Garden Update

I have somehow managed to completely fail at blogging anything so far this year, and it's already April (how did that happen?) I guess I'm just too busy living life to write about it. Or maybe I'm just too busy working... My camera has also been a bit temperamental over the last few months, so I haven't taken as many photos as I wanted - completely missed taking a photo of the tomato bed in it's prime, which was a shame, it's not much to look at now. I'm just going to do a quick overview of the last few months, as I need to go to sleep soon for work tomorrow.

November - The vegetables are growing well and I was able to eat mesclun, spinach and pak choi. I've been eating juicy strawberries since the 8th November, they have been very productive this year and I'm glad I planted them in a bed instead of a strawberry pot (as I'd done the previous year).

Above is a box with mesclun, snow peas, beans, brocolli, pakchoi, carrots and spinach growing. The mesclun is bursting out of the square!

In November I also started laying weedmat around the boxes to keep down the grass and weeds, as I was getting a bit sick of mowing and strimming it away from the boxes. Here you can see potatoes, which I am growing in left over compost bags. I built a cage from chicken wire to protect my strawberry bed. The far bed in the above picture has broccoli, peas, and onions. It did have parsnips but they never germinated :( Think I had a bad batch of seeds.

Strawberries and raspberries - yum :)

December - I continued the weedmatting endeavour, and spent a day shovelling Otatara pebbles on top, with a lot of help from mum and my boyfriend. I think it looks almost stylish now!

The centre box has peas which you can see have shot up - they are Dwarf Massey peas which supposedly means they don't need staking, although I did give them a bit of support by making a cage around the box - primarily to protect my broccoli from cabbage butterflies and their caterpillars. I had a good, if short, harvest of peas - unfortunately the bulk of them were ready whilst I was away over Christmas and New Years. The fruit picking continues, and I've harvested my garlic (the pots in front of photo above), picking carrots when I want, and giant broccoli heads too.

January - Even though Summer seemed to have deserted us for most of the month, I at least still managed some great harvests. My experiment with cucumber fell flat though, with my cucumber plants promptly dying as soon as they went outside. Nevermind I have a solution for cucumbers for next season...

Carrots, strawberries, broccoli, peas, spinach... yum yum yum!

I also seem to be growing something surprising in my raspberry bed!

February - I came into my main crop of potatoes (I was hoping they'd be a bit earlier) and have spring onions and baby turnips too. My broccoli was almost done, and I ended up freezing a lot of later use as I just couldn't eat my way through it all.

March - This month has seen the bulk of my tomato crop ripen. They are in a raised bed by the back door and have done surprisingly well for being outdoors, although ripened later than I would have liked. Having said that, I did have some ripen before the next door neighbour's tomatoes, which are in a glasshouse. I have Roma, Moneymaker, Russian Red and Sweet 100 growing. I've made some into puree and frozen it. I love tomatoes, but there are just too many for me!

I also bought some fruit trees and planted them along the new fence my kind neighbour built as our new boundary. There are 2 ballerina apple trees, a meyer lemon and a feijoa so far. I've harvested all the potatoes from the bags I planted them in, and most of my crops are coming to the end of the season. It's also bulb planting time - I noticed last spring there was a severe lack of bulbs in my garden, so now there are tulips, daffodils, anemones, ranunculus, freesia, crocus and dutch iris.

April - The biggest accomplishment of April so far - my new tunnel house that Dad built me for my birthday!! Now I can plant even more food!

There are currently some pak choi, broccoli, silverbeet and lettuce growing in there. In summer I'll try for some cucumber again, and grow tomatoes so hopefully I will get some earlier. Unbelievably, considering how cold it has been recently, I'm still harvesting tomatoes, and strawberries. In fact I've had strawberries constantly since November, and haven't had to buy a single punnet.

At some point soon I'm going to write a post examining my successes and failures for the season and looking at where to go next. Right now, though, I have to go to sleep!

Filling the Square Foot Garden

So I was going to write about how I prepared my vegetable garden a while ago, but I have been too busy in my garden to actually get around to blogging about it! So I actually did this back in August, and it is working very well, but I'll update with new garden photos later. First off I want to explain about the mixture I used for the boxes. As I am using something called the 'Square Foot Method' I wanted to be fairly true to the book and follow the instructions to create a good growing medium. This involves using a formula of 1/3 blended compost, 1/3 vermiculite (a type of volcanic rock) and 1/3 peat moss. I was a bit sceptical about using peat moss as I remember the devastation of peat bogs in the UK, but peat moss in NZ is from sustainable places apparently so I felt a bit better about it. The vermiculite was difficult to source, but I eventually got it from a gardening supply place in Christchurch who happily couriered it down to me. For the compost, the book recommends using at least 5 different types, but this was pretty difficult, especially as many bagged composts don't actually state what is in them. I used Tui vege mix, Nicholls organic, Tui organic and worm castings. My boxes are 12" deep but I only needed to use the mix for the top 6" so the bottom half I just used plain compost of a different type again underneath.

My equipment - tarp, buckets, and compost, as well as the trusty book.

First I mixed up all the compost (I had already done lots of sums to work out how much of each compost I would need).

Then the peat and vermiculite were added and the whole thing was dampened and mixed some more.

Then I dragged the tarp over to my boxes and started shovelling it in with the bucket, wetting the mixture frequently which helps the compressed peat moss to expand.

I actually mixed it up for each box one by one, so did the whole thing 4 times. It got a lot easier...

All four boxes are filled up, and I had some left over as I have a box which is only half the size of the others - saved it for my next box. My flatmate and her entire extended family turned up while I was doing this... I'm pretty sure they thought I was completely crazy...

Then it was time to start planning and planting. I'll update with photos of my lovely growing garden shortly, it is doing very well.

My Bathroom Renovation, part 2

After the bathroom was practically gutted, it was time to start putting it back together. Having the floor completely ripped up at least meant it was somewhat easier for the plumber to get to the pipes and sort out the plumbing, some of which was looking a bit dodgy - again, such a wonderful DIY job was done on this bathroom previously...

The bath and frame are positioned.

Bob the builder looking busy building the new laundry cupboard.

Bath in place, it is starting to take shape!

I have walls again!

The shell of the cupboard has been built - slightly smaller than the original so that I could accommodate a bath. The bath is also slightly smaller than standard so that I could still have a laundry cupboard, as there is nowhere else in the house to put a washing machine.

My shiny new vanity - now I have real storage, this will be much better than the plastic drawer set from the Warehouse I've had under the sink for ages.

The bath liner is fitted.

It took me a while to decide on paint colours - I wanted something I liked and that matched the wood detailing, but not something too modern as it isn't in-keeping with the house. In the end I chose a deep purple with an off-white purple for the upper walls. People who know me know how much I like purple, but honestly it was what matched best! (And it was actually my boyfriend who originally picked it).

New floor! It's just vinyl but the wood effect works well in the bathroom and blends well with the real wooden floors I have in the hallway - so much so that when my mum first saw it she thought it was wood.

Really taking shape, not long until it's finished!

The shower is in! Finally I have a shower with good pressure!

Cupboard doors looking very smart.

All finished!

I've had the bathroom finished for a couple of months now, and am still loving it. The shower is so much better and it's nice to have a bath once in a while too, and the whole bathroom feels a lot cleaner and tidier than before, with plenty of storage. It'll be a while before I can afford any more house renovations, so in the meantime it's on to the garden!

Where oh where shall my garden go?

After building my garden boxes, it was time to position them. I'd chosen to put my garden along the side of the house as this side gets the most sun, even managing a good morning of sunshine in the darkest winter months, at least until the next door neighbour's trees obscure it. The sun is almost at the point of topping those trees now (beginning of spring) so it should be fine in the summer time. The bottom of the garden is the flattest part, with a slope up to another fairly flat level. For some reason, I decided to place my boxes in a diamond rather than square pattern... not sure why really but it seemed to make sense at the time! I think it makes the garden look interesting anyway, although it is perhaps not an efficient use of space...

I had a bit of help from my flatmate to remove some of the grass from the area I had marked out, although I went around afterwards and straightened it up a bit as his edges weren't that straight.

My lovely cut out square of ground.

I placed weed matting on the ground to stop any weeds from getting into my beds. I don't think that will be too much of a problem, the grass is dying just with me trampling all over it. The box fits over the top and nestles into the cut out square so it won't move too much.

The first two boxes fit snugly in the flattest bit of the garden.

Now came the dilemma of where to put the next box. The further up the garden, the less sunny it is, so I really wanted to keep it close to the first two. Unfortunately there is a bit of a slope in the way.

I decided that the slope wouldn't stop me, I could just dig the bed down into it. Easier said than done, it took me a lot of digging over an afternoon and following morning to get the bed vaguely level. It rained overnight as well, so I was slipping around in the mud a lot, but I think it helped to loosen the heavy clay soil somewhat.

I marked out the area with black tape and then started to dig.

Poppy lends a hand - put your back into it!

Almost finished.

The box goes into place.

This was incredibly hard to do on my own but I got there eventually after quite a bit of heavy work! It is still not quite level but was the best I could get it and I think it will be fine.

The three 4x4ft boxes finally in position.

I've protected them with bird netting, not because of birds but to stop the multitude of cats in my neighbourhood from using them as litter trays. Of course my cat is much better behaved! The grass and soil went behind the fence by the garage to raise that area a bit as I am going to make a pathway around to the side of the garage to make a composting area... don't think the neighbours will mind will they??

All the boxes in place and partially filled with compost. In the back is my 2x4 box which I have placed in an empty space in my old garden bed between two plants I uncovered from the mass of weeds that was originally there. I'll make sure to keep those bushes trimmed and away from my box. It will be planted with raspberry canes - if they fruit higher than the fence I can also go around the fence and pick them.

It was a lot of work to cut into the slope - but I will probably do it again for another 4x4 box at a later date. Either than or cut the whole slope out completely and put in a retaining wall. Tempting, but an awful lot of digging for me...

I also treated the wood with linseed oil to prolong the life of boxes. I will do another coat soon. If only it would stop raining!

Next - filling and planting the boxes!

My Bathroom Renovation, part 1

One of the things I've been itching to get done since I moved into my new house is the bathroom. It was functional (barely) but had a lot of issues, not least the terrible shower water pressure and the fact the shower base was leaking. To get a hot shower you had to turn the shower mixer right around as far as it would go, and then you would get scorching hot water dribbling out. Any less than that and you would just get a cold shower. Not pleasant. I was also fairly convinced the shower had been leaking and rotting the floor away - there was a suspicious sponginess to the floor by the corner of the shower.

It took a long while to find good builders who actually bothered to give me a quote (clearly builders in Dunedin have too much work, as I got a complete lack of response from many of them). The builders I chose were recommended to me on WOMF, which is a useful site for finding recommendations. I'll talk about the builders more when I inspect the finished work!

I chose a new vanity to replace the pedestal sink, and a bath and bath screen with a slide shower to replace the tiny corner shower. I also have a laundry cupboard in the bathroom which accommodates the washing machine. It is actually too big for the purpose, and needed to be made slightly smaller so that the bath could comfortably fit. Even so I do have a slightly shorter than standard bath, but it is still a decent size. The items I chose weren't particularly expensive, but are practical options. The most expensive items were the taps and mixers - I needed good quality tap ware that would function with my unequal low pressure water system. I chose some nice taps from the Methven catalogue, a company well known in NZ for their specialised low pressure tap ware.

On Monday morning the builders and the plumber arrived and started to demolish the existing bathroom. Out came the sink and washing machine, followed by the demolition of the cupboard and shower

When we were able to see the flooring it was obvious that there was extensive water damage and the whole floor would need replacing.

Not only was their water damage from the shower but also from the washing machine. When I first moved in the hot water tap had been leaking, probably for a long time. It was clear the bathroom had been a bit of a DIY job - the floor was just particle board with the vinyl put straight on top, and at one end was a gap where the floor did not even reach the wall! So the floor was removed as well. The builder described it like pulling up weetabix, the damage was that bad. I think the vinyl was the only thing stopping us from falling through!

Luckily the joints underneath the house are in fairly good condition considering the age of the house. We did, however, spend Monday night without a bathroom floor! I'm glad that the toilet is in a separate room! The cat, who likes to explore under the house, was having great fun jumping up onto the joists. Unfortunately she kept disappearing when I tried to take a photo.

I had a slight dilemma about which spout to use on the bathroom vanity as I could not decide from the pictures in the catalogue. The lovely plumber went and got me some spouts to see to help me choose. I posted the photos on Facebook to see what people thought.

I opted for the high-rise spout in the end, it got the most votes! I hadn't been keen on it in the catalogue but seeing it in real life helped a lot.

The building work continues on Tuesday, with the new floor, plumbing and bath being fitted. Excited!