We finally finished planting the garden–although, to be honest, that is a job that never really finishes, since I keep planting little bits throughout the year. The most of it is done, though, and to celebrate, and as a way of keeping a record, I took a video as I walked through. So, if you want to see what we’re doing right now, have a look!
Homesteading
Garden–December 2023
I didn’t take very many pictures of the garden in December. I spent an hour one morning talking to my sister on the phone while I weeded this patch. That was a great way to pass the time while doing a job like this!
The entire bed before I finished…
…and after the weeding was finished and I mulched it.
One of the children took a picture of these roses by the house.
They also got a close-up of some of the strawberries!
While I was working in the garden one hot afternoon, the children had a waterfight with the neighbor, using his water guns, which he offered them the use of. It was pretty funny to watch!
I took this video the second week of January.
Hatching
We bought a new incubator a couple of months ago, when the old one we were given quit working. So far, we have used it for two batches of eggs. Our first batch, which started with 56 eggs, gave us 35 chicks. Hatch day was very exciting! This was the first one to hatch. The poor thing had a few hours with no company, and was very lonely.
That evening, we took all the babies out of the incubator; there were already 24 of them!
The next morning we moved all 35 out to the brooder.
About a week later, we started the incubator again, with a fresh batch of 56 eggs. Princess decided this was a great place to sleep; it was nice and warm! However, she must have pushed the lid a little, and that messed with the turning mechanism. We had to make Princess stop sleeping there.
These eggs are hatching tonight; so far, we have 16 chicks out of the 55 that we left after candling the 56 we started with. The first lot moved outside into a pen on the grass yesterday. There were 34 of them left; a cat pulled one through a crack in the side of the coop one day and had a snack. We patched up the crack. This picture shows what I saw one day this week when I opened the door:
Garden–November
We got most of the garden planted in November. We also got a water tank to collect rainwater from the garage roof to use in dry times! It is enormous; we estimate it holds about 15,000 liters (that’s in the neighborhood of 3,000 gallons). It took a couple of tries to get a HIAB truck (crane) to get the job done, and even then we were holding our breath to see if the truck would get back out of the garden after setting the tank down! It worked–praise God–and now we’re hoping for enough rain to fill the tank.
Our pitcher plant is blooming this year. Such an interesting plant!
We got a truckload of 10 cubic meters of compost delivered, and spread it through the garden. The children did part of the job, and Gayle finished it.
Remember my story about the tomatoes that didn’t grow? A friend in Canterbury mailed me her extra seedlings, and I potted them. A month later, they were looking like this, and now they are growing fast in the ground!
These are the ones I started in early October. This is seven weeks after seeding them. They grew fast!
After setting out the tomatoes we spread newspapers on the ground in between them, and then rotten silage that a local farmer gave us. We’re hoping for few weeds! This thick mulch is certainly keeping the soil moist. Other places have gotten rather dry already, but it’s very wet under those layers of paper and hay.
Garden–October 2023
My first attempt at starting tomatoes this year was a complete failure. We planted the seeds in the ground in the greenhouse, as I did a few years ago when I was not able to buy potting mix because of the lockdown. When they germinated, we pricked them out and put them in a mixture of potting soil and compost that I bought from a department store in town–as I have done every year for five years. This year, they didn’t grow. After about five weeks, when I realized they had barely grown since transplanting, I transplanted them again, into larger pots. Two or three weeks later, they still hadn’t grown at all. By then, I had started some new seeds. When a friend mailed me her extra starts, I sadly dumped every one of the nearly 300 tomato plants that refused to grow and were, in fact, dying. This is what they looked like at that point, two months nearly to the day after sowing the seeds.
This is the new ones that I started the second week of October. By the third week of November, they were nearly all about 5 inches tall, growing fast and ready to put in the ground. Our tomato crop will be late this year, but hopefully we’ll get one.
I started a lot of beetroot! Quite a few of them got covered up with the mulch they were transplanted into in the garden, though. We have a resident weka who spends its nights throwing mulch around, probably searching for slugs and such underneath. What a nuisance!
When James rented the digger to work at Simon’s house, he took advantage of having it to do a couple of jobs here. This was the first; he had Elijah dig a hole for a septic tank for the garden sink. They dug the hole and then James dropped in a barrel which he had cut both ends off of. He covered it with plywood and some boards and ran the drain into it, then covered it again. It is wonderful to be able to use that sink without getting my feet wet and without having a perpetual mud puddle there.
This was the other job, and it was a sad one. Our gorgeous tulip magnolia died, so he dug it out. Now, instead of a beautiful tree with branches perfect for the children to climb in, we have an ugly hole. We’re planning to plant grass there, and eventually build a swing. I won’t miss the shade on my garden, but we do miss the tree.
Garden, January 2023
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!)
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!
Reading to her baby. 
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.