Vegetables

A collection of 57 posts

Featured

How to Grow Peas

Peas prefer mild, cool weather - not too hot, not too cold. Here in Horowhenua, I can sow them Autumn through Spring. When temperatures rise, peas stop/ reduce flower production. Find your own perfect pea moment by trying all the timings. Regular sowings of peas throughout, brings a steady supply

Monthly gardening advice

What to Plant in Your Vegie Patch in Winter

A journalist once asked me "Whats the best time of year to plant a garden?, and I said "Anytime!" There is not one food growing season, there are four!" As long as your garden isn't under snow - you can continue to plant and

Featured

A DIY Greencrop Seed Mix

Greencrops (also called greenmanures) are awesome! Diversity, homegrown fertility + living mulch all in one. * Use them to restore soils after a heavy feeder - you use less compost this way * Sow them beneath/ beside bigger crops like broccoli, pumpkin or beans, as a life giving, living mulch * Use them for

Featured

How To Harvest, Cure + Store Kumara

Kumara loves the warmth - all the way through the growing process, from the shoots through planting to storage. Steer clear of cold, and keep warm in the forefront of your mind and you wont go wrong. Those of you on light, free draining soil are on a win -

Featured

My 2 Ingredient Biological Liquid Feed

Liquid feed is awesome tonic support for the food garden, and this 2 ingredient biological brew in particular, because its alive! It's a brilliant one size fits all that has a gently transformative effect on citrus, vegies, roses, berries, fruit trees, the chook yard, pasture, even compost piles.

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

How to Grow Sweetcorn

Corn is extra effort to grow, but to my mind, it's easily worth it! Not only is corn a heavy feeder - meaning good soil prep is required, but its also best to stagger the sowings and plantings so as to drip feed the kitchen and eating corn

Featured

Year Round Saladings

A year round supply of fresh picked salad greens is a must have! Sounds like a mission, but its not as hard as you think. With a few tricks, we can make each planting last a goodly long time. This is the key - the longer we stretch the harvest,

Vegetables

Leafy Greens are the best!

Leafy greens are the best! They win 'Most Resilient Crop of All' for being the easiest to grow, hands down the most nutritious and so very generous - they give and give. Try a few new ones each season and steadily build a diverse collection that’ll take

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

Featured

3 Ways To A Living Mulch

Living mulch (covering the soil with plants), is the most nourishing mulch of all. A soil covered with plants is alive! Living on and in and around plant roots is a diversity of soil life forms - fungi, nematodes, protozoa, bacteria, arthropods and of course worms, these team up with

Soil health

An annual DIY Soil Test

Your soil is unique. It's history and geography make it so. And because it's unique, and because understanding your soil is at the heart of your garden's health - you do well to get to know it. The best way to know it, is

Permaculture Design

Make a Basemap + Wishlist

Understanding your land and your climate first is key to you making sound placement choices. "...protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labour" Bill Mollison (co founder of permaculture) wisely advises. Start by making a basemap - a birds eye view sketch or photo of your

Featured

Grow Vegies in Containers + Make an Instant Vegie Patch

Containers grow amazing vegies! Perfect for small spaces, young children and our elders too. They are quick and cheap to set up, and can pump out a goodly volume of kai. When you are new to land, growing in containers brings a lovely breathing space. Rather than stressfully trying to

Featured

How To Grow Beetroot

Beetroot is such a sweet crop. Virtues abound for the grower and the cook. They're undemanding on the soil, grow quickly, not bothered by pest or disease, use hardly any space and get on well with everyone - all in all easy peasy ... or is it? Some of

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

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

Soil health

Eke Out The Water: Embrace The Shade

If plants are wilting under the hot sun, your best save is to provide a bit of shade. Shade is also a good idea, in hot climates, for newly planted seedlings - especially those that prefer the cooler side of life like saladings or brassicas, which you may be planting

Featured

A Useful, Yet Oh So Beautiful Herbal Border

A food garden is a cooperative happening. The gardener, the soil, the weather (lets not forget the weather!) and the companions. Those companions are the icing on the cake - they bring it altogether. Today is all about them, specifically herbs, and how irreplaceable they are in your food garden

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

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,

Harvest

How to Grow Yams

Yams (oca) are the easiest crop I've ever grown. No issues with pest or disease, and once they are planted - you can pretty much forget about them. The only negative is that they are in the ground for a long time, so if you are short on

Featured

How to Save Tomato Seed

Having your own little seed bank is solid. Be fussy about the seed you save, choosing tomatoes that are * pest and disease resilient * vigorous, unfussy growers * delicious! Left to their own device, tomatoes eventually drop to the ground where they rot and ferment, cleaning up seed borne disease in the

Featured

Help my tomato has wilted #2

In an ironic twist of fate I lost three of my outside tomatoes this week. Having just written about Verticulum Wilt in my last newsletter (this about my mums tomato), it seems I now have it myself. Symptoms: sudden wilt when laden with fruit and yellowing on the lower leaves

Featured

Help, My Tomato Has Wilted!

There's nothing sadder than a crop gone awry, all that love and care down the tubes. In this case we have a wilted (past the point of recovery) tomato. When something goes awry in the vegie patch look to the obvious things first (I know how you love