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Oh! Oh! I know this one! It’s yarrow, otherwise known as Achillea millefolium. I think I’ll stick to yarrow!

While we’ve certainly got a lot of swathes of yarrow leaves around in the paddocks since we had the grass cut once again I had to venture down the back to find these specimens for you. Aren’t you lucky!? We’ve even got some really pink yarrow flowers down there too, but the photo turned out rubbish and it’s too hot to go for another walk. So tough luck there.

It was fun over the winter to watch birds perching on the top of the dried up flower stalks and eating the yarrow seeds. At the time I was amazed by the fact that the yarrow stayed standing with a bird on it. Now, having had to pick up quite a few birds that the cats have dragged in I’m not so amazed by the yarrow, I’m just amazed at how little birds weigh!

Nice as yarrow flowers are, they can be a right spreading pain in the butt. Around the vege garden I keep having to pull out huge matted pads of the roots. They go for miles and miles. Blech. But at least they come out relatively easy.

Just before the skies opened and they got a dump of water on them (finally!) I dug up the shallots that were the last veges growing in the top garden plots. Thanks to last year’s trusty garden diary I can tell you that the original bulbs were planted on Friday, June 17th. You really wanted to know that, huh?

Not a bad haul really, for all the neglect they got as well. We started out with five little clove/bulb things, so that’s about a 300% increase in a year. Not a bad return. But still nowhere near enough to get us through a cooking year. Some way to go before that happens. So now we have to work out which to eat and which to try to keep ready to plant out. Decisions, decisions…

And yes, if you look very closely (might help if you click to get the bigger version) you can see two perfectly formed garlic bulbs there too that I dug up a day or two ago. Just a pity they’re so small. Not sure if they needed more food, more water, or just more time to grow. They are very cute though.

Unfortunately there’s now no reason why I can’t bring the last 2 garden plots down to the “bottom” garden. Except for the rain, of course. Long may it continue!

Bit of a busy day here today. We had a couple of real rural kiwi blokes around to plonk in a bit of a fence for us. Luckily for them they had the right tools for the job. A tractor, a pile driver, and a bloody great metal stake to drive in the ground before even trying to drive a post in.

So now we’ve basically halved the plot into two bits. The back bit, which can just stay pretty untended for now, and the front bit that we can worry about tending to a bit more. It actually does a really good job of putting a nice square edge on the lawn too.

And we can also use the fence to support some wind-break cloth so we can start a garden along that edge too. That was kind of one of the major driving reasons to get some fencing done at all.

And while they were here I got them to drive in some bigger poles for the chook run. So now we finally have somewhere for my most excellent door to hang, once I manage to get some hinges and a latch thing. And for the actual chicken coop to hang out in too. Just have to get the important bits sorted, like wire netting and, of course, the chooks themselves.

But at least we’ve started the year progressing things along. Wonder how long that will last!

Despite all the neglect and abuse the tomatoes in the tunnel house have taken over the last couple of months (e.g. forgetting to open the doors in the mornings, forgetting to water them for a day or two too many etc, etc…) we seem to have managed to get quite a few different types of toms to grow. An now the first batch are starting to ripen. Yum yum!

Just have to quickly get rid of the last store bought ones so we can try them.

The big success of the tunnel house is still the cucumber plant though. We’ve even resorted to making cucumber soup today to use up some of the glut. I liked it, Bec wasn’t so sure, but secretly I think she liked it and just didn’t want to say!

This is probably the most veges we’ve harvested in one go. Not that we haven’t used lots from the garden already, but we’ve tended to grab one thing or another for whatever meal we’ve been cooking. But today we grabbed cabbage and carrots and spring onions for an Asian inspired coleslaw, lettuce and capsicum for a salad, potatoes and beetroot for sides (and a bit of bottling). Yum yum yum!

The other day we finally got around to planting the sweetcorn plants we had sitting around. The reason it had taken so long? We needed to make a patch for them to be planted in!

A quick bit of carpentry later we had at least a delineating timber square. A slightly longer time was spent digging the ground out inside the square and mixing with composted dirt. It didn’t help that it was hot. Damn hot! Digging is always a bit slow when you can’t see due to rivers of sweat dripping down the eyes and glasses! But we finally got there and managed to get the plants in too.

I suspect that unless they’re really comfortable or lucky plants they’re going to struggle a bit with the wind where they are this year, but we’ll see.

It’s now been about a week since the lawn got seeded and I’ve been out looking for signs of life but no luck. Until yesterday, about 3:30pm. That’s about when I saw the first sign of life that didn’t look like weeds. Yippee! All the watering and rain seemed to have worked some magic.

And this morning there was a huge explosion of growth all over the place. Yippee again!

(Honestly, there is some grass in this photo! I’ve even made it clicky for a big version to prove it!)

Now we just have to keep it alive enough to grow and spread, then think about mowing it all…

It might look pretty much the same as all the other pictures of the lawn to you, but there’s a subtle difference. This one contains the grass seed that was distributed yesterday as well as the last remaining small stones. Yippee!

Now it’s over to us to get some proper irrigation sorted in the next few days so once “the lawn” starts getting a bit damp we can keep it that way so it’ll get a good start in life. Then maybe we can finally move away from staring at brown and start starting at green.

We can also start to finally start thinking about some fences and gardens too… Just have to remember not to use the back door for a few days.

Another day’s work on the lawn area today. Levelling out most of the remaining hollows and humps (not that there were many left) and then running a stone burying machine over it all.

It’s looking really, really good. Good enough for a casual game of croquet anyway! It’s amazing to see how few stones are left of the surface now. I think we can claim some credit as we did a pretty reasonable job of collecting the big stones and carting them away, but it’s still pretty impressive anyway.

So apparently tomorrow there’ll be a lot of rolling with a big roller, and then the seeding. Then it’s up to us and nature to keep it all watered until it’s nice and lush. Gulp! The responsibility after all this work!