31 January

• Time to begin planting our overwintering seed crops…..It’s a big week here, we are preparing beds for planting our seed crops of carrots, daikon, turnips beetroot radishes, salsify etc . We’ll sow lots of seed, then harvest them all late May, select the best roots and then plant them in isolation gardens, (and in the case of carrots,  in fenced gardens in the middle of sheep paddocks so we have no crossing with wild carrot! ). Check out the Moon Calendar to see what food plants need to go in now! Our brassicas (especially cabbages) are also going in now, they have to be fully mature before winter if we want them to go to seed strongly in the spring.
• Loads of seeds are being harvested so we’re back into making new compost heaps, and yes, the best thing is we are now using our own compost when we plant crops. That has taken a year to achieve. Our compost has all been made with lots of minerals so from now on we will need to use far less fertilser, mainly foliar feeding. I’m really excited about Paul Taylor’s workshop coming up in October. I caught 2 days of it when I was at the Permaculture Research Institute in Australia  a few months ago. He is a wonderful teacher, and he has done the work to make biological agriculture/soil food web knowledge  accessible to everybody. He shows us how to make our own fertilser for almost no cost, in a way that is easy and suitable for large or small areas. I caught enough to know that if I add these techniques to our compost systems already in place, we won’t need to continue buying fertilser, and we will have nutrient dense food. I’ll be doing this workshop.
• I’m focusing on separating seed sizes and weights when we clean seed to improve our mother seed lines fast. very excited about that, lots of amazing info coming through in Acres USA, which we will reprint for you in our July catalogue which will focus on Seeds this next Spring

23 January

• We began cleaning our Early Red garlic and weighing what we got from the area it was grown. Our early Red Rocombole produced 7 kgs per sq m. That is just over the average Bio intensive yield, and I could see we could do far better but that is a good start in a new garden. Are you achieving those sorts of results? You could be.
• Loads of seed harvesting happening right now, in the last week we  have harvested garlic, potato onions, shallots, rocket, red cabbage, tatsoi seed, Aomaru Koshun daikon, calendula, puha and dandelion seed. It’s all finishing drying in a cloche or in the greenhouse or on sheets in the sun.
• Each day after lunch when the seed is very dry and crunchy we process it using our hands our feet and the screens we have.
• We’re beginning to plant the veg for our April Permaculture Design Course, which is filling up well
• We potted up our first legumes for the food forest we are designing here. So far we have planted Acacia retinoides, Acacia cultriformis, tagasaste, sulla, tree medic, Siberian Pea tree,  an amazing yellow leguminous shrub found growing in Moeraki.
• Dan and Amanda Palmer  of Very Edible Gardens in Melborne, have been over for a visit and together we are designing an urban garden section of the Institute house  site. We are designing it provide maximum nutrition, to try and get a our heads around just how can design our basic nutritional needs in to very small spaces. We are using Weston Price principles which means the principles all indigenous people Weston price visited early in the 19th century. Unbelievably the biggest challenge seems to be getting enough calcium but Vitamin A is also a challenge on a very small site.

Aomaru Koshin Radish Slices

Aomaru Koshin Radishes

Aomaru Koshin Radishes - growing to produce seed

January 12

• we are harvesting; rocket seed, flaxseed, loads of flower seed, Bloomsdale spinach seed, beetroot seed, and much more.
• drying seed in the green house and cloche cleaning seed using our beautiful hand screens
• powdering 1 lot of our chickens with diatomaceous earth (see picture) to rid them of the lice that took advantage of us having no diatomaceous earth bath in their pen
• filling all the worm farms with fresh cow manure to grow worms and vermicast fast training our chickens to eat worms so that we can feed worms rather than soaked grain for 1 meal a day
• getting the February catalogue ready to print putting together a monthly newsletter
• loading our new 10 week internships programs onto the website yee haa!!!!!, a huge moment
• preparing beds to plant vegetables for our Permaculture Design Course in April.