Back to the Garden after Lockdown!

It was great to be back in the garden today after so many weeks away, and we had quite a little adventure seeing what was growing and what had changed.

We discovered:

Our spinach, silverbeet, lettuces and spring onions were going fantastically. We had enough to pick and take home to share with our families, that’s if we could stop ourselves eating it all first. It’s always super exciting to harvest some of what we’ve grown ourselves, and for some reason these veggies seem to be so tasty that we happily nibble away at them straight out of the garden.

Our brassicas – the broccoli and kale – weren’t there at all.They had been appreciated by the cabbage white caterpillars while we’d been away. In fact they’d appreciated them so much that they had eaten the plants to practically nothing, despite our attempts to cover them with netting. Over the lockdown some of the staff had kindly cleared the stalks away for us.

Our thyme plant had also grown really well. Some of us had a taste and discovered it’s one of those very strong flavours which is better mixed in with other foods than eaten by itself!

Once we’d re-familiarised ourselves with our garden, we set about doing a bit of planting. Our seedlings that Whaea Clare had carefully nurtured for us over lockdown were more than ready to go into the ground, most of them had roots coming out of the bottom of their punnets. We planted beetroot, spinach and more brassicas. Now that the weather is colder there aren’t any cabbage white butterflies around, so these ones should be safe from their hungry caterpillars.

We also sowed some fast growing green crops in between the bigger plants. We’ll be able to harvest these relatively quickly while the big plants are still growing. The green crops only have shallow roots, so won’t get in the way of the deeper roots of the bigger plants. And they will also cover the bare soil quickly – nature doesn’t like bare soil and if we don’t cover it up, she will do it for us with weeds :) Because we just LOVE to take things home with us from Garden Club, some of us also sowed seeds of winter greens into punnets to grow at home.