Saving water

With Wellington's water crisis, talking about ways of saving water has gone mainstream.

As well as saving the baby's bath water for the garden, we've started showering with a bucket.

My Dad is catching the water from his washing machine in the laundry tub and siphoning it onto his garden. I reckon I might try doing that myself when I wash the baby's nappies today.

Save the environment - cut down the trees!

It's not often that someone will try to sell you a sawn-off tree as being good for the environment.

In this case, though, these trees are on the northwest of our house, shading everything with their big, leafy, albeit carbon-absorbing branches.

So although trees are good, pruning them to reduce our winter electricity use is way better.

They're growing on the neighbouring property, so this summer we approached our neighbour, who turned out to be absolutely lovely and very accommodating. He gave us permission to cut the trees right back.

The difference has been amazing. It's been way sunnier and warmer.

And the trees are already starting to grow again.

Paradise Lot

There was an inspiring permaculture garden featured in the NY Times yesterday.

Reading about it makes me itch to get out the spade.

I wonder if Compost Bloke would let me turn the lawn into an edible forest?

Amazing green wall

This amazing green wall on the Caixa Forum Museum stopped me in my tracks in Madrid.

After I got home I discovered this is a vertical garden by Patrick Blanc. It was featured in the Listener in early July.

It seems like kind of a fad, but I like that one of his aims is to increase biodiversity and that it runs on wastewater and acts as insulation for the building.

Plastic-free basil

Look at this marvellous piece of marvellousness!

Last year I had to buy basil in a plastic pot (grumble grumble) but this year I found basil seedlings for sale in a recycled takeaway coffee cup.

Good on you Grow from Here.

Winter

Rain. Having the heater on. Coming home from work in the dark. Wearing your woolies. Baked potatoes. That's what June's about.

I miss the garden.

(Love the wintry list of produce that's in season though.)

Late summer

I love this time of year—when, if you turn your back for a moment, the garden gets away on you.

Today I got a fistful of fat beans and a zucchini that was making a break for marrowdom.

The best garden shop ever

Completely shameless plug for Grow from Here, now my favourite garden shop ever.

Not only did they get in the exact thing that I wanted (Awapuni newspaper-wrapped leek seedlings), but, when they saw me testing out the weight of bags of compost, they lent me a trolley to get a 20L bag home with.

Wish I had a big garden and therefore a reason to rush out and buy heaps of things from them.

Hmm, maybe I could turn the living room into an indoor jungle ...

Edible hedge

The new feijoa hedge around the council flats on Aro St is flowering.

Edible hedge—what a brilliant idea.

Plastic-free gardening

Before the garden shop incident, I was feeling very proud of how little plastic I'd used in the garden this year.

I planted:

• Awapuni courgette and pumpkin plants (sold wrapped in newspaper at New World)
• Sweetcorn, pea, cornflower, chickpea and annual bean seeds in paper packets
• Scarlet runner seeds saved from last year
• Koanga edamame seeds gifted from a fellow community gardener
• Cherry tomato plants from my dad
• Heritage tomato plants (sold wrapped in newpaper from the organic stall at the Victoria St markets)

Whoo, look at that: zero plastic. Frickin' brilliant!

Update on The Three Sisters

The beans and the sweetcorn are now neck-and-neck.

I'm rooting for the corn to get ahead.

Ooh, new garden shop! *wriggles toes happily*

Very excited about Grow from Here, the garden shop on Abel Smith St that just opened TODAY!

Although I've been doing extremely well on being plastic-free in the garden this year, I thought I'd show them some support (and divert my dollars to help create the world I want—ie one where there's a garden shop five minutes walk away :) by buying a basil plant in a (plastic) pot and a (plastic) bag of potting mix.

Did make me laugh when I got to the checkout after thinking about all this and they carefully asked me if I needed a plastic carry bag instead of automatically giving me one, saying "We try not to use too many plastic bags."

Makes me realise that I've moved on from just thinking about plastic bags to noticing disposable plastic everywhere.

Some people are dismissive and say that focusing on not using plastic bags is a waste of time because it lets people feel they are being "green" when in fact plastic bag use (or not) has only a very small impact. But I think that maybe taking a reuseable bag shopping is a gateway action, like drug scaremongers say marijuana is a "gateway" to harder drugs. Making one (easy, obvious) change makes you realise that change is possible, and gets you thinking about stuff.

Good on you Grow from Here. Bless your little heart for taking that first step.

Note to self: The Three Sisters

As an experiment I planted The Three Sisters in the garden this year—that's a traditional Native American system where sweetcorn, beans and pumpkins all planted together. It's amazingly efficient—the beans grow up the corn stalks and the pumpkins grow around on the ground between them.

I wasn't sure how to do it so I planted everything together. It looks like I should have waited for the corn to grow a bit before planting the beans—right now the beans are zooming ahead.

A once-only plug for Starbucks

Normally I am anti Starbucks and all that it stands for (slick characterless multinational peddling overlarge overly calorific drinks in throwaway plastic cups) but in a personal lapse today I supported their profit margin by giving them my money. And yes, getting a throwaway plastic cup did make me feel a bit yucky.

(Did I mention their greenwashing with their token fair trade coffee? They talk up their fair trade drinks in their marketing material but if you look carefully at the menu you'll see that only one or two items are actually made with fair trade coffee. Ooh that bugs me.)

But (and here's the once-only plug) while I was there I figured I would pick up one of their bags of used coffee grinds for the garden. I have thought about it before but the bags were always too heavy and I didn't like that the grinds came in a plastic bag ...

Well, today I discovered that the bags aren't so heavy any more AND when I got it up to the garden the plastic bag turned out to be a bag the original beans came in that had been reused (at least, that's what it looks like it is—the top was cut open roughly and there was one of those little coffee bag "breathing" valves on the side).

So I might be popping back there again. Not to buy any drinks, you understand, just to pick up the coffee grinds :)

Asparagus season, mmm ...

I've triumphantly added "asparagus" to the list of vegetables in season.

I harvested the very first spear of the year from the garden on Wednesday. It was the best-tasting asparagus I have ever had :)