I started this post on the 13th September 2021. More or less 8 months ago. A lot has happened. We moved up to the Paekakariki (a 32 minute drive north of Wellington). Then Omicron arrived. Then Parliament and the area surrounding it in Wellington were occupied by anti-vaxers, anti-mandates, and anti-everythingers for 23 days or so. Then Russia invaded Ukraine. My son started university and I started a teaching job closer to home. And finally after five years and many re-writes, I’m making headway with my novel.

This blog is all about the new garden. It’s a coastal garden and the soil is sandy. Gardening on sand has some ups and a whole lot of downs. Sandy soil drains well, but only if you can get the damn water to sink in and not run right off the top. Sandy soil warms up quickly and is easy to dig. it dries out quickly too. You have to keep adding mulch and compost continuously if you want to grow anything apart from weeds or succulents.

My last garden had its challenges, but overall it was an easier garden to grow lots of different sorts of plants. And that was because of two things: the soil and the climate. It had heavy clay soil and a much wetter climate. So long as I added a topdressing of mulch or compost once a year life was easy. If I had one complaint with that garden it was the sun. I would’ve liked more sun.

My new garden is almost a blank canvas. It has several pohutakawa trees (in various sizes) at the front and nothing out the back (apart from a few leggy lavenders). The garden, like the Wellington garden, is long and narrow, but it gets a lot more sun. And I mean a lot. Like the Wellington garden it gets a fair bit of wind, (although the northerly here is salt-laden which is really hard on unprotected plants). I have four big challenges: the dogs, the sandy soil, the northerly wind and the weeds. I have never had to battle so many pernicious weeds. For the first time ever I’ve bought glyphosate weed killer (although it’s the labour intensive kind that you paint on individual stems).

Here’s how I started this blog back in September last year.

“I’m hosting book club this month. It got delayed because of lockdown (in early September). Whoever hosts book club gets to choose the book theme. I chose ‘dystopian fiction or anything to do with an alternative world’. I chose this theme way before lockdown, back when we thought that our normal covid-free New Zealand life would go on for ever. Back then I was reading The Chrysalids by John Wyndham , which is where the dystopian theme came from. Once we hit lockdown the last thing I wanted to read about was a post-apocalypse village called Waknuk, where fundamentalist Christianity and eugenics were a normal way of life.”

Sadly, the world is starting to resemble Waknuk. I don’t need to go into details. You know what I mean. Gardening has never been more important.

I’ve never been able to write short blogs. But I’m going to try. Here are a few photos from the back garden.

This is what the back garden looked like when we bought the house after lockdown in September 2021. It has a nice old garden shed and quite a few lavender bushes. As soon as I saw this area I knew four things. Firstly, I wanted a flower border and it would follow the curve of the retaining wall; secondly, I wanted an orchard along the back fence; thirdly, I wanted a greenhouse; and lastly, I wanted to turn the triangular garden (top left in photo) into a lavender border.

Heres’ what the same garden looks like 8 months later. A lot has happened. I built a flower border, I planted an orchard, I planted a lavender garden, I built raised beds and filled them with soil and filled them with veggies, I covered the entire lower level in mulch to suppress the weeds and Paul built me a greenhouse.

Here’s the lavender border or whatever you want to call it. It’s a mixture of loamy soil brought into the section by a previous owner and sand. It’s full of pernicious weeds, the worst of which is convolvulus. Never have I battled such an evil plant. It’s bulbs or corms or tubers remind me of boils. When I researched how organic gardeners deal with this plant I found out they paint on glyphosate poison.

There were a few old woody lavender bushes (the big kind). They’d been heavily pruned when the bought the place and have now grown back beautifully. I’ve moved smaller lavender bushes here from other parts of the garden and planted some new ones. There are lots of different kinds. I planted rosemary, an orange buddleja, and iris, four different salvias, an echium, an erysimum, an Australian shrub whose name I’ve forgotten and two apple trees (one dwarf, one regular). Oh, and there’re two kinds of miscnathus too.

The big dog loves to walk through this garden (hence the stakes). The big woody lavender bushes are brilliant at protecting smaller plants. The big dog can’t walk though or over them.

Our friend Paul built this glasshouse for me out of recycled materials. So far I’ve only grown chillies in it, which I neglected and yet still grew. It was an oven last summer. So this year, I plan on making some blinds for the ceiling to make it cooler. The soil to the right of the glasshouse is, most likely, contaminated. It’s full of old bits of treated timber and cans and all manner of rubbish. The soil smells sour. For this reason I’m growing all my food crops (in this part of the garden) in raised beds and containers.

The soil isn’t too bad along the fence. Over the years people have added topsoil and it’s less sandy. This is the orchard, where I planted the fruit trees. The apples are doing well. The peach looked ok (apart from the mottled leaves, which I’ll have to sort out), but the two plums have been on the brink of death since I planted them (is it the soil? is it the climate? Although my neighbours plum looks healthy. Is it me?) I’m underplanting the trees with roses, umbellifers, daisies and any romantic orchard-looking flower that will live here.

I tried a few different crops this summer. I grew lots of heirloom tomato plants from seed, but I didn’t feed them, hardly ever watered them and I didn’t stake them. It wasn’t a surprise they failed. I planted corn far too late and it all ended up in the compost. My potatoes were a success (albeit a moderate one). I bought several bags of ‘Rainbow Heritage Potato Mix’ from Koanga Gardens. I planted some in grow bags and some into compost in my orchard under the peach tree. You can see some of the ‘Rainbow Heritage’ potatoes above. I also planted a lot of Jersey Bennes in bags, which were also a moderate success (if I’d fed and watered the potatoes in the grow bags better then I would’ve had a better crop).

Here are some of my most ‘well-thumbed’ garden books at the moment.

And just before I go here are some photos of the garden in autumn, back when autumn still felt like summer. See you in a week.