Strawberries

Yum, picked fresh from the garden, tasting sumptuous, enough for dessert for us all. Large!! Loving this time of year

White wisteria

Gracing our covered verandah. Growing strong, flowering well. I just love it. Looks like summer snow.

Reverse bricking

For those of you who are crafters', have you heard the term "reverse stitching"? There is no "unpicking" in my world, it is all stitching no matter what the direction.

The path and garden beds slowly being constructed

Well the landscape gardening we are doing has suffered from some "reverse bricking". I have been teaching myself to be a brickie (I will never make any money from it as a profession as it takes me over an hour to do about 16 bricks!!). Anyway, I have been merrily bricking the surrounds to the new garden bed. (sometimes not so merrily). While Aaron was in Australia for work I thought I would crack on with it.

Just a little fix to do after the reverse bricking.

Sigh, when he came back he pointed out the some of the brick was in the wrong place. So out with the chisel and we peeled away four bricks and there is only one hole to fill, which will be easy.

We have also redesigned the path, so part of the first section of bricking I ever did is going to have to come under the chisel for a bit of "reverse bricking". I got very frustrated with pulling down what took so much effort to put up. But hey - the altered layout will be heaps better.

There seems to be a lot going on here.

I don't know about you but my home life seems to be like my craft life at the moment. A rather large number of projects on the go and nothing actually being completed. When they finally do it will all look amazing!!

And on top of this we still have to get carpet in the hall and bedroom and finish painting everything in the lounge.

Firewood being chopped and a grumpy Jakob stacking it.

A new woodsheet being built - The most solid ever.

A new garden and paths being marked out. Do you see the paint lines?

Eli getting stuck into making Donna Hay easy muffins.

The muffins out of the oven - red currant as the fruit.

Yummy muffins - from Donna Hay T.V programme

Into a bowl sieve together:

2.5 cups of self raising flour

1 tsp Baking powder

1 cup caster sugar

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients. Into the well put

1/2 cup vegetable oil

3/4 cup milk 

1 egg

mix the wet together in the bowl to ensure the egg is beaten and then mix all together. The mixture is quite stiff.

Add whatever fruit you want. 300g fresh or frozen fruit. Put into muffin tins (put the mixture over 12 muffin tins) and sprinkle the top with granulated sugar. 

Bake at 180 deg C for 30-35 minutes until the top is crunchy.

I link to these places.

What is in the Trug for dinner tonight.

Carrots, rainbow beet, zucchini, broccoli florets, butter beans, french beans - add a little bit of fresh ginger and some thin thin slices of meat and we will be having a lovely spicy stir fry on rice (mixture of brown and white). I think the tomatoes will just be snacked on.

DIY in my DNA

NOT!!! But today I have been trying out my DIY again. I am pretty happy with the result. I cut, measured, sawed, sledge hammered and nail hammered. As a result I have a pretty square netting support. It is in an L shape along the fence.

 This will have bird netting over it in the summer to protect the red, black and white currents nestling under it. No more pegs and cloth getting caught up in the bushes.

This is my best DIY yet. Another job which I have procrastinated for about 5 months but really only took an hour.

I am pleased but the whole time I had Aaron telling me, that is not right, don't use the hammer that way..... aye aye aye....I told him to go away as I do believe that I have done as good a job as he would have!

I link to these places.

Am I crazy??

Removed the rotten edging from this bed

Why is it that I always do massive garden reconstructions in the worst weather? It is almost that I have bad weather and realise that it would be sensible to stay indoors but that means I am just itching to get outside.

Today I was going to get on with all my quilt and UFO organisation. BUT instead I have had the sledgehammer out and pulled one garden bed to bits and am redoing the glasshouse.

A month ago Aaron told me that he would like to see the rather ramshackle garden beds looking a bit better. I have a wee pile of bricks so am going to make a brick bed. But sigh, he will not let me take over any more lawn so I have pulled apart a bed that was falling to bits.  I think he is a brave man telling me to brick. Goodness knows how that will turn out!!!!!

Cleared out the glasshouse

So today I pulled the bed to bits - I will put the chickens in it over the next couple of weeks. I used some of the edging that had not rotted and some edging from another bed Aaron has been demolishing and directed it to the glasshouse.

I am trying to make more of a walkway that will not have all the dirt slide onto it over the summer and it will also allow me to build up the beds.

All of this on a day that there are severe rain warnings out and I swear I thought it would snow!!!

I link to these places

Cleared out these beds, planted spring onion and garlic

My rather solid new edging to my glasshouse path

Dirty hands and a hole in the garden

Over the weekend Aaron and I tried to catch up on all the jobs around the garden that just don't get done in the summer because of all our camping.

mulching like mad

Well my arms ached, my legs ached (and so did my butt - it felt like it should be really tight and small!! Why does it not look like it feels?). Anyway, I worked madly trying to mulch all the clippings and layer my compost with the pig poo from my sister (see her blog gardening in Amberley). Then on Sunday I mowed the lawn to add to that layering.

The hole and the stubborn stump

The dirt on my hands were a good representation of the hard work.

Aaron spent Saturday trying to dig out an old stump. Man did he work hard!! But the stump is still there. At one point I tried to help him I leant on the crow bar and heaved but all I ended up doing was falling on the end of the crowbar and smashing into my best zuchini (courgette) to absolute pieces. (I think some of my aches are from that as man it hurt all along my chest where I fell on the bar). But the stump is still there and all that happened was Aaron could hardly move as it really agrivated his back.

My sister wrote a poem once about my mothers' hands. 

Ellerslie Flower Show

NZ in flowers

Devonshire tea in the Dilmah tent. Very smart and nice

Well Aaron and I went to Ellerslie on Friday. I won tickets - big yahoo and yippeee. I get the NZ Gardener weekly email called Get
Growing and for $10 you get a VIP section with competitions etc. And I won (yes I know I said that - but I was very excited)

Loved this colour combination

So we went. The gardens were spectacular. The recycled and upcycled gardens so appealed to me. There was one that was made from old kitchen benches and drawers and pallets. Oh the pallet use was amazing. I wanted to zoom back to work and pull the two pallets out of the skip. But where would I put them???

What was disappointing was the size. It was about 1/2 the size of the first show we went to in 2010 which was amazing. The food tent was non existent, they said that the food area was set up as a farmers market look with straw bales etc, but there were only 8 stalls - yes 8!

Amazing garden with Moa sculpture

So I enjoyed it, some was amazing, but we were home by 1.30pm. I am so pleased that I had not paid the $42 entry but actually won tickets.

In the recycled garden

   

Great upcycling of old movie theatre seats

Pallet vege garden, look at the use of old kitchens and drawers

A buzzy bee flower garden - fantastic

Early Morning

Well it is only 8am and we have all had breakfast and the boys have gone. They are off Tramping up Mt Oxford with one of Aaron's workmates. This is very early for us on a Saturday morning. Pancakes in their tummies to keep them going and off they went.

This tramp has many memories for Aaron and I. We met while tramping into Lake Daniels. A week later Aaron called me at work to say that he was going tramping up Mt Oxford and do I want to go. Only it all went very wrong. He asked for Karen when he got the switchboard and they put him through to a different Karen! 15 years older, no interest in tramping at all. He had a very bemusing conversation with her. Fortunately Karen realised that it could be me, as though we worked in different areas and on different floors, I had talked to her in the staff cafeteria. She rang me and asked if I knew a Aaron who was into tramping. We laughed quite a lot when she told me of the conversation. It all ended well as I rang Aaron back and explained it all. If it had not been for Karen realising it was me he wanted, we may never have gotten together, as he thought I (as in the other Karen) was putting him off and not very interested.

The tramp we did was great, though for the last 50 metres I ran out of steam and Aaron pulled me up. His story is always that he pulled me up 500 vertical metres!!!! Anyway we now know that my inability to keep the steam going up hills was due to my heart. In spite of that I have done extensive tramping and just used to take going uphill more slowly. Unfortunately now I can't even go up a flight of stairs without it getting to much. So the boys are off without me.

The second picture is all the seed sewing that I did yesterday - spring fever hit. I also put some pea seeds directly into the garden. So we will wait and see if I am just too ambitious for the weather.

Gardening experimentation

I have just had a failed experiment and started a new one!. I hate brussel sprouts, icky, yucky. But my husband loves them. So I thought I would be really good and grow some for him this year. Four have already gone by the way of the chooks for extra fodder as they just were not growing where they were. Two looked like they were doing the right thing. But all of a sudden they have starting running to seed as the weather turned dramatically warm overnight. We went from winter to summer in a couple of days.
I have taken a photo of the only one worth while and that is after I have plucked off all the sprouts that had "sprouted" to seed. It is PATHETIC. I think they know that I do not like them???

The new experiment is making watering container for tomatoes. As we go away a lot in the warmer weather the glasshouse often dries out and hence the tomatoes get affected. I am trying a trick I have seen in other places. If you put a bottle into the ground as deep as it can go then you water the roots rather than water landing on leaves and risking rust etc. So I tried the first one today with a little bottle and think I will continue. The idea is the roots will go down deeper as the water is down deep which means it should not get so badly affected with the odd "dry out".

Add caption

 1. Get a plastic drink bottle and punch holes in the bottle cap. I punched 5 holes in but think next time it would be 3 as the water drained through quickly

 2. Chop the bottom of the bottle, make sure the cap is screwed on well

 3. Push down into the ground so that about an inch of the bottle is above the surface of the soil. Hopefully watch those tomatoes grow!!

Linking up here

A new strawberry bed

I have reclaimed the last bit of lawn that I am allowed. But all in a good cause - a new strawberry bed. I had forgotten how much hard work it is to dig up turf, do edging etc. This garden is 100% eco friendly, recycled and upcycled. The bricks are from various chimneys that came down in the earthquakes, The edges of the paths were from tiles already in the garden and just used in a better format. Then I dug out some of the chook pen and put all the lovely stuff on top of a pile of shredding I had done. Added some compost with loads of worms. A leftover 1.5 metres of weed matting from another job and viola a bed ready for a scrummy strawberry summer. (not to say sore bottom muscles from all the digging and brick moving.)

I still have to finish digging up the bed behind the strawberry patch, but at least it's edging is in too and as it will be a potato patch it is too early anyway.

The chooks are super happy as they have a new lawn for their run. I love the way they recycle things for me.

I have run out of compost

It has been a lovely winter day in Kaiapoi for a spot of gardening. I started setting the vegetable garden up for the winter about a month ago. As usual I have not finished. So I attempted to get it done today. BUT - I ran out of compost. So 2/3 of the garden has compost, sawdust, blood and bone and lime. The rest has some green crops growing and some just missed out completely.
Anyway, about a month ago I cleared out the glasshouse and let the chooks have a good rummage around for a couple of days. Then I composted, sawdusted, watered, etc. I thought it best to give it a bit of time to rest (read into that - I ran out of steam and got distracted by other things). So today I planted out the bok choy that I seeded a couple of months ago and some cauliflower and broccoli plants I had been nurturing for quite a while.

They should all be eaten by the time I need to think of spring and summer vege. Yummy. Last year the cauliflowers I grew in the glasshouse were enormous and the best I have ever had. So I have great expectations for this crop.

Tidying the vege garden for winter

Trying to use my panorama option on my camera. Have to get a bit better at the matching up bits!!

We have been having better weather for autumn than we did in summer. The winter growth on the brassica's is a bit stringy because of it. Today I acknowledged that winter is on the way and started getting into the vege garden to compost and feed the winter over plants, finish doing my cover crops and punnet up seedlings etc for my sisters new 20 acre property.

The garden is a bit daunting at this time when there is so much to do but small bites of 1 1/2 hours makes a significant difference. Soon I will have to look at the flower garden and trees but at the moment I am just thinking of food!!!!

Seed Collecting Time

rainbow beet, eating pea, bulb fennel, sweet pea, kurly kale

Yes it is autumn in the garden and I am either collecting the seed from the plants that I left in for that purpose (or bemoaning forgetting to leave a plant in and realising I will have to buy seed!!!), sewing green crops and generally not doing too much work but eating the harvest.