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| Our back section - December 2009 |
When I was a child, our family had a complex pocket money system which involved doing a range of jobs during the week, which were each worth specified amounts of money. Small weekday jobs (eg. doing dishes) were usually worth ten cents a day, and more onerous tasks were reserved for the weekend, and were worth up to fifty cents. If you didn't do your job, you didn't get the money - and thus began our introduction to modern industrial society.
The worst job of all time was gardening, which was a fifty cent job. I would do anything to avoid gardening. I hated it. It was boring, dirty and repetitive. Furthermore, the vegetable garden was responsible for producing deeply unpleasant vegetables like zucchini, silverbeet and beans. Clearly, there was no redeeming features to be found in the garden whatsoever.
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| September 2010 |
My commitment to garden avoidance remained strong until about two years ago, when I started wondering whether it would actually be kind of fun to grow my own vegetables. Ed was keen to give it a go, so last summer we put in our first vege garden. By which I mean that Ed spent a day digging out the plot and wheelbarrowing soil up the steps. And then when the hard work was done I did the fun job of planting seeds and seedlings. Our friend Colin has been gardening in Dunedin for several decades, and he came and helped Ed with the digging, and advised us on what to plant and where. Colin is now our trusted gardening guru, as he knows the answer to pretty much any gardening question! I was impressed at how well the garden grew - especially as we had no idea what we were doing.
This year we decided to expand the garden, and Ed got to work doubling the size of our vege patch. We tried some new things, with varied success. This year we've had potatoes, zucchinis, beans, peas, carrots, spinach, rocket, lettuce, tomatoes, spring onions, bok choi, broccoli, a pumpkin and lots of herbs. Most things have grown well, except my strawberry plants which were a complete disaster, and the verdict is still out on whether the pumpkin plant will grow any pumpkins. Growing our own veges means that we haven't had to buy as much from the supermarket, which of course has been useful this month! I'm not sure if we're saving money or not - we spent a bit buying soil and seedlings etc. so we probably haven't this year, but I think we would in the future.
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| 1 December 2010 |
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| January 2011 |
Hey Jo, what an awesome vege garden! I have been working with a minature garden for about a year now with varied success. (my first tomato is slowly going red!) My main plants at the moment are broccoli and cauliflower and they have been invaded by white butterfly catepillers. Would your gerdening guru have any ideas on how to get rid of them? preferably without derris dust or hand picking...
ReplyDeleteI am still traumatised. The worst bit was, you couldn't trade your gardening for double baking duty.
ReplyDeleteOne day I would like to have a feijoa tree, but I think I'll leave the rest of the gardening up to Stephen in the meantime (I still can't get over the creepiness of dirt all over my hands).
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm very impressed at you overcoming traumatic gardening memories. Those purple carrots are amazing. As is this blog. Keep up the good work.
Hazel - I know what you mean about the caterpillars, our broccolis were totally decimated by them last year! I asked Colin, he said to use Pyrethrum spray, which is made out of flowers and not harmful for humans but deadly for insects. You can get it from gardening shops, or I found a website with instructions to make it here: http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Pyrethrum-Garden-Spray
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