It’s so nice to be here, watching all the small things we did one day in the past come to fruition. I’m trying to take the time to just enjoy and notice the things that are happening. To be grateful for our progress.
Right now, the garden is absolutely heaving with fresh delicious food – it’s almost a problem. But a good problem to have.
So, what are we harvesting? What’s flowering?
Bananas
We’re about to pull down our third arm of bananas and run the “what are we gonna do with 100 bananas?” gauntlet all over again.
This time, I’m going to send a couple of boxes of them to my friends. Unfortunately, the postage alone costs $15 – and who wants to spend $15 on bananas?
So it doesn’t work out to sell them online. But it’s a nice thing to do for friends who are keen to give my little bananas a try.
As well as the arm I’ll be pulling down later today, there are another 10 banana flowers in the small patch we planted back in 2019. That’s likely to be at least 700 individual bananas this year.
Whenever I think about planting more bananas, I come back to this problem of too many bananas for two people.
Still, they seem to disappear from the local pātaka kai when we put them there, so I guess feeding my community is always a good use.
Sunflowers
I was having a bit of a rough time back in December. I was feeling pretty overwhelmed, and still pretty bummed about the garlic crop.
As happens when I feel out-of-sorts, I turned to my garden to cheer me up. I dragged myself outside with a couple of tools and a large bag of sunflower seeds I’d saved the previous season.
I quietly planted one of my garden beds in sunflower seeds. Just created rows with a hoe and laid them down thick. I wasn’t really in the mood for gardening, but sunflowers are just so… happy. I made the effort, but it was a bit begrudgingly.
I planted them in a recently-vacated garlic bed. Sunflowers are good for cleansing soil and creating biomass. I figured they’d do two things: improve the soils, and put a smile on my face.
Over the next couple of months, they sprouted, and grew, and now they’re beginning to flower!
And right now, I’m feeling much better. Taking a break from things helped. Planting and caring for my sunflower patch helped. And now, I have dozens of sunflowers smiling in the garden.
I love walking out there and seeing some more each day. It really is delightful.
Planting leeks
Yep, it’s the middle of summer and I’m thinking about my winter veggies – that’s how it works.
If you want to grow leeks, plant seedlings now. I wrote a ‘how to’ a couple of years ago.
Leeks are super-easy once you know the tricks, but sometimes frustrating and hard if you don’t.
Richard and I planted over 60 leek seedlings out into the garden one evening last week. They don’t look like much right now, but give them a couple of months and they should be fattening up.
We’re looking forward to eating them (we are eternal fans of my mum’s cheesy leeks) all winter long.
Dahlias
A couple of years ago, a friend gave me a selection of dahlia seedlings.
I planted them out, and they’ve been growing ever since.
Last year I lifted a couple of clumps that were getting a little too big in the veggie garden. I split the tubers and took some to work, spread them out in my own garden, and gave a few away.
And now all those dahlias are in full swing. We have a bunch of them scattered about the place and I just love the variation, colour, and surprises they bring.
