Blood & Bone

Harvest Time

Well it turns out Courgettes grow crazy fast. We just got back from a week in Karamea and suddenly there are courgettes everywhere ready to be eaten! 

We popped down and picked the ones that looked ready to eat and ended up with almost a whole bucket full! It really is a very satisfying feeling heading home with a bucket load of home grown produce.

Pretty amazing to think that it was over a year ago that I had the idea to do something on this big old plot of land and now I’m about to go and eat our first veges! 

Fortunately we have a really good courgette fritter recipe - we going to be eating these for weeks!

Water Catchment

We made a pretty cool rain water catchment system today that I think will work pretty well. We wanted to make liquid manure for our pumpkin plants (apparently they get very hungry when growing those huge tasty pumpkins!) but we didn’t want to waste water from the tap. So we came up with this really ugly but pretty effective system to store water in this barrel. 

In hind sight we should have set it up with the sign facing down wards so it was quite so ugly!

UPDATE: Popped down two days later and the barrel is already a quater full. Good times. Sadly it still looks as ugly as it did on the weekend.

Growth!

Things have become pretty busy lately but just thought I’d upload a quick pick of how things are looking. We’ve planted corn, potatoes and courgettes, rhubarb and pumpkins and all of them are growing like crazy! We grew the corn and courgette plants from seed which has been pretty cool watching them come up and now be fully grown plants. We were also pretty lucky to get some people who live across the road from us to grow a tray of seedlings too so they’ll be sharing in the goodness come harvest time. 

A while back we struck a deal with some lovely people (David and Sue) who neighbour the garden to use a tap on there property for watering. We now have a fancy electronic timer set up to water the garden automatically twice a day. If it rains we just pop down and turn it off. Pretty easy really. 

So mostly things are in maintenance mode until it comes time to eat - can’t wait.

Barking Mad

Man that was a bad pun. I should get a job reading the news.

Well today was pretty sweet for a lot of reasons. First off Jolyon got us an amazing deal on loads of bark. A tree felling place had some excess bark which we managed to get delivered to the community garden so, without even lifting a finger, we were ready to start spreading the bark around. 

Secondly some really cool cats (Matt and Kelly) who live in the old bowling club rooms chipped in a for a couple of hours to get the job finished. It was great to have some help and Matt said that he’s keen to set up a Chicken coop on the section too! Pretty cool. 

Lastly we managed to get the whole garden totally covered in bark and it actually almosts looks profesional! Good times all round really.

The Weirdness of Death & Why We Are Not Really Cut Out For Neighbourliness Sometimes

I was walking down to the water the garden today and passed by a women who lives around the corner washing her car. We politely said hello and I continued on my way. On the way back she called out asking if I knew anyone who would like to buy the car. I said I couldn’t think of anyone off hand but would ask around. How much did she want for it? $1800 apparently which I thought was a bit steep given the age and condition. Apparently it’s a very nice ‘tourer’. I’m not totally sure what that is. 

I was told that the car had belonged to her husband who had died. I sensed it was a recent thing and said something along the lines of, “I’m really sorry to hear that”.  To which she replied with a quite a lot of emotion in a voice, “it’s very hard”. 

I really felt for her in that moment. The emotion was so raw and intense, but I wasn’t really sure how to react. And it struck me that I never know how to react in these situations. In an awful way I almost felt angry that she was dropping all this on me. We are so conditioned to keep everything hidden and put up a brave face all the time that it’s almost an affront when someone drops their guard for a second. 

I wish it wouldn’t have been really weird to go and give her a hug, or invite her round for a cup of tea some time, and I wish I didn’t care that it would be weird. Instead I just repeated my platitude about being sorry, nodded that it must indeed be hard and wished her a good day as I turned and left. 

I often spout all this stuff about wanting to be a ‘good neighbour’ but today helped me remember that it’s not all dropping off free spuds for Christmas or spreading bark around over a bottle of JB. Sometimes being a good neighbour means actually being there for people, not as a lack-lustre gardener, but as another human being who is willing to take a few minutes to feel someone’s pain and not shy away. 

Looking around our neighbourhood we are all locked in our silos, bathed in the glow of plasma TV’s or cocooned in the fogginess of a stiff drink. This neighbourhood needs more than just veges! It needs people to relax, open up, talk to each other, help out when the going gets tough and celebrate the good stuff when it happens. It needs a total revolution…

Might just stick to the low key gardening…

Rhubarb & Spuds!

Today is a very excting day. It’s the first day we actually planted something in the garden. So far it’s all been preparation stuff but today we’re putting real life plants in the ground that will hopefully feed us over summer! 

First up into the ground was rhubarb. Anna’s mum had a lot of the stuff around so we dug two old tyres into the ground to keep the soil warm and then planted the rhubarb in the middle. Apparently when it’s growing rhubarb needs around a bucket of water every day! 

Then it was time for the spuds. We’ve chosen to plant spuds because they are good for the soil long term and are obviously a bit of a staple in the kiwi diet. We first created three rows by pushing the soil up into mounds on either side of where the spuds would go. Then we placed the seed potatoes about 25cm apart in the trough’s between the rows. The last step is simply to cover the over (but not very deep) and wait for them to sprout. As they grow we’ll keep covering them up with the soil beside the rows and hopefully we’ll have a bumper crop of potatoes in time for Christmas!

We were pretty lucky this weekend to have Jolyon’s brother staying with us. Jared is an organic farming certifier and has heaps of great ideas and tricks to help farmers (and lowly community gardeners) grow great produce organically. Hopefully he’ll be back with some more advice too!