Monthly gardening advice

A collection of 56 posts

Monthly gardening advice

How to Plant + Prune Deciduous Fruit Trees

Fruit trees perform better by far when grown in native soil - ie soil that's original to your site. Deciduous fruit trees don't need compost + fert around their roots - the original soil is perfect especially if you've matched your rootstocks to it. What

Monthly gardening advice

Be Cabbage White Butterfly Free!

Summer of '22, I grew brassicas out in the open without any insect mesh, from seedling to finish. I was feeling confident in my parasitic wasp population, and they didn't disappoint. What a turn around! For most of my garden life I haven't bothered growing

Harvest

Break The Pest Cycle

Pests are part of a gardening life - especially when your vegie patch is full of all their favourite food. Add to that a bit of stress like drought for instance, and immunity and pest resistance are lowered, fanning the flames and increasing the likelihood of high numbers of sap

Greenhouse

October in the Greenhouse

There's a gradual take over happening in the October greenhouse as new crops of tomatoes, peppers, aubergines, courgette, cucumber dwarf beans + basil are planted out amongst finishing winter salads, bok choy, spinach + celery. * Peppers and aubergines need to go in fairly soon - they take ages to produce

Monthly gardening advice

My Healthy Fruit Tree Game Plan

A diverse environment around your deciduous fruit trees is the answer to all your fruit tree problems. Yes! Truly! All of them! Get a bit wild, my friends and loose the tidy. Engage as broad a range of plants, trees, shrubs, a pond if you can - even a small

Flowers

Make a No Dig, Perennial Garden

Densley planted perennials make the easiest care, best looking gardens of all. Herbs, picking flowers, nectar/ pollen rich flowers for bees and beneficials, fruit, natives - you name it!, jam them all in together for a garden that beats out weeds, flowers year round and provides food and medicine. Beautiful

Harvest

Harvest Smarts - Squash, Pumpkin + Kumara

Please be patient my gardening friends! Don't rush to harvest your squash and pumpkins. For sure, they look ready on the outside - but until the stalk dries off, there's still work to be done on the inside. Let it finish, and be rewarded with deeper,

Monthly gardening advice

Back to Basics: Fruit Tree Pruning Videos

Here are a couple of videos that I hope will give beginners a bit of pruning confidence. Thanks to my buddy Ray at Soulhaven Productions for making them and thanks to Barry for letting us film his trees! These fruit tree pruning videos won't answer all your questions,

Monthly gardening advice

How to Pick and Store Plums

There's a small window, a perfect moment when fruit is ripe for picking. The only way you catch it is by keeping an eye on your crops. With a plum harvest, I reckon it's just before it hits the ground. Pick your plums when the skin

Monthly gardening advice

Natural Ways With Pests

Heat and harvest come to this - pests. It's easy to malign them, "Damn things!" But pests are not malicious. They've come because you've served dinner. Aphids, leafhoppers, scale, thrips, green vegetable bugs - put a feed out, create the perfect environment

Monthly gardening advice

How To Thin Fruit (And Why You Need To)

Removing excess fruit from an over-burdened tree rewards you with a more robust tree and better fruit (this year and next).  From mid-spring on keep an eye on your fruit trees and thin heavily loaded trees as fruits reach marble size. Because Steady is Good Thinning is removing extras to

Monthly gardening advice

The Ins and Outs of Choosing Bought Compost

Compost is the heart and soul of your garden. Does it matter which compost you buy? Damn straight it does! Well made compost is all our soil needs to grow abundant crops with minimal disease. But rubbish in, rubbish out -  compost made with sub-standard ingredients will wreck your soil

Harvest

Grow Yourself a Daily Winter Harvest

Achieving a daily harvest year round, takes years of practice. I remember the first year I grew all my own carrots. Pride. And the year of the onion, that was solid. Potatoes have been a recent achievement, but that's only because all the teenage mouths have left the

Harvest

Testing Apples For Ripeness + A Super Helpful Calendar

One of my most asked questions is "How do I know when apples/plums/ pears are ripe?" I remember wondering that too. The realisation that harvesting required as much knowledge as growing dawned the day I harvested a whole tree of apples in a rush of excitement because

Monthly gardening advice

How to make liquid feed

Comfrey is such a fabulous tonic for the garden - brim full of minerals and the answer to the gardener who doesn't live near seaweed. First up collect a bucket full of comfrey.  Use a bucket with holes in the bottom. Feel free to add any other seasonal

Monthly gardening advice

Grow Your Own Peach Tree

The peach trees are sprouting! Save stones from your favourite peach this summer and grow them on for your very own, hardy little peach (or apricot) tree. This is an awesome thing to do in schools. Choose a peach that's ripe in term time, hardy and leaf curl

Animals

My top 10 healthy chook essentials

Keeping chooks in good nick is a matter of pride don't you think. A vibrant comb, bright eyed + alert, productive + a bit cheeky - this is how we want our chooks to roll. The thing is chooks are really vulnerable to parasites - internal and external when in

Monthly gardening advice

Easy Peasy Crop Rotation

Crop rotation is falling out of fashion - and I'm glad for it, it used to be a stuffy, over  complicated thing. However, don't lets throw the baby out with the bathwater! I love the moving about and mixing of crops, and so does your soil

Monthly gardening advice

How To Plant + Prune Deciduous Fruit Tree's

Shelter trees and deciduous fruit trees a go! - it's time to get planting. Don't plant citrus or subtropicals though. It makes no sense to put their heat loving feet into freezing ground. If you live somewhere frost free and mild (eg: the winter-less north) then

Monthly gardening advice

Mulched Paths - Oh Yes!

The first permaculture book I read was "The Permaculture Home Garden" by Linda Woodrow. Back in mumblemumble 1997. I read it from cover to cover one cold weekend in bed with my first baby, those were the days. I gobbled it up. Linda made so much sense. One

Monthly gardening advice

Homemade Mulch

And by mulch I mean any old thing, don’t go mortgaging your house for fancy store bought stuff. In the absence of garden waste (which I find hard to believe – there are always things to prune or weed) there will be an old blanket lurking in the shed, a

Monthly gardening advice

How To Grow Great Citrus

Citrus are fussy darlings, deeply sensitive to wind, wet feet, dry feet and frost. The foothill's of the Tararua's is not their ideal which means I need to choose my varieties well and put some effort into creating awesome micro climates for them. Before you go

Monthly gardening advice

Learn Your Land (And While You Do, Go Temporary)

When we arrived here we set up temporary fencing to keep the pigs in. Those temporary fences bought us time. Time to figure out how the grazing would work in with all the other stuff and time to understand those little details that keep life simple - like big roadside

Monthly gardening advice

How To Thin Fruit (And Why You Need To)

For top quality fruit and a better performing tree - thin your fruit this month! Thinning removes the excess to improve the remainder - and it's a lovely job, so peaceful among the fruit trees (apart from Nellie the pig's grunts for more!) I thin because

Monthly gardening advice

Get Ready For Psyllids

Boy, did we panic about psyllids when they first arrived on our shores. And rightly so! Our tomato and potato crops got hammered as we figured out how to cope with them. And figure it out we did. We've got it sorted! So moving on from the panic,