From our Garden to yours

I find a lot of people discuss money how much they don’t have.

Well, money is great to pay the bills or buy what you need. Money is a tool and that is all it is. If you are good with handling money, it’s good to you. If you just spend without earning it comes and it goes very quickly.

Then a garden can be a friend, when times get tight. If there is not much ground you can get a pot and plant just about anything that produces food in it.

So hence we have a garden. I grow things, flowers and plants and herbs. Fruit and vegetables. Things for butterflies. Butterfly plants. I try all sorts of things. Yes, you do have to spend some to get a garden and quite often you can get a cutting from a friend for free.

Growing your own, saves money.

Im aware that soil types and climate conditions are different all over the world . Even in New Zealand, in the South Island you can grow cherry trees and get cherries at Christmas time. You can’t do that in Auckland. We have a Cherry tree, it grows cherries as tiny as match sticks. You can’t eat them. It’s too hot to grow Cherries in Auckland, but in some countries it grows too cold to grow citrus trees like lemons.

So let’s begin with a simple Apple Cucumber plant. Yes, I bought it, but you can also cut out it’s seeds when you eat it, put the seeds on a saucer in the sun and dry them. The seeds can be planted and you can grow many apple cucumbers from one plant.

Care of plant, try not to water the leaves, water from the ground. Cut out excess greenery and tie it up on a pole so that the air can circulate around it. Give it shelter from the wind. It does not like wind.

How simple is that? Very easy, you don’t need “Green Thumbs!’ To grow it.

This is “Bog Sage”, it’s a tall plant, I don’t know if you can eat it, but it attracts bees and smells lovely, it’s beautiful with a bunch of flowers in a vase. It grows like a weed. Once you have it, you can always have it. You need bees, they gather pollen and fertilised fruit and vegetables. Without bees and insects we would not have fruit and vegetables.

Avocado trees can be grown from a pip, I like them the pip went into the garden and this is the result. This tree is too large for our garden so I cut it back where I can and you have to have a lot of space. In New Zealand Avocados are expensive and yet they can be easily grown.

A tip when they flower spray with dilute honey water and then the bees do the pollination for you. You get more fruit.

A Rose, a beautiful Rose can be grown from a cutting. Put it in the ground and see what happens you don’t need to be a millionaire to grow Roses of any kind.  Now after the flowers die, cut the head off and more flowers will grow.

Now in saying that, it doesn’t always work but if you are persistent by trial and error you will eventually get a Rose to grow.

Sometimes its quite good just to put a rose cutting in water and wait until you see some roots growing out of the water end and then put the rose cutting into the ground.

Dill is a herb in the garden and when these seeds go brown I sprinkle where I want Dill to grow and “Hey Presto” Dill grows. The leaves are great as flavours in cooking.

A lemon that is growing on our Meyer Lemon tree. It produces a lot of lemons. Yes, I bought the Meyer Lemon tree to grow from Mrs Stirlings Garden centre at Greenwood’s corner. It was about $20.00 but the Meyer lemon tree is a faithful tree for anyone.  She grew plants and lived in that shop until she died last year, she was about 80-90 and worked until she died. Her daughter now takes over.

Lemon is great for all sorts of things. Make your own lemon drinks and its great to heal colds.

These green peaches will soon grow orange and they will be edible. Every year I stew some and put them aside when there are no peaches. I did not buy a peach tree. Warwick and I visited Napier known as the fruit bowl of New Zealand and brought peaches. This tree grew from a pip. Since then, I’ve grown peach trees and given those away to those who need them. One neighbour even bought me some of her first grown peach tree from my golden Queen Peach tree.

These are green guavas yet to grow, they aren’t as large as some countries but they make wonderful Guava jelly.  I got the plants two types, red and yellow for $5.00 each. You can eat them raw tool

Now here are some plums. Not a single plum tree have we had from over the fence until last year I had an idea! When spring came I got a paint brush and brushed the paint brush over the blossoms of a neighbours plum tree not in sight of this plum tree.

The bees got busy and now we have plums for the first time. Hopefully more to come in other years. They taste all right.

Here is another cucumber.

Yes, I have lots of things and it makes you think its a better garden than it is. I have only done about 30% of all the work that needs to be done here.

However as it’s produce comes through. Will show that in an appropriate time later.

One more thing. Let the birds help you grow the garden. You don’t need lots of pesticides. However, you do have to cover the strawberries and discourage the birds from eating those.

The more you did and water, the more slugs, and snails and spiders get eaten by birds.

Then it’s easy here, we don’t get snakes in New Zealand, only 2 legged ones, some people. The most poisonous snakes and spiders in the World live in Australia, our nearest neighbour. New Zealand does have poisonous spiders and very nasty looking ones. So you need gloves for gardening.