down to stop her digging. Wish I'd thought of it sooner. 

Here she is coming to say 'hi' after some veggie garden trashing.

 I'm still babyminding all the monarch caterpillars. I have so many this year that they have almost completely denuded all my swan plants.  I've been decanting some over to my friend! But I've had huge success, lots and lots of butterflies have hatched.

Here's three stages ~ the caterpillar forms a J when it's ready to go into a chrysalis. Then the chrysalis forms, and over the course of days it turns from black to transparent and the butterfly hatches. In the final photo you can see the red of the wings showing through. When they hatch they pump up their wings and sit for a good while before they fly off. During this time if you put your hand down the butterfly will happily crawl onto it and stay there for ages, testing its wings. It's amazing.

In the Greenhouse, the tomatoes are still producing and so are the chillies. Lloyd picked a huge amount of chillies this morning.

These will be turned into chilli sauce ( with the other 8-10 kg that are in the freezer!) He's going to book time in a commercial kitchen in Kerikeri to do this as we've heard on the grapevine that a new market is starting in KK. So he can perhaps sell it there.

Elsewhere around the garden we have all sorts going on. The strawberry guavas are ready. We have these to attract native birds and my  chickens love them, but I know that some people make jam. 

The roses are still blooming.

And self seeded ~ rogue ~ tomatoes that popped up around the place are actually producing fruit! This plant is beside the spa near the palms! The birds were eating my tomatoes this year, which was a bit of a pain, but we're benefitting now because they must have pooed seeds out all over the place!

And hedge update - as you can see, it's coming along nicely. It's a bit of a faff as I need to prune it little and very often while it's getting to the size we want it - but it's looking ok.

And last but not least....autumn colours. 

The Garden Share Collective is the brain child of Lizzie from Strayed from the Table. There are a group of bloggers from all over the place who chat about what is going on in their gardens, with hints and tips. Pop over and check out all the others. 

The Garden Share Collective - April

I have to say, I am loving these Garden Share Collective posts. They give me a monthly calendar of the veggie garden. I've just been looking back over them and it's very cool to see what it all looks like month to month!

So, April...

The main thing this time is the veggie garden. It was well past its best. Lloyd and I have just spent a couple of hours totally clearing it.

BEFORE
Loads of dead stuff, pumpkins and squash all over the place. Just general mayhem!

AFTER
Now that it's clear, I can get my head round what I'm going to plant and where. I don't work well in chaos. I need order!

A few more before and afters. Pumpkins growing all over the asparagus ferns ( which really needed cutting down)

Nice clear beds, and the pumpkin haul. Not too bad from only one crown pumpkin plant and one butternut squash.

I'm really pleased with these. I only bunged them in because I had a spare bed and didn't want to waste it.

So that was a hard graft, but it feels good to have got it done. We are enjoying an Indian Summer in Northland in NZ so we have to make the most of it.

In the greenhouse
I am still getting hundreds of tomatoes. One of the plants I planted last autumn is STILL producing tomatoes! It's the wonder plant!

These cherry tomatoes are so sweet. (Sweet 100)

There are chillies coming out of our ears. We've got about 5kg of them in the freezer. Lloyd does a stockpile then makes a gigantic batch of chilli sauce when we've picked them all.

Theres some more basil in there and a few tomato seedlings to go in as well.

This month - PLANTING
I don't do a lot of winter veggies. But this year I am going to do broad beans - always do these, and some parsnips.
I just planted a load of sweetpea seeds.

Also will collect a huge trailer load of alpaca and horse poop - put it on some of the beds -  definitely the asparagus bed - then cover with a thick layer of hay. By spring it will have mulched right down and will make a weedfree ( almost! ) bed with lovely top soil!

HARVESTING
Tomatoes, potatoes ( Agria and Maori) loads of herbs, chillies, the luffahs, globe artichokes, passion fruit, feijoas, figs, bananas, spring onions...


In the rest of the garden...
we've got flowers all over the place

Brugmansia like a detura !

Castor oil plant flowers

My swan plants are still bearing up under the onslaught of monarch caterpillars. This year has been great, so many of them have hatched! It's so cool!

This month the alpacas were all injected with their boosters, drenched, toenails trimmed and the ones that have genetic dermatitis got their cream put on. We don't do all this ourselves. The lovely Keenan from Waiheke Alpacas comes and does it - I run around like a daftie trying to catch them and generally making a fool of myself. This year one of the girls spat in my eye! That wasn't fun!

Oh and remember the elderberries from last month?  Well, I did make something from them. I made 2 batches of elderberry elixir - its lovely!

Today was a good day and incredibly productive. I also cleaned out all the chicken houses and put new bedding in them.

                                                                   ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Garden Share Collective is the brain child of Lizzie from Strayed from the Table. There are a group of bloggers from all over the place who chat about what is going on in their gardens, with hints and tips. Pop over and check out all the others.

Cyclone Lusi

I love a good storm. I don't want it to hurt anyone or cause damage, but I love listening to the wind and rain, love the wildness of it all. So when we were told that Cyclone Lusi was heading our way I took all the usual precautions - went all round the place making sure nothing could blow away, moving various bits of outside and deck furniture. Stocking up on water in case of a power cut etc. Then waited... and waited... and waited!

I know! New Zealand is a tiny country, and where we live is very narrow so it's difficult for the forecasters to really be sure of exactly what will happen, but at our place all we had were some gusty winds and rain. Not even torrential rain.

But as you can see, it was expected to be huge! We are right near the top of the North Island at the bottom of the very narrow bit ( more or less!)

So, against all warnings, I went off in the jeep with my trusty camera and searched out anything I could find that was storm related! I drove over to the coast, to Paihia, and oh wow, poor old Paihia was getting the brunt of it all. It was high tide and the sea was going crazy.

This is the road along the front. Usually Paihia is lovely and calm, I swim here a lot. There is no sea wall or anything like that, cos there really hasn't been a need for one!
However it seems like half the beach was washed onto the road. It was worse further along.

The usual flat waters round the beach, the boat area and the beach cafe.

More beach on the road further along the front. There were numerous fire engines here pumping out water from various places.

This wee dinghy broke its mooring right in front of me. It started bobbing along in the sea.

Very difficult to show the scale of these waves, but take my word for it, they were huge!

As far as I know, this yacht survived! It was well tied on!

And today it's al over. Rain has stopped and the sun is trying to come out.

Usually Paihia looks like this..