Late Winter Update

This year's winter was much colder than we're used to, but it didn't affect the garden all that much, for which I'm grateful. The seedlings are growing well and will hopefully give a bumber crop in Spring.

Salad leaves

More salad leaves

As usual, some seeds from the previous seasons'  crops self-planted. That's one of my favourite things about garden....

Garlic

We tend to plant more leafy vegetables than we can ever eat and share some with family and friends.

Lots of leafy veggies. e.g kale

Another view of the garden

The lavender flowered for the very first time.

Lavender

Swiss chard

My Garden This Winter

We're transplanting hundreds of seedlings over the bare patches

Hi. I hope that you've been well and you are enjoying your gardens this season.

I've been well. I didn't feel comfortable with blogging then. I'm still working through things but time, counselling and communicating with friends and family has helped enough that I can now blog without feeling too naked.

The garden was a great comfort. The spent summer crops and weeds provided me with a good outlet for working through my anger and stress, and I now have enough produce bottled or frozen to last me through winter. I'm pleased with how the garden is evolving.

The garden is growing

A friend of mine gave me the honeysuckle below in a small pot as a birthday present in 2012. The plant is now much taller than I am. I love gifts that last and keep on giving.

A birthday present that keeps growing

The fruit tree saplings that I planted in 2013 and 2014 are also growing well. However, I estimate it will be at least two more years before I expect to see any harvests. I can't wait!

What a difference two years makes!

The herbs are reseeding very heavily, so we have plenty for soups and stews and teas to boost our bodies' immune systems.

We have to keep borage in check though because it grows like a weed.

Perennial vegetables like rhubarb and artichokes are also growing very well. It's nice not to have to replant some things each year.

I also spend a lot of time in the kitchen preserving produce and trying out a few recipes. I've been bartering with people who do have fruit-bearing trees because mine are still too small.

Home-made pizza for lunch

 We sell the excess produce at the cottage which we have set up as a small  farmshop-style place.

At the moment we have a lot of pumpkin, potatoes chilli and onions and I expect we'll start digging the sweet potatoes very soon. Then in a month or so, we'll start picking Chinese cabbage and spinach.

My January Garden Wrap-Up

My little peach tree survived

January was a very tough month for the garden. More difficult than I antiticipated or planned for.

Part of it was the heat and the water shortage. What the sun didn't scorch directly, died/shriveled/slowed down in growth  even though we were watering as much as we could. A shade cover over the food gardens is desperately needed.

The sun also made it difficult to be out there doing physical labour. It was very debilitating.

But this morning as I walked through the garden, I could see that most of the garden will survived. Crispy around the edges, but Ok.

Despite all the troubles, we are still getting some of our food from the garden. Not as much as I would have liked, but enough to make a difference.

Today I harvested watermelon, green tomatoes to let ripe on the window sill, basil to make pesto and parsley to dry for winter use.

Some Vegetables & Herbs Doing Well In My Garden Despite The Heatwave

Repotted spring onions into a bigger container outside the kitchen

Repotted rosemary also set outside the kitchen

I love to nibble on the nasturtiums when I step outside the kitchen

Lettuce seedlings in a shaded corner of the house outside the main garden

Happy about the watermelon that self-planted among the maize

Another batch of maize, planted later than the first one

I keep picking the chilli, but more comes through. ***happy dance***

The sun scorches my poor poor cucumber seedlings

The baby marrows are also getting a beating from the sun

2013 Wrap Up And My 2014 Gardening Plans

2013 was a good year for my Phokeng garden. We had some bumper crops, a few moderately good crops, and some major disasters.

I want to increase the veggies/flowers/herbs mix in beds; move towards potager

Bumper crops

Tomatoes were sweet, with less acidity

We had enough tomatoes to eat some fresh, froze enough to last us through Spring, and sold quite a lot of it.

Doing Lots of Planning

Now that most of the gardening areas have working beds, I now have the space to add experimental crops.  

My plan to increase the crops of vegetables we eat on a regular basis, increasing the yield from each garden bed, as well as adding experimental crops, which will mostly be vegetables that we don’t eat regularly.

Mid-Autumn Progress Report

My back is sore. spent most of the day hoeing the paths between the beds and weeding old garden beds so we can start growing in them soon.

We also planted more spinach, cabbage, carrots, turnips and beetroot. Here are pics  of how some of the beds look. Most of my focus was on newly planted/germinated seeds, not old summer beds that are on their last legs.

The day's harvest. Lots of chilli to preserve. Beans for tomorrow.

Inching Our Way To Mid-Season

We are now approaching the end of the first month of Autumn, inching our way towards mid-season. We are still harvesting plenty of spinach, onions, parsley, basil, thyme and chilli, with the occassional green peppers and roma tomatoes.

But I can see that I will need to stagger my plantings much more effectively to allow the vegetable harvests to be staggered throughout summer and autumn, and not have one big batch at a time and little left for the rest of the season.

Kelebogile, the part-timer gardener who helps me with the heavy lifting, prepares the soil for me to transplant seedlings

Preparations for Autumn/Winter planting are underway. So far, the following seeds have sprouted:

• Peas
• White beans
• Broad beans
• Carrots
• Spinach
• Beetroot
• Swiss Chard
• Roma tomatoes
• Onions (3 types)
• Potatoes
• Sweet potatoes
• Butternut
• Cucumber
• Coriander
• Cabbage
• Broccoli
• Cauliflower
• Nasturtiums
• Sweet peas (climber and bush)
• Wildflowers
• Allysium

We've begun transplanting tomatoes and cabbages, and will transplant or thin the rest as and when needed. I still have more seeds to plant - some for later crops of the vegetables named above, and some for new vegetables we have never planted before.

I am very happy with our progress though, and I feel that the food we harvested in summer and early autumn is contributing heavily towards my family's food security.

Then there are the unexpected bonuses: like today I was in the garden, picking some red jalapeno chilli to bottle for future use and street food vendor who regularly buys chicken from us came by and found me in the garden. On impulse, she decided to buy a whole bundle of jalapeno chilli to use on her food. It wasn't a big sale, but i've enjoyed some regular sales even though i don't advertise at all, as i don't view my gardening as a business. But  the money goes into my seeds funds and at the rate it's growing, it should buy me some nice seeds for Spring planting. The garden being able to pay for seeds would be very nice.

P.S Food Police: For the past week, I've been very consistent with meals, eating when I needed to, even when I didn't feel like it. Today's dinner sucked though: I was in the mood for lasagne, and SIL was going to town to do her own family's grocery shopping. So she volunteered to bring me a pre-packaged meat lasagne frrom Checkers Hyper.  To say it was bad is a kindness:   the mince tasted like bad soya and there was very little of it. There were two sheets of lasagne in that one boxed serving. MAYBE! The rest was the sauce, which kinda tried to make up for the lack of substance in the meal. Someone remind me why i bought this pre-packaged stuff, when I could have made my own lasagne/ or at least, bribed SIL into cooking it for me?

Gardening News: An Update Covering Spring and Summer 2012

When I first moved to Phokeng, I had so many good intentions about updating this blog. Unfortunately, my nature is to cocoon and not communicate much when life is a bit rough. Very frustrating for friends and family, but after so many years, they work around me when I turn tortoise to make sure I don't get lost in my head.

However, while I was extremely quiet (online too), I was working hard to settle in my new home and create gardens that are both productive and visually appealing. The physical labour also helped me get rid of some of the stress I was under.

I'm now able to communicate again, and can share with you some of my gardening news (what I've been up to in the past year).

To start with, the Phokeng garden is big, as we live in a village on approximately 2 thousand square metres of land. My grandfather and father had previously raised  food in the garden, but years of neglect after their death ( Pappa in 2002) had taken their toll on the land.

The trees surrounding the property were overgrown, the shrubs and flowers being choked by runner weeds climbing the fences and up into the trees. So restarting the vegetable garden was a very tough proposition, though I welcomed the challenge.

As for the patch designated for the main vegetable garden (around a third of the overall yard), it had weeds that were over 2m tall. I'm convinced that there was a very big population of snakes hidden in the mess, waiting for the right moment to take over the rest of the property. For my own sanity, I had to try to make the place habitable again. I also needed a relaxing pasttime away from the sickroom, a way to exercise without paying gym fees and a source of fresh food in an environment where the cost of living was getting too high and I was scaling down on my writing ventures. 

Yet to be weeded patch of yard behind 

my SIL's chicken coops(Patch 6)

By Spring of 2012, we had a small crop growing. At this stage, I was still learning the soil and climate, as i hadn't l lived fulltime in the area in more than 25 years and the North West region, where the village is based has a different climate than  Gauteng, where I previously lived.

This small patch  (Patch 5) was next to the house and not in the main garden.

By the beginning of summer 2012 (October 2012), a large portion of the main garden had some structure ( beds) and we did a big planting session). Some of the crops went to provide a bumper harvest, allowing me to feed my own family of 4 and also share with 3 of my siblings.

We also managed to provide our workers with veges twice a week (SIL runs chicken business with 4 coops accomodating 400 chickens in each, and also buys ready to slaughter specialty chickens, employing 1  fulltime and 5 part-time people and I have part-time gardener helping with heavy lifting ) and sell left-over tomatoes and spinach to the villagers to make some seed money.

The section in view is about a fifth of the main veggie garden

Since then, the garden has grown. We are still sorting out the largest portion of the yard, restructuring for greater productivity, clearing out previously neglected corners and improving the productive capacity of each bed. I've also decided to go with the potager theme for the garden, planting herbs, fruit and flowers among the vegetables. So far, I've planted two peach trees ( we already had four), one apricot tree and one avocado tree. I also plan to plant a couple of mango, orange, naartjie , lemon and some berries ( have only strawberry bush so far)

We have harvested and dried lots of basil and thyme, and more is growing. We also grow sage and rosemary.

There is a still a lot of work to do: to create more gardens in the unused patches of land and make the frontyard more cosmetically appealing.

I plan to plant sweet potatoes on the small patch behind the cottage (Patch 2). The roots of sweet potatoes are too invasive for the rest of the garden, and this patch has lain mostly fallow, so I can let them do what they like here

Patch 3: Lawn is such a waste of space!

 

Front yard (Cosmetic garden) :The shrubs in this part of the garden need trimming and the beds need more colour

Down the line, I also plan to create another cosmetic garden in the space facing the kitchen (Patch 7) and start a container garden in one of the courtyards (Patch 8).


And although we have a borehole, we're not really water-wise and I'd like to start harvesting rain water and grey water. But that will take time (we've only been operational for two seasons really) and money I don't have at present.

Autumn Garden

We're also planting for Autumn and Winter.  So far we've planted  lettuce, beetroot, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower,  beans nastatuims (sick), onions, spinach, peas and plan to plant more.

Overall, Autumn is turning out to be my most favourite time for gardening. The sun is no longer scotching, so I no longer have to work through debilitating heat to get things done. The plants also look happier in cooler weather, we use less water and somehow it all just feels right.


Lessons learnt

There has been so many! And most of them have been painful.

1.  My real garden can never be as perfect as the garden in my head and I need to get over that fact and just do what I can and enjoy what I have. You'd think that I would have learnt that lesson earlier as a writer, as the stories in my head have always read way better than the ones I manage to publish. It's the nature of fantasty life versus reality. However,  while fantasy life is more perfect, the reality is more rewarding.

2. Gardening is working with the existing landscape.  I'm not sure if this is a universal truth, or if it's because I live near a dam with a wide variety of wildlife and indigenous plants regularly try to retake the land. But I've discovered that I have to work with the existing landscape, rather than trying to tame it. It does involve a heck of a lot of weeding.

3. Stick to what you believe in as long as you are sure of your facts.  I've found that everyone is an expert. Even non-gardeners know what you should be doing. That one was very hard to swallow. Mine is a very basic organic garden. I use a lot of chicken and cow manure to fertilise the garden, and some natural home-made remedies and plants to attempt pest control ( haven't used any pesticides so far, even organic ones, because honestly, i can't afford them) And I can't tell you how many times people walking past my house have stopped to give me advice on what i need to do, the pesticides I need to buy to keep my crops healthy. I choose not to argue with them - it's futile - so I smile and thank them for their advice and then carry on with whatever I was doing.

4. Planning is fun - at the beginning, all I wanted was to get some things growing so that there was tangible proof that I was doing something ( it motivated me).  Now that that has been accomplished, I have the luxury of being able to plan my Winter and Spring 2013 gardens, and it's so much fun to sit at the kitchen table with my seed packets spread out, trying to determine where they would be the most appropriate.

5. Gardening can teach you a lot of life lessons - I'm finding that the garden is a small ecosystem reflecting real life. Through it, I have learnt to be (a bit more patient) with myself  and to recognise thatsmall improvements eventually result in bigger changes. And if this season's crop is a disaster, the next season will come, and I can try again. So bad things happening no longer define my life moment, because I know another opportunity to do things differently will come.

My Summer Garden ( Summer of 2009)

My vegetable garden in the summer of 2009

I'm a writer based in Johanneburg, South Africa. I love gardening and sharing through words, which is why I started this blog. For more information about me, check out my personal blog.

Anyhoo, when I first started growing vegetables in my garden, I used a patch of land that is part of the backyard. It seemed like a natural place to grow my veges, as it was at the back, close to the kitchen.

Unfortunately, my crops didn't thrive. I think the soil is not very healthy there. And somehow, everytime it rained, the top soil would be swept away, along with anything else that I tried planting.