Winter is the perfect time to collect seaweed for the garden

Dunedin is always good for a trip to the beach, even if you have to wrap yourself in the picnic blanket to get warm. The goal is to get seaweed for the garden direct and the compost bins, if I get that much. Of course I don't headline so bluntly. 'Who wants to go to the beach and try out Johnny's new BBQ?'
Everybody it turns out. That affords me 6 sacks of seaweed. We can all carry back one bag each.



The BBQ was a metalwork project.  Local council by-laws outlawed open fires outside quite a few years ago and we moved to a gas BBQ but we have always missed the  incomparable excellence of a  sausage cooked over wood coals.   

Here's the BBQ as yet unused. One handle is some sort of animal head (sheep?).

There is a rule that wherever you stand you'll get smoked. If you move, the wind changes.

Fire is going well, now patience for the wood to burn down to hot coals.

quick, put on the rack and the snarlers, note the makeshift tongs, had to forget something...we'll find a way...



And the proof is in the eating.
Now I didn't get any photos but I dug the seaweed straight into the tunnel house and watered the whole thing. It doesn't smell at all.
I got 8 sacks of seaweed for work singlehandedly today and realised there are better ways to do things.. Got home and announced, 'We need a few trips to the beach these school holidays, take a BBQ and collect seaweed.'

winter

I've forgotton the name of these little lantern fruits. That's it, Cape Gooseberries. Seems odd to have a harvest of them just as winter officially arrives. About this time of year I am very aware that we are on the south side of the hill and our sun window is about 10 until 2 as we get to the shortest day. Too windy, shady and damp here for these almost tropical fruits, weeds apparently.

Don't ponder the mystery, they were a gift from a friend on the other side of town. She lives on a north facing flat section, hedged in on four sides with macrocarpa and such to a good height;  effectively they have a walled-garden microclimate.



These cape gooseberries are a bit like an aromatic, almost spicy,  tiny tomato;they  grow well in poor soil which explains why they grow like weeds by her hedge. M clips them back with the hedge clippers after fruiting. That seems to be the only care.

I have put the plant into the tunnel house here to survive and will put it out in late spring. I made the fruits into the nicest chutney I have had for a long time. Possibly the best use for them of all.



Now I've been going to vege club, and I am ashamed to say I was a bit disparaging at first.  I completely underestimated the  hidden depths and qualities of these marvellous people.
When the president mentioned that they played vegetable bingo at the last mid-winter club dinner I realised it was time to participate more fully in what the club had to offer...

I bought a few celeriac plants at the club last year and they have quietly grown into this thing about the size of a turnip. The leaves got a bit tatty which suggested to me that they were now fully grown, and I hoicked this one out of the ground and rinsed off its roots for the photo shoot.

In the end I made a scalloped potatoes and celeriac with cream, garlic, and cheese and the dish was scraped clean. Really delicious. I expect these things will sit in the ground unattended,  as root vegetables do here, and then start to grow again in spring. I'll grow these again.

  

The carrots are my brag shot as there is no gardening at all going on at the minute. It's a great thing to have good soil for growing carrots and there it is, the soil has done it all. These followed peas  and the ground has had nothing from me in the way of additions since I began that piece of garden.Well done you lot.

The red brussel sprouts above, well those plants came from vege club too. The club has a sales table where members sell off surplus plants. Apparently these were grown from a Kings' seed variety and the red ones are sweeter than the green. They are a great alternative to a big cabbage which sits in the fridge getting progressively older and nastier to eat. I  pick these as I'm cooking tea and they remind me that fresh brassiccas are a completely different vegetable from stale ones.
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I can see by successes  that I am working with what this climate and garden grows best (sometimes);  yams are in that group. It was mild enough this year  that the tops have only just frosted down into slime the way they do.
Now I planted some garlic elsewhere that hasn't come up and I suspect it may have rotted.  We'll have to eat the yams a bit faster to make room to plant more garlic.

The ground is so wet here that I'm reluctant to do anything: however garlic is important enough to get my gumboots out for. I'm thinking about making raised or sloped  beds on the flat parts to improve winter drainage.

Think away, it seems too wet to do anything for the next few months at least. Fortunately I have overgrown hedges of my own to tackle and they seem to be a big enough job for any spare gardening moments.

In the Meantime

I had high hopes for a jumpstart on the planting this winter season, to set me up for spring, but have moderated my aspirations; medium hopes will do.

Here's the excellent reason for lack of prompt garden time-keeping: painting the house. The smaller the surface area the longer it seems to take to paint e.g. window frames, eaves, chimneys and the front door. Paint demands the warmest, nicest weather and has first call on the day for this year anyway. By the time we paint the house again, we will be pensioners.

I did tidy the shed and that was worth a photo. I've found I can fit alot more in now...

It looks like a plum tree to the left but it is only red orach, seeding. I figured if I let it seed freely, by the time I move the chook house back here there could be a carpet of orach to eat.
The lettuce have been under a plastic cloche through the late summer: a happy picture.

Club root: a very sad picture. The photo doesn't do justice to the distortion. It is an ugly sight. The brassiccas were failing to thrive and would wilt during the day even in the rain. I finally dug one up looking for grass grub, alas no.

Fortunately at that very moment Rose arrived with a bucket of lime and some pinecones. One of those items will help the ground considerably and the other will light the fire.
We had another perfectly timed visit when an electrician came to our house this week by mistake (looking for another house) and we were able to call him in to solve an electrical puzzle for us before letting him get away. How often does that happen?
I wonder how he wrote it up on his time sheet.

There is a beginning and an end to this photo which I see I've left out. The beautiful loam was a black sack of dock seed heads a year ago; it rotted into a crumbly, lovely mix  over 12 months, although mid-way, I do remember peering into the bag and seeing little seedlings, then tying the bag back up again.
The end photo, if you can imagine a green fuzz of zillions of little seedlings emerging here. It seems the motherload of seed was not nuetralised after all.
In a garden, there aren't many disasters, just plan B, plan C, plan D and ever new resources to redirect around the property. 

I had redirected clusters of onion weed to the compost bin. Midway through turning the pile I found them.  The photo doesn't do justice to the particular light-starved green as they regrew in the middle of the heap. Nae bother to flick the bulbs off into a bucket and compost the tops. You can't drown the bulbs, they grow, so I may splash out and pay to put these out in  a rubbish bag.

I do that now and again.

Reporting in on the tomato stakes

There are a few garden stars that laugh at the dry weather and perform magnificently yet again. This sedum, for example, which was originally from a cutting from K & M's first flat in Invercargill, the one where  funghi grew on the couch; lack of moisture was clearly never a problem in that location.
Behind it the Japanese Anemone, some call it a weed. It flowers over a long period of time and has lovely foliage; survives neglect. You'll do, and I paid money for this particular plant from a local gardener's stall.

Now the reason for this post was to show you the tomatoes Mum. I've mixed the names over until I've forgotton who is which, but Galina and Siberia above and below: or 'big red' and 'little yellow'. Big red wins on flavour and colour. Yellow is good in a salad mix, not so useful for pasta sauce.

The White Cherry below has the best flavour of all,  along with Black Jack which you will just have to imagine. It  fruits prolifically so it has been deemed the winner and I will plant it again next year.
Three cherry tomato plants to every Big Red was the wrong ratio. Well, everything has been a bit topsy turvy this year.

And everything else has been late. That's my maincrop beetroot and carrots  to the right of the flowering yams.
I plan to plant broad beans, peas, and garlic very soon and get the jump on next season for a change.
This will necessitate extending the garden a little...

B came in and saw the courgettes/marrows and said 'Please, please, don't cook them for tea.'
With only two fussy eaters left at home to feed the other two of us would be stuck eating these monsters all week. Like 'filboid studge'  they would reappear at every mealtime until they were eaten. Aaaagh.

The happy ending to this story was courgette loaf (a lot like carrot cake) with cream cheese icing. I love a happy ending. 

 

Rounding Up

Certain things in the garden at the minute are particularly satisfying.  Like the rhubarb after the rain when it crisps up tall  after nearly touching its toes,   tired,  and neglected.  Bottled some up with the last of the Black Doris Plums (thanks for the idea Jen). Gives a good deep red colour and breaks up the stringiness of the rhubarb.

 

One of the first tasks with the tunnel house was to get some  seedlings on the go. A visit to the garden shop to buy a few winter plants was the reality check to spur me on. Even the packet of seed set me back $7 (fennel) so I'll be cossetting that lot along.
I can't help doing a mental tot-up as I water them and watch them grow:  x number of punnets times $3.89 equals...ka ching.
It's a bit like when you bring out tea and say to the family, 'That would cost $20 in a cafe'. Oh how they must get tired of that one.

 

This tomato is Galina, a cherry tomato, apparently yellow but that is still to be revealed. The satisfaction for now is to see fruit and flowers and foliage all growing as they should.
I left a lettuce in behind them to flower and coax in the bees as a small handful of tomatoes doesn't seem to promise much pollen to fill the saddle bags let alone nectar.

In the foreground you can squint and  see the blackcurrant cuttings which are throwing out leaves. From memory there are two years between now and a bush and maybe another year for fruit so the sooner I start the better.

     

Don't know why I haven't done it before; covered the carrot and beetroot seed with some wind cloth.

Two equally important benefits,

1.  keeping the neighbourhood cats off from using the seed bed as a dirt box,
2. keeping the moisture in for germination over the uncharacteristic run of hot dry days (The seed has gone in very late but I think I got them in on the last gasp of the season ).

 

Here's a partial glimpse of the rhubarb forest.

 

The chickens have fulfilled all our expectations. How often does that happen?
We are moving the run slowly along the terrace. Slowly in every way. It is not exactly a chicken tractor, more of a chicken behemoth that takes a few 'volunteers' to move. 

The chooks are scratching up and manuring the debris. I fork what is left onto the compost heap and will throw all my old seed over the bare ground: oats, old mesclun mix and enough kale seed to feed the South of Scotland if the seed were all germinated and planted out.   They can eat what comes up on their return trip about the middle of winter I'd say. The chooks, not the Scots that is.

   

I had clipped back the grass around the raspberries last year and cut out some of the canes. It was so overgrown there seemed to be no new growth but  this year they have come up trumps with lots of strong new shoots. It would nice to get fancy and give them some compost next time there is some, why not manure,  and even weed a bit. A fine thing to aspire to.

 

Sunset at the end of the Tunnel...House

To explain the rose below first of all, it is in 'a sheltered pocket of great value' and gardening on this site is most successful when I can match the plant to a benign environment. Given that we are on an exposed site, the tunnel house project will create an optimum environment that I've been looking forward to.

 There was a small hiatus in a week of wind and whitecaps on the harbour -  Thursday evening from 7.30 to 10.20. Three hours was all we needed to put the plastic on the tunnel house which has been a tunnel skeleton hitherto.

  

Here it is with all the framework, not quite waiting because I merrily planted it out and just as well as according to the well worn rule, the project took a lot longer than we thought.

When it came to  attaching the canopy, the tomatoes were easy enough to avoid but amongst a forest of weeds, and planted in between plants as it was anyway,  the basil was trampled. Never mind, the plastic has a guarentee for 10 years so let's say it will be another 15 years before we dance the plastic manouvres again.



The diagonal struts that reinforce the sides are the old tent poles from 'the big top', Bill's family's old canvas tent that eventually rotted out. Fortunately we kept the poles.Unfortunately we are want to keep many things that may or may not achieve a  phoenix reinvention.

The compost heaps were on the dirt patch above  until very recently when I moved them for construction purposes. It is solid clay beneath the dirt veneer,  full of worms courtesy of the compost.
I did say I wasn't going to extend the vegetable garden but that little plot has suddenly become 'a sheltered pocket of great value for special things'. I have put in a few beans already. It suggests corn to me for another year.

That's two chairs folded up at the end  of the concrete  path and ready for morning teas. A shelf is on the way to hold the cups, and before long, plants.

It's too dark to see but throught the door, on the lower third of the far curve,  there is wind cloth for ventilation down the length of the house, with a plastic roll-down blind to close it off at night. Next post I will detail those features with photos. 

The neighbours who intitially gave us the curved pipe that it is built on ( they had salvaged and  stored them for about 10 years) came around and we launched it today with champagne and blackcurrant shortcake.

The cinnamon roll dough below is just to show off my prize holiday purchase in Nelson, $4 at the hospice shop, a heavy enamel baking tray that is in perfect condition. Perfect. 

 

Tunnel Vision

 To start with irrelevance, only a blogger knows the idle pleasure of dreaming up silly titles. No, it's a foible of newspaper editors also and with apologies to hairdressers, Salon names must also share the prize for nonsense.

To the task in hand, the tunnel house is being built at odd moments, after tea mostly; that's a benefit of the long evenings in the South and a reflection of the busyness of this time of year.  Some neighbours gave us the pipes with the as-yet hollow-promise of baking  still fresh in their memory no doubt, it had escaped mine until now.

The tunnel house is built to the existing concrete remnants of the glasshouse, which ought to have some passive solar benefit and certainly lend strength because the concrete has iron uprights embedded in it. We have decided to use Agthene to cover it and estimate 10 metres.
Watched a few tunnel houses go up on You tube in all of about 20 minutes.We have our own reality check unfolding slowly,  part of it is the challenge of integrating  recycled materials.

I couldn't wait and have already planted it out which has called for nimble side stepping. It has been cold and all the  warmth lovers are growing very slowly. In truth I am embarrassed to put up a photo until they look better but that's no way to edit a garden or record a life for that matter.  Will address that in the next post. Adios.