Taming the Triffid Garden

My vege gardens have had their various successes and failures in the last few years.  This year though, I've been determined that we need to have a successful garden.  There is an extra motivation for this, well several motivating factors to be honest.  The first is that my parents have moved into a retirement village - my mother's dementia or alzheimer's (seems to depend on which Doctor you talk to) has worsened to the point where the village was the sensible step for Dad - he won't put her into full time care and the village has a dementia unit if she does worsen too much or if something happens to him.  Dad asked if he could have a patch for veges, but hasn't had the time to come out and do anything with it yet, so we'll just grow enough for them too.

Recent earthquakes and the American election make a lot of things seem unstable so making sure we have the resources to feed ourselves healthily becomes more important.

Last year, I had great success with my broccoli.  I always leave it after I've cut the main head off and pick the side sprouts.  Side sprouts are usually bite sized, but if you keep it up, you can get a few extra meals out of them.  Last year, those side sprouts grew to be only just smaller than a normal head of broccoli, so I got at least ten heads per plant.  They also just kept on growing, the sprouts getting a little smaller as they went until I just didn't bother anymore and I left them to go to seed.  I only stopped them from doing that about a month ago when I decided it was time to start sorting out that garden for this year and pulled them out.

Within a couple of weeks, baby broccoli plants were popping up everywhere.  There has to be at least a hundred self-sown broccoli plants in that garden.

I left the remainder of my spring onions last year to go to seed as well.  They're still flowering so we'll see how well that goes, but they still haven't died off since last summer either.  I also have silverbeet and what I thought was the red stemmed version of silverbeet but has turned out to be beetroot - so I'll leave them to seed and look after the babies a little better.  At the moment, I just pick the leaves and stems as treats for cattle and chickens.

This was the garden that we put several hours of work into yesterday.  The weeds had also bolted, to the point where I couldn't even see the tomatoes that Hubby had planted in there.  They're now clear, staked and laterals removed.

I wish I'd taken a before picture for comparison.

I filled one of the gardens with chicken manure and sawdust (the sweepings when I cleaned out the chookhouses) at the start of last year - nearly two years ago.  Everything grew very fast and very tall.  Too fast and too tall in fact and most of it bolted straight to seed.

All the brussels sprouts I planted last year bolted to seed immediately and I'd left them to seed.  That patch of garden also had radishes that had also bolted and the seeds had grown and then bolted too.  I started cleaning the flowering radishes out and found a heap of small brussels sprouts plants.  Because they had been tucked in amongst a lot of much taller plants, I've been slow weeding that garden, giving each handful I uncover a few days to toughen up before exposing them completely.  I haven't seen what is growing deeper in that patch, because I'm afraid of stepping on a baby plant, but I am working slowly through it.

In the other main vege patch, we planted some potatoes probably a month ago.  Two weeks ago, I mounded them up with year old cow manure.  Hubby had planted out some tomatoes in between the rows of potatoes.  He was sure he'd left lots of space between them, but I was starting to mound them too with the potatoes.  In a week, the potato plants had grown to over a foot above the mounding I'd done.  I don't want to risk using more cow manure in case it ends up too nitrogen rich which would mean lots of plant, but a few small potatoes, so I'm finding some rather sour old clay soil to do the next layer of mounding.

We still have 60 odd seed potatoes waiting or us to plant them, so we're filling tyres again.  And I still need to figure out where I'll be planting peas and beans.

Earthquakes 14 November

As you may remember, we moved to our lifestyle block after the devastating Christchurch earthquakes of 2010 and 2011.  Generally, we feel the odd quake, but only mildly and very few of the quakes that hit Christchurch.

So when we were shaken out of bed just after midnight this morning by a 7.5 magnitude earthquake, it was both familiar and a rude shock at the same time.  However, having been there before, I found that while the quake was still rocking and rolling us around I had already assessed how much food we had, how much water was available, our ability to cook and keep warm.

It was somewhat satisfying to realise that because of our efforts towards self-sufficiency we would be okay for quite some time.

We recently had two cattlebeasts and two pigs slaughtered, so the freezer is full of meat.  I also have several male turkeys that are overdue for slaughter, so there was always that available too if the power went out and we didn't want to open the freezers.  My veges are starting to grow well for this season, but except from some neglected carrots and silverbeet that has become triffid-like, most of it is still in the early growing stages so that would be a little tough, but there was still some of last years broccoli and cauliflower in the freezer.  I've also got shelves and shelves full of various preserves in the pantry.  We'd be okay for food.

We have a 900 litre header tank on the roof full of water, a 2000 litre tank up the hill and there is always the water in the creek although that would take some boiling. We'd be okay for water.

We have the coal range for heating and cooking if the power goes out.  We have plenty of firewood in the shed already and there is a lot of old gorse wood in various spots around the farm.  We have gas barbecues and gas in the bottle.  We'd be okay there.

We have tents and shelters and sheds.  We have jackets and gumboots hanging up outside the door.  We have torches galore.

We were going to be okay.