Tracking into Spring

Hello everyone! Well, first thing, my gardening business is putting on a fundraiser for Wellington City Mission for the month of September. We are offering $80 garden consults, consisting of a 30-45 minute in person visit to your garden (or over Zoom, if you are far away), and we donate $30 of the proceeds to WCM.

Wellington City Mission do a bit of everything, with a focus on empowerment- they have a social supermarket, where you can shop but don’t have to pay, transitional housing for the homeless, a budgeting service, a dental service and more. They have been heavily overburdened this Winter (a Winter where multiple homeless people died from the cold, I might add), and it has been breaking my heart, so here’s our chance to give a bit back.

Things you could ask/talk about in the consult:

• How to make your garden more sustainable, including water cycling and reduction of inputs/how to buy less;

• How to set up and manage your vege garden, where to plant your fruit trees and which varieties are best for your area;

• Run your landscaping ideas and plans by me so I can help you firm them up, or get a basic outline on the fly;

• Problemsolve an unwell plant or struggling area;

• I can tell you how to fix a problem, or work out which nutrients you need in your soil;

• How to maintain your garden in a low-effort way;

• Anything you have read that you might want a personalised explanation for.

Anyway! We put up the ad on instagram and have 14 consults already! I would really love to hit $1,000 raised for WCM, which would be 20 more consultations- so please spread the word! (If you would like to donate without a consultation, the link is here.)

(No, I am not Christian, and no, they do not push or expect Christianity. They are one of two exceptional outreach charities in Wellington City and the money goes directly into the community.)

If you need more reason to support this fundraiser, please appreciate this image which my daughter made for our social media:

Salad greens! When thinking about what might be helpful for people to grow, and especially for my household, I start with the money and work my way back. We buy two heads of lettuce a week, which works out to be about $10 a week. So growing it ain’t so bad!

Right now I am growing buttercrunch and cos lettuce, as both of them self seed readily throughout the garden and seem to tolerate very cold weather. They’re obviously also lettuce, which helps when my partner ventures out to find them!

I also grow rocket, which is a brassica but self seeds readily everywhere, which is fantastic! But this year I am looking at expanding out a bit and I have found a few options-

I’m going to give spinach another go, it is relatively easy to grow from seed if you prime it, by soaking it overnight, and then letting it dry out again completely (in a cool, dry place- not in the burning sun!) before planting.

Joe Lampl swears by mustard greens, but I am not so sold, as someone who isn’t a huge fan of spiciness, and relies on leafy greens to be a pretty bland, crunchy moist thing (not a particularly tasty thing!).

I have decided to retire the ‘drunken lady’ lettuce which I was growing most years, it is cold hardy and has red tips, but I have to admit that I don’t really like the taste! I am going to buy a heap of different type of seeds from Kings seeds based on vibes, and try them all!

Water your plants. Go and check them, honestly, you are likely to find that under the first few cm of soil the soil is dry and the plants are struggling. Water them deeply- like, gently spray the ground all around the plant and leave it on dribble near the plant for up to an hour.

The other thing we do at this time of year is mulching, and even mulching in places where we haven’t finished weeding, because Spring weeds are about to explode and cover the ground. It is easier to weed the bits we missed later, and not have hundreds more to deal with, than put off mulching until the entire garden is weed free.

Everything is budding up in my garden! Is it budding up in yours?

Have a great week, everyone!