Lily's Blog (7)

First batch of potatoes are out of the ground! My youngest was very excited to help me hunt for treasure—we got 1.7kg, perhaps 4:1, which is not brilliant, but they’re lovely big tubers grown from a grocery store potato gone mad…

There’s lots exciting happening in my garden right now.

First, unfortunately, both of the chicks we hatched turned out to be roosters. What can you do? Given so few chicks hatched, and they were so distinct from one another, they grew up each very beloved—so the soup pot wasn’t an option for these two gentlemen. Sweet, cuddly, Polish Maharajah has been…

I've mentioned before that my house is on a steep hill, and that I've terraced up part of the unused too-steep area as a food forest, which has been working very well.  All the trees I put in have established nicely, although it’s looking a bit bare again now that the pumpkin vines have died down and I’ve given the young trees another trim to promote…

Just curious as to whether anyone does anything to extend the growing season around here?  Most of the online growing guides talk about using cold frames or poly tunnels to extending the period that your plants are able to ward off freezing solid.  But for me, I'd really like to grow some more cool weather crops for more of the year, and there's not too much information around apart from increasing shade.

I had the idea of planting in a zeer pot.  A zeer pot is an evaporative cooling…

My food forest is really starting to get established.

I put it in place at the end of winter this year on a slope out the back where nothing much has ever grown. Getting the garden in order there had always been a few phases of down the line after I'd done the more visible parts.  Its number had actually just come up: I've worked my way around most of the rest and I was taking a breather before getting stuck in--and then we realised some trees had grown up there, tall enough to be…

Finished setting up my new aquaponic pond!  Well, I say finished... but are these sorts of things ever truly finished? I’ve been tinkering a lot over the last few weeks, so who knows what my next hare-brained scheme for it will be. But, I have reached the point where the only further plans I currently have in mind for it is to add more fish as the system cycles up to be able to handle their waste and trim the dracaena to give it a bit more sun as it establishes.…

It makes me so happy to see our…