A few months ago I downloaded a mobile app called ‘Life Cycle’ and allowed it to track and monitor my whereabouts and the amount of time spent at each location.
The tiny sliver of walking with only 21hours made up the result of 121,980 steps. Imagine what you could achieve in your garden for the same amount of energy. It could be transformed.
In December 2020, as you can see above I did a lot more activities including many interviews, meetings and meetup sessions. We also traveled to Mapua for Christmas so there are more locations to track.
In January 2021, an interesting factor is that dedicated walking is only 4hours compared to November 2020 with 21hours. I would personally prefer to be doing dedicated walking in nature than walking between tasks, however I’m loving being back at work having had 12 months off.
Did the garden get more focused time during this period? Yes it did. Sadly for the app the garden isn’t far enough away from ‘home’ that garden time isn’t registered as a separate event. I will review this and try to get a timed ‘gardening’ event. I’m expecting that I spend less than 2hours a day in the garden.
Yesterday, I did spend time weeding or as I like to think of it, refilling the compost heap. The above raised bed had several keepers and a diverse range of support plants. The support plants add great value to the compost.
I noticed that this season that the compost has really dried out so I added extra greens and dried grass and watered it down. The water is laced with live bacterial culture and makes a world of difference as long as the area remains moist. More on that another day.
I started an indoor garden as a hobby during the New Zealand lockdown, and continued to develop into the winter months. We attended farmers markets and then went on to sell locally and to private buyers. The project continues to deliver microgeens to order. We have a dedicated growing space in a controlled environment suitable for 20 trays of greens. Our preferred microgeens are radishes and basil.
It’s 11th of January and I have a Product Manager interview at 10:30am, as a way to relax and prepare I decided I would get some gardening tasks completed and generally have a walk around in the cool of the day.
Kumera is growing well in the clotch.
Strawberries are continuing to produce. This year we forgot to cover the plants, but what we’ve discovered is a complete lack of blackbirds that would usually swoop in and gobble up bright red berries.
Cabbages are growing awesome, we’ll have to start harvesting these shortly.
Potato strip down the back path has worked well. Good crop and added diversity to the area beneath the fruit trees.
Apples are coming along nicely and are a bit unexpected considering the losses we’ve had after the late frosts, many of our fruit trees are bare this year.
The biggest delicious delight is found under a mass of peach leaves.
Here are a few pictures from our travels over the 2020-2021 holiday season.
First we visited Conway, stayed overnight near the beach and watched dolphins. The next morning we traveled up the east coast to Mapua, stopping along the way taking photos and 360 degree video.
The bulk of our time away from Canterbury was in the Nelson and Mapua area, with five nights in Redwood Valley and 3 nights at the Mapua camping ground.
We saw New Year’s Eve in at an off the grid log cabin in Glenhope on our way back to Canterbury. Two fantastic nights and lots of river walking! Simply beautiful territory.
Having arranged the water storage for garden use, I noticed that there were other down pipes that could possibly reduce the amount of water caught. If I could reduce run off without increased chances of flooding, we should be able to collect more water per down pour.
The idea is that if water could be dammed at two points, we could increase the volume of water able to be drained into the barrels.
The catchment area is approximately 150 square meters.
The spouting is 5cm deep before it overflows into the house, and the dam wall is 2cm, which means that in a significant rain event the water can spill over.
