the winter planting

With the cooler weather well and truly settled in, its time to be planting the winter veggies. We've got little broccoli, carrots, beans, cabbage, kale, asparagus and chive seedings now tucked in among the rocket leaves, silver beet and herbs. Our beetroot is looking luscious and will be soon ready to pull up for eating! Our sprouting trays are also active, with tiny peas, pak choy and rainbow chard seedlings poking up through the soil. 

Winter is a quiet time and I've often associated it with being dormant and restful. A time of dying back and bare branches. Harvest time is over and there is a resting of the soil. Walking around our garden and watching all the growth I've realised its not necessarily so and it can be quite an abundant season. Tomorrow's the winter solstice and our little garden has been a beautiful reminder of the importance of the seasons. 

For the peas we made trellises out of sticks collected from the garden. 

A shack for the seedlings :)
One of our favourite things about this garden has been watering it each day and taking the time out to wander around the garden and see the changes happening.  Going out to the seedlings each day is especially rewarding. I'll never get tired of watching seedlings pop up!

Summer :)

the spiral garden

This is the herb spiral I made after thinking about sacred geometry and the symbolism of the spiral. I thought it would be beautiful to have a garden in the shape of a spiral. Herb spirals are a popular permaculture design that maximise space and allow you to create varying microclimates for different plants. The plants that are higher up have better drainage and require dryer soils where as the ones lower down, such as spearmint, enjoy damper soil.
I loved collecting our veggies and herbs from the spiral, although the chickens worked hard teaching me the nature of impermanence as they were constantly getting in there and removing everything!

For more information here's a link I used http://littlemountainhaven.com/how-to-build-a-herb-spiral/

 First I put down cardboard boxes that had been soaked for a couple of hours over the area. This suppresses the weeds.
Next I placed the bricks in the spiral design, building them up in order to gradually raise the layers. I then placed some gravel in the centre to allow for better drainage.

Then I topped up the spiral with soil.

and planted away. 

Leah :) 

for the love of chickens

We started by adding three chickens to the family. Speckled sally, Houdini and Fabio. 

We wanted free ranging, happy chickens so instead of fencing them in we built a fence around the little veggie patch.  Houdini acquired her name by frequently being found in the veggie garden happily digging everything up.  Fabio reminded me of a large Italian man and Speckled Sally was unfortunate enough to be named by my housemate. The chickens laid delicious eggs each day and generated plenty of chicken love. 

In Summer our back garden was full of nectarines so we had fun making many bottles of jam and chutney.