The end of a very long week has finally come and with it my birthday has arrived. All my gifts have been money – I guess people figure I am going to need it soon! Every day at the moment is full of uncertainty over resigning but also full of evidence that I have made the correct decision – it can get very confusing at times. With $26 of my birthday money I have treated myself to fifteen different types of seeds (bought online). They haven’t arrived yet but in the meantime this weekend I will get started on making my newspaper pots. Hopefully that should have all my Xmas presents sorted out as well. My first lot of Green Feast pea seedlings in their toilet rolls are ready to be planted out – will take some of them over to family as well. I have a scrunched up piece of paper in the bottom of each toilet roll that I gently take out as peas don’t like being transplanted. I also cut down one side of the toilet roll as the cardboard will take a while to break down and I don’t want my peas to be constrained. Having things growing gives one a nice feeling of achievement to ward off the resignation blues – it also provides food on the table and can make for relatively cheap gifts.
5 Days after my resignation
I don’t think I have quite got the hang of this resignation thing. Yesterday and today I ended up putting in 13 hours each day at the office – I’m sure the point of resigning is to do less work! Meanwhile while I have been working hard so have my seeds – came home today to all my peas germinated and my lettuce seeds that I have planted outside in an ice cream container also starting to sprout. Incredibly easy to grow. My self-seeded lettuces are ready to start eating – we will have to start having salad every night to get through them all. Every time we have had visitors I have been handing over a tub of lettuces as a take home gift. While everyday life continues normally at the moment it is a lot easier to get up for work – I am up early each day even fitting in household tasks before heading off to work, eager to get to the end of my resignation. I am finding it hard though to put up with those well meaning comments from people like “No regrets?”
Grow Your Own Food Pesticide Free
Reading this today Pesticide Residue inspired me to keep going with growing some of my own vegetables. Arriving home from work today I found my two lettuce seedlings that I had re-potted and brought inside at the weekend had tripled in size just in three days! I have about another twenty seedlings outside that have started growing in last season’s pots that I never emptied out. I let my last lettuce of the season bolt and obviously it bolted all over the place and I now get to reap the results pretty much free of charge other than some potting mix and weekly feeding and some labour. The frost has been pretty severe the last few weeks involving lots of cold mornings defrosting the van windows but the lettuces seem fine with it all. Now that my lettuces have inspired me I think I might start sowing some pea seeds this weekend as well to plant out at some point in August.
Lettuce Surprise
I came home last week to find a nice surprise – one of my pots that I hadn’t emptied out from last season had sprouted two lettuce seedlings.
Today I went out and now every pot has little lettuce seedlings sprouting everywhere. Only problem is that I don’t know what to do now! I will obviously have to re pot them as they won’t grow that well in old potting mix and there are far too many per pot. But I’m not sure about growing them outside given the amount of frost we get – I don’t know what type of lettuce they are and whether they will grow well in winter given they might not be winter cultivars. I wonder if I can take them inside and grow them and try to capture the little amounts of sun that we get over the rest of winter. Sometimes growing your own food is a very hit and miss affair when you are a novice.
Spreading the word
Visiting family a few weeks ago my sister-in-law mentioned that she was now doing what we do at our house and planning meals on the fridge door and it was making a huge difference. (Ours is defrosting in the fridge at the moment. Steak on toasted ciabatta bread, lettuce, red onion, tomato, avocado, onion marmalade chutney……. mmmm.). Meanwhile my mother at the age of 74 has become a white vinegar convert because of me and in turn is spreading the word to all she meets. I was talking to someone the other day about the usefulness of white vinegar and they said they couldn’t live without their Jiff but even my husband who was a Jiff fanatic happily uses our white vinegar spray and wipe. My mother–in–law has become a bush baby dwarf bean plant convert after I gave her some seeds last year (very easy to grow). It’s nice to see people’s lives getting a little easier just from simple things that you do in your life. It all helps to make us the eighth happiest country in the world NZ eighth happiest country in the world – National – NZ Herald News – maybe if we all work at it we can move up in the ranks after the next survey!
Growing Money
I think one of the best savings the last few months has been growing our own lettuces. We don’t have a garden at the moment as it is still basically a building site so everything has been grown in containers. It would of course be much cheaper growing straight into soil – maybe next summer. I have found you can pretty much grow lettuces in anything – two of my happiest lettuces the last few weeks were grown together in a 2 litre icecream container! Growing them in pots such as icecream containers or small pots has been quite nice as you can grab a container and bring it in for meal time to pick your lettuce leaves. You can also sit down somewhere comfortable with the pot on your knee when it comes to pest control day and pick off all your insects by hand. You can also move an infested pot away from other lettuces while you try to get the pest numbers down. There’s a good article here on various types of lettuces that this grower is trialling in their garden if you don’t know much about different varieties http://www.garden-nz.co.nz/grow-your-own/grow-your-own/lettuce-be-friends.html
January gardening diary
I think the lack of sunshine this summer must be taking its toll on my plants with the maturity dates totally way off. The lettuces that I grew from seeds should almost be full grown by now, instead they are still little seedlings while my beans are a few weeks off as well. My baby bush dwarf beans are absolutely gorgeous though – at the moment they have these very cute 2 cm long bean pods. I can’t wait to pop them into stir fries in a week or two. Insect wise some of my plants have thrived, others have to be watched daily for dreaded invaders. I lost my chives last week after months of being perfectly healthy and gave up on one of my tomato plants as well. Overall though my first year of herb and vegetable gardening has gone relatively well and through sharing my seeds, seedlings and plants two other households have also benefited from my growing experiments. I have learnt that I wouldn’t be without fresh herbs in the kitchen now and hope to expand a little further on my inside herb growing range this year.
Novice Gardening Diary
Driving home today we passed an elderly couple at the end of the street, husband and wife were out gardening at the front of their property. It made me a little jealous as in my household I am the only one who gardens. I bought some more lettuce seedlings at the weekend – hubby was curious as to why when we already had lettuce plants? I had to explain to him how plants work and if you don’t keep planting them you run out! Hubby lives by the philosophy that he doesn’t do gardening but he has been happy to eat our lettuces especially in his favourite weekend treat of BLTs. My other lettuces that I am growing from seed in my toilet rolls are mostly an experiment – I don’t have too much hope that first time around I will actually get them through to full grown lettuces. It was an exciting weekend with my peas finally forming pods – shouldn’t be too long now before I can start eating them. My poor tomatoes are flowering but not sure how they will turn out in the long run as last week there was hardly a drop of sunshine to be seen and tomatoes need about eight hours a day. You win some, you lose some when you garden – it definitely isn’t a perfect science but it’s quite satisfying trying.
Wonder Pots
I usually use whatever old plastic pots I can find around my garage for planting. My parsley has been happy growing away in an ice-cream container for the past few months. However having a newly renovated house with lovely new carpet I was a bit nervous about house plants in terms of water accidents and water stains. A few months ago I found these great plastic pots at the Warehouse – the pot has no holes in the bottom of the container. Instead they have a section at the bottom where the water can drain to and sit and then a small plastic bung in a hole on the side to let out excess water. They are great as you can water your plants in rooms like the lounge without any spillage worries. I don’t really use the bung much as I leave the water for the plants to use through their roots. The containers are a nice design and come in three colours – neutral, green and brown with a few different sizes. They are made in Malaysia which isn’t great for carbon miles but I imagine I will keep these pots for life as they have been so invaluable. The size below are the small ones and retail for $6.99 but every now and then you can get them on sale. I’m going to pot one of these up for one of my gardening relatives for their Christmas gift.
Lettuce Love
Shopping yesterday there was no lettuce on the shopping list for the first time ever – my lettuces have been happily growing away the last few weeks and are getting to the point that we can now start to eat them. We adore salad in our household so we will need to keep planting lettuce in order to have a constant supply so that is one of the weekend tasks. I am also raising lettuce from seed to see how difficult the process is and whether I have the patience for it. The lettuce seedlings are so fragile when they are young in comparison to the hardy pea and bean seedlings – I’m not sure how successful I will be in raising them. I weathered off my first lot of seedlings (peas, beans, sweet peas) last week out on the porch – they had a tough first week – frost and howling gale force winds. It was hard to believe it was actually getting to the end of spring. Living in the North Island I don’t expect to be removing ice from the car windscreen in November!
