Early winter jobs

Another beautiful sunny winter day. Where do you start? All the garden needs attention. I pulled some grassy weeds and planted some garlic at last. I make sure the beds have well rotted manure or compost and I space the garlic about 20cm apart. Consider growing your own garlic it's so easy you just have to keep the weeds down. Who'd want to buy supermarket garlic that's been sprayed to prevent botrytis, suppress weeds and then at harvest to stop it sprouting. Worse still it the Chinese garlic, recognise it in the supermarket by the roots being totally removed. Just imagine what they do to it before it's allowed to be imported. This time of year I lime my soil and add as much compost as I can lay my hands on. It's alot of work on my own so the long term plan still includes providing some accomidation for WWOOFers. Standing on the compost heap to view the winter veges.



I'm often heard saying I wish I had a wwoofer to .......I figure even though we only live on a small section we can offer a great stay to organic minded visitors. We have a good selection of fruit trees and animals and a collection of medicinal herbs, we are close to some of NZ's best spots and Motueka our town, is nestled between the mountains and the sea. I reckon hosting people from different cultures would be a valuable lesson for the kids and never having traveled myself it would be a good start to broardening my own horisons. Although I must say visiting all my favorite blogs is great, I know more about the contryside and culture in England, Canada and the States than I ever did. I love checking in on the every day lives of the bloggers. I updated my links be sure to check them out.

Look at the late sunflower hiding from the frost.

Jobs this week include planting more garlic, weeding, cleaning the chook house, and hopefully I'll get into the shadehose to sort the plants. I've planted out some asparagus corms that I grew from seed, it will be an experiment to see if they survive the transplant so young in the cold, wet weather to come. I got the strawberry bed sorted too, it was over-run with clover and buttercup from the horse poo I put on last year. L helped me to make a worm farm I filled the bottom with horse and rabbit poo and introduced some tiger worms from the compost heap with some apple cores to eat. Underneath is a bucket to collect the worm juice. Sounds delicious! I was quite pleased with the idea of having it by the back door so the kids can drop in their apple cores and banana skins but it might get a little smelly in summer. Anyway hopefully the worms I put in today will make lots of babies and make lovely vermiculture for the spring seedlings. Also if you've got a warmer garden you can sow peas and broard beans and probably little onion seedlings. They'd just freeze in the soil here as the frost will stay on the ground all day soon. The winter veges are well established and I'm optimistic we'll have enough brassicas leeks, lettuce and celery to get us through to spring.