Featured

A collection of 105 posts

Featured

Learn Your Winter Landscape

The shady, the sunny, the frosty, the soggy - how well do you know your winter landscape? Ideally, really well. Are the plants that need winter sun and warmth located in it? Take the opportunity! Winter comes but once a year. Timing is everything. Shady by itself means not much,

Berries

How To Grow Raspberries

Awesome crops of awesome raspberries begins with a good setup, and so today I'm focusing you in on getting the basics sorted first: choosing a good location + a good variety. With this well sorted, their care is easy i.e. less pests and disease + better crops. From there

Featured

Pruning 101: Thinning Cuts + Heading Cuts

Understanding the difference between thinning cuts and heading cuts will transform your pruning life. What a difference to the productivity and health of your fruit trees when you give up heading and get thinning! Heading A heading cut, also referred to as 'heading back', is a cut that

Featured

How To Prune Feijoas

Excerpt from my little pruning book " Pruning Fruit Trees: A Beginners Guide" If you prune your feijoa annually - you'll find there's not much to do. A lovely, feet on the ground job. I like to prune my feijoa's right after harvest.

Featured

Manure 101

Manure is part of natures deft design - we eat the food that grew on the ground that's fertilised by the manure which began as the food - such an elegant cycle! And manure can, when used well, bring much goodness, but - and it's a

Featured

Step by Step to a Perfectly Fed Vegie Patch

Overfeeding is easily done. Surrounded as we are, by seductive marketing and miracle soil food, home gardeners fertilise wildly. Less really is more. All you need provide is just enough. Today I hope to bring you clarity and ease, as I explain why you feed + what to use + how much

Featured

Soil Preps for Heavy Feeder Crops

Heavy feeders are called heavy feeders because they are hungrier than light feeders. It's not that they need piles of fertiliser, what they need, is just enough... steady, not boom and bust. Overfeeding is, long term, perhaps worse than under feeding. Today is all about how much, is

Featured

Garden Coach: How it Works + Why 20mins is Perfect!

Garden Coaching is a 20minute chat with me, over zoom, to resolve your edible garden woes - fruit trees, vegies, chooks, compost - whatever has you confused or stuck. 20 mins may sound short, but in my many years of guiding gardeners, I've figured out that little bites

Featured

An Easy, Nourishing Winter Food Garden

Today is especially for those of you who dream of eating a fresh picked bowl of goodness, like this one - every day, but dont have much time to garden. You can do it, if you focus on the most efficient crops - one's that are highest nutrition

Featured

2 Ways to Transition from Greencrop to Crop

Greencrops are such good soil builders, that you don't need to use as much compost when you regularly incorporate them into your crop rotation. A big win if you're aiming for most of your compost to be homemade. Here are three ways to get good at

Featured

How To Store Apples

A store of eating apples to draw on through Autumn and Winter is deeply satisfying, and the best kai of all - an apple as nature intended! Storing is, however, really tricky for home gardeners. The perfect long term storage (consistently cool, 90% humidity, off grid and rodent proof) is

Featured

OM is Your Gardens Guardian Angel

Gathering organic matter (OM for short), is your best ever garden habit! With a variety of ready to use matter at hand, you are only 10minutes away from creating a new garden bed, mulching, making a compost pile or revitalising tired soil  - no shopping required! Collect OM in a

Featured

My 3 Fav Ways to Start a Vegie Patch

Here are my three favourite ways to begin a vegie patch. All are variations of no-dig, and all grow brilliant vegies with no bought fertiliser. The only buy ins are greencrop seeds and perhaps compost, if need be. The first method, and my all time favourite is -  "No

Featured

Are Raised Beds Your Best Bet?

Timber edged, raised beds aren't a garden essential! For sure, they have their place, but in most cases - yes most cases! - your soil, your body, your plants + your wallet are better served without them. Simple, no-dig beds, without timber edges are easiest by far to work

Featured

How to Prune Cucumbers + Melons

For best health, plus the joy of a small footprint, grow vining small fruit cucurbits (melons, cucumbers, small squash) up strings or frames rather than along the ground. Pruning them as single leaders, as per tomatoes, makes for an easy life - easy to pick, to spot pests, and to

Featured

How to Prune Tomatoes, Peppers + Aubergines

A single leader tomato is a very fine thing. Easy to support. Easy to pick. Easy to spot pests. Easy to spray. But most important of all in my high rainfall not reliably hot climate - plenty of airflow and sun for best health + ripening. A single leader best suits

Featured

Easy-as Alternatives to Weed Spray

Weeds are, on the whole, not that tricky. Sure there's a select few that are dynamite, but that's to be expected given that we live in one of the weediest places on earth. Find my ideas for the really tricky weeds, at the bottom of the

Featured

How to Grow Green Beans + Shell-out Beans

Beans have a bad rap. I mean who lists beans as their fav crop?! People who grow their own, thats who! Fresh picked is the only way to go, and there are so many awesome varieties to try. And then theres dried beans, or shellouts. Homegrown are worlds apart -

Featured

Resist Rushing into Summer Crops! Sow a Living Mulch Instead

Game on! It's the great summer-crop wait out! Has your garden hit the tomato, pumpkin, bean or corn planting sweet spot? If not, I'm sending you the strength to resist rushing in! The day is coming, my friend. As the air slowly warms, the soil soon

Animals

Be Kind to Your Broody Chooks

Springtime means babies, and heritage chooks hear natures call to nest and hatch. Sitting on eggs in hope, is called being broody and some varieties feel the urge stronger than others. Needless to say hylines and shavers have had motherhood bred out of them. The difference between sitting to lay

Featured

Managing Weeds: Naturally + Easily

Weeds are on your side. They've come to heal the soil from its historical treatment. They do this in many ways - drawing minerals that are missing, soaking up toxins, moderating excessive minerals, adding organic matter, improving soil structure ... they are nutrient dense, mineral rich powerhouses - and

Featured

How to Grow Kumara Shoots

The journey to a boomer crop of kumara begins with shoots or tipu. Start them growing now, in early spring. Shoots are grown on a kumara, and this kumara is so special its called the mother. Choose your mother with care. Select a firm, organically grown kumara with no rots.

Featured

Biological Fungicides

Cankers, oozing sap, fruit scab, fruit rot, leaf spots or leaf curl, and are all signs that pathogenic fungi/ bacteria are out competing beneficial fungi/ bacteria, on your fruit trees. It's a numbers game. Simple as that. Whoever owns the space, rules the day. Your job is to

Featured

How (+ When) to Prune Citrus

Citrus are my favourite trees to prune. Especially thick, thorny, over grown ones - they restore so quickly and beautifully when you use mainly thinning cuts. What a difference when you give up heading cuts and get thinning! Because citrus fruit on new seasons wood, this style of pruning keeps

Featured

Notching: A Cool Pruning Trick

Notching is a simple, old school trick that stimulates a branch to grow. Use it while training young (2 - 4 year old), deciduous fruit trees to fill any empty spaces that would ideally, be fruitfully filled with a branch. * Choose a lovely fat bud in the locale of the