Recycled pallet garden planter

It's time to start utilising the deck more for gardening, and pots just aren't cutting it anymore.
After making sure our pallets were heat treated and not chemically treated, it was a fairly simple task to transform them into a planter. In saying that it would be alot quicker the second time round, but considering what you would pay for a planter this big in a gardening store, the time was well spent.
Caster wheels would have been nice but the cost would have out weighed the benefits.
The best thing about it is that it's just outside the door so we can just grab coriander without having to put shoes on (which can make the difference when it's poring down).
There are no rules, just give it a go.

Plum wine

The last of the plums are well gone by now. We've even drunk most of the wine we made from them but it's been a great harvest / forage and I intend to double production next year. Plums are one of the least labor intensive crops to turn into wine. You can quickly pick enough for a batch and turning them into wine is easy.
Our approach was very unscientific and organic. After all, fermentation is a natural process.
My theory is that you are relying on the fruit itself and the ripeness of it, to give you a good result. For example the best batch I did this year was a carboy of Black Doris plums which were so ripe they were pretty much just juice inside the skin. We hardy had to add sugar or yeast, they just wanted to start fermenting. It was a sweet brew so we combined it with a dryer one we made earlier and it was a match made in heaven.
Can't wait for next season.

The brew below is the Black Doris, that's kombucha back left. Below that the dryer plums and below that the brew we made from them. 

Winter Salads

Is might be the first day of winter here in New Zealand but there is still plenty in the garden to put into a salad. Mint, rocket, purple carrots, parsley, Basil, lettuce leaves. And a good handful of sprouted sunflower seeds from the kitchen. There's also salami in there as well!

One chicken molting out of three

One of our chickens has decided to start molting while the other two keep their current feathers. It works out well as we still have two chickens laying eggs.

Check out the new feathers coming through! 

Fresh root vege

Just pulled these yesterday -  out of a root vege plot in our garden that's now ready for the chopping board. You could see that the purple onion had great color from what was exposed above the dirt but the purple dragons are just as amazing now there out of the ground.

Here are the ones we planted

Cabbage tree fronds and mulch

If you have a cabbage tree ( ti kouka ) on your property, or even if its on the next door neighbors you will be familiar with the fronds getting blown all over lawn. Seems you cant just run them over with the mower ( they are fibrous like flax and will stop any mower or mulcher in its tracks ) and you have to go around picking them up anyway, you might as well make use of them.
Gathering a dozen or so at a time and tying them together creates a nice bunch that can be placed in between seedlings. They offer protection from the wind, stop the weeds from coming up and stop the soil from drying out.