Rasins?

 

Raisin trees are a great easy care tree.

The raisins are the very sweet swollen base of the flower stalks. Sweet and crunchy.

These trees self prune, are an amazing bee tree (buzzingly so), creates beautiful shade, fast growing, deciduous and can cope with dry.

Am propagating more this year to spread amongst my chestnut and avocado orchards.

Mixing it up

 Nothing like a good guild of plants.

Sunflower seedlings on left where planted into a cover crop blend of seeds (peas, lupins, spinach, oats, crimson clover, wheat, buckwheat...) The sunflowers provide shade and then when harvested the cover crop grows until I'm ready to plant the next crop. Diversity of food, height, roots....

And well the flowers on the right are just a riot. All taking up different spaces and places. Shadign and feeding the insect life and soil in their own unique ways. Loving the purple millet and am going to save so much seed this year.

Buckets of learning

  

Its not just learning how to grow new things, but learning how to pick and process and how much you get from everything.

Am getting buckets of flowers and have so many bees.

Chrysalis everywhere!!

 I am on high alert in the garden at the moment.

There are so many of these beautiful treasures hanging everywhere. And I mean everywhere. I have swan plants scattered throughout the garden and loads more zinnea's (butterflies love these the best) and other flowers than ever.

Weeding is now worrying after I pulled out some plants with a chrysalis on -yes my weeds are big.

Its time consuming to check each plant before mulching.

What an amazing problem to have!

Poppies and bumblebees.

What a time waster. I spent so long today watching big fat bumblebees trying to land on flimsy floaty poppies. A crazy dance.

The poppies keep just out of reach as the draft from the bumblebees wings pushes it away.

There where a few successful landings by the most persistent bumbles.

The poppies petals only last a day due to this persistent pestering.
 

Bee watching!!

Watching bees.

First you have to sneek up to flower. 

Make sure your shadow is away.

Slowly hold flower and if you are gentle you can bend it towards you and get really close! 

And the corn goes in!!

    

Planning for it has been an annual dance for years. This is our Kaanga Maa patch -our staple corn which we have had for over 10 years now. Porridge, tortilla, pozole....

Our cover crop has been scythed (roots left in the ground), any buttercup removed, mulched, a legume rich cover crop sown, and our soaked corn planted.

Was super impressed with the cover crop. It has been flowering since April and the amount of biomass was amazing. It was mostly eye level and so diverse. Look at the size of our lupin trunks - and the root nodules where impressive too. Oh and I forgot the amount of worms and the fantail that worked with us all morning.

Thanks to our amazing WOOFERS we got this job done in a morning!!

 

      

Planting tomatoes

Can you see me!! I am standing up. This is before I moved all of the bumblebees and edible broad beans and picked a salad (spinach, kale, edible flowers, lettuce, sorrel, carrots..) I used a mower to mulch everything and after a little weeding planted my tomatoes into deep mulch.

My cover crops are getting wilder and it is getting harder to mulch them as they are so full of life and food!!

 

Crop Swap Flowers

During lockdown I have been even more aware of all of the plants and learnings I have gathered from Crop Swap. Even though I am missing the amazing people I am reveling in the connections I have in our  community and know as we unlock we will be able to meet again.

Here is a link to the first Crop swap day.

Tansy

Tansy is a constant presence in my garden. If allowed it will grow up to 2 meters all and run riot with beautiful yellow flowers.
I use it for an ever ready source of chop and drop mulch, food for insects, flowers for my table and as it is a perennial it provided growing roots in the soil all year.

Cold wasps

As soon as the weather starts to turn hornets are everywhere. 

Hunting our warm fences or sunny places.

Most of the queens have fattened up on autumn flowers and are hibernating in a nice warm place.

All that is left in the nest are workers with no work to do and the odd male. 

As the weather cools further they will die off. 

There work done for the season.

Herb flowers

Herb flowers are always popular with pollinators. I wonder what sort of powerful rongoa they share.
This blue butterfly is drinking Thyme nectar.

Sharing

Some things are just too good not to share.
This bumble bee and Copper butterfly.
Often sedum plants have a wide variety of pollinators all at once..
They are an easy care perennial plant that is easy to divide and spread around your garden

Thistle flower

Not everyone loves thistles.

They are an indicator of compacted low calcium soils. Funny that they have deep taproots so can help rectify this.

I have noticed that they move through the landscape. It would be interesting to see if there were many changes in the soil after they have been.

This small patch is full of bees, beetles, small butterflies and a katydid.

Lettuce flowers

Lettuce flowers with a Blue butterfly pollinator.

The whole ecosystem benefits from plants going to seed (if it is not an noxious weed).
Flowers for pollinators, seed for next year, soil shaded and fed by living plants for longer, higher proportions of carbon for compost and as the leaves can die back an opportunity to plant your next crop as an understory.

Sunflowers

I am loving sunflowers.

In summer whenever I have a spare bed I sow them as a part of a diverse cover crop.

We have beautiful flowers to share, food for pollinators, petals to eat, are deep rooted for loosening soil, create mychorrizal connection, create a great nursery for winter kale and spinach and grow lots of carbon for compost.

Working with royalty

It is very powerful to know you are an important part of a system.

This is a newly hatched Queen bumble bee in my garden. I have attempted to define the roles we play below.

She will; pollinate a few plants while she builds up her reserves for overwintering and then in early spring when out of dormancy, build up a brood of worker bees that will pollinate my garden all growing season.

I have made; nesting boxes for her 'mother' and then her to raise their brood, sure there are overwintering sites for her, made sure there are food sources available for her and her mother when they need to build reserves (early spring and autumn), sure of a diversity of food crops throughout the whole growing season to support the whole nest of workers, there is clean water and no pesticides or herbicides used.

Food forest

It is a food forest!!!

One of my criteria for a food forest is that they should give the workers (including me) food from the outset. Why else would you spend time there while you were waiting for the trees?

This will eventually be a guild of citrus.

In the meantime in the succession of things we will be eating pumpkin, tomatoes, chilli, sorrel, spring onions, mellow, dill, buckwheat, strawberries...........

There is also plenty on offer for the pollinators and co.

Honey harvest

Harvest time.

If we harvest before Christmas we can be sure there will not be poisonous Tutin in our honey. This stuff can be eaten straight from the comb.

Passion vine hoppers suck the sap from the Tutin bush and then in turn bees harvest honeydew from the hoppers. This is especially true during hot summers so after Christmas all honey harvested needs to be tested.

As bees categorize nectar as they store it in their hives then Tutin honeydew can be  concentrated  in small areas of the comb. After Christmas comb honey is a no go.

Entrance transition

I'm loving the path to the garden at the moment.

You transition off our drive under the Tagasaste (which is full of  Bees, Bellbirds and Kereru), past the Grapefruit,  over the drain and you feel there before you even open the gate.

The narrowing of the path (off the drive), preview of destination and sense of slowing down or arriving always invites me whether I am driving past, going to work or passing through to gather food for a meal.