The excitement builds!

Wandering around the gardening this morning got my heart a-fluttering as I noticed the very early beginnings of what will hopefully be a bountiful harvest this year.  The raspberries and blackberries have finally had a permanent home for a year now and have had a chance to set down good strong roots so for the first time they're suckering like mad.  The first flower buds are appearing too.  The strawberries are still flowering like crazy and there are tiny embryonic berries where some of the flowers have come and gone already.  The peas that self-seeded all over the garden last year are putting out a good early crop, which is delicious and just enough to snack on as I garden.  (Sadly, not nearly enough for me to share with Sam - oh well...).

The blueberries are looking sad.  They're supposed to be easy but I never seem to be very successful with them.

The first 2 asparagus pea pods!  I can't wait to have enough to cook with.  They are supposed to be an asparagus substitute (handy for people like me who haven't got a space in the garden to leave undisturbed for years in order to get an asparagus crop).  The red flowers are pretty and the plant fold it's leaves closed at night - fascinating!

Don't you love lettuce?  No fail plant.  Just drop the seed packet and they all sprout :)

The first alpine strawberries ripening... Umm... well, nearly the first.  Sam and I ate the first 2 yesterday.  They  are DELICIOUS!  I've ordered 15 more plants from TradeMe.

Self seeded peas growing happily with the sweet peas and the orange-berries

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The cranberries are fattening up beautifully.  Hope we beat the birds this year :)

An unspecified trailing berry that I picked up as a sick little sprout at a sale years ago.  I wonder if I'll get more than 2 berries off it this year?

My first ever potatoes are sprouting happily!

Companion planting

I'm not trying to be self sufficient and I'm not averse to a little chemical warfare every now and then but in an effort to try and reduce the money I spend on chemical sprays and fertilisers I've developed a keen interest in companion planting.  It's the first year I've tried it and I'm watching various clumps of edibles with interest.  Certainly, the blood sorrel and strawberries planted nearest the garlic and parsley seem to be the biggest but time will tell.


The patch of mint that we inherited with the house was the sickliest, weakest mint I ever saw so I ripped it all out.  Then, a few months later after the parsley had seeded I ripped all that out too.  Low and behold if the mint didn't come back thick and juicy!  I didn't think anything of it until during my research I discovered that mint HATES parsley.  Now that the parsley seeds are all germinating around the mint patch I'm watching with interest to see what happens... there may be something to this companion planting lark after all!

Strawberry companion planted with garlic and parsley - the garden doctor plants.

Wish there was a plant that quelled oxalis!

 Parsley, garlic and chives are supposed to be excellent companions for roses, improving scent and preventing aphids... watch this space.  Did you know sorrel is from  the oxalis family?

The official strawberry patch (although I tend to plant strawberries everywhere) companion planted with garlic and self-seeded parsley.  I read somewhere that planting red flowers near your strawberries confused the birds so I tried a few red pansies.  They're rather wind tattered!  My strawberries last year were very mutated due to a lack of pollinators so this year I've also planted bergamot (bee balm), cerinthe major and phacelia to try and attract the bees.

Amateur photographer

Why is it that when I walk in my garden I feel proud and pleased with it and then, as soon as I photograph it, it looks totally hideous?  Is it because a photo only shows a sliver and not the whole?  For whatever reason, since it was another foul Manawatu weather day today (the type that flattens my seedlings as soon as they're transplanted) I decided that I'd archive a few 'before' photos in the hope that in summer I'll have a lovely lush, well planned garden to showcase.  Mostly what I saw in the images was chaos and wilderness - not exactly aesthetically pleasing - but then I guess you reap what you sow, *cringe at cheesy cliche* , as I abhor rows and formality in my garden and I tend to bung veggies in any old place where there's room.  Little surprise then that my informal companion planting is creating a tangled mess!  

The rose garden is the only strip of garden to get full sun so the roses now have to share their warm bed with rainbow beet, parsley (companion plant for the roses apparently), perpetual spinach, asparagus peas and cerinthe major to attract the bees.

It looked prettier before I started harvesting the rainbow beet and perpetual spinach!

In the beginning...

Gardening is a matter of your enthusiasm holding up until your back gets used to it.  ~Author Unknown

I never thought I'd be a blogger but after posting my 15th consecutive Facebook status celebrating the first pea shoot or lamenting the piles of prunings I had to cart to the dump, I had to face the hard fact that, probably, most of my friends and family were quietly unfriending me and losing sleep over the way my life was sliding into the mundane.  Ha!  If only they knew the half of it... my perfect evening involves a glass of wine, 'Better Homes and Gardens' on TV and the latest copy of 'New Zealand Gardener' on my lap.  It was during one of these perfect nights, searching for blogs by New Zealand gardeners like me (ie: amateurs in the suburbs) and coming up with very few that I thought, "Well, why not get the ball rolling?"  Hopefully out there, there are people who will read this and think, "I could do a better job than that," and then we'll all have more free gardening material to read!


A smidgen of background... I am lucky enough to have recently purchased a lovely 50's house and it came with a beautiful established garden full of Agapanthus and Bear's Foot.  I'm about ready to start putting my own stamp on it, as we've lived here for a year now.

The garden as it was when we bought the house.

OK... I'll be totally honest.  I may have already rushed in and made my stamp in places.  The huge patches of mud attest to that but I'll fix it I swear!  Next year my garden will look amazing.  Famous last words.


I'm not entirely sure what I want.  I dream of growing my own food but I'm not willing to sacrifice aesthetics.  I want a veggie garden but I don't want it to look like one.  I would like to feed the senses - ALL of them!  At various stages in the last year I have wanted:

• a totally edible garden
• a sensory garden
• a fragrant garden
• a beautiful wild flower garden
• and a potager

Now I know that I want all that and more!  Join in me in my journey as I, novice and optimistic gardener, try and create my dream garden without ruining all the hard work and design that came before me.