Gardening

What a spring this has been. Wet, dry, hot, cold, snow, sleet, hail, and lots of frosts. Hopefully this isn’t a sign of the kind of weather we can expect for summer.

What’s the one thing we can all plant that will have the most benefit to our food eating lives for years and years to come? Well, from the title you can deduct my opinion very quickly.

Compost tumblers can often be found sulking in a garden mostly unused. There are generally a couple of reasons for their lack of use. There’s the ‘one day I will get round to using this gardening marvel’ or alternatively the ‘I used it once and it didn’t really work’ reason.

As we come to the end of the growing season, I recall many conversations I’ve had over the years about what can and can’t be grown in this region. This often includes what I’m really trying hard to grow.

I love living here in these mountains and the adventures of trying to grow food that comes with that.

July is probably my least favourite gardening month of the year. It’s generally the coldest, bleakest month we have. If you’ve got winter veggies in a tunnel house/glass house or under some hoops and frost cloth, they pretty much go on strike this month. They’re doing minimal growing if any at all.

It is definitely winter and I’m a fan of winter, yet as a gardener I’m already counting down the weeks to spring, it can’t come quick enough for me and my aching bones.

Dr Compost, aka Ben Elms, has been sharing his composting and gardening knowledge with Queenstown Lakes locals through his fun and informative workshops, one-on-one advice and articles for over a decade.

Let’s talk about food waste. Did you know that around one-third of all the food produced in the world is wasted?

This seems like a good time to talk about getting a couple of chickens in your backyard to give you a couple of tasty eggs every day. It’s time to start transitioning to the good life, build some resilience in our lives, what better way than getting some chickens.

As I dip the quill in the ink it’s another sizzling hot day, nudging over 30 degrees celsius without a breath of wind. Summers arrived with a bang and so too is the garden starting to produce the goods for us, based on our spring efforts. I have a scarce garden this year, I’ve focused all my time on building a Natural swimming pool from scratch, more on that later.

The elixir of life is often overlooked when we think about growing veggies. Water water, there seems to be plenty coming out of the skies this spring yet as we all know suddenly and usually the tap gets turned off for the summer. In other parts of the country watering the garden can be an afterthought, for us living in the rain shadow of the southern alps it can blow for days with the promise of rain only for the front to spit a few drops and then head up the west or east coasts.