Winter planting and rain at last

Next, I gave the garden beds a couple of watering cans of rainwater each, and then turned each one over again, and transplanted the strawberry plants that survived over the summer into some lovely terracotta strawberry pots made locally in Northcote. It was nice to see pots not imported from Asia. Adam then came out and helped, and we convinced Ben that it would be good fun to help with the seeds and to be the water boy. We planted three garden beds, in accordance with my crop rotation plan. The first bed was planted with two packets of early crop broad beans. The next bed was planted with white onions, spring onions, spinach, and leeks, and in the third bed we sowed french breakfast radish, round radish, parsnips, daikon radish, and two rows of beetroot.

I left one bed fallow for the time being and will plant some sweet peas, poppys, and nasturtium late in April. I also sowed some basil and garlic chives in pots. Hopefully the basil will grow, as it is very late in the season for it. After all the sowing was complete we watered well from the tank and called it a day. We still have two other beds to plant out, but I will do that tomorrow. I am going to plant these two out with Purple Podded Peas, and Snow peas. I collected all of the seed myself from last seasons crop and we will see if they germinate! We had a good time and were very sweaty by the time we finished, and I am happy to report that the Water boy did his job diligently. Thank goodness we finished when we did as it was getting very humid and it looked like a thunderstorm was on the way. I went for a swim to cool off.

After lunch, I started on my presentation for the Rotary club. I have a 25 minute time slot, so I whipped up 25 Powerpoint slides about our journey so far, gave my blog a plug and promoted Earth Hour on the last slide. I am excited about giving the presentation, and to catch up with some old friends. You see, I used to be a member of Rotary myself, but I had to give it up due to work commitments. When I figure out how to convert the slides to pictures, I will add them to the blog for all to see.

Then, as I was settling down to write this blog, a huge lightning show started out to the North west. I quickly jumped on the web to the Met Bureau rain radar site and there was a huge rain storm coming our way in about 10 minutes. So the entire family turned off all the lights and computers in the house, lit some candles and watched the show. It was so enjoyable to have a good downpour, and the garden, family, and my rainwater tank loved it. The tank is now three quarters full, and I have about a months worth of water for the garden now! The rain died down after about two hours, and out come the stars and the moon. What a great evening had by all.

I will leave you with this quote to finish off today’s post;

There can be no other occupation like gardening in which, if you were to creep up behind someone at their work, you would find them smiling. ~Mirabel Osler