Garden

February Garden

April 2, 2016 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

The garden is now looking pretty sad, after drying out with six more weeks of no rain, a howling wind one day that sucked the moisture right out of the leaves, and then a frost, but it was gorgeous in February. For once, I got a few pictures of it near the peak. Mr. Intellectual grew this beautiful sunflower.

The pumpkins from two gardens grew toward each other. Just after they met, though, we decided we needed a path between them to the gate at the far end, so we redirected the vines to keep it open in the middle.

For a little while, it felt almost like a tsunami spilling out of the garden! The pumpkins and zucchini were trying their best to take over the world. The frost has nearly finished them off by now, though.

We left the onions lay out to dry for a little while. We have enough for a few months!

Mr. Imagination frequently checked on the pumpkins, looking for large ones. I scratched his initials into a few of them.

January Garden

February 3, 2016 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

The garden is doing splendidly! My boys have been a great help again this year. We’ve picked cabbage twice; this is the first harvest—30 heads! We made 110 pounds of sourkraut that day, more than we need for the year. It took only about 4 hours from picking the cabbage to finishing the cleanup.

Another day I picked a bushel and a half of peas. It was a lovely day to sit under a tree to shell them.

Little Miss loves to eat peas!

Mr. Intellectual has his own beautiful garden at the edge of the big garden. Here is Mr. Imagination showing the size of his brother’s sunflowers and corn.

This is our corn and pumpkins, with cabbage just beyond, and potatoes on the other side of that.

Little Miss likes zucchini, too!

Mr. Intellectual has been harvesting dandelion roots as well, and making them into “coffee”. He looked up directions and figured out how to roast them. Yum!

Tonight’s Shopping Trip, and Frost Recovery

January 21, 2016 by NZ Filbruns 2 Comments

I had great fun cooking dinner tonight. My first step was to make a shopping trip. I walked through the garden collecting ingredients to put with some cooked lamb I had in the fridge, to make a delicious stew. This was what Mr. Diligent and I picked in a few minutes:

I love this time of year! We eat so well.

Our late frost was five weeks ago already. The zucchinis are completely recovered; within three weeks they were the size they had been before that frost. The tomatoes, on the other hand, while they are the same size again, have really been knocked back. They are finally blooming again now, but I’m afraid we won’t get much of a crop. Here are pictures of the same zucchini plant and the same tomato plant, the day of the frost, three weeks later, and tonight.

Garden Update

December 13, 2015 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

The boys and I have been spending an average of half an hour a day, each, on the garden. It’s really amazing how much can happen in that amount of time! The garden is thriving. We’re watering when we have to, from a large cistern by the house that collects the overflow from our half unit of water from the Council. We’ve had a little bit of rain lately, which does wonders. We also save all the water we can in the house, such as from washing lettuce, or Little Miss’s bath water, and bucket it out to the garden. We’re loving having all the lettuce salads we want. We’re going into my favorite time of the year!

These first three pictures were taken the last week of November.

I took this one a couple of days ago. The boys were finishing up their 30 minutes, with Little Miss’s help, while I fixed lunch. Left-right: Mr. Sweetie, Little Miss, Mr. Inventor, Mr. Diligence.

This isn’t quite the garden, but it is a plant! We were recently given a couple of pitcher plants. They are catching a lot of flies for us—so many, in fact, that the plant can’t digest them all and gets indigestion. We’ve had to cut off a few traps that were dying because of all the flies inside them!

Outdoors Fun

November 20, 2015 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Because it’s spring, and the temperatures are lovely and moderate most days, and the grass is green, the boys have spent a lot of time outside lately. I get out when I can—I try to get to the garden at least a little each day. Here are several pictures I’ve gotten lately. As you can see, Little Miss loves being outside. If she’s grouchy and nothing seems to suit her, asking if she wants to go outside will often make her happy. This week, she figured out how to get outside without falling on her nose out the kitchen door, so watch out—she won’t be contained in the house any more!

Little Miss wanted to go watch her brothers play in the water.

She stands up anywhere she feels like it, without support, although she hasn’t started to take steps yet.

Apparently, she didn’t want to go through the patch of bare ground; it was more interesting to follow Mr. Imagination.

He had a toy car!

I assigned Mr. Diligent to plant pumpkin seeds in the moist creek bed. We’ll see if they grow. He had a wetsuit on because he had been playing in the water.

Mr. Imagination and Mr. Sweetie were still playing in the water. The boys built this dam across the creek after the 3-inch rain we had in September. The creek dried up behind it by mid-October, and the boys reinforced the dam at that point, and then when we got another inch of rain a few weeks ago, it filled up again. They rigged up a small sump pump below the dam to pump the water that leaks through back above the dam. That’s what the white pipe is for. The boys have spent a lot of time playing in that water, but by now it is starting to smell like swamp muck and I’m not very happy to let them “swim” anymore. Yesterday they put a bigger pump in and used the water to irrigate the garden—perfect use for it!

Mid-October Gardening

October 26, 2015 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

We’ve been trying to get the garden planted over the last couple of weeks, and spending a lot of time weeding what we planted in August. The day we planted peas, Little Miss wanted to help! She only got one packet open, and thankfully, peas are large enough we were able to pick them all up out of the grass.

My boys planted all the peas. It’s a little amusing, now that they are coming up, to see exactly how they were planted! Some rows have long empty spots, and other spots are pretty thick. Oh, well, peas are pretty forgiving. This is Mr. Sweetie and Mr. Intellectual, who was in charge of the planting. I dug the rows this time.

Soon, Mr. Diligent and Mr. Imagination showed up to help. I think it was about here that the planting started looking funny!

After I had all the rows dug for the peas, I started planting onions. The onion seedlings were a lot larger this year than most years. They’re looking pretty good.

We’re eating stuff that we planted last year, still, as well as some Bok Choy that I set out in September. Here is Silverbeet (Swiss Chard), celery, spring onions, broccoli, and some cabbage that was going to seed (I cut off the leaves and used them), from last year’s garden. The carrots were from the shop; we ran out of our own awhile ago.

Potato planting! Esther came out and helped Gayle and Mr. Inventor. She wanted to discuss the plot for a movie the children were making with the boys, and that was the only way she could talk to them that day.

I’ve been cooking weeds more this spring than ever before. I harvested stinging nettle from the area in the bottom photo, as well as other areas that grew up in weeds. I also use mallow. I cook them together in chicken broth, blend them thoroughly, and freeze them in muffin tins to put in soups later. Mr. Imagination named the concoction for me—prickle mallow soup!

Starting the Garden

September 24, 2015 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Yes, it’s a little early, but we have the garden started. I wanted to make sure the pepper plants got big enough to produce some fruit before it gets cold in the fall, so I started them early. This is what they looked like in early September; now they are outside in our “greenhouse”, so I don’t see them every day.

I set out Bok Choi, kohlrabi, broccoli and cauliflower that I started, the other day when we had a warm spell. It’s turned cold and rainy now, but the little plants look great, at least what I can see of them from the kitchen window (the middle window you can see in this picture; the window on the left is a bedroom, and the one on the right is the laundry). Mr. Sweetie had fun with my camera while I was transplanting.

Little Miss had fun crawling around on the grass while I worked in the garden.

Mr. Imagination had fun running in the dirt, and Mr. Intellectual was working on a project.

Mr. Inventor’s ducks have been eating the lettuce and Swiss Chard that I had growing, so we informed him last week that his ducks would be locked out of the yard/garden, or eaten. He got busy putting up a duck-proof fence, and then herded them out.

Here is the beautiful tom turkey again. I know I’ve posted a lot of pictures of him—I love watching him display!

Mr. Imagination on the trampoline.

Mr. Imagination picked me a bouquet of daffodils!

These ducks wanted back in the yard!

August 2015 Pictures

September 18, 2015 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Here are the last few pictures I wanted to share from August. I’m getting close to caught up!

We’ve had rain a couple of times. We’re still desperately dry, but since the weather is cool the little bit of rain we’ve gotten has been able to soak in and make the grass grow a bit. The ducks were delighted this particular morning to have water to play in!

I started peppers the first week or so of August. I planted the seeds in potting soil in this ice cream container, and put it, with a tight lid on, above the hot water heater. The peppers came up incredibly fast—I think this picture was taken after only a week!

I liked this picture of Mr. Imagination peeking into Esther’s room (just before she moved back out to the sleepout).

Mr. Handyman and Mr. Inventor have been tilling the garden. The ducks love the freshly tilled soil—they must be finding worms.

Mr. Handyman brought this skink in to show us. I believe this is about lifesize on my computer screen.

A goose nest. I hear that there are now two geese sitting on it simultaneously. We’ll see if anything hatches!

Gayle frequently brings home a load of compost from work for the garden. This time, he took Little Miss out to supervise the unloading from her Bumbo. Mr. Handyman was helping unload, and Mr. Sweetie is watching.

More Harvesting

May 4, 2015 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

This was the zucchini we found in the garden after our trip to Timaru. It ended up being nearly the end of the zucchini for the year, too, since we had a killing frost a few days later. We were happy to have these, since I’ve discovered a way to cook zuchini that everyone likes. I dice it in about 1/2 inch cubes, then toss with salt, pepper, fresh rosemary, and oil. Then, I spread it on a cookie sheet and bake at about 350°F for an hour or so. Yum!

Last week, Gayle and the boys dug all the potatoes. It wasn’t a very good harvest, but we’re thankful for what we got—and thankful that they weren’t rotting in the ground like they did last year! This is Mr. Handyman, Gayle, Mr. Diligence, and Mr. Inventor.

This is Mr. Diligence running away!

Finishing the Harvest

April 27, 2015 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

We are getting close to the end of harvesting food for the year. Gayle and the boys are digging potatoes today. That is quite different from last year! It was so wet last year that there was water in every hole made by the fork when they dug up a potato plant. About half the crop rotted in the ground, and I had to deal with rotten potatoes in the bin all winter. Yuck! This year, the soil is bone-dry! We’re hoping for heavy rains soon, though, so Gayle decided it was time to get them dug.

The shelves in the jar room are very nearly full. The freezers are mostly full—even the “new” one we bought to put a steer in in another two weeks is a third full! Onions are braided and hanging beside the jars of food, and the pumpkins are piled in there and on a porch. We won’t go hungry this year!