The years have passes and the garden is thriving

Wow it's been a very long time since I last posted. A lot has happened since then, in the garden and in my life. I am now a mother to a beautiful little girl and back teaching part time. Whilst I was pregnant I didn't do too much in the garden. There was a lot of work to be done but it was all very heavy work. There were raised garden beds to be made, soil to be dug, trees to be pruned and the cuttings to be mulched. I wasn't sure if hanging around the compost bin and fiddling with that and other manures were a good idea whilst pregnant. Being pregnant for the first time I read too much and scared myself from eating this and that and doing this and that. Mothers and pregnant women around the world will identify with this I'm sure!

Well it's nearly two years since my daughter was born and we are now in the middle of planting our second winter crop. Six rasied garden beds have been built, all but one of them filled using the no-dig method. An old bath from our house renovations has been converted into a strawberry patch and another bath is waiting to become a blackberry patch. There are still summer veggies growing, much to my surprise! Eggplants, capsicums, long peppers, long beans, they don't seem to want to stop producing and I'm not complaining!

Talking of summer vegetables, we had an awesome summer harvest. One thing I need to learn is to use the vegetables quicker and find ways of freezing or canning them because unfortunately the compost bin and the rabbits also ate their share of the goods. I guess this isn't really all that unfortunate, compost is black gold as far as I'm concerned and the rabbits do us a great service making manure for the garden.

It's been great to make savings on our food bill. This is the only area of our budget that we struggle with, buying organic and being big eaters. Out of curiosity I weighed all the zucchini we produced and calculated how much it would cost at organic supermarket prices. It turned out to be over $300.00. And that was only counting the zucchini! So maybe paying off the $2000.00 initial set-up cost will happen sooner than I thought. I can't wait till we have all systems in place and no longer need any outside input and thus really be producing 'free' food.

 Knowing that there a absolutely no pesticides or synthetic fertilisers on our veg also lets me sleep quite a lot better at nights. It also  makes me feel that I'm doing the most basic and most important thing I can do as a parent, feed my child quality food that has been produced with love. 

A garden really is the most wonderful place in the world!