Wild Hope Homestead

The Garden

The Vege Garden isn’t much to look at at the moment, but hey, it could be worse! There are a few crops scattered around and most of the beds are mulched with old chicken bedding. To keep the weeds down on the paths I have been laying cardboard and topping it with all manner of trimmings and choppings from the garden. It ain’t pretty but it’s doing the job. Well, at least in the parts that have been successfully covered.

The elephant garlic and brassicas are slowly chugging along. They’re bigger than this now.

The common garlic that I cheekily planted in the Herb Garden has popped up too. I only planted six cloves (I wrote it down), which is not what it looks like in the photo. I think a couple of these shoots (the back right ones) are daffodils, as there are some popping up nearby.

There are sluggishly growing carrots, beetroot and parsnips, which got sowed a little too late, but plenty of kale, parsley, cutting celery, spring onions and coriander. I seem to have come to a happy arrangement with the coriander. I left it to seed in two patches in the Herb Garden and one plant seeded in the Vege Garden. Now we have a continuous supply of coriander as seedlings pop up around the place, maybe not quite where I thought they would, but they can pop up anywhere they want. So, the key to coriander is not to try and make it grow in just one spot, but to let it have a wide area to pop up where it wants to. And then we get to have nice curries and soups when we want to.

Tiny, slow carrots.

Happy coriander.

Brassicas and spinach semi-hiding in the parsley.

We offloaded about half of the unneeded stones by the front carport by selling them on TradeMe. The remaining ones have all been shoveled off the tarp that was on the garden area and onto the concrete path, awaiting removal. It looks better out there already. Of course, now that the tarp has been removed from the ground, we can see the resprouting camellia stumps that still need to be dug out. I can hereby testify that camellias will keep growing even when covered for many months under a heavy duty tarp and a large pile of stones. Even I, firsthand witness to the annoying persistence of unwanted camellia stumps, was surprised to see green leaves when I pulled up the tarp. We have at least seven stubborn, resprouting stumps or roots to dig out. I have cut through the trunk of the ivy on the fence, which is beginning to wilt.

Meanwhile, the silver heavy duty tarp was still in great condition and has been handily repurposed as the sandpit cover. The old green one was not heavy duty enough.

The Little Fulla needed some sort of tool to keep him occupied while we use the big people tools, so I quickly whipped up this ‘rustic’ hammer with a piece of tapered timber and a piece of dowel that were lying around. He was stoked, but he could be heard calling it a “funny hammer”.

The Chickens

Frodo and her chicks have successfully been integrated into the main flock. A few days after the accidental unlatched gate merging, in which Frodo sustained face injuries, I had some time and good weather to try reintroducing them while I was around to supervise. I put a cage into the middle of the pen and threatened to put any misbehaving hens in there for time out. Everything went much better than I expected. Frodo announced her presence with a flapping display, but the other hens were busy with the fresh earth and bugs that I had exposed by moving some of the wooden objects in the pen, plus some piles of weeds. Distraction at its best. Thereafter, Frodo wisely stuck to the outskirts with her chicks and no-one required time out. The biggest scrap must have been sorted during the accidental merging. After the first day, Frodo increasingly distanced herself from the chicks, who are well old enough to look after themselves, and now they are independent. They also learnt how to drink water from the water bucket very quickly. They are 10 weeks old. I’m trying not to think about Mareks.

The Back Carport Clean-up

My back carport cleanup was going very well. I had cleared the whole left side, aside from some concrete posts and blocks that we need to offload.

Then The Husband came along. He did move the tower of pallets out of the front carport, which was much appreciated. They just ended up here, in the back carport. He has been dismantling, de-nailing and sawing them, which takes rather a while. They are very chunky pallets.

Now my cleared space has been filled up with pieces of wood again. However, I have moved almost everything from the right side, which was a lot that can’t be seen in these photos.

Things are decidedly soggy here again. Nothing really dries out in winter; we definitely have a Wet Season.

While there’s been a lot of wetness and sickness, I’ve been doing a lot more knitting. I sewed the buttons onto my wrist warmers, knitted one hat and am partway through another hat. I can’t show the hats yet, since they’re for other people.

The wrist warmers are complete with buttons. And the colour is still showing up horribly wrong in the photos.

There is noticeably more light in the mornings and evenings now, which is a nice change. On the one hand, I can’t wait until winter is over, as I am counting on it packing sicknesses and sogginess in its suitcases. On the other hand, there are a lot of projects that still need to be done, like paving the patio (so I can move the BBQ, so I can construct my mini greenhouse), doors for the house, the spice shelf, which somehow totally stalled, and raised bed construction in the Vege Garden, and I’m not quite ready for the spring season yet. I need to start sowing some crops in seed trays. But I actually need to finish my Vege Plan first. It is proving tricky. I can’t seem to fit all the jolly crops into my ‘small’ Vege Garden. There is a distinct possibility that the growing space in my head is larger than the actual Vege Garden…