If I’m absolutely soul-searchingly honest, growing fruit and vegetables, all year round, seems like an impossible task. Impossible. So much can go wrong. There’s so much you have to know. There’s lots of planning and the building of structures. There’s a lot of work.

It feels to me that growing fruit and veg all year round is like driving a car (with a flat tyre) around an obstacle course, while juggling 3 eggs (raw not boiled) and singing the national anthem in a Mickey Mouse voice.

Sure I dabble in a bit of fruit and veg growing. I grow a few potatoes and tomatoes. I grow a few herbs and greens. I have a few fruit trees, but. that’s it. I’m not exactly living off the land. I’m not Barbara Good.

I’d like to grow a lot more food. I really would. I’d really like a beautiful and plentiful food garden with something to harvest every day of the year. It’s a confidence thing. It’s a being organised thing. It’s a reading up on information sort of thing. And It’s a space thing, cause I don’t have a big area to grow food in. It’s also a getting inspired and then getting motivated sort of thing. That seems like an easy place to start. Inspiration.

About 10 years ago I bought Alys Fowler’s book ‘The Edible Garden’ and It was life changing. She made growing food look hip, and (most importantly) - easy. It was important to her that her garden was abundant and beautiful. That’s when I started growing potatoes in containers and a few tomatoes.

Bad luck for me that my ‘Edible Garden’ book is packed away in storage (just when I need it) along with most of my other garden books. Good luck for me, my husband pays for a site that lets him watch premier league games. This same site lets me to watch anything on the BBC. This week I’ve been watching old episodes of the BBC series that accompanied Alys’s book ‘The Edible Garden’, which are just as inspiring as the book.

Luckily, one of my favourite food growing books isn’t in storage. It’s ‘Creative Vegetable Gardening - new edition’ by Joy Larkcom. I bought it for $3.00 at the Salvation Army Store a few years back. Joy makes fruit and veggie gardening look like ornamental gardening. Flowers intermingle with food plants and food plants are planted like ornamentals. Everything is possible with imagination.

I often flick through the book just to look at the pictures. There are little brick paths meandering through mixed beds of veggies and flowers, and topiary bay trees, and archways of grapevines, and wigwams of beans or sweet peas, and cherry trees trained into fan shapes against brick walls, and apple trees trained to make step-over hedges. And lots and lots of flowers for pollinators and for eating.

And just as I was asking myself how I would go about fitting all of Joy’s ideas into my garden I came across this.

This most incredible inspiring veggie garden. It belongs to Long Beach Cafe in Waikanae. I was at the cafe last weekend for a family lunch. The garden is out the back and they welcome customers to wander around the beds. Which I did. And now you can too.

It’s the middle of winter and there’s so much growing.

Check out these greenhouses.

The world might be burning down or drowning in floodwaters but I can turn my back garden into a cross between The Garden of Eden and Noah’s Ark. It’s a gloriously bountiful idea. After walking around the Long Beach garden I’m ready to go.

This is what is happening in my gardening this week.

It rained a lot. And it’s still raining. My daffodil and tulip bulbs (in pots) are growing leaves and one yellow tulip is flowering. My crocus bulbs are still flowering though they’re looking a bit rain battered.

See the yellow string in the photo above? One step closer to the new fence.

There’re lots of seedlings growing in the greenhouse. The most exciting has to be the thin green sweet pea shoots, like flagpoles, pushing up through the soil in their pots. They’re a heritage variety from Koanga, which produce seed you can collect (unlike most of the sweet peas you grow from seed). I planted out the remaining scabiosa seedlings that I grew from seed. I was going to put them into pots but they’d done a lot of growing in the seed tray. They were bigger and lusher than the scabiosa seedlings I potted on 2 weeks ago. As for my poor radicchio seedlings they’re still waiting to be potted on.

Scabiosa seedling planted out into the garden.

I bought and assembled 5 raised beds and used one of them to replant an ailing olive tree. I planted the olive tree at the end of summer into gravel and sand. I planted it where I planted it to block an ugly concrete power pole. As soon as I planted it its lower leaves started turning yellow with brown tips. A quick google search suggested it could be any number of different problems. One was a nutrient deficiency. Yesterday I dug up the olive tree and replanted it in a round raised bed, along with 2 lavenders. I used free-draining potting mix and some compost.

Rather than wait for a delivery of soil I bought five 40L bags of potting mix, three 40L bags of compost and two 40L bags of garden mix. I lifted each bag myself. All ten of them. And it was all going well until I had to dig a hole for the olive tree, which should’ve been an easy job in the light soil, but wasn’t. My right wrist suddenly became too sore to bend (so I swapped hands). My wrist is still too sore to bend a day later. Moral of the story: use a bloody wheelbarrow next time.

This blog is dedicated to my oldest friend, Sal. We’ve been friends since we were 14. Neither of us were in a hurry to grow up. United in our love of plants, garage sales and anything quirky, creative or silly. Mainstream we weren’t. We went mushrooming together, blew up snails with double happys (not our best moment) and hung out in her mum’s large and incredible garden.

My tree of the week is a pear tree. Sal had a big one growing at bottom of her garden. We used to climb it and sit and natter. I grew a pear tree in my Wellington garden. And apart from a terrible lean it was easy to grow, had the sweetest blossoms, the tastiest fruit and leaves that turned red and orange before they dropped.

This is what I’m reading in the bath after a day in the garden. There’s a podcast too with the same name. Thanks Sal.

See you next Sunday.