The Garden Share Collective - September

  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 to Strayed from the Table to check out all the others.

Sorry I missed everyone last month, I was over in Scotland visiting family and friends for 4 weeks. I loved it, but I did miss the garden.


I'm going to refer back to the last post - HERE and update on that.
It's still winter and hasn't been that cold, but oh boy! it's been wet. We have well draining volcanic soil here, but even that has turned all boggy. It's saturated, and not at all fun.

The Greenhouse
The most exciting thing I want to start with is that I actually have tomatoes in the greenhouse!! Green ones, but the experiment for winter tomatoes is sort of working. What I've learned from this is that I definitely need to plant them way earlier next year if I want to have tomatoes to eat over winter! I'm thinking they need to go in around May (?) so it will be an experiment again next year, but I hope I get the timing a little better.

The chillies have all been harvested, and cut right back. Again, as this is the first full year with a greenhouse, we just hope they all come back again and don't die. I have high hopes, though as until last week there were still red chillies on them.

I am looking for a bit of advice. I've noticed that some of the chilli plants have some black pesty things on them. What do people use in the small space of a greenhouse as pest control?


The Veggie garden
So, the fabby compost that I was given - not so fabby. It obviously didn't get hot enough to kill the seeds in it, so now, where I put the compost is slowly but steadily turning into lawn. I need to get weeding pretty much immediately, as it's getting warmer now and soon it will go crazy. I'm really disappointed. I've worked so hard getting my veggie beds in good condition, the last thing I need is a gazillion weeds.

'A Heartbreaking work of Staggering Genius'

The peapods are about 8ft tall and have pods on them. Another couple of weeks and I'll be noshing them. However, these were really planted to save a lot of the peas for planting. Often it's difficult to find Alderman peas to buy. So I do it this way.

The globe artichokes have done amazingly well.  They are gigantic. Still no sign of any artichokes yet, though.

The rest of the beds are still sitting pretty much empty - as was my plan.

But!!!! the first of the asparagus is poking through. This bed is only three years old and I have been nurturing it like it was a baby. Look how big and strong these look. I have a feeling it might be a bumper year!

And, got mint!

But,  there's not a huge amount happening in there right now, however soon it will be a hive of activity.

Quite a lot of marigolds. I always have marigolds in the veggie garden. They're a very good way of keeping aphids at bay. A great example of companion planting

The rest of the garden...
We did have half the grassy part of the garden fenced off. It's working amazingly.  It's given us another 2 acres of grazing for the alpacas which is ACE!  It's put that part to much better use. Before I used to have to mow it. Now the mowing takes almost 1 hr10 minutes less time to do and uses a lot less petrol. whew!

 And an added bonus, we can see Rachel and all the Alpacas from the french doors in the kitchen. Bliss.  You can see it's still very much winter. No leaves on the trees yet.

We planted a few trees. A Weeping willow in the nursery paddock for some shade. It'll take a couple of years to get big enough. Also 2 wedding cake trees, in the garden. These are really beautiful when fully grown. (But don't look like much now!)

The daffodils have been and (almost) gone.

The citrus orchard has been a goldmine of fruit this year. It always is. There's going to be some lemon curd made this week.

We have some lovely huge hands of bananas almost ready to be picked off the trees and taken to our deck to ripen.  They don't ripen on the tree. If you look closely, to the left of this hand, and slightly lower, is a brown blob? This is a hand of bananas that we left on the tree a wee bit too long and rats ate it. They've been a terrible problem this year. Despite us having three cats.

And speaking of cats.. this is Kopi. And this is pretty much all she does!

And my lovely chickens? Laying up a storm. We always get eggs all winter (I've got just over 20 chickens) we get around 4 or 5 eggs a day right through winter. Over the last month it's upped to 14 a day. Brilliant, especially considering 6 of my chickens are 7 years old! Time to get my 'eggs for sale' sign back out. 

Plans for the next month
The next month is where I have to work really hard making wee paper pots, and getting my seeds planted so that they are ready to go out into the veggie garden later. This is my first time of having the greenhouse to get them all ready in - so it would be fair to say I'm really excited about it this year!

I'll be planting
Sweetcorn, lots of it and various ones
Tomatoes - heirlooms - a real mix.
Aubergines/Eggplants
Courgette
Luffah ( if I can find any seeds - no luck yet)
lettuces
rocket
peas
cavalo nero/black kale
spring onions
various beans
silverbeet/rainbow chard
beetroot ( for Lloyd)



I've found over the years, that this is what we eat. often I've grown other bits and bobs, but this is all our favourite things. BUT! If anyone feels like we're missing out on something fab, I'd love to hear from you.

There is also a very full herb garden.

So, that's my main to do job. But there will also be all the jobs that need doing ALL THE TIME. Mowing, weeding, trimming, pruning.
My main weeding job is the 2 beds round the house - the front one is gorgeous with camellias and gardenias and some hibiscus, but it also has Oxalis ( this really should have a skull and crossbones after it! evil stuff!) it is the bane of my life, along with convolvulus which we also have in a corner of the garden. 2 things I loathe!  Also got 3 dwarf frangipanes to take out. They're not dwarf and they never flower. They're just taking over the beds in a mass of green bushiness.

And the mowing - nightmare, as our mower broke down last week when I was just about to start mowing. We haven't got it back yet and the grass is now the longest it's ever been. This makes me anxious. I'm a bit of a neat freak and I hate it like this, so here's hoping the mower is fixed soon, or I may have to go and sook up to our lovely neighbours and borrow theirs.

Still, the bees are out in force and this makes me smile

I shall leave everyone with this thought - I noticed we've all being talking a lot about seeds. I have a bazillion seeds. I'm putting it out there, but what do folk think about a seed swap? Obviously we'd have to be careful to follow our countries rules on this. I know NZ is a big NO NO for sending seeds to but we could do it within our own countries??

Roland's Wood

We kept hearing good things about this place. Roland's wood is an area of land that was donated to Kerikeri, years ago, by a lovely man, who was a dog lover. When he passed away he left it as a place where people could walk their dogs, freely. Anyone can go there!

The Rotary Club took it on and have done wonderful things with it. There's been a lot of planting and path making and maintenance.

Up until recently we've always taken our dogs to the beach. They adore the beach, but with Bob Dog having arthritis now it's not the best place for him. He forgets he has a sore hip and gets so excited, running into the water, doing sort of dolphin leaps! He always ends up coming home limping and suffers for a few days.

We thought we'd give Rolands Wood a go. And oh how I wish we'd gone yonks ago! It is an amazing place, and the dogs adored it.  It looks particularly lovely just now, as all the magnolias are flowering. In a few more weeks the bluebells will be out.

This is sort of the area of the wood  - it doesn't go back as far as the photo though!!

Shall we go this way?

Or this way?  Brodie and Lulah were on a mission to explore every inch of the woods!

Brodie is one very happy boy.

 Lulah smelling the daffodils as she runs by.

She's pretty well camouflaged in all the leaves. 

Swimming! She is SUCH a waterbaby.

Bob belted around the place having a total ball. Hard to believe he'll be 10 in a couple of weeks.

Poor Lloyd was on Poo Bag duty!

See, stunning!

Super delighted dogs.

There's an amazing amount of flowers out just now

Tired but happy, doodles. Except Lulah, who looks very sad to be leaving.

My favourite pic of the day - Bob in the magnolias.

Sainsbury's raspberry macarons - a mix!

Long term readers will know about my love hate relationship with macarons!
When I was over at mum and dads, mum and I were shopping in Sainburys and mum found this...

 A ready mix kit for macarons. All you need to do is add 2 whipped up egg whites. I thought it would be a bit of a laugh to try - and having checked out the ingredients there was nothing blerk in the packet, so I thought, why not. ( the packet got rather bashed in the long haul flight!)

 I followed the instructions, all very easy. Then piped out some circles. It was looking good so far.

But, as has been the norm recently, it all went horribly wrong in the oven! The cooking instructions were very different to what I've done in the past, so I thought it might work. Put them into a cold oven and turn to 50c - for 20 mins, then turn up to 150c and cook for a further 15 minutes.

 This is what happened!!! Now, to be fair, I did pipe out larger circles cos I only have one baking tray! So they would take a bit longer to cook. But they all cracked and in some of them the middle sort of oozed out of the shell! No feet either.


However! They do taste really lovely. Very almondy and raspberry. But not overly sweet. I think if I lived in the Uk and had a Sainsburys near by I would definitely give them another go.

But, I think the time may have come for me to knock these on the head! I'm probably going to stick to cupcakes!

We've been home for a week...

and it's just flown!
When we've been away for a while I always feel that it takes a few days to "claim the house back!" So, I've been doing a lot of hoovering - Bob is shedding even more crazily than usual - a bit of baking, a lot of gardening ( when it's not raining) and mammoth loads of washing!
I did manage to fit in a couple of lovely winter dives with Dan though. Winter dives can really be gorgeous ( if colder!)

It was one of those stunning mornings, that start off incredibly misty, then as the sun warms up the mist burns off and you're left with amazing blue skies.  You can see the last of the mist just burning off in the valley. 

Once we got out in the bay it was almost even more lovely. The water was actually calm, flat and almost glassy. While we were zooming out to the dive site I thought, probably for the millionth time, how lucky we are to live in such an amazing place.

At the end of the day I came home with a lovely, big cray fish. Definitely not the best pic of me, I was tired and had been diving all day, but I'm well happy!!  Roll on next dive.

 So I celebrated with a cup of Earl Grey. One of my lovely friends in Scotland, Stephanie. She knows how much I love old china, so she gave me this trio set and Lloyd one too. We've been using them every day, they're just so beautiful, and I'm sure tea tastes nicer out of a china teacup!

We're home!

It feels like ages since I wrote anything. We've done so much! Our trip back to the Uk was totally excellent. Lloyd had a lovely time with his family and friends, then he headed up to Scotland to spend a bit of time with my lot.

Mum and dad had a brilliant golden wedding celebration. The weather was so hot. The uk was having the best heatwave ever.

I'll just post a whole load of pics! (In no order) they're a sort of overview of everything..

 North East coast of Scotland, near a small fishing village called Gourdon. My school friend and her hubby own an amazing restaurant there, right on the front. Best fish and chips. It's called Hornblowers - so anyone, if you're ever up the east coast you have to go!!

Aberdeen - and the whole of the uk were having the best summer ever. Aberdeen even reached 28 degrees while we were there. very unusual. The beach actually had people on it!! Here's Lloyd and I doing a selfie. Lloyd even went in for a paddle.

 Mum and Dad's Golden wedding anniversary party went very well. This is them cutting their cake. It was lovely to see my brother, cousins and Uncle and aunty. Don't get to see any of them much so it was brilliant.

 There were barley ( I think) fields all up the coast. They looked incredible. I was so glad to get some pics of them before they were all harvested.

 And yes, I did drag my skates over. I had asked the lovely folk at Granite City Rollers if I could go and train with them and they were so incredibly welcoming. The training was so hard. I thought I was going to pass out at one point! I also NSO'd for them (non skating official) and I learned to score which was ace.

I made some vanilla, gold themed cupcakes for mum and dad - not for the party, but there were a lot of people round at the house at various times, so they went down a treat.

 My uncle had this huge banner made! Mum and dad loved it!!

 Clouds - yep I took about 100 photos of clouds when we were flying. We did a LOT of flying. It takes a long, long time to get to the north of Scotland from New Zealand. An awful long time.

 Ah jet lag is a wonderful thing. I took this photo of Aberdeen beach at 4am. It doesn't get completely dark up in Aberdeen in mid summer. I had jet lag for almost the whole trip. I even went to Tesco at 3.30am!! that was interesting and definitely a good time to go shopping if you want to avoid the crowds!

 One of the many lunches! This is my Mum, my Dad and Lloyd!

Aberdeen is right on the coast, there are millions of these...everywhere!

 Lloyd really did go in for a wee dip at the beach. He's very brave!

 lovely North Sea

 More amazing barley fields. It got a bit stormy sometimes in the late afternoon. I think because it was so hot and humid during the day, there were some spectacular thunder and lightning storms at night. 

 

On our last night in Scotland we went to Jamie Oliver's Italian restaurant. It was fab. Really great food and a very cool atmosphere. We'd heard mixed reviews, but we really wanted to go. And we weren't disappointed at all. It was so, so good.

  Next stop - Langkawi. We had 2 nights and sort of three days here. We had hoped to get a bit of sun, but in actual fact it rained and thunder and lightninged the whole time we were there. But we didn't mind at all. We slept a lot, and used room service! We went for a walk as well. It does mean that we seem to have escaped jet lag on the way home...I think.

 There were 2 of these right outside our window, for ages, eating the berries on the palm. It's a Hornbill of some sort.

Then it was time to fly home. We got home last night. It was so good to see the dogs and get loads of cuddles. As I type this, Lulah is lying on the sofa behind me, resting her head on my back. She's lovely and warm.

So, we had an amazing time away. It's lovely to be home as well, though.