Savings

Leo single-handedly harvested our dried beans we'd saved for seed the other evening. With intent concentration in every line of his little body (oh those capable little baby boy fingers!), he tried out different ways of opening the pods, plucking beans and dropping them into his bowl. Then we had belly laughs when we blew away the chaff.

From. Our. Own. Patch.

We are so excited!

We have harvested the very first potatoes that we grew our very own selves!!

They are a variety called pink fir apples, and are best when boiled or steamed. Yummy, knobbly, slightly pink, and best of all: the kids ate loads and asked for more!

We are grateful to have a harvest at all. At first, it seemed that our spuds were not going to work out. We tried growing them in tyres, starting out with one soil-filled tyre, and adding more tyres full of soil/mulch as the plants grew, as suggested in various permaculture/organic gardening books we know and love...but they didn't work so well. The potato plants died off before they could flower, and seemed to rot, stem and all. I did some web research to see if we were having our very own Irish Potato Famine, but no, something went inexplicably wrong with our spuds.

So, we decided to just dismantle the tyre towers and grub through to see whether there was anything in there. And lo! We found some spuds! There wasn't the bumper crop that the tyre-growing potato contingent had spruiked, but there was a modest bucketful. Enough to get us and the kids excited, anyway.

Sprung!

Hi there.

So we were minding our own business, being chilly, wiping winter lurgy drips from our noses, complaining about the weather and how dark it was in the morning/evening/anytime, envying overseas friends who are in the throes of summer; also known as wishing our lives away.


Then one day, it wasn't. Chilly, that is. I actually had to take off the scarf that I think was starting to somehow become part of my neck, and lo! We looked out the window, to find that Spring had Sprung!

The evidence is everywhere: The blossom is out next to the woodpile.

The broad beans in our vegie patch have suddenly started to grow before our eyes, and turn to follow the sun each day.

The bare-rooted strawberries have only been in the ground 4 days, and yet! Leaves!


They even beat the raspberries that we put in a week ago:


We're hoping the kale is too small to attract the notice of possums, though some snails and slugs have already succumbed to a beery trap:

All this greenness and new shoot-ness has inspired MrWildflower to use his holidays to create another vegie patch. Just because. (and also, I am not busy enough while he's at work. I need another thing that needs looking after. I do, I tell you. Be quiet, of course I'm grateful.)

Aerial view of said vegie patch construction. Particulars: no-dig, terraced as we're on a hill, whacking great stump in the middle for...trellis attachment? seating? sacrifices to the vegie gods? who knows! Note also that all paths planned for ease of working in the vegie patch have been forgotten in the excitement of construction. Much scratching of heads ensued.

The dog is now worn out from all the attention and outdoor plays the good weather has afforded him.