Gardening Resources 1

Looking at the world around us, I think many of us are realising that we need to take a bit more responsibility for our own wellbeing, including producing at least some of our own food.

Gardening Resources 2 – A to Z of our fav fruit & veg

Ah, those wise souls who have been doing this for years – getting nutritional, economic and emotional benefits from the practice. And then there’s me… So it’s a bit of a steep learning curve as we learn about raised beds vs container gardening, compost and worm farms, which plants like which soils, and how quickly can we get our quite large but steep property producing food for us and hopefully at least one other household?

What with one thing and another happening over summer and early autumn, it was Easter before we really got started, with a little help from our friends. Well, to be honest, a lot of help. We now have a raised garden bed on what used to be a lawn of sorts, and have hopes that some of what we’ve planted will be able to be harvested over the winter.

When I say a lawn of sorts, that’s actually a more useful thing than you might imagine. A friend who knows more about foraging than I do walked our property saying things like “ooh there’s some plantain” and “ooh there’s some more… and another one…”. There are also some dandelions and plenty of wild parsley, if the weed eater guys haven’t been for a while. So we don’t have to go far to do some foraging.

In the raised bed we have peas, carrots, beetroot, broccoli, celeriac, spring onions, cos lettuce, onions and some strawberries for summer. Probably time to take a new photo…

In other parts of the garden we have a thornless blackberry and some blackcurrant bushes. There are some raspberries joining them soon. And in containers, we have blueberries, radishes, and some herbs.

There will be no words of wisdom coming from me on gardening, but hopefully I won’t have to report too many failures either.

Mainly I want to save some links to useful websites and videos, which we expect to refer to many times.

So I’ll save them here in case they’re of use to anyone else as well.

Some of them are general videos / info from around the world, and some are specific to NZ.

It will probably be added to from time to time.

Best places to buy seeds

Use heritage seeds so that you can harvest more seeds later on.

Koanga Gardens – for heritage seeds and plants, permaculture workshops and lots of knowledge.
Kings Seeds
Look for a local seed exchange, great for finding things that grow well in your area