Term 3 Begins

After two weeks break it was good to be back in the garden. There was lots of enthusiasm and excitement which made it a bit hard to focus but we will soon settle back into things. 

Our pea vines are still producing and it was interesting to see how often everyone kept drifting back to the pea garden to do a bit of foraging during the session. Lots of greens were consumed today that’s for sure.

The winter veggies we planted 10 weeks ago are coming along really well, and the broccoli are forming heads. 

And the bulbs and wildflowers are getting there too…

Clare checked on the hebe cuttings we had taken a few weeks ago. They looked the same on the surface but when we took them out of the potting mix there was a big difference – they’d gone from being stumpy little twigs to fully formed plants with their own strong root systems. So they can continue to grow each cutting needed to be transferred into its own pot. This took a bit of time as we’d been so successful with our cuttings that we had over 20 plants to repot. And to think these all came completely for free!

Finally, we had some work to do on Savage Paradise, our insect hotel. Mr Reiger needed some of his bricks back, so we needed to do a bit of disassembly and redesigning on the spot. This required us to employ not only brute strength and co-operation but some maths skills as well as we figured out how to replace the missing bricks with other objects that would retain the balance and height of each layer.

The most exciting, and for some traumatic, part was all the spiders we discovered along the way. We are gradually learning that these little guys are nothing to be afraid of and are in fact doing our garden ecosystem a lot of good.