Feast

Whilst we've been feasting on frittata, it seems that some of our neighbours prefer a raw food diet. 

I picked about two dozen caterpillars off our red cabbage and curly kale last night, including a chrysalis or two. I knocked off as many eggs as possible too. Hopefully that will give the plants a head start for a week or so.   

Nursery spider on manuka

Dragonfly

This beast took a break on our downpipe recently - it was easily as big as a sparrow - gigantic!

Harvest

After just three weeks, our first crops are ready to be harvested. 

I'd voted the silver beet seedlings 'least likely to succeed' but remarkably they're the first to be productive. 

We're now looking forward to fresh greens with mint and feta for dinner. 

Kitchen creations

I've been busy cooking over the last few months. I made my own mincemeat for the first time with cranberries and orange peel. I learnt how to sterilise the jars in the oven and it has kept well.

Chocolate bark was another festive success though Lark's teachers didn't thank me for this gift at the start of term when it compromised their New Year's resolutions...

I've been experimenting with cake decorating too - using a crocheted doily to make a pattern with icing sugar on a Somerset cider cake. (If you try this, do it just before you're ready to serve the cake otherwise the icing sugar is absorbed and you can't see the pattern - it took me three attempts!)

I attempted a buttermilk glaze for this plantation prune cake but it didn't really work - tasty but lumpy - so I covered it up with more icing sugar! The cake itself was popular at one of our gardening group gatherings.

I've been doing some more preserving with grapefruit cordial, using the remaining fruit from our tree...

... and pickled cucumbers (though I didn't serve them together).

Next, I think I'll try some more adventurous bread-baking - maybe rolls or hot cross buns in time for Easter...

House plants

I've been busy gardening inside as well as out. Lark and I have been busy propagating all these babies from our spider plant to provide more ground cover in some of the borders. 

And my chilli plant has been flowering well after being cut right back over winter - but no signs of chillis yet. Does it need food, perhaps?

Te Whare o Te Weta

Over the holidays, I built a bug hotel at Playcentre from recycled material gathered from kindly neighbours. 

I've named it Te Whare o Te Weta - the house of the weta, in Te Reo Maori.

After that, I felt the need to construct something at home so I started this pile of logs and pine cones under some ferns. Once I've built up my collection of pallets again, I'll start on something more substantial but this should provide some temporary lodgings.

Native bush

The native border on the edge of the lawn is coming along well. The plants have grown fatter and taller and we even had a flower on one of the native iris.

The border has benefited from some weeding by my parents and the out-laws and a bit of mulch has been added. My father also built a barrier from wattle tree logs which will prevent the mulch from washing away down the valley as it did over last winter.

I've taken out a privet or two which were crowding out a pink-flowered kanuka tree and purchased some ground-cover which you can see at the front of this picture. I also picked up two dwarf kowhai to attract tui and provide some colour.  

Unfortunately we have even more weeds to pull out now that I know that these grasses are invasive pampas rather than the native toetoe. The two plants are hard for an amateur like me to distinguish and I had hoped they were toetoe but suspected they weren't. When they flowered in January, I knew that they were weeds. We'll add them to the kill list along with wattles, privet and tobacco trees.

Complications in the compost heap

I've been diligently contributing to my compost heap for the last 4.5 years but not taking any of the compost out. And now that I have a vegetable garden ready and waiting for compost, I've found that it's not really fit for purpose. The heap is being invaded by kikuyu grass and convolvulus and I've never turned it as it's been too tricky to take it to pieces and get stuck in. Worse still, the wood is rotting after being eaten - devoured - by wood lice. 

So I've dismantled one of  the heaps and salvaged a few of the planks to make a temporary three-sided heap which I'll be able to turn more easily. So far the chickens haven't scattered the waste too far. 

I've been looking around for ideas for a more permanent construction and think that something like this might work - five pallets upcycled to create two bays. The front panel is made from a board which can be easily removed for turning the compost and then using it. 

And I'll be borrowing the pest-proofing technique from this design... 

Elders and Berries

This was my haul from the garden last weekend. Hydrangea heads for an arrangement for a party, three eggs, a dozen apples from our young tree and a few teaspoons full of elderberries - just enough to flavour an apple crumble. 

I was interested to find that the berries in the shade were ripening faster than the berries high up in the sunshine. I can't begin to explain that.

The tree was covered in sap-sucking passion vine hoppers which I'm sure are the reason for the meagre harvest.

We should have more success in future now that this young elder tree has been planted by the chicken coop. I hope the chickens will eat the bugs and not the berries and we'll have sufficient blooms for elderflower champagne.

Love is...

...building enormous raised beds...

Completed over the course of several Christmas holidays, these are our enormous raised beds, now containing 10 cubic metres of weed-free garden mix and a range of vegetable seedlings, herbs and fruit bushes.

We've used windproofing cloth to provide a pest-proof fence. It should keep the rabbits, peacocks and hens away and we can add fruit netting over the top to keep the birds out as required. 

On the left, there is silverbeet then curly kale. The middle row contains spring onions and red cabbage. And on the right hand side, it's celery and then dwarf beans. 

All the vegetable seedlings seem to have doubled or tripled in size in the fortnight since they were planted. They wilted severely by the time evening came around for the first few days but now they stand up proud, eagerly awaiting their evening watering.

I'm particularly intrigued by the red cabbage and can hardly wait to see how they transform from spindly plants into great big dense purple globes. 

In the other bed, I've planted low maintenance Mediterranean herbs - purple sage, pizza thyme, garlic chive - so that I don't need to water so often. The irrigation system is a work in progress. There's a row of sprouting garlic cloves to the right of the herbs, only one month late, and then globe artichoke, guava, blueberry, loganberry and blackcurrants beyond.

I suspect that my raised beds won't ever look as good as they do now. But I still hope that one day they look as attractive and productive as the edible section at the Botanical Gardens...

Art in the Garden

I think that one of the ways to add more interest to our garden, without lots of digging, is to install some garden art. When I visited the Kaipara Sculpture Gardens recently, I found some lovely examples, all beyond our budget! So I'll be looking out for ways of re-creating some of the pieces using found, junk and natural objects. 

I'll be hunting down an old teapot and bowl to make a birdbath like the one above...

And some piles of stones or wood could look almost as good as the cairn above...

The wire and bead creations above look like they'd be fun to make. And the nest below was made from a hanging basket with twigs and concrete eggs in it - very easy...

This is what I've managed so far... A wreath ($1 from the hospice shop) with feathers from the moulting peacocks. I thought it was pretty good for a first attempt and I have great plans for future garlands - using rosemary for one and the heads of giant sedge for another. Watch this space! 

Roses amongst thorns

One area of our friends' garden is a mix of prize-winning roses, palms and succulents. They love the roses and seem to have mixed feelings about their spikier companions. 

In contrast, I don't mind roses but love the tropical succulents.

Our front border now features a mix of both. The old rose has been the subject of several vicious prunings and has bounced back each time. It was cut back to a few inches above the ground last winter but is now twice the size that it was in these pictures which were taken at the end of last year. It's leggy and totally without flowers. Maybe it needs more food... 

The succulents that my father planted when he dug out this bed are unquestionably thriving. The weedmat and mulch have done a good job of keeping out intruders and there is obvious growth amongst the new plants. And not a single one has been attacked by chickens! The bromeliads were damaged by a peacock but I hope that they'll survive. And the agaves which have been in this border through thick and thin (and renovations) have some lovely big pups beneath them now. 

I hope to create similar borders below the house and the shed. There are some natives below the shed (flax and nikau) and one lonely canna lily after my other bromeliads and iris fell victim to a pukeko or possum. I think that some more exotic plants would look good - maybe a strelitzia and some red hot pokers. 

Below the house, there's some good ground cover in the form of rosemary and native grasses but my father added some interest along the driveway with more succulents and miniature palms - some of which are even producing offspring. Driftwood and rocks have kept the chickens from scratching out the new plants and large logs in their old dustbaths have forced them to look elsewhere for their ablutions. 

Hydrangea Avenue

One of the features that I'd like in my garden is a long avenue of hydrangeas around the back of the house, just like my grandparents had. There are a few bushes there already and my father planted a few new one from cuttings that a friend gave me. But I'm going to need a few more before it looks as stunning as the one that we saw at the Kaipara Sculpture Garden...

Grand Designs

I have decided that I need a plan. A grand plan for our garden. Unfortunately I'm struggling a little bit because we already have a gorgeous landscaped garden - parklike, the estate agents would say. Rolling lawns, mature trees and a few borders already planted out with shrubs. 

It looks lovely (if a little parched right now) but it holds no surprises. You take it all in with one sweeping glance and a tour of the garden consists of a ramble around looking at a handful of interesting plants. I'd much rather have one of those gardens where every corner offers a new aspect, a new experience. 

I know what I'd like to include in the garden - lots of natives, lots of edibles and some colourful exotics which will thrive in the Auckland climate. But I don't quite know how to achieve it. Particularly when I factor in a lack of time and a lack of inclination to do any serious digging in the hard clay soils that predominate. 

So I took some books out of the library to get some inspiration... 

And I visited the garden of some friends...

...and admired their different areas of beautiful plants and flowers...

...and I'm finally beginning to get a few clues as to how to proceed. I've even made some progress thanks to the strong arms and green fingers of my parents and my out-laws... Look out for updates through the coming year to see how my plan is taking shape.