Blog
Weekly tales from The Outpost.
White Cabbage Butterfly
A deep dive into white butterfly – one of the most common and destructive pests in Kiwi gardens.
The second peanut harvest
Results from my second season growing peanuts.
Another year in the berry house
The annual task of tidying up the berry house is upon me!
August in the garden
We’re at the tail-end of winter rolling towards spring, and things are heating back up.
Five trees you’ll find at The Outpost
A tree that can grow 6 meters in a year; another that you can wash your clothes with. A guide to a few of our trees.
Tidying the berry house
The berries are flowering, so it’s time to secure the berry house against birds. If only it were that simple!
A mid-season update on the garlic
After last year’s disaster season, how is the garlic growing in 2022?
The shopping spree
I spent my 40th birthday buying and planting trees. 16 year old me would be horrified.
Why I don’t keep bees
You’d think with so much native bush (and with more trees planted each year), we might put in a few bee hives at The Outpost. But we won’t be. Here’s why.
Planning a miniature food forest
I’ve been thinking and scheming – and I think I’ve come up with a plan for our first area of ‘food forest’.
Project grow-a-mango
This week I spent $13 on a piece of fruit – and it was worth every cent. But can I grow good mangoes in New Zealand? Well, I’m going to give it a try!
Another month’s worth of rain
The rain fell quite spectacularly this week. We’re now in our fourth year of weather monitoring, so how wet has the last year been?
Five things I did this week
It’s been an unexpectedly dry week, so we got some things done.
The berry house
We’ve finally planted our collection of cane berries into the ground!
Gran Shirley’s Sally Lunn
We’ve got too many potatoes so I’m looking for new ways to use them. Turns out, my Gran had a delicious way around a potato glut.
Let’s go fly a kite
It’s taken nearly 3 years but I realised that all our space and wind make a fantastic combination for kite flying, so I bought a kite.
Some faults on the fenceline
The storms last weekend brought down a couple of nīkau palms near our fence line. How did we sort this one out?
Max chicken
We’ve had a bit of a poultry shuffle. The ducks have found a better home, and we’ve gone max chicken!
The succulent garden
It’s been on my ‘to-do’ list for a while, but last week I finally created my succulent garden.
Growing past my biggest failure
Last year, my garlic crop failed big and hard. This year, I’m nervous and more subdued about planting again.
Spraying gorses
Gorse is an unfortunate reality of owning farmland in New Zealand. This week I got out and sprayed some.
The Smith sister’s boarding houses
Part four of my hunt for details of the lives of my great-great aunts, the Smith sisters.