Horse poo

I promised everyone who visited our garden this season regular updates, but I forgot. Recently I wanted to send someone a photo of our garden in mid-summer glory, but I realised I don't have any photos of the garden in summer.
Nevertheless I will try here to give a garden update, with photos of dead tomato and courgette-plants.

Dead tomato plants overgrown with Nasturtium

The last tomato harvest

Dead courgette plants with last courgettes waiting to become soup

In the beginning, before we even knew if and if so which house we would buy, we started collecting plants for our future garden. By the time we moved, we quickly filled the vege beds, and then the crazy hot, sunny and dry summer began.

I tried to keep on top of the tomatoes, but every time we were away for a week of fieldwork or holiday, the tomatoes developed more and more side-shoots, so that by January the 7 plants had morphed into 1 big jungle of tomatoes, and tomatoes appeared everywhere, even when the actual plant was meters away.

A number of pumpkin plants had spontaneously appeared and we let them grow but they took over literally the whole garden, and by the time I started to try and eliminate some of them, we could already harvest 4 big pumpkins. There were pumpkins everywhere, except for in the tomato-area because the tomatoes themselves were growing so densely. 

Some of the pumpkins

Brussel sprouts, that I thought would be broccoli

We harvested grapes for weeks, made juice, jelly, and overfed the chickens (they liked the grapes a bit too much…not great for chickens' digestion).

We had pears and peaches at the same time all requiring immediate processing, and at that time I cursed the garden a bit because it was just too much work, but now it is lovely to have preserved pears and peaches with breakfast.

Then came 3 tree loads of apples, luckily they are keeping quite well in the shed so we have an ongoing apple supply.

Even the figs ripened recently, leading to fig jam, figs in brandy, figs in port wine, a delicious desert of figs in a syrup of caramel and port wine, and an overjoyed Mediterranean friend who ate through a whole bag.

The last big thing now are feijoas, a South American fruit very popular here in NZ. We have 5 bushes and have been eating feijoas as snack, in muesli, in Strudel, in chutney, as salad and in chicken. The overload feels a bit like the zucchinis but the feijoas are less tiresome, and a good trade item.

Because today we traded feijoas for rotten horse poo. Sounds like a weird trade, but the rotten horse poo is very good fertilizer. Our colleague Chris took a monstrous cauliflower on the first fieldtrip of the season, explaining he had started using the rotten horse poo from 15 years accumulation. We were ca. 6 people on that fieldtrip for 10 days and couldn't finish that 1 cauliflower. 

Shovelling horse poo

vege beds with horse poo

So today we used work's trailer again and went to Chris' place to shovel in some horse poo. And then back home to shovel it out onto the vege beds. After a summer full of digging soil pits, we were physically well prepared for this job, and also to dig some new holes to relocate 4 berry bushes. Always a sure sign of being a soil scientist is when you dig a hole for a berry bush in your own garden and happily yell out to your soil scientist partner “I reached the B horizon!”.

The berry-bush B horizon

The new berry area

Our supermarket New World ran a tv advertisement in spring for when they were giving away their “Little Gardens” vege seeds. In the ad, people get their Little Gardens from New World, they grow their plants, and start harvesting their own veges. At the end they had a shot of the Fruit& Veg area of a New World supermarket in summer, empty of customers because they all grew their own. And that is in fact what happened in our case, although not all our fruit & veges came from Little Gardens, but we hardly ever bought anything over the whole summer other than bananas and mushrooms. Last week we had a meal that consisted almost 100% of stuff from our garden (eggs, potatoes, lettuce, tomatoes, herbs, lemon juice, fruit for dessert). And that feels really good!

So next season I'll try to keep track of the garden's progress a bit more, depending on how many trips we'll make and how much time is spent on skinning peaches… 

Chickens are starting to look much better, actually growing feathers