First the unavoidable, the schoolwork. We managed to finish up all our themes from last year and so will be starting a new theme when we start up again later in January. We will be doing the Sea and Sky Theme, from WinterPromise. It will be on science and history of the sea and sky. We like these programs as they give us a lot of choices in how we learn and provide us with lots of good books and  fun activities. Although sadly this may be the last year we use them, depending on what new programs they bring out.

On the craft front, I probably spend way too much time in front of my sewing machine, but I did achieve several quilts, some gifts and started on the gift bags, that we want ot be using from now on.

We have enough chickens at the moment, so we are not planning anymore chicks this year. Maybe next year, but we will see. They have started to get out of the orchard so we will have to upgrade the fencing quite a bit to keep them all where they are suppose to be, before they start finding the garden.

And on the subject of gardening, now that I have put the sewing machine away for a while, I am finally starting to tidy up the weeds. Production is down, due to my own neglect, but it is also picking up as well. I really like the whole chicken dome idea, and it seems to be working quite well.

The kikuya is a bit more of an issue, as the chickens managed to kill it off, but did not dig the roots up at all, so that is something that I will have to work on for some time yet.

They left us with a lovely cleared, fertilised and mulched area that was all ready for planting.

These photos were taken at the beginning of spring and shows the gardens just starting out.

This was the first circle planted, and many of the plants are due for replacement. In saying that, it provided us with fresh peas and salad greens for christmas, and is now producing cherry tomatoes beetroot, and some very beautiful cabbages right now.  I have just added some more tomatoes and spring onions but will put more in over the next couple of weeks.

This was the next circle, we have had an almost endless supply of pumpkin plants out of it, which is not so bad since most of my seeds failed to germinate this year. The pumpkins have mostly been transplanted, and I have lots of tomato plants going crazy in there. We have a few green tomatoes on them, but mostly they are just starting to flower.

We have had several meals of broccoli, and there is celery hiding under the broccoli leaves. I seems to like it under there and is doing very well. We are already eating the outer stalks while the plant is continuing  to keep us supplied with celery. The lettuces again need replacing (will probably happen today) as they are all going to seed with the hot weather.

This poor circle has sat neglected for all this time. I didn’t even get around to putting the edging on it. Yesterday I planted some bean seeds, and I have some more started in trays to go in here. I also have some more broccoli plants and well as few other things that are waiting to go in. Good to start getting some production going in here.

On a more positive note, I did get around to planting corn on the other side of the house, and it is doing really well.

It is just starting to form its top flowers so I am looking forward to getting lots of corn of it this summer.

The sheep are still here, they were shorn again at the end of last year and are running in the orchard out of the way. I haven’t decided if I will do lambs this year or not, that will have to be decided closer to march when the ram goes out.

The cows have consumed the most time this year, and also have brought us lots of pleasure and some sadness.

Liquorice is still at the neighbours after being weaned at 10 months, he is looking very good and is very settled there for now. Poor old sweetie did not take kindly to Ollie, when she lost her own calf.

We milked her up until three days ago but now we are drying her off.

Little Ollie seems to only be loved by Murray, but is doing well sneeking feeds from Daisy while Murray is feeding.

He is still much smaller, but is certainly not hungry at all. We will continue to have Daisy feed both the calves for another few months before we wean them off. If she starts to lose too much weight we may take Ollie off sooner, but again to be decided later.

Daisy loves being a mum to her own baby, but will only tolerate Ollie. She has slimmed down quite a lot now that she is making milk, and sometimes I feel that she could do with a rest before she has another calf. We did not intend to have her feeding two calves, it just ended up working out that way.

Neither Daisy or Sweetie Pye are in calf at the moment. We could detect the heat cycles the whole time the AI techs were working, and of course the week after we could get them any more, the both came into heat on after the other. Very frustrating.

This is Sneezy. She was one the calves we got in as week old, late born babies last year. She was always very friendly and seemed to want to be a house cow, by the way she kept coming to see us, for a scratch, and would lick me if I let her. As a last gasp effort, week after the AI techs officially stopped working, she came into heat, so I rang the tech, and he agreed to come an AI her.  At this stage it is looking like she has held, and so she could well be our house cow next year. She was just 15 months old when we had her inseminated, and although we would have liked to wait a bit longer, none of the other cows were coming to the party.

The weather is very dry here at the moment. We had a very wet winter, not much of a spring flush, and now we are going into drought conditions. This is not good for our grass situation, and we are hoping of a few days of rain soon. At least we sold two of our yearlings, so that has eases things slightly.

Overall we have had quite a good year. The biggest high was Daisys baby being born, the biggest low was Sweetie Pye slipping her calf. We are hoping for another good year and not too much excitment, just more chugging on and getting on with life.

The first step, of course, was the frame – this turned out to be a little cumbersome to build, but with a bit of effort from both Sharon and myself, we managed to put this together.

The next step was to put some sort of bracing in place so that this frame doesn’t fall to pieces!  We managed to do this with the baling twine we had from the hay we got at the start of Winter.

Finally, we used a tarp that my brother left up here before he moved to Christchurch at the end of last year.  This has been placed over the top of the dome to provide the chooks with some protection from the wind and rain.

The tarp is secured to the surrounding ground with tent pegs and to some of the trees by cord.

As a new year is about to come upon us, it is time to take stock and see how close to our goals we have reached.

The garden is starting to crank up for the summer harvest, and we even got our first crop of beans for the year. We eat alot of beans, so this is something that I not only grow for immediate eating, but also I freeze alot for the winter months. Last winter we ran out in the last month before the garden got going so this year the plan is to do a bit more.

I have some peas in the freezer for use over the hot summer months when they don’t grow, and my last row of them is just poding up now, it looks like I got the timing right that they will be finished before the heat kills them. I have today sown the pean beans that we used last year for homemade baked beans, so it will be good to get some more of them.

We have cucumbers and zucchinis in over abundance right now and the the tomotoes have started to ripen. The garlic has been harvested and is in the process of drying, seems to be bigger bulbs than last year, so that went well.

Potatoes, well  I could well be able to do two full crops so we will have plenty over the summer and still be growing them for the winter months. This year we have once again grown Chipawas for the wonderful chips they make, and also Sambagos for roasting. I have some moonlight seed potatoes but haven’t got them in the ground yet, as well as an unkown type that were here when we came and I have moved to the orchard to help the forest garden get going.

As for fruit, well we have had a surprising large number of raspberries off our one little plant, and I see that it is now sending up lots of shoots so as long as we have a cold enough winter we should get lots next year as well. The blueberries have done nothing with the berries just not ripening on the plants at all, but the strawberries have done well so that is all good.

We are looking like we will get plenty of apples and are already getting plums. One row of pear trees(winter cole) is doing very badly in the fruit department, but then it always has done next to nothing and we are still trying to work out what the problem is with them. The packham and nashi pears both have lots of developing fruit again so no worries there.

The necterine tree is doing really well on all the compost and manure it got last year, but the peach tree right next to is is fighting with us as to whether it will stay alive or not. This morning it had nine shoots on it, that is two more that two days ago and seven more than last month. Needless to say we will not have any peaches this year.

I think all the other trees are pretty much doing what they have always done, although there does seem to be alot of figs on the fig trees at the moment.

We are continuing to milk the cow, and we have been enjoying wonderful homemade ice cream, yogurt, butter, as well as milk. I have not made any cheese as yet, but nest year when daisy is in milk we will probably have to. Daisy is, I am pretty sure, now pregnant, but we have not been able to catch Sweetie Pye in standing heat to get the AI man into her, so not quite sure what we will do about that as yet. Her not so little calf Liquorice has been growing steadily for the last seven weeks and has will make a wonderful addition to our freezer in a couple of years.

We finally reached the point with the chickens were they are paying for themselves, and then my rooster died some mysterious death one day. On christmas eve we hatched the last lot of eggs we had from him, so now we will have to decide what to do about a replacement for him. I have been toying with the idea of just buying in fertile eggs rather than feeding a rooster all year around, but that decsion is still to come.

We have ended up with seven lambs of which only one is on the plan to keep, so lots of lamb chops in the future.

Having the pigs in winter stocked the freezer well, but they were not fun to care for in the rain with all the mud around. We had to repave around their gateway as they had created such a hole in it. Summer is definetly the only time we should do pigs, and certainly Orenoko and Tobermore that we have now are much more fun. Lesson learnt and we have an extra one on order for the end of next year to raise over the summer.

Over all I feel that I have reached my goal for the year. I wanted to be producing 70 -80% of our own food, I feel that with the addition of a housecow we have reached that point. We can certainly go through our fair share of packaged foods when we want to,but the whole point is that we only do so by choice and not because there is nothing else to eat. Even Bevan has been heard to comment on the poor quality and hugh number of additives in prepackaged goods, and that is a whole new way of thinking for him.

Now for my goal for next year. This is a hard one, as I really want to continue on the path we have started on. I think I need to have the gardens under better control as the weeds keep getting away from me at the moment, and I would also like to make some cheese in the future.

Certainly we will be wanting to achieve at least as high or higher percentage of home grown food.

It is spring, and things are just starting to kick off for the season. Most of the garden, right now,  is either empty, waiting for the remains of the winter crops to come out or busy growing weeds.

I have been weeding a mulching as the weather permits for the last couple of weeks and have some seeds started and ready to go.

I may have over done the tomatoes but we will have plenty as we go along. And of course everything is being planned out in the Planting Planner to give us a continuous supply throughout the year.

So now we are just waiting for the right weather and temperatures to really get up and running.

Now come and see my garden at the beginning of spring.

This winter I planted four blueberries. Bevan said that I could not  have a raised bed there for them so I have planted each one in an old tire. I had problems with the birds digging them up, so a few broken bricks on top seem to have kept the plants in the ground and the birds gone. The plan is to be able to attach aome bird netting to the fence to drape over the plants at fruiting time. We will see if we get there.

When we moved here this garden bed had a hugh flax plant in it. After much effort we pulled it out and then grew very late corn in it. Last summer we grew our wonderful chipawa potatoes and over winter cauliflower and broccoli was in there. It was good as the garden is right outside the door and has a path next to it. The last stumps from the brassicas are still there waiting to be removed and composted. I had carefully removed as many potatoes as I could find when we harvested in the autumn, but as you can see some got missed and they have popped up again.  I have also planted my only lone raspberry plant, as this is on the colder shadier side of the house.

At the other end of this garden, I have planted this years garlic under the papaya tree.

Then we come to what was the main vegetable garden.

As you can see I have started to mulch a bit with the grass clippings, they make good worm food in the garden. I have three still small zuchinni plants in the corner, two green and one yellow, and the bigger plant is a hydranga.

On the other half of this garden, I have a row of carrot seeds that can’t be seen yet, and some more cauliflower. It is a garden waiting for some plants mostly now.

Next is the asaragus bed, it has been mulched this year with seaweed and grassclippings. I have been enjoying nice fresh asaragus for a couple of weeks now and there should still be plenty to come. At the back of this bed are several clumps of chives, and to the side some rhubarb. Above it is a very healthy crop of spinach and a few silverbeet plants.

Now this was a strawberry bed when we moved in here, which was great until there ended up just too many buttercups. It became too hard to weed and since the two plants seemed to have a similar look I decided to just replant all the stawberries and use the box for other things. Over the winter we have had plenty of carrots as well as some beetroot from this bed, with just a few carrots left at the end of the box. At the top are just a few lettuce seedlings.

The peas are coming along well in this box, they are meant to be dwarf peas but they are growing alot taller than was expected, but they should be starting to flower soon too. When we arrived there were potatos in this box, so we do get the odd potato popping up here too.

This is the box that Bevan built for Sammie. She has been slowly filling it with animal manure, compost and grass clippings. She has not yet decided what she wants to plant in it but is thinking about corn this year.

The developing herb garden survived the winter with the Lemon Balm, Sage, and Rosemary, still intact. The thyme and orageno did not survive here, so a new orageno has already been planted and I do have another thyme plant in another spot, so all is not lost.

The parsley went to seed in the autumn so I only have this little seedling right now, which is also mulched with grass clippings. I do plan to plant more though.

Now this is one of the two new garden boxes we are building around the other side of the house. At one end I planted some cabbages and the other some celery over the winter. Now I am planting potatoes so that as they grow I can hill them up and slowly fill the box with compost. It is a big box so there should be lots of potatos by the end of it.

This is the other new box and as you can see it is still to be finished. My plan is to put my tomatoe crop in this box since it is on the hottest side of the house. We also have plans for more boxes around this area, but who knows when that will get done, in the meantime I am planning to grow our pumpkins where the boxes will be so that I can start to work the soil.

So that is our garden at present, I think it is going to be good to see how the plants grow and what changes we have as we move more into the growing season.

You are probably wondering what an empty fish tank has to do with our current lifestyle, and I have wondered that many a time over the last couple of years.

It has been such a warm winter this year that I decided to grow a tomato indoors, just to see if it would work. Tomatos being sub tropical don’t really like to grow in the cold.

Well I planted the seed and got it to germinate in the hot water cupboard. Then it lived on one of those defroster pads next to the fire. Then of course, just as it was starting to grow, we had a cold snap so all growth stopped. The poor little plant has spent the last two weeks on top of the heating plate on the coffee machine. You know the little cup warmer thingy, so we have been drinking our coffee out of cold cups because the plant was more important. But of course the coffee machine gets turned off at night or else it overheats.

Yesterday I planted my lettuce. I have one of those mini seed raising glasshouse things on the deck. It has three shelves and zips up in the front, but the sun is not warm yet so I needed to put the seeds elsewhere to germinate.

I came up with the idea of turning the fishtank lights on to see how warm it would get and putting the seeds in there. It has both day and night lights, and although the nightlight isn’t as warm, it will hopefully be enough and give the plants some downtime.

So now I have both the lettuce and the tomato plant in there. It is like a mini hot house, and if it works out well then maybe I will invest in some mini tomato seeds for next year and we can have homegrown tomatos all year around.

We had our first and only frost so far about 2 weeks ago, followed by the wonderful tree pruning weather.

Guess what I have been doing, yes cleaning up the garden and starting to prune the fruit trees in the orchard.

Now one of the problems with having a large home orchard is that it take so much time to maintain it. If this was my only job then it would be different, but I am squeezing it in around all the other things I have to do. The other thing is that when we moved in, most of the trees had been neglected for a few years, so it  is a long slow job to reshape and knock them into some sort of shape again.

The two rows of apples are now responding well to all the compost and food they have been getting so whereas last year there was very little to do to prune these nongrowing trees, this year they have grown quite a lot.

The large peach and necterine trees had a big prune this year, as did the cherries.

Plums well it is a work in progress. The trees that got a big prune last year, have had a smaller maintainece prune and work has started to reshape more.

Pears well I will admit to only getting one of those done so far, still its early days yet and if we manage to get more fine days then we can continue with the pruning.

The rest of the garden has been having a fairly major cleanup as well while the fine weather persisted. There has been a lot of weeding, chopping, pruning, pulling out, digging up etc. Not much replanting at this stage but it too will come.

We have also ended up with another couple of pigs. Tamworths this time. Sammie has called them Tom and Rose. They are smaller than the large blacks we had, but after treating them for worms, lice etc they are growing well. They arrived with a mild case of mange, but are coming right with that now. Sammie and I had great fun trying to catch them for their treatment as they are quite people shy, they don’t even like to have a scratch while the eat. Still we did manage to catch them and Sammie sat on them while I popped a needle behind their ears. I was amased at how they didn’t even flinch when it went in. Poor things, still they have stopped scratching now and the hair on them is growing back, so they are starting to look much healthier.

I am not thrilled with the way they were ringed and they are having great fun rooting up the paddock, so will probably not do winter pigs again. They need to be gone around October as we have some more large blacks booked for the summer. We should end up with plenty of bacon.

Now that the weather has turned, it is time to focus more on the homeschooling and this will be the time I reevaluate and plan for the coming year, but more on that later.

As we say goodbye to the summer garden, I am reluctant to clear out the sad looking tomatoes and peppers in the hope that winter may not be quite so close. But the truth is that winter is on its way, and we all need to turn our thoughts and embrace it.

Last winter I noticed what grew well and there were a couple of months there that, even here in the winterless north, nothing really grew at all. So this year I have been filling the garden early with many of the winter veges we will be wanting.

This may seem like a good thing to do, but has been problematic due to the hugh amount of white cabbage butterflies we have had to contend with. They are every where and seem to be able to get in tiny gaps around the garden boxes to lay there eggs. All the brassicas have bird netting covers still on them, but the butterflies are getting very clever all the same. I had some cauliflower seedling almost ready to plant out, and some cabbages just popping there heads up, but when I looked at them this weekend, they have suddenly become nothing more than stalks. Luckly I have been interval sowing my seeds so all is not lost, but with the warm weather fading I went into a bit of a panic, and went and bought some seedlings from Koanga Gardens (which we are luck is just down the road from us). So now we have some wonderful heritage seedlings that we didn’t plant sitting in the garden under some frost cloth. Interesting that the cauliflower I got from them was that same one that I had planted, but the broccoli was different. This is good since it hasn’t messed too much with my planning on the Planting Planner.

We have been luck this summer, in that while most of the country have be suffering a drought we have had just enough rain to keep the grass growing. We are going into winter with a little less growth than last year, but as the grass is still growing we will hopefully get through well.

We have also chosen this year to hold off getting the ram in for a while. Since we are only raising the lambs for our own use and not for the open market we have a bit more freedom to move. After the christmas lambs being so easy to care for because of the warm weather, we decided that having the first lamb born on august the first like last year, was just making the winter harder. So hopefully the ram will go in with the ewes in a couple of weeks, and we will have lambs the end of september.

All our winter firewood is in, and we still have pears and now also feijoas in the orchard.

It has been with great pleasure that we have watched our grocery bill drop down to less than half what it was before we started this venture. With food prices rising steadily, we are eating as well as, if not better than we use to for a fraction fo the price. I often now wonder if it wouldn’t be a good thing for downturn in the economy if it forces more people to plant a garden and grow even a little of their own food. There is something amazing and very satisfying about sitting down to a meal that you have produced yourself. Italmost feels like free food when the main cost is just time. A packet of seeds can go an awful long way.

Pretty soon we will have to start the autumn clean up, and there will be lots pruning and composting, but for now I am content to just pretend that it is still summer, even if it is getting colder.

We planted these in August, and have been eating them all summer. They have been great, but I decided that the last lot, which was about a quarter of the original bed, needed to be harvested, hardened off and then stored for later.

I was so pleased to get 15.3kg out of what was left  in the bed. It might not be quite enough to last all winter, but it will see us through for a little while at least.

On the same day, I managed to put another 1.2k of beans in the freezer for winter as well, so with what was already there, we should be able to get right through the winter with green beans.

The dried beans are podding up nicely and I can see that they will be a good experiment, and are looking to be quite successful for us.

The humidity is playing havoc with the tomotoe crop, and many of them are rotting before they are ripe, but I managed to get a few jars bottled for winter soups and sauces, so although a disappointment it is not a total waste.

We were thrilled when we came here as it already had an orchard that had been here for quite a few years. The orchard consisted of about 33 plum trees of different varieties, 11 Nashi pears, 11 Packham pears, 11 wintercole pears, 22 royal gala apple trees, 3 lemons, 2 avocados, 3 figs, a couple of macadamia nut trees. 1 peach, 1 necterine some grapefruit and little orange trees and about 11 feijoa trees.

Quite impressive really. Except that most of the trees don’t seem to be doing so well and are certailnly not great producers. One has to wonder what was on these peoples minds to plant the way they did.

So now we have the job of transforming it into not only productive, but also something a bit more useful to the home orchardist.

Last year out of all those trees, we had a good crop of plums off only about 4 trees, and so made lots of jam and plum sauce. We gave a lot of the plums away and put the windfalls into the freezer which the pigs have been enjoying. The nashi’s did well but since we don’t eat them much the pigs also got most of what was left after the cows cleaned them up. Packham pears are one of my favourite pear and we had plenty to keep me happy last year as well, not one single fruit off the winter coles though. And as for the apples, well out of all those trees we barely got enough to put any up for the winter. Peaches did well, they were nice and juicy, but quite small, but the necterine didn’t have much and what they did have the birds ate. Feijoas were good and they make a good wind break too.

Something had to be done.

I started to make compost under some of the trees to help them along a bit and over the winter we looked at which trees needed pruning, and wondered weather we would kill the whole tree if we gave any a hard prune.

It was a pretty rough winter and indeed a few trees did die, like the two apples that kept falling over in the wind no matter what we did, and the smaller of the avocado trees that decided for no good reason that life was no longer worth living.

We also plan to change out some of the trees so we can have longer cropping seasons. So starting with the pears and apples, we planted a Speckles pear tree in a gap so that it could pollinate the wintercoles. Seems to have worked because we actually have two wintercoles with just a few pears on them each this year. Yay!

We also planted an early and late variety of apple and I did a grafting course last year and managed to succeed in grafting another early and late apple so that will be good. We also planted another peach, which Bevan ran over with his lawnmower one day and a necterinewhich I have been carefully nursing through the summer drought.

Now that the apples are ready for this year I have managed to harvest and bottle half of them for apple pies over the winter, which has given us as many as last year with still half of them to go.

We have chosen not to spray and artificially fertilize the orchard even though the previous owners did, so it is not surprising that production is down. I have been, this year, carefully collecting the animal(mostly horse but some cow)manure and depositing around some of the trees. Eventually they will all get a good and hopefully continuous dose and we should see some action. We also pruned some of our plum trees and every other pear tree in the rows. We did it like this so that if we killed them all off from the shock then we would still have some, and so far it is looking like it may have paid off for us.

We have our chickens freeranging in the orchard to help with pests and have not seen much in the way of leaf rollers or apple moths, so this has worked well for us.

The drought (which was only just starting to effect us) seems to have been broken and we have had a wonderful gentle rainfall all day. Exactly what we needed, so heres hoping that those worse off are getting the same treatment.

The birds have seemed to be bolder this year and last year hanging CDs on the trees in the orchard seemed to be enough to deter them. This year we had a poor plum crop and it took the CDs and some strips of plastic in order for us to have any.

We had a much improved crop of necterines, in that we actually got to eat some this year, and the CDs seemed to work well for them.

As for the lonely thrush, last night when it was being so determined, I got my solar owl statue out from under the grape vine and sat it on the side of the garden box. For now this seems to be working.

As we are coming up to time to start planting the winter brassicas we need to address not only the ongoing bird problem, but also the white cabbage butterfly. It was time to invest is some bird netting.

We are using it two fold in that the first lot has been put over the box planted with carrot, parsnip and beetroot seeds to keep the birds off. We have been replacing a lot of the not so good fence wire around the place and so have a lot of this waiting for disposal. In the true spirit of recycling we have bent some into cloche hoops and put the bird netting over the this box.

Doesn’t really look pretty but it will keep the birds off.

I am in the process of covering some wire hanging basket with some of the bird netting, these should fit nicely over the brassicas as they are growing and will hopefully keep both the birds and the butterflies away for these plants. We have plenty of other plants that both these species can enjoy, so I don’t feel bad protecting some of our food crops.