As usual, I love the way the garden looks right now. January is such a wonderful time in the garden! Everything is at its peak of beauty, and the weeds haven’t taken over yet. I took a few minutes the other day to make a video tour. It was interesting watching it this afternoon. The little lettuces in the last minute have doubled in size since I took the video two days ago! And, it’s raining today, with more predicted tomorrow, so things should grow even more. (I also noticed that two of the cats managed to get themselves into the last couple of minutes!)
Homesteading
Tomatoes
It’s that time of year when we start all the tomato plants we need for the upcoming summer! This year, Esther wanted to help, so she could learn how I do it; most years, I do all of this project by myself. Late in August, we put the seeds into the soil.

We put the tray of seeds in the greenhouse under a second layer of plastic until they germinated. Esther cleaned out that corner of the greenhouse. There are several tomato plants there that she transplanted in there from the garden, where they started growing late in the summer. We had kept an extra layer of plastic over them all winter, and they lived, although, with low light levels for a few months, they didn’t thrive. One has a green tomato on it, though!

About a week or a week and a half later, the tiny seedlings were ready to prick out and transplant into individual punnets. It was a beautiful day, so we sat at the picnic table to do this job.


I took this picture on the 25th of September, about a month after we initially planted the seeds. The plants had been in our hothouse, a frame covered with greenhouse plastic on our back step, which faces the sun.

Today, the 29th of September, five weeks after starting the seeds, I decided it was time to transplant the little tomatoes into bigger pots. Little Miss helped with this job; she loves writing the labels! We didn’t get the entire job done, but did about a fourth of them, choosing the largest plants to start with. Now, they get to live and grow in the big greenhouse until time to plant them in the garden.

Our Garden This Week
The garden is at its peak of beauty right now, so I decided to do a video walk through it. I was especially thinking of you, Mom, and hoping you can watch it.
I had fun photographing some of our harvests lately. The first picture was my harvest the evening of Christmas Day; the rest were this past week (the 3rd-8th of January). I love bringing in gorgeous fresh vegetables!
September 2021 Photos
I think I should be taking more pictures! I’m running out of fodder for posts. It doesn’t help that my camera doesn’t work very well, so I forget to take it along when we go places. Mr. Sweetie let me use his last week when we did a fun science experiment, and I got a good video of what we did…and then he deleted it without thinking. Sigh. Anyway, here are the rest of what we took in September.
This is Mr. Imagination with his pet budgie, Tammie (short for Tamarillo). The budgie isn’t very tame, but he keeps working on it.
We killed a beef and dressed it out ourselves, for the first time! That was pretty exciting. We had never done an animal bigger than a sheep before. We got a friend to kill the animal, and the boys and Gayle got it skinned and gutted. We hung it here, in the woodshed, for a few days, wrapped in clean, old sheets to keep flies off. As soon as I could get to it after the weekend, I found videos on YouTube about boning out quarters of beef, and went back and forth, watching a bit, then doing that step. It wasn’t too hard. Gayle boned out one back quarter, but I mostly did the other three. I wouldn’t mind doing this job again.
This was the pile of steaks. Yum! This is some of the tastiest, most tender beef we’ve ever eaten.
The day I finished putting the beef in the freezers, Elijah brought home four deer legs! We decided to make venison sausage. The whole family got into it, and Gayle got to share his expertise in linking sausages. He did that for many years at his last job. These sausages are delicious!
Elijah got to lay the carpet in the tiny house. It looks good! Mr. Diligence and Mr. Sweetie now sleep in there. We have two sets of bunkbeds now in that house, and can sleep five people in there when we have company (the boys move to the container then). I need to get some pictures of it now that it’s finished.
She’s licking out the pavlova from the mixer!
Sitting in a dishpan to suck her thumb!
This is a craft project we did for our study of England. These are guards at Buckingham Palace, made from clothespins.
The boys’ old sleepout, which is slated for demolition. They are enjoying having more space.
The Garden—January 2021
A week ago, the garden was about the most beautiful I have ever seen! Everything was in beautiful shape. Then, we had a week of rain. We got 185 mm (7 1/2 in) of rain in 5 days, and one of the days we had gale-force winds, as well. There was hail a couple of times, too. A lot of plants, especially lettuces, got badly bruised, and the peas got knocked partially off their trellis. The runner beans got broken off at the top of their trellis. Because of the rain, the stems of a lot of plants are very brittle, so when I try to straighten them out, for example to help a runner bean up its trellis, they snap off. It could have been a lot worse, though. In Motueka, on Christmas weekend, they had about five inches of hail! I’m thankful we didn’t get that.
Here are the tomatoes. The ones in front are the South Australian Dwarfs, which don’t do well with staking but put on a prolific crop.
Zucchini is in the row closest to us; the rest are pumpkins. We spread bird netting over the greenhouse for the pumpkins to climb up.
Inside the greenhouse. The cucumbers are nearly done. The pepper plants just to the left in the middle lived over the winter. We put a small, plastic-covered box over them so they didn’t freeze. They are loaded with chilis already, and I’ve been picking bell peppers, too.
Beside the greenhouse is this bed. I have dwarf (or bush) beans, and then runner beans on the trellis. We’ve had enough runner beans for a couple of meals already.
The other side of the trellis has cucumbers, and at the far end are some climbing zucchinis.
The peas have this trellis. The peak of it is about five feet high, and before the storm the plants stood up at least a foot over that. I’m trying to get them to stand up again, but I’m not sure it’ll work.
Corn, lettuce, beet root, leeks and onions.
I planted lettuces where the corn didn’t come up in this bed.
Lettuce, carrots, and potatoes behind them. I have dill all over the garden. We just weed out the excess, and have plenty for pickles.We found this giant in the garden when we came home from our big trip! Stuffed zucchini on the menu, for sure.
There were a couple of large cucumbers, too.
This was my harvest one evening. Yum! We eat well this time of year.
The Garden This Week
The garden is at its peak as far as beauty this week. It is so lush and green! We’ll probably get more of a harvest in another couple of weeks than we are now, but by then it won’t be as beautiful, so I took some pictures this week of what I get to enjoy.
This was my harvest on Wednesday afternoon: zucchini, cucumbers, spring onions, beetroot, radishes, lettuce, green and purple beans, basil, a cabbage, and a kohlrabi.
As you walk into the garden between the garage and the container, this is the first garden patch you come to. There are climbing sugar snap peas and runner beans along the side of the container, and beyond that is a tomato patch. The sunflower/cosmos “house” is just past them, and there are pansies planted in the top of the stump. Next is a bed of cabbage and broccoli, with some calendula in it. I also have a few tomatillos and ground cherries in that bed, but you can’t see them in this photo. The next bed has a few cucumbers at this end, then cauliflower, kohlrabi, silverbeet, and then kale. The second photo shows that bed better; past the kale is the old lettuce bed, which needs cleaned out, and then cabbage. On the other side of the path is a patch of cucumbers and corn, and there are self-seeded pumpkins here and there. The turkey run is on the other side of the fence, past the corn.
Turn around, and past the red currants, you’ll see this patch of tomatoes and green beans, with cucumbers at the far end. The greenhouse is beside them. The pink/lavender building is the back side of our garage; the building in the back middle of the picture is the neighbor’s workshop, where they maintain their fleet of tractors and other agricultural equipment. Our three youngest have been putting water in the yellow bathtub and playing in it.
Go into the greenhouse through the south door and this is what you see. To the left is a large, self-seeded South Australian Dwarf tomato plant, then a few okras, and then my peppers and chilis.
To the right are the cucumbers, which I’m training up on strings.
Just past the cucumbers is a small patch of rockmelons, and then some tomatoes and basil.
Next, there are a few beetroots, and then more tomatoes and basil.
On the left, past the peppers, are eggplants. I’m not sure what the tall plant is. It masqueraded as an eggplant when it was tiny, but now it looks like a nightshade. I’m waiting to see what the fruits look like when ripe before deciding on its fate.
Past the eggplants, there are a few cabbages, then this silverbeet left from last winter, and then a tomatillo, tomatoes, and basil. On the right are a few carrots, more tomatoes and basil, and then a patch I planted in carrots (although they aren’t coming up) and two or three borage plants that grew when I gave up on them germinating and dumped the pots!
Come out of the north door of the greenhouse, turn left, and this is what you see. The first bed is beetroot, then spring onions and leeks at the far end, with a cosmos or two and some dill. Next is a small patch of potatoes and the onion patch, with dill in it, too. Close at hand, on the far right, is a Daikon radish that went to seed. The bees love it!
There is a small patch of lettuce at the corner of the potato patch.
The next bed over is mostly potatoes, and then we have a patch of broccoli and lettuce, with a few corn plants separating them from more potatoes. The last bed in this part of the garden is the corn.
Looking back toward the greenhouse and the garage. The white building on the other side of the dill is the chook coop (or turkey coop, right now). The plants with white flowers, sprinkled through the potatoes and onions, are coriander (cilantro) that self-seeded and is now going to seed again. I’m going to try to save the seeds.
These green beans and lettuce are at the end of the third patch of potatoes.
This is the far corner of the garden; these are the pumpkin plants.
On the other side of the path, behind the magnolia tree, is the zucchini patch, and the rest of the tomatoes. The turkey run is that fence past the tomatoes.
Here are the turkeys! The white one is the tom; the others are hens. We also have a white hen. She’s sitting on eggs at the moment, at the other end of the run. There are two more nests, too; I was informed yesterday that another hen is setting now.
We’ve had a dozen turkeys hatch this year; five have survived the weather. They’re getting pretty big already.
I also have a couple of small garden spots by the house, just outside our bedroom. It’s sunny and sheltered here, and handy to the kitchen, so I have my herbs here. This one has celery, parsley, basil and rosemary, and some flowers. There’s also a tomato that snuck in with a basil!
On the other side is this patch, with more basil, some silverbeet, calendula, nasturtiums in the bathtub, and still more tomatoes! Little Miss is loving picking edible flowers for our salads. We’ve been using calendula, nasturtiums, pansies, and borage. So fun to dress up a salad that way! The boys are disgusted, though. They like plain lettuce.
I am thoroughly enjoying the garden right now. We were able to get so many grass clippings this spring that weeds have been minimal, and the boys weeded the rest of it. We’ve also had a nice amount of rain (since the monsoon came to an end in early December and allowed things to start growing!), and with all the mushroom compost we bought, everything is doing well. What a blessing!
More Spring Gardening
It always amazes–and challenges me–to see how the children ALL want to do whatever I’m doing. This afternoon I went out to transplant tiny tomatoes into individual pots. Within minutes, all six children had joined me, and were helping. A couple of boys got started planting pumpkin seeds that they had saved from the pumpkins they grew themselves last year in newspaper pots, and Esther worked on the tomatoes. They can’t wait to plant in the big garden, which was plowed this afternoon. Next week it should be tilled and we can plant!
Setting the tomato seedlings on top the woodbox, where they will have plenty of light and warmth.
Spreading the bird netting over the strawberry patch–the first strawberry is nearly ripe!