The 7 days lockdown has passed relatively uneventfully except for a rogue tsunami warning on Saturday. I just carried on as usual but with more naps. My sister doesn't quite believe me when I say librarians need naps to rest our eyes from all the reading we do.
Tomorrow it's back to school and work, so will load up my funcargo with books again. Today, I managed to pick up a kaffir lime (thanks Ben!) and was shown his syntropic food forest, just two years old, in Glen Eden. He has a keyhole garden, a hugelkultur bed, a tree that has grafted ten different kinds of apples, azzolla water weeds in buckets, a banana circle, and what must be hundreds of various edible plants all waiting to be planted in his north facing slope of a garden. He has been busy!
The kaffir lime has gorgeous limy tasty leaves and can keep growing happily in a pot so I will keep it there for now. It does has some thorns but doesn't seem too vicious.
I harvested the fennel which has gone to seed so I've made a little teepee/obelisk from the stems in Socks's bed, and seeded it with fennel, yarrow, parsley, agapanthus, swan plant, cardoon, borage, wormwood, lychnis, basically, ANYTHING that could grow there I would be happy with. I'm planning to chuck some sheep pellets and gypsum on there and also poppies, sweet pea and any seeds past their expiry date and see what comes up. Honestly nothing's really worked in the past, not even green manure, I'll just keep on adding organic matter until something clicks. If I can get any mushroom compost maybe that might start things. The feijoa tree seems to be doing alright and the manuka is still there, but the abutilons look a bit lonely and straggly, while the lambs ears seem to have reached their limit and the spider plants no longer like it as it's too sunny.
Martha has been helping dig the driveway beds and it seems like she's actually doing quite a good job of it. For once!
Dad's captured some more of our bounty - we had both kinds of grapes, and more naked ladies. Another week and it will be time to plant and sow again, so now everything's open I'll need to get growing again.
Hooray!
