Week 23 - Rain

It's been raining a lot lately. It hardly rained for all of March and April, and now it won't stop. I'm no longer worried about the amount of water in the tank. If anything we have too much water now. I've spied small leaks in the pipes leading to the water tank and also at the pumphouse.

I last sprayed the weeds on the property about two months ago. After that weed growth died down quite a lot - because of the lack of rain more than anything else. About a month ago(?) I noticed small weeds starting to poke up and thought I'd better spray again before they took off. But I was busy and then the rains came. And with the rain came renewed growth. Plus I can't spray again until the rain stops for a few days. So the place is starting to look quite overgrown again.

Today was relatively dry. It rained overnight and for a time (quite heavily) this morning. When it wasn't raining I spent some time in the vegetable garden, pulling out weeds by hand. My gardening books recommend this time to year to dig over the garden before winter and/or plant green crops. Well I've left it too late to plant anything but was intending to dig over the garden today. I got a quarter of it weeded before I ran out of energy. Found several more potatoes. What I don't quite know is what the books mean by "dig over". I understand it to mean digging up the ground so the top layer goes down and the lower layer comes to the top (to aerate the soil??). But what the books don't say is whether this is a one-off event or something you do continually over the winter. Any experienced gardeners wanna give me some advice? I would like to hope it's a one-off but knowing the way weeds grow it's probably continual. Darn it.

However, I did find out a few things today. Our soil type is clay. My friend L measured the pH the other week and it is 7, which is pretty good for growing things. The garden is approximately 5 metres by 15 metres. All this information makes me feel a lot more comfortable about making a plan for what to plant in the garden in springtime.

On four occasions over the last couple of weeks I have found birds in the fireplace in the sunroom. The first time I opened all the doors and windows and it flew out straight away. The second time it landed on the windowsill and the cat promptly jumped up and got it. The third time it landed on the curtain rail and didn't want to come down. The fourth time it again flew straight out. Not sure why they're suddenly falling down the chimney. Luckily we've not been using that fireplace much.

I picked another 5kg of feijoas this week. We made a yummy feijoa cake yesterday which used up some of them. Have been making lots more passionfruit juice too.

The neighbour's horses and cattle are still grazing in our fields. They are doing an amazing job at getting the grass down.

-M